Villainess Level 99

Episode 5

It's official: Patrick Ashbatten is a keeper. There are a few very obvious reasons why, with the major one being that he talks to Yumiella like she's an actual person rather than a scary person-shaped weapon that might explode at any moment. He's the one who offers to work with her in class, despite very likely knowing how it will turn out for him. (He was there for her defeat of the Three Stooges, after all.) He's also the one who recognizes that the treatment she's getting from the aforementioned trio and their girl is nothing more or less than blatant prejudice based on her appearance. Patrick isn't going to let that sort of thing dictate how he treats another person—and that's a real first for Yumiella. It's something she's quietly pleased about—even if she's now also desperately afraid that she'll screw up and lose him.

Because that's another thing her interactions with Patrick are forcing her to reckon with: he's a person with his own thoughts and talents—not a background NPC in a video game. He's thinking things through, expressing opinions that are at odds with the game she knows, and that means that if he's not a character, maybe no one is. Prior to getting to know Patrick, Yumiella seemed to be operating on the assumption that everything was still basically going according to the script of the otome RPG she played—and if some things were different, well, that was just because she as “Yumiella Dolkness” was messing with the order of reality. But now that she's getting to know Patrick, we can see her sorting through another possibility—one that she even voices to herself this week: that this isn't a game but a real world that just so happens to share some striking similarities with one.

That could be an uncomfortable realization for Yumiella. While we don't know much about her life in Japan, she doesn't seem to have a lot in the way of social skills and isn't great at reading the room (or individuals). When she was just interacting with game characters, that didn't matter—she could talk about level grinding and fighting and keep it safely in the realm of interactive fiction. But if they're real people, that raises the stakes considerably. She may still think it's in their best interests to raise their levels quickly but now it's because it could be the difference between life and death in a very real sense. This episode has her really struggling with these ideas in her own understated way and it comes across the most clearly in her worries about Patrick. She's afraid to lose this new ally (she's working up to thinking of him as a friend), because now she's worried about being all alone, something that may be okay in a game but is substantially more frightening in reality.

The idea that this is reality is also forcing Yumiella to look at what she likely still thinks of as the source material differently. If Alicia and Edwin are so drastically different from how they were in the game, does that suggest that the game really cleaned them up for public consumption? It's like meeting a famous person from history and discovering that all the texts were wrong; jarring and also kind of upsetting—especially since their ire is directed at her. And if they're rotten, what does that suggest about Game Yumiella? Current Yumiella knows that she's had dark magic since childhood, so does that mean that her game counterpart did as well? Maybe she wasn't a villainess so much as she was someone so beaten down by the so-called heroes that she became the hidden boss out of pure, lonely, desperation. It's depressing to think about but that doesn't mean that it wasn't the truth.

At least now Yumiella has Patrick. If she hasn't scared him off yet and he's standing up for her to the prince, I think we can count him as the one friend she's truly made.

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Villainess Level 99 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.