This is hardly a fanfic, just a twiddle of a scene that popped into my head while thinking about something else, as often happens. But credit where credit is due, I’m in Love With the Villainess, by Inori is very, very good and you should all read it immediately. It’s out in English from Seven Seas so there’s no real excuse to not do so. Thanks to Inori-sensei for creating delightful characters, and GL Bunko and Seven Seas for bringing them to us. Here’s my first fanficlet in years.
Villainy For Fun
“What’s so funny?” my co-worker’s voice interrupted my train of thought and I jumped, pulled back into a harshly-lit-by-cheap-fluorescent-bulbs reality.
“Funny?” I asked, to cover my momentary confusion.
“You had a funny look on your face and you were…chortling.” Tanaka-san’s expression indicated that she wasn’t sure if she should be amused or frightened.
“Oh, ah,” I muttered quickly, again to cover myself, but this time, I knew what she meant. “I was thinking about something funny on TV last night. You know, how it is.”
“Of course! I saw a funny commercial too!” Tanaka-san was off and running with a recitation of a funny to her commercial, and all I had to do was nod and smile. I was good at that. The people around me at this company were nice, but incredibly dull. Television, fashion magazines, they liked what other people liked. I wasn’t one of them. I could fake it well enough to get by without friction, but I rarely watched the popular TV shows. I never needed to, someone else always did and I could use their words to cover my disinterest.
Me? I like to play games. All of them. Card games, board games, RPGs, but my favorite – and the reason I was smiling – was an otome game. The kind where the protagonist is overpowered and “romanced” by a bunch of hot guys and the player has to choose one guy’s route to get to the end of the story. That kind. This otome game was typical of the breed and it was fun enough. I’d gotten through two of the prince’s routes so far and had started the third, but it wasn’t the princes that had me chortling.
It was the “Villainess,” of the game, one Claire François, that kept me coming back. It was only a game, but I loved her underhandedness and her willingness to do her own dirty work. She would jump in between the player (me) and the prince and it would thrill me. Her shrill laughter, her insulting tone…she was magnificent. I’d played the game over and over until I could practically skip the romance scenes to get to the scenes where she bullied me. I had begun wishing there was a super-secret route I could unlock where I could get her, rather than a prince. Last night I had fallen asleep while writing a fanfic in which Claire and the player (me) ran off together.
This morning, while staring at my work computer, a new scene popped into my head. What if, the player (me) encouraged Claire to be an even more magnificent villainess? Would it thaw Claire’s heart? It would be fun to write, at least…I thought and, Tanaka-san was right, I chortled.