Characters / My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! - Catarina

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! Characters (Catarina Claes)

Catarina Claes/ The "Monkey Girl"

Voiced by: Maaya Uchida (Japanese), Jeannie Tirado (English), Yetzary Olcort (Latin American Spanish)

^{Click here to see her as a child}

^{Click here to see her as the "Monkey Girl"}

A former Alpha Bitch who Took a Level in Kindness — and also became a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander — after a childhood head injury awakened Past-Life Memories of being a seventeen-year-old Japanese schoolgirl. This past life (known only as "the monkey girl") remembers playing an Otome Game very similar to the world she is currently in, and realises to her horror that she has been cast as the Self-Disposing Villainess who meets a terrible fate in every single route and ending.

Thus, the new Catarina Claes vows to avoid her fate by spending the next seven years practicing her physical and magical skills (for self-defense), taking up a profession (so she can survive if exiled), forming healthier relationships with the people around her, and basically trying to avoid creating any reason for comeuppance at all.

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Tropes applicable to her current self

#-I

• Achievements in Ignorance: Played with. Catarina is consciously trying to avert her terrible fates, but by accident does things that work a little too well. Without even meaning to, she ends up winning the hearts of all of the game's love interests, the other rival characters, and even the main heroine herself. Catarina is completely oblivious to this.
• Affectionate Nickname: Other students at the magic school refer to her as "Saint-sama" (Lady Saint) for her kindhearted nature and her blindness to social status.
• Alliterative Name: Catarina Claes.
• All-Loving Hero: She invokes this both deliberately and inherently: while she tries to get on everyone's good side to stay alive, she is truly affectionate and caring enough that everyone around her - including her maid and her rival - falls for her. In her previous life too, she was so loved by her best friend, to the point that when she died her friend reincarnated into the same game to stay with her.
• Ambiguous Situation: It is not entirely clear whether Catarina is really Catarina or just the "monkey girl" in her role. On one hand, Duke Luigi thinks she and her mother are very much alike personality-wise, and after regaining her Past-Life Memories she identifies as "Catarina+α". On the other hand, "monkey girl" Catarina stated that she always wanted a younger sibling whereas the original Catarina hated having one, is largely oblivious to, or even outright rejects, societal norms and etiquette befitting of her nobility, is prone to thinking what her game counterpart would do, and during her magic-induced coma she identifies as the "monkey girl" with the memories of Catarina.
• Ambiguously Bi: While Catarina considers herself straight, she does spend a suspicious amount of time thinking about how gorgeous her female friends are, especially Maria, and other rather suspect thoughts. She also, rather suspiciously, loads her romance literature club's library up almost exclusively with Sapphic novels without even realizing it.

• Amnesiac Dissonance: When Catarina couldn't remember her past life, she was well-behaved but spoiled and bratty. When she gets a blow to the head and remembers her past life as a person of the lower class, she drops this attitude and becomes super friendly and tomboyish, much to the exasperation of her mother.
• Animals Hate Her: The only ones that don't seem to like Catarina are dogs. This seems to have carried over from her past life. This is possibly a case of Animal Jingoism, given her past identity being referred to as the "monkey girl".
• Anything but That!: Says this word to word when Geordo goes off to tell her mother about her throwing a snake toy at him and her tree-climbing contests with Alan.
• Apologizes a Lot: She frequently apologizes whenever she thinks she's screwed things up for other people, especially when she thinks that she might've either ruined the romance events for other characters or tripped on her doom flags.
• Ascended Extra: A meta example. In Fortune Lover, Catarina was nothing more than a Hate Sink villainess rival who serves as a source of cathartic justice from the players. Here, she's the protagonist, and an extremely likable one, at that.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Catarina frequently gets distracted mid-conversation and misses out on important things. She's also capable of acting with dignity and etiquette until she's inevitably distracted. Also, as soon as she's done being scolded, she forgets about what anyone told her and goes back to what she was doing the next day. People actually envy this ability of hers.
• Bad Powers, Good People: She accidentally becomes a wielder of dark magic after rescuing Keith from Sarah. However, she hates the idea of actually using it and has her friends promise to try and keep her on the side of good if she gets corrupted by it (which none of them imagine could happen in the first place).
• Bait-and-Switch Sentiment: While trapped together in a magic book, Sophia stumbles over her words trying to give a Love Confession, Catarina just smiles and says she loves Sophia too. Obviously, it's platonic on Catarina's part, but Sophia desperately tries to make it romantic.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Where other people either ostracized or put on a pedestal the other main characters, Catarina ignored all of that and viewed each of them as equals worthy of kindness and respect. Catarina being Catarina, however, she's also blissfully unaware of how the kindness she showed them has made them want to be more than just her friends.
