© 冬夏アキハル・白泉社／「転生悪女の黒歴史」製作委員会

Lady Amaryllis’ suicide has changed something in Iana. She’s haunted by her failure to save the duchess, suffering from nightmares and depression. Ginoford, ever the saintly and kind future brother-in-law, invites her to his family vacation home on their estate, alone with Konoha, Sol, and Yomi in tow. If you’ve ever spent a family vacation by the lake, you know what awaits them: comfortable if relatively rustic lodging, hiking, fishing, and an elf with a bowl cut collapsed in the woods. Wait, what?

Yeah, elves are real in this world. A totally-not-sinister young boy named Kagura Ivy leads the party to one who has fainted near the road, and they take him back with them to recover. Iana explains that there was an elf arc in The Dark History, because like any fantasy-obsessed teenage girl, she thought elves were the kewlest and hottest things ever. They wouldn’t mockingly pretend to consider inviting her to join them like her meanie classmates, because they can see the truth of people’s hearts. They could see that she was so pure-hearted that she was worthy of being invited back to their home, even though they never allow humans in their village because they can only thrive in an environment free of any corruption.

Iana shows two impulses that I find interesting for the future of the story as the episode sets up for a new arc. The first is that she’s decided to be proactive instead of reactive. Reactivity was what resulted in Lady Amaryllis’ death, after all. Because the story mechanics were all in place, Iana could only react to other characters’ choices. She’d written Amaryllis as a person who chooses death over imprisonment, and no amount of pretty words could change that. Once she was captured, this turn of events was inevitable.

But with the elves, things can be different. The main impetus for the arc was not an individual’s choices, but the seal on an ancient evil coming undone. If she keeps it from breaking, the elves will be saved with no need for Konoha to be put in the middle of it! It’s a marked change from her response to the kidnapping debacle when it wasn’t happening when she expected, so she never put the pieces together. She’s started looking ahead with the understanding that, for story arcs to happen when they’re supposed to, the chain of events starts long before they show up in the plot. Ounce of prevention, pound of cure, etc., etc. That’s character growth.

The other impulse is a touch more problematic: her obsessive need to protect Konoha. I get it – she’s dealing with a lot of underlying guilt about the fact that she created her to suffer terrible, traumatic events. Still, it’s getting to be excessive like her not wanting Konoha to stand too close to the water when they go fishing. She’s more like a helicopter parent than a little sister.

But there’s a reason helicopter parenting is frowned upon in this day and age: if you don’t let your kid take some risks, they’ll never grow into competent, confident adults with a sense of agency over their own lives. It’s one thing to save Konoha and Ginoford from being attacked by Konoha and Iana’s uncle, or to rescue Konoha from being ravaged by a lustful beast. Nobody needs to go through that. However, now she’s fully trying to take Konoha’s place as the heroine of the story so that Konoha never has to take risks, never has to suffer or feel a negative emotion, never has to experience friction in her life. Konoha is probably too sweet-natured to think this, but Iana’s determination to keep her swathed in bubble wrap will suppress her growth as a person.

And her soul is crying out to grow! Her latent saint powers are being smothered. But Iana feels she must constantly intercede between her and the plot. At the end of this episode, it has not gone unnoticed as a sinister figure comments from a tree how strange it is that the little sister, and not the saint-like woman, is the one coming to the elves’ rescue.

Meanwhile, a love triangle has started to percolate between Iana, Yomi, and Sol. I mean, we all saw this coming, right? We’ve all seen the opening theme song; it’s only a matter of time before Cheneau enters the mix as well. When she has the two of them accompany her to the elf village, she orders Yomi to stay behind, going into her domme mode to stop him from whining about having to stay behind. Sol immediately goes icy with anger, because he’s also madly in love with Iana. Thank god she figured out already that he doesn’t want to kill her.

**Rating: **

*The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess is currently streaming on Crunchyroll. *