I was sick yesterday and crashed, spending my time sleeping and reading web comics (manga/manwa/manhua) in the villainess niche. My daughter Ray is getting me to read them, and…I kinda like them, and I’m thinking of writing a serial (not a manga) later, after I get my current serial work-in-progress Blind Date with Death up and running.
(This explanation is written by a fan of manga and a Western fiction writer, so I think I have a decent perspective here…but I’m not an expert.)
Background for a Villainess...
What’s a villainess manga? It begins back in the day of Jane Austen…
I’m not joking. It actually does.
So Jane Austen writes some cute, snarky, dry-witted, emotionally moving romances back in 1810s Britain. People like them! Later, from the 1930s onward, Georgette Heyer resurrected the same time period, called it the “Regency” period because it centered on the regency of Prince George (later King George IV), and cemented it as a subgenre of historical romance. Over time, romance novels set in the Regency era enter into a sort of fantasy realm where some types of historical details (titles, clothing, social manners) must be exactly historical, and others (world events, industrialization, epidemics) were suppressed, creating a sort of sci-fi alternate reality subgenre that hid under the guise of “historical” fantasy.
By the 1940s, shojo (“girl”) manga artists were starting to draw cute girls doing cute and/or tomboyish things. During World War II, paper rationing kicked in and most of the magazines folded–but a few survived, and after the war the genre expanded a LOT.
Early manga were four-panel comics, much like the ones in US newspapers (but oriented from top to bottom instead of left to right). The first shojo manga to run as an ongoing story was probably Princess Knight, about a main character who was born with the pink heart of a girl and the blue heart of a boy. (Showing that lbgtqia+, androgynous & gender-flipping heroes & heroines have been a thing in manga since the early days.)
Oh, and the cute clothes that are drawn in manga? They often point toward social movements.
The 1970s saw the rise of otome (“maiden”) fashion, which focused on non-sexy, girlish fashion for women with layers and layers of ruffles, cardigans, vests, skirts…and a lifestyle of non-hypsersexualized cuteness to go with it.
From otome fashion came lolita fashion, a 1980s movement to escape from current Japanese society into Victorian-era fashion and hobbies, while making them super-cute, modest, and non-sexual. The fashion is more innocent, more layered, and more youthful than otome, with adult women dressing as children while avoiding being seen as mothers or sex objects, per se.
From shojo manga and otome/lolita fashion culture came otome games, which initally focused on creating a world for a modest, girlish character, like the earlier shojo mangas, but then later expanded to cover the same ground as other shojo manga, that is…well, some of that stuff just gets weird. Time loops, male homosexual romance meant for female readers (boys’ love), alternate realities, more.
But the stereotypical otome game goes like this:
A young, naive heroine (who gets to wear a lot of pretty dresses in a historical setting) is caught between two or more suitors, spending the greater part of her gameplay time doing quests that make one or another of her suitors fall in love with her.
…and often the antagonists are women.
The Rise of the Villainess...
The fact that the enemy of a female heroine in a stereotypical otome game is another woman did not go unnoticed, apparently. A lot of things in video games and mass-produced manga did not go unnoticed, apparently, because a whole genre of storytelling has arisen around it, called “isekai.”
(Isekai started in the 1980s, by the way, far earlier than the LitRPG subgenre that is currently popular.)
The stereotypical plot of an isekai story is that someone in world A (usually our world, modern Earth) gets killed and is “reincarnated” into world B.
While in world B, the character(s) from world A often try to “fix” everything that they didn’t like about the original work.
Villainess manga is about taking the female antagonist character from an otome game, and turning her into the hero of her own story.
Why did the villainess character act the way she did? And why was what the main character did so praiseworthy in the first place?
Good question.
In Consideration of the Villainess...
What I love about villainess manga is that they are so meta. They love the works they’re based on…but they’re very critical, too.
The villainess dresses well…but the heroine dresses extravagantly.
The villainess takes direct, clear action…but the heroine simpers and manipulates men into acting for her.
The villainess learns how to actually rule…but the heroine puts on grandiose events just for show.
The villainess cares more about standing up for what they believe them (even when it comes as a shock)…but the heroine cares about reputation over authenticity.
I tend to like the villianess manga (and other isekai and fantasy manga) where political intrigue is centered. In Western fiction, the same situations tend to bore me silly; I’d strangle myself having to read for hours on end about political meetings, where I’m fine with, say, the anime That Time I Was Reincarnated As a Slime doing the same thing. Or Ascendance of a Bookworm. I’m not sure what the big difference is; maybe it’s that in the Western stories, the emphasis is on backstabbing and maintaining a status quo, and the manga/anime tend to be disruptive, “Well, why don’t we try something different?”
And, because villainess manga are centered around literally disrupting existing narratives, they tend to focus on politics that actually move the world forward (if only so “their” character doesn’t get murdered during political intrigue).
Reading List for a Villainess...
I’ll run this blog post by Ray and see what she has for comments and recommendations, but here’s what I’ve particularly liked so far:
- Death is the Only Ending for the Villainess / Villains are Destined to Die (the pink-haired one)
- The One Within the Villainess (where the villainess swaps back with the earth person)
- The Eccentric Duchess (she’s not the villainess but she’s close, right? the one where there are multiple versions of the main character watching the plot, and it’s the boys’ love illegal mod version)
- How to Win my Husband Over (the Borgia one)
- Yes, I’ve read Roxana (the evil butterfly one), and while it’s interesting I wouldn’t put it at the top of my list.
(In my opinion, the only thing not to love about villainess manga, or isekai in general, are the titles. Ugh. Nobody can remember which one is which by the titles.)
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