• Berserk Button: While it's very difficult — nigh-impossible, even — to do so normally, one thing that will surely rouse her righteous anger is seeing somebody waste perfectly good food. One such example is when some bullies throw Maria's muffins on the ground and try to crush them, which Catarina sees as akin to an unforgivable sin.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Catarina is one of the sweetest characters you'd ever meet, but Maria's bullies were terrified of her when she stood up for her. Catarina chalks this up to her "villainous face". Also, while it's mostly an Informed Ability, Catarina does note in the manga that her sword training is actually going well, and there's no indication the noblewomen she interacts with practice swordsmanship themselves, so Catarina might have more qualities backing her up than just her face.
• Big Damn Heroes: At one point, she saves Maria from being attacked by a bully who was about to try and burn Maria with fire magic.
• Big Eater: She really enjoys food, to the point where if left to her own devices, she'll eat so much she pukes it up before going back for more. She'll even eat food off the ground if she thinks it looks tasty, including the first chapter of the spinoff where the food is pretty clearly damaged.
• Big Sister Instinct: She's always wanted a younger brother, and when she gets the opportunity she becomes a doting older sister to Keith. A big part of the reason she does so is that if she doesn't he'll grow into a playboy whose pursuit of Maria would eventually result in her death or exile, but she also just finds him cute and lovable enough to deserve doting on.
• Blithe Spirit: She accidentally fixes everyone's problems with her stupid optimism and friendliness, accidentally seducing all the game's love interests, rival characters, side characters and even the game's heroine herself. People are attracted to her not just because she's nice, but also because she's so damn weird and out of place that they have no clue what she's going to do. This is particularly true for Geordo, whose primary reason of falling in love with her being this exact trope.
• Blue Is Calm: Inverted. She is the only character associated with the colour blue yet she's also the least calm of all.
• Blue Is Heroic: Blue is Catarina's primary color, with bright blue eyes and a turquoise and navy dress. It makes it all the more ironic that her original role was that of a villain. Eye-wise, it seems the original intention is most likely trying to invoke sinister Icy or even Creepy Blue Eyes, which the manga does invoke in one of the color illustrations.
• Book Dumb: Inverted. Catarina is socially as dumb as a box of rocks and before reincarnating had terrible grades. However, Atsuko attributed this to a lack of interest in studying. As Catarina, she's actually pretty diligent when it comes to studying and picking up skills because she feels she needs them, and turns out to have at least average academic ability (placing in the top 80 in the Magic Academy's rankings)... when it comes to the few things she bothers trying to learn about, like magic.
• Boyish Short Hair: In her previous life, her hair was a much shorter bob cut, which suited her tomboyish qualities better than her current long hair as a noblewoman.
• Brutal Honesty: Catarina first captures Alan's interest by pointing out that if a girl is more interested in hanging out with her than her fiancé, it's probably because said fiancé is boring.
• Call to Agriculture: She takes up farming because it's not too ambitious and to be self-sufficient in case she gets exiled, which has since evolved into a genuine hobby, much to her mother's ire. This is a carryover from her past life, where she used to spend vacations at her grandmother's countryside farm.
• Can't Hold Her Liquor: Gets blackout drunk from one glass of wine.
• Captain Oblivious: Catarina manages to constantly miss the totally obvious, either because she's naturally dense or because she stops paying attention to things that don't interest her. In fact, her obliviousness to her own uniqueness is one reason why her friends find her refreshingly attractive.
• Caring Gardener: Catarina takes up farming to both increase her affinity with earth magic and so that she'll have a useful skill in the event that she gets banished. Even after finding out that it wouldn't help her with magic at all, she continues to do it as a hobby well into her teenage years, much to the confusion of everyone around her.
• Casting a Shadow: She has the ability to call forth darkness after gaining dark magic powers, though the only dark magic spell she can use (besides summoning her familiar Pochi) is her "Dark Bump" which creates a 3D inkblot a couple centimeters big.
• Chaste Heroine: Catarina tends to brush off romantic gestures and veiled confessions because she doesn't consider herself attractive (and because she is supposed to play the bad guy). As a result, she doesn't mind doing things like offering to hand feed Keith.
• Childhood Brain Damage: The story starts with her getting a bad blow to the head at age eight. By fifteen, she has developed an impulsive and spacey personality that leads several characters to wonder in-universe if she's suffered from this. Out-of-universe, it's implied but never stated that the "monkey girl" persona from her previous life has completely overwritten whatever personality and reasoning Catarina had previously.
• Childish Older Sibling: Catarina has the mentality and attention span of a child, while Keith is very well-behaved and often finds himself playing Cloudcuckoolander's Minder for her. Catarina is annoyed with the latter arrangement, noting that she's supposed to be the older sibling.
• Class Princess: Catarina is called "Saint-sama" (Lady Saint) with full sincerity for a reason. She is blind to social status despite being one of the top nobles in Sorcier, and always gets into other people's good graces. You see that plains-clothes commoner over there, the one being bullied or whispered about by the many nobles at the school? That is one of Catarina's best friends, and Catarina steps in to stop any bullying she notices. What is unusual is that she acts more like a Tomboyish Genki Girl, and completely lacking the proper decorum for a duchess, let alone potential Queen Consort.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Catarina actually does have reasons for doing weird things like taking up agriculture or carrying toy snakes, but she doesn't explain herself and therefore everyone thinks she's nuts. Which is true anyway. A lot of people are attracted to this specific quality about her more than her kindness, such as Geordo, Rufus, and even "Lana", who is secretly in the Ministry of Magic and even more secretly Geoffrey's official fiancé.
• Clueless Chick-Magnet: Catarina is the romantic equivalent of a black hole; she'll attract anyone who gets too close to her, regardless of gender, but she's so astronomically dense that she's completely unaware that so many people are vying for her affection. Nothing can escape her pull, not even light (i.e. Maria).
• The Comically Serious: Catarina is a very sincere and earnest person who puts her entire heart and soul into anything she puts her mind to. This is often juxtaposed by the completely ridiculous circumstances she's become involved in. For example, she teaches herself a perfect wind-up and release worthy of a Major League pitcher...in order to toss a toy snake at someone. On three occasions, she gives a group of bullies a menacing death glare: once because she really needed to pee and they were just in her way, a second time because they tossed a basket of homemade sweets, and in the third time she threatened the bullies with "doom"...because that's what happened to her back when she was a videogame villain. The fact that she is completely unaware of how nonsensical her actions or words are only added to the hilarity.
• Converted Fangirl: The "monkey girl" was an Outdoorsy Gal who was brought into manga, anime, and romance games by her Otaku friend Atsuko.
• Cool Big Sis: Downplayed. In her past life she always wanted to be an older sister, so when Keith was adopted into the household she goes out of her way to give him a good impression of her. However, while Keith adores her for being one of the first people to not shun him, he is also exasperated with her childish antics, and his view of her is of a more romantic bent.
• Crazy-Prepared: Catarina practices swordsmanship in case she trips on "doom flags" and needs to defend herself, and hones her magic as much as possible to have something to fall back on if she gets exiled and loses her title. She also carries an increasingly realistic fake snake for scaring off Geordo with and is possibly putting more effort into her farming than she does at schoolwork, as an alternate exile option. Nobody else quite understands why a nobleman's daughter wants to become a farmer.
• Curtains Match the Windows: This doesn't really apply to Catarina specifically, but both her hair and eyes were brown in her past life as the "Monkey Girl".
• Daddy's Girl: Like in the game, she's this to Duke Claes. In this case, he accepts her odd behavior more easily than her mother does and secretly considers them like each other.
• Dark Is Not Evil: She becomes a dark mage, yet retains the same pure good personality.
• Death Glare: Catarina's got a pretty mean glare when she gets angry, or so she thinks. It's actually a bit ambiguous: people may instead be more afraid of her family name than of her personally.
• Declaration of Protection: After having saved Maria twice, she vows to Maria that she will protect the latter from further bullying.
• The Defroster: She is considered "saintly" at her magical academy for her ability to be a positive influence on others' lives.
  • Prince Geordo Stuart was a Broken Ace as a child who grew bored with most things due both to his natural talent making him the best in multiple subjects, as well as the lack of affection from his parents. While becoming betrothed to Catarina Claes, he inadvertently causes young Catarina to hit her head, which (unbeknownst to anyone except herself) awakened her Past-Life Memories and completely rewrote her personality. With knowledge of several possible futures (especially endings in which Geordo will wind up killing her), Catarina begins one crazy scheme after another to avoid her future. Most of them fail, but they gain the interest of the prince, who falls in love with her because life is never dull with her around.
  • Prince Alan grew up sickly and constantly outdone by his twin brother Geordo, gaining an inferiority complex that haunted him for years. Catarina inadvertently gains the love of Alan's fianceé Mary, and an angry Alan challenges her to any contest of Catarina's choice. Catarina chooses climbing trees, and soundly defeats Alan again and again. Alan tries day after day, until one day Catarina notices that he can play music far better than anyone else — even his brother. After this, Alan comes to realize that there are things he is uniquely good at, and not only mends his relationship with his brother, but also falls in love with Catarina himself.
  • Student Council President Sirius Dieke attempts to use dark magic to corrupt the lives of his fellow students...especially those connected to the "saint" Catarina, whom he resents and hates for creating such a positive, friendly environment for everyone. He tries placing her in a magical coma, but she breaks the curse and confronts him, using information she's learned to call out his real name, Raphael, and help him sort out his Dark and Troubled Past. This helps dispel the evil ghost that had been possessing him — after which, he makes a Heel–Face Turn, turns himself in, and falls in love with Catarina.
  • Selena Burg's butler Rufus kidnaps Catarina and tries to hold her ransom to force crown prince Geordo to renounce his claim to the throne. At first, he intentionally tries to behave cold and aloof to frighten her into compliance. However, over time, Catarina begins having casual and insightful conversations with him, and even shows an interest in traveling the world with him after the current matters are settled. After later learning that his employer was captured offscreen, he turns himself in and (you guessed it) falls in love with Catarina.
• Designated Villain: An In-Universe example. Catarina designates herself as a villain, and continues to believe that she's doomed for a bad ending as a result of her villainy even though she's a complete Nice Girl who has never done and would never do any of the awful things the original Catarina did. Practically everyone else thinks she's a saint.
• Devoted to You: Every single one of Catarina's suitors is completely and totally devoted to her, forsaking interest in anyone else while there is still even the remotest chance that Catarina can reciprocate. Even in this case, special mention must go to Mary, who does not let by any opportunity or chance to prove her total devotion to Catarina. She will do anything if it makes Catarina even the slightest bit happy, even to the point of swearing to eat poison if Catarina is the one serving it to her.
• Dishing Out Dirt: Catarina's elemental affinity, though her magic is weak with the original character only using it to trip people. Current Catarina manages to move a larger amount of earth after seven years of work, but it still isn't much. This is a rare example of a hero being aligned with the earth element (Generally Fire, Air, Light, and Darkness get more attention), but then, Catarina accidentally forced herself into the hero role - the original heroine was the light-aligned Maria.
• Earthy Barefoot Character: She sometimes likes taking off her shoes to enjoy the feeling of grass below her feet.
• Elemental Personalities: Zigzagged but present. While Catarina is a bit of an airhead, she has probably two of the most common personality traits of people with earth powers.
  • Stubbornness: This isn't so much about her determination as it is her unbending nature when it comes to her hobbies. No matter how often her mother tries to beat her love for farming and unladylike behavior out of her, Catarina will always find ways to carry on, her methods differing between the various adaptations. It got to the point where Catarina would go incognito as a commoner to research more ways to farm.
  • Nurturing: Intentionally or otherwise, Catarina can be relied on to be kind and friendly to others, and has nurtured multiple characters into becoming better, more outgoing people. The running list so far includes Anne, Tom, Sophia, Mary, and Maria. Getting technical, this can also be said to apply to Alan.
• Endearingly Dorky: Many members of the cast find her social cluelessness, ditzy behavior, and overall idiocy to be endearingly charming and cute, especially Geordo, who finds just how different she is from the rest of the social elite to be both refreshing and amusing.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • There are genuine dangers ahead of Catarina if she doesn't prepare for them, and as such, she takes steps to avoid them. Some of her ideas are practical, like being nice to Keith lest he grows to resent her, while others make no sense, such as "interacting with the source of her [earth] magic" by plowing a field.
  • When she finds out Keith went through his first interaction with Maria from the game, she asks him if he fell in love with her. When Keith gets embarrassed and denies it, she understands it to mean "yes" and reassures him that she won't get in the way of his love life. In truth, Keith really didn't fall for Maria and has eyes only for Catarina.
• Even the Girls Want Her: Apart from the pretty boys around her, there are at least four girls^note five, counting Sienna in On the Verge of Doom! who are also into Catarina.
• Extreme Doormat: Everyone is aware (shockingly, including herself) that Catarina is completely defenseless when it comes to being romantically or intimately approached. By her own admission, when she is cornered in a situation soaked with romantic tension, her mind and heart both race so fast that she can't keep up. This is why Geordo is so confident that he could bed her at any time; if it weren't for the others coming to rescue her every time, Catarina would never have the will to resist and unlike the others, there would be very little scandal or fallout involved if the crown prince impregnated his own fiancée.
• Eyes Out of Sight: Whenever the story shows the "monkey girl", it goes out of its way to obscure what the upper half of her face looks like, whether it's through obscuring camera angles or outright shadowed eyes. Fans quickly joked, "No wonder she builds a big harem. She was an Eroge protagonist!" We finally get a good, clear look at her face during the dream she has while in her dark-magic-induced coma.
• Face of a Thug: Catarina thinks that she intimidates and frightens people due to her "villainous face", not realizing that Game!Catarina looked villainous because she usually had either a frown or a smug sneer on her face, while her own Genki Girl personality means she's usually smiling. That said, when she's legitimately angry (like when she's saving Maria from a group of bullies) she can pull off a pretty good Death Glare. Funny enough, when she used her "villainous face" during a school play for her role as a wicked step-sister to the story's heroine, many of Catarina's admirers actually found it to be quite attractive.
• False Cause: She's prone to the "X directly leads to Y" variant. She dreads the prospect of either Geordo or Keith falling for Maria because she's afraid it will lead them to either kill or exile her to preserve their relationship with Maria, completely failing to realize that the fate of her game self is the consequence of being horribly abusive to Maria.
• First Friend: Through her friendliness, she becomes the first friend for several characters: Mary, Sophia, and (sort-of) Maria for her current life, and Atsuko for her previous life.
• Five-Second Rule: 3 seconds are what Catarina claims, though Maria's homemade treats were on the ground a lot longer before Catarina dug in.
• The Fool: Friendly, has no idea what she's doing, but somehow succeeds in every way except what she expects.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The Foolish to Keith's Responsible.
• Forehead of Doom: Catarina's large forehead is part of what clues her into the fact that she is in the villain's role. She mentions once that her scar can be covered up with her bangs, but proceeds to never do so.
• Generation Xerox: At least once it's been mentioned that she's quite similar to her late grandfather, one of the main points noted being her equal treatment of everyone regardless of social status.
• Genki Girl: Her default mode most of the time is this. She's upbeat and energetic nearly all the time, she remains pleasant even to people that are wary of her, she's very rarely down or anxious, living her life mainly for the pleasures of each moment, and she ends up infecting almost everyone around her with her carefree optimism and cheerful demeanor. The only real exception, which is of course Played for Laughs, is when she can't satisfy her monstrous Sweet Tooth and starts getting hungry.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Regarding her magic. In other magical universes, dedicating herself to growing vegetables, learning about plants and doing the physically demanding work involved in farming (rather than just relying on magic) would be rewarded with improved magical ability, due to an enhanced understanding of her element. However, in this universe, magic is genetic and seems largely predetermined: Catarina can't even make it into "Weak, but Skilled" territory simply because she doesn't have that much potential to begin with. Despite attending a Wizarding School, where this is a serious drawback, she's not bitter about this, just pragmatic, taking the view that practical farming skills are their own asset and reward.
• Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Catarina is so consistent about mentioning she's straight when talking about how her female friends cause her to swoon a little that the question becomes more whether she's in denial about being bisexual or whether she genuinely doesn't realize it than whether she's actually straight or not.
• Heavy Sleeper: She often needs Anne to rip the bedding from her in order to get her to wake up on time. Played for Laughs during the kidnapped arc, where she announces that she can't fall asleep after learning that Rufus has dark powers, only for a Gilligan Cut to reveal her sleeping until noon.
• The Hedonist: Catarina is all about doing what's fun and pleasurable right this second. Fortunately, she does care a great deal about people, so she never abuses anyone in her pursuit of the maximum amount of fun. It does exasperate her mother and little brother, though. While her hedonistic tendencies could potentially be explained by her head injury, it's also explained rather early into the series that Catarina's biggest desire is to live out a long, happy life—an understandable desire considering her previous life died so young.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: The "monkey girl" and Atsuko had been best friends ever since middle school, and the fact that they never got to say goodbye to each other is one of the few regrets she ever expressed over her death (aside from the fact that she died so young). While they are reunited as Catarina and Sophia, this dynamic has since changed to a slightly more romantic tone.
• Hidden Depths:
  • She actually turns out to be an amazing actress. Or at least has the potential to be so. Sure, she's basing her lines off what Catarina from the game would say because she didn't have time to learn what she was supposed to be saying, but acting involves far more than just reading a script.
  • Catarina also has shown surprising insight at times. When she confronts a group of girls bullying Maria and claiming favoritism is why she's so successful, Catarina points out that if that were the case, then her own grades would've been above average due to her prestigious lineage. When she confronts Sirius, after he says the sleep spell was supposed to kill her, she immediately calls it out as a lie, pointing out that no one was around when he had cast it on her and that if he had wanted to, he could've killed her on the spot and nobody would've known he'd done it.
• Hostile Show Takeover: In a manner of speaking. Catarina forcibly takes over the heroine position by seducing all the love interests, their rivals, and even the supposed main heroine herself. However, she does it completely on accident. Moreover, she does it all while thinking of herself as the unwilling villain.
• Humble Goal: Having died as a teenager in her previous life, Catarina has resolved to live to a ripe old age in this one, specifically to become an old woman sitting in a rocking chair, staring at the sunset with a cat on her lap.
• Hypocritical Humor: Catarina responds with amused affection when she thinks of dense harem protagonists and considers Maria one, but completely fails to realize that she has become one herself.
• I Am Not Pretty: Catarina is considered to be above average in attractiveness, but thinks she has a villainous face. This doesn't cause her to get depressed or anything, but it does mean she assumes she's unattractive and therefore people wouldn't be interested in her. The issue might also be that by face alone, Catarina is pretty but not cute like the other girls.
• Idiot Hero: Catarina is, well, stupid. This comes off as more charming than anything else, but still the plot is driven mainly by her entertaining stupidity. This goes so far, the fandom gave her the nickname "Bakarina".^note "Baka" meaning "Moron" in Japanese
• Idiot Savant: Despite being pathalogically unable to view her friends as anything as the characters they were in the Visual Novel she played as Monkeygirl, and her almost painful naivate, she somehow manages to make every situation turn her way.
• I Have Brothers: Catarina had two older brothers in her original life, which greatly contributed to her tomboyish personality.
