It's such a huge disappointment when a series appears to be doing something interesting and unusual in the first volume, only to slip immediately into a fairly uninspired groove with subsequent volumes. I fear that may be the case with The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess, which spends much more time indulging in well-worn villainess isekai tropes without really bothering to subvert them this time around.

The first major development in the volume is the return of Yomi, a young man who is utterly devoted to Iana, from university. He's confused by Iana's sudden change in personality, and suspects her sudden mild temperament and lack of ill-will toward Konoha is due to some kind of nefarious machinations. After all, how could he guess the real reason, that Iana's personality was overwritten when their creator took over her body? (Which is honestly pretty creepy when you stop to think about it for a couple seconds…) His insistent malice is a serious liability to Iana, who just wants to keep her head down long enough until the death flags stop popping up and she's not constantly worried about her own survival.

This leads to some decent humor – such as Yomi not understanding what BL is – but Akiharu Tōka seems to have gotten a little tired of the gimmick of Konoha Satou being reincarnated into the world she created in her own adolescence. There are only a couple chuckle-worthy references to her hormonal brain coming up with silly ideas, such as people checking fevers by touching foreheads, but overall, it seems to be leaning away from that. Instead, it's playing more into villainess story tropes, as the men who originally would have been out to kill Iana are now falling in love with her but Iana is too dense to realize what's happening, and so is confused instead.

I'm not especially well-versed in the “reincarnated as a villainess” subgenre, but even with my small exposure, the male cast falling in love with the villainess instead of the heroine strikes me as fairly expected. In fact, the vast majority of isekai aimed at any gender seem more than ready to indulge in harem elements. There's nothing wrong with this necessarily, but the focus on Iana's relationships with the boys around her throws the weaknesses of Touka's art into sharp relief. The thing is, the boys just aren't that cute! They're all tall and extremely lanky, identical except for their hairstyles. Even then, and maybe I'm just getting old, they made my fingers itch to drag a comb through their hair in a totally unromantic, unflirtatious way. The panel layouts are busy and it's often hard to tell exactly what's going on, which works fine when portraying the chaotic mind of a teenager, but hampers visual storytelling at all other times.

It really is a huge disappointment to see the manga turn so quickly to genre standards, because there's so much fertile ground to continue to explore the relationship between creator and fiction. Iana was supposed to die in the prologue, which means the story has gone somewhat off the rails; there's so much to explore there! What is the same? What has changed? Trying to remember what she wrote will be of increasingly limited use to Iana/Konoha now, but the dark elements of her world persist. Plus, as a former isekai-loving, fiction-writing teenager, I know that there'll be plenty of disjointed or underdeveloped parts of her world, since no fantasy universe is totally watertight, especially not the ones hastily scribbled into notebooks during class. What happens when someone stumbles into one of the plot holes? Instead of reacting to her melodramatic plot twists, couldn't Iana/Konoha take more proactive steps to change it?

Iana comments that even though she created these characters, they're finding ways to surprise her, but the “surprises” are things like showing concern when she gets a fever or defending her, adhering to what we, the audience, know to be typical for the genre. It would be fascinating to see the characters start acting more like whole people with their own motivations, priorities, and interests. What happens when book-Konoha gets frustrated or tired, instead of acting like a perfect angel all the time? Instead, they surprise Iana/Konoha by acting like the same stock characters she wrote them as, just directing that behavior toward her instead of book-Konoha.

The first volume of The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess added to literature's rich tradition of satirizing and interrogating genre cliches, but the new volume lacks the first's sharpness. Although it's not weak enough for me to wash my hands of the series just yet, it's a let down to be sure. The next one, however, may be make or break when it comes to whether it'll turn back the affectionate parody of the first volume, or settle back into just being another example of the genre, barely differentiated by its gimmick.