Katarina Claes, the villainous lead of My Next Life as A Villainess: All Roads Lead to Doom, is desperately trying to save herself from a fatal ending. Whether she will achieve this or not is the object of the story she wound up starring in, but here’s what we know so far.
Katarina is the spoiled, selfish antagonist of a video game called Fortune Lover. Her character is a Duchess engaged to Geordo, the firstborn prince of the kingdom of Sorcier. Her villainy centers around the fact that she refuses to end her engagement with him when he falls for someone else. Her character then resorts to bullying and cruelty to hurt her rival and secure her place in Geordo’s affections as well as high society.
She is meant to follow one of two possible storylines, both with unfavorable outcomes. One leads to her death, the other to exile. But after hitting her head during an accident involving Geordo when she was eight, she remembers her past life as a 17-year-old high school student in what appears to be a normal version of Japan. She realizes that she has played Fortune Lover before and that, as Katarina, she is supposedly destined for doom no matter what she does.
This knowledge makes her determined to change her fate. Instead of remaining selfish and spoiled, Katarina completely reinvents herself once she regains her memories, becoming a kind, quirky and fiercely affectionate person. She takes up swordsmanship and agriculture. She climbs trees. She speaks her mind. But, although she does become a better person, she is still not perfect. And some of her persistence in winning people over comes from a selfish desire to avoid her predestined outcome within the game.
The change in her behavior makes her into something of an accidental heroine. The combination of her memories of the game and her natural inclination toward being a friendly -- if a little dense -- person causes her to inadvertently recreate fundamental moments with other characters in the game that would have never happened with her originally, as we see when she tells Mary Hunt that she is amazing for having a magical green thumb, which results in Mary falling in love with her.
In fact, Katarina unwittingly makes almost every character in Fortune Lover fall in love with her simply because she takes the time to be kind to them. Most of the characters she befriends are meant to have some element of a tragic backstory, but through Katarina’s well-intentioned intervention and loving attention, their lives are shifted in a new, happier direction.
By building strong relationships with her would-be enemies in childhood she has changed the fundamental nature of the game while also giving herself a tight-knit friend group that would do anything for her. Yet, even when each person around her goes out of their way to let her know how they feel about her, she has yet to realize that she has made herself into the main character of the game. It is possible that each person in her life may be assigned a new role as well, especially because they are all potential rivals for her affection.
Her choice in girlfriends is interesting, too, because both Mary Hunt and Sophia Ascart are cast as rivals to the heroine in different storylines of the original version of the game -- though not to the extent that Katarina is because they both at least have the option of a "true" happy ending. Instead of remaining bullied outcasts of society, through friendship, they become happy with their own lives and less focused on romance. Unless that romance concerns Katarina.
Although she is happy with her friends and her life within the game, each positive relationship she builds within her world gives her a better chance of survival -- which is her main focus. She is very intentional about being a good person because, well, her life depends on it. Although, the tree-climbing “monkey-girl” she has become is fundamentally kind in any case. This is demonstrated when she accidentally helps others, like scaring away Sophia’s bullies as she jumps out of a tree at Geordo and Alan’s tea party.
Instead of alienating everyone around her with cruelty and meanness, Katarina has created a close-knit group of friends that love her. If anything, her plan may have tilted things in the opposite direction and all of her friends may fall a little too hard for her. It is not clear exactly what may happen within the rest of the story but the progress she’s made in her social circle means she is likely well on her way to achieving the goal of changing her fate.