• Immune to Mind Control: As a result of how utterly bizarre her mind is and how she possesses a case of Incorruptible Pure Pureness, all attempts at influencing her brain will fall flat, not even exaggerating her regular idiocy, as shown through incidents like being the only person who was exactly the same mentally and fully aware something wrong was going on while stuck in a Lotus-Eater Machine, or Raphael Walt not even trying to enflame her sense of jealousy and hatred because she doesn't feel those emotions in the first place. That said, only mind control fails to work, as other mental magics like Forced Sleep, which straight-up shuts off the mind instead of manipulating it, still work normally against her, in contrast to light magic users, who are completely immune to all forms of dark magic.
• Inconsistent Dub: Her past-life nickname is not consistently translated by the official translations. In Japanese, that nickname was "nosaru," whose literal translation of "Wild Monkey" is used in the novel and the manga. The anime, however, uses "Monkey Girl."
• Inconsistent Spelling: Different translations have spelled her name with every possible combination of C's and K's: Catarina Claes, Katarina Claes, Catarina Klaes, or Katarina Klaes. The anime translation even had a little fun with this, as normally they use "Catarina Claes", but when she was acting out her role in a play written by Sophia, the Big Sister Bully character's name (just her real one spoken slightly differently) was turned into "Katarina".
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Sirius tries to ruin Catarina's reputation by amplifying her jealousy towards Maria, but fails because she isn't jealous in the slightest. Dark magic can only amplify emotions that are already there, not create new ones whole cloth.
• Informed Ability: Catarina took swordplay lessons as a child and supposedly had good form, but they're never utilized.
• Inner Monologue: Catarina has inner monologues whenever she is trying to work out how to avoid potential doom flags. This takes the form of strategy meetings in her mind in which different aspects of herself give ideas and work together to formulate coherent plans, and though they might look and behave directly, they all think about the exact same thing, and Catarina secretly wishes somebody else could join the conversation to give her a more objective outlook. The omake of volume 2 of the manga and the anime respectively identify each facet of her personality as "standard"/Happy Catarina, Chairwoman Catarina (distinguished with her fake beard), Glasses/Studious Catarina, "kind-of-confident(?) duke's daughter"/Fearless Catarina, and "kind-of-timid(?) duke's daughter"/Spineless Catarina. However, the omake also reveals that, despite the difference, they're in-reality all the same personality trying to act like different ones.
• Innocent Blue Eyes: While Catarina considers her blue eyes to be cold-looking, they're really more along the lines of this, given that the manga illustrations show them as being a color that looks far more friendly than harsh. She herself is super innocent in nature and doesn't get it at all when people make a pass at her.
• Innocent Fanservice Girl: In addition to being Oblivious to Love, she's also oblivious to how certain actions she takes, such as taking off her shoes and going barefoot, can cause some... reactions from her friends.
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Catarina does have her reasons for learning to farm and carrying toy snakes, but these are still absurd answers to serious problems that had already been solved anyway. The only "destruction flag countermeasures" she practices that people don't find weird are learning swordsmanship and being nice to Keith.
  • In general, she tends to have a tenuous grasp on cause and effect. She can understand the concept that one event follows another event (X happens, then Y happens), but doesn't seem to understand that events happen either because another event happened (Y happens because of X), or that some other event has influence on the outcome (Z happens because X and Y happened). For example, she knows that in Fortune Lover, Catarina either dies or is exiled on the Geordo and Keith routes; however, she takes this to mean either suitor falling in love with Maria will cause them to get rid of Catarina as a competition, not really getting that her fates are the result of her game self being utterly loathsome.
• Irony:
  • For someone so Genre Savvy and able to avoid all the pitfalls of tragedy and evil, she is rather Genre Blind in that she can't see how her actions have earned her the love of her friends around her. At one point she discusses how dense a dating game heroine tends to be at how much she is loved by others... not knowing that she's in that very position.
  • For all of her attempts to avoid being the evil rival towards Maria so that she won't die, Catarina might have only brought herself further to this intended fate by unknowingly stealing away all of the unique things that made Maria the main character in the first place.
  • In the game, Catarina was the nastiest of Maria's rivals, bullying her relentlessly. In this story, she sticks up for Maria when she's bullied by other noble girls and ends up becoming Maria's dearest friend.
  • When she confronts Sirius/Raphael, she outright says that she can't save him or anyone else. Yet she'd already saved many people from unhappy lives, and with her words and offer of friendship, she manages to save him from possession by a malicious ghost.
• It's All My Fault: Invoked and played straight as Catarina acknowledges that all of the misfortunes that were caused by others are her responsibility. A more direct example happens after Maria was kidnapped by Sirius. All Catarina can think about is how she failed Maria by not insisting on going with her when the latter went off on her own.

J-Z

• Kindhearted Simpleton: She's an immensely dense moron with an immensely kind heart that makes everyone love her.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Catarina's friends all had various issues in their lives which were solved by her empathy and kindness. They visit her frequently and go out of their way to keep her around them at all times. It's to the point that when she's in a dark magic-induced coma, they openly say they'd lose the will to live if she were to die.
• Look Both Ways: The "monkey girl" was killed in a traffic accident while rushing to school. Given that she died so young, her primary goal as Catarina is reaching old age.
• Loophole Abuse: The school refuses to allow Catarina to grow her beloved vegetable garden on school grounds, saying it's inappropriate for a noblewoman of her high status. She compromises and gets permission to grow flowers instead, which is sufficiently ladylike... and promptly plants a vegetable garden, claiming with a straight face that she's growing eggplant flowers and cucumber flowers. Sure, they'll turn into vegetables eventually, but they'll be flowers first!
• Loved by All: Thanks to her genuinely kind personality and efforts to put herself in other characters' good graces, Catarina is loved and respected by almost everyone around her. This is a far cry from the Hate Sink of the original game.
• Made of Iron: For a girl who has lived a pampered life without any physical training, while also having rather weak magic, Catarina is surprisingly very resilient, even as an eight-year-old. Her smashing her head on brick ground, while causing heavy bleeding, didn't leave any lasting damage beyond a scar and potential minor brain damage (which could easily just be explained as parts of the personality of the "monkey girl" bleeding through), while getting smacked by a giant dirt doll only results in temporary unconsciousness.
• The Matchmaker: Catarina seems to have a sense of saying just the right things to people with strained relationships to get them to open up to each other and realize their mutual feelings:
  • Her parents married for love, but originally didn't realize they each felt the same. Following some words from Catarina with them together, they end up confessing how much they love each other, with them going on to become a loving couple and great parents.
  • Selena is crushed by doubts about how much she suits her fiancé, Prince Ian, after enduring gossip about her inadequacies for years. Catarina reassures her and suggests that she find out for sure how he feels before doing anything rash like terminating their engagement. True to form, Ian really does love her and was only shy and worried about seeming clingy.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: During the Magical Academy Festival, Catarina ended up getting roped in to act out a part in the school play after the original actress became ill. Ironically, Catarina's character in the play is an evil step-sister who bullies the story's main heroine being played by Maria. Hilariously, when Catarina forgets her lines during her character's introduction, Catarina improvises by acting like her previous Fortune Lover self and uses lines from the game. The irony only gets better when several of Catarina's admirers, including Maria herself, found the villainous persona that Catarina was putting on to be rather attractive.
• Messy Hair: Her hair was a mess in her past life. Her current incarnation has long, straight hair... and a maid to make it that way.
• Modest Royalty: Catarina finds the outfits that would be expected of someone of her station to be stuffy and restrictive, much preferring the work clothes that she wears while tending to her farm. She has only willingly worn fancy jewelry once (a necklace that Nicol gave her as a present on her fifteenth birthday), and that was only because it looked just like the one worn by a character in one of her favorite romance novels.
• Mundane Utility: Catarina comes to realize that her rather unimpressive earth-bump can be rather handy for plowing fields.
• My Skull Runneth Over: The injury to Catarina's forehead bled a lot but wasn't that serious. However, it also restored seventeen years' worth of a past life, passing out due to overload and remaining unconscious and feverish for five whole days. No such issue occurs in the spinoff, however. The Watsonian explanation could be that her teenage mind was better able to handle the memory load.
• Naughty Is Good: Catarina is referred to as a troublemaker by her mother and as a problem child by her maid due to her tomboyish behavior and lack of manners. She's also unambiguously the story's heroine, and even her mother and maid acknowledge that her good qualities outweigh her flaws.
• Never Gets Fat: Although it's justified since she often eats so much until she pukes it back out, as well as the fact that she does a lot of manual labor with her farming hobby, Catarina does eat a lot of sweets yet doesn't gain much weight.
  • Briefly averted in the S1E08, where in a desire page, Catarina eats a whole gingerbread house and gets inflated because of it
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: Catarina very rarely dwells on her past life or the people she left behind; the one exception to this rule is her best friend Atsuko. When the two are briefly reunited while she's in a magic-induced coma, she takes the chance to give Atsuko a proper goodbye, unaware that the latter is already also in the world of Fortune Lover as Sophia.
• Next Life as a Fictional Character: The example that makes My Next Life as a Villainess the Trope Namer. Originally a normal girl from modern day Japan and a fan of the otome game Fortune Lover, she awakes as the game's villainess.
• Nice Girl: Catarina is extraordinarily sweet, kind, caring, and friendly, rarely thinking badly of anyone and often reaching out to people isolated from others. Also, as evidenced by her attempts to reach out to Sirius despite knowing the threat he poses, not all of her kindness is dumb naiveté. Eventually, she is even given the nickname of "Saint Catarina Claes" among several of the nobles.
• Nice to the Waiter: Not only is she a total sweetheart to her friends and family, but she also completely disregards differences in social status, treating family servants like Anne and Tom with just as much love and appreciation as she does her peers, which greatly endears her to every one of them, especially the former, who was saved from her subservient shell through Catarina's influence.
• No Name Given: Catarina's former life never has their name given, and is instead referred to as "monkey girl" because of her monkey-like climbing ability. In fact, right when she's about to tell her name to Atsuko when they first meet, the story cuts away at the exact moment before she even starts saying it.
• Non-Idle Rich: Something as dirty and laborious as farming is considered an odd hobby for a noblewoman, let alone a potential Queen Consort. Catarina initially took it up so she could provide for herself in case she gets exiled.
• No-Sell: She's completely unaffected by any attempt to use emotion-manipulation magic, though this isn't because she's special like Maria. She simply doesn't have the emotional makeup necessary for it to affect her, as any other kind of ability works normally against her.
  • Sarah revealed in an internal monologue that Katarina is mysteriously immune to the detrimental effects of using dark magic, such as owning a dark familiar, which would normally drain the user's lifeforce to function, unless they had stolen extra life-energy from another victim beforehand. So far, Katarina's health seems completely unaffected from having Pochi around.
• Not Helping Your Case: When a group of girls accuses Catarina of bullying lower-class students, Maria in particular, her friends spring to her defense by pointing out that she's far too dense to carry out the coordinated bullying she's been accused of. Catarina, for her part, is glad that they're defending her but can't shake the feeling that something is off, because she's too dense to realize that she's being dealt a Stealth Insult.
• Oblivious to Love:
  • Because of her obsession with avoiding the Bad Future in store for her role in a game and her own belief that, as a villainess she is unattractive, Catarina is completely ignorant of the fact that her relationships with others often go beyond simple friendship on their side. This goes double for anyone who wasn't a "capture target" in Fortune Lover. At the end of the first main arc, Maria uses the exact line from the game that cements her final partner not on any of the boys, but on Catarina. She assumes this means she got the "friendship ending" and doesn't give it a second thought.
    • Notably, it does occur to her early on in the school arc that she might have the highest Relationship Values with Maria in this timeline, but she fails to follow this to the logical conclusion that Maria is crushing on her.
  • Not just limited to romantic attraction, she is also rather oblivious to people’s affection for her in general. For instance, despite having very good relationships with Geordo and Keith, she still thinks that there is always a chance they will exile or kill her if she does the wrong thing by supposedly standing in their way to Maria’s heart. She completely failed to realize that this timeline's Geordo and Keith would rather cut off their own arms than harm her.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The name of Catarina's previous life is never given, and she's only referred to as the "monkey girl".
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: After Alan accuses her of "seducing" Mary due to taking her attention away from him, Catarina in defense tells Alan that it's because he is boring and has no appeal at all. She immediately regrets it upon realizing that she just directly insulted a prince.
• Otaku: She developed a love of anime, manga, and otome games in her previous life after befriending Atsuko. Since none of these things exist in the world of Fortune Lover, she feeds her addiction by reading romance novels.
• Out of Time, Out of Mind: Catarina ends up becoming a seventeen-year-old in an eight-year-old's body after regaining her memories. While she considers herself a twenty-five-year-old at that point, she still acts like an eight-year-old, perhaps because her personality was childish to begin wish.
• Outdoorsy Gal: Catarina climbs trees constantly and farms as a hobby.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Catarina is noted to be reasonably pretty but absolutely nothing compared to Mary, Sophia, or Maria. In general, she seems to suffer from this, not that she minds. She's good at pushing Alan's buttons, but needs to push them to beat him in any competition between the two since she knows he's smarter than her and more talented than her in anything that isn't purely physical; she's worked incredibly hard on her magic and knows how to use it offensively, but literally all her friends are better casters than she is; she has passable grades but is nowhere near her peers in terms of academic accomplishment; and so on. That being said, she has all her friends beat in popularity; while she has her detractors, no one in her clique is better at making friends than Catarina.
• Parental Title Characterization: As a well-mannered young noblewoman, Catarina calls her mother "Mother" ("Okaa-sama"). When the monkey girl does this to her own mother during her dream of her past life, her mother gets confused.
• Parody Sue: On the outside, she is a Purity Sue who saves everyone from their inner demons, has a whole harem of rich, attractive men and women, and is called a saint for her kindness. While she does live up to her reputation and genuinely cares for everyone, she's also a dimwitted Genki Girl who thinks that her harem consists of very good friends. For example, when accused of bullying, her friends defend her by saying that she's not the type; not only is she too nice, she's not bright enough to pull off the complicated Stock Shoujo Bullying Tactics she was accused of.
• Past-Life Memories: After receiving a head injury at age eight, Catarina regains her memories as the "monkey girl", a seventeen-year-old high school student and otaku from modern-day Japan. Within these memories are farming experiences with her grandmother, a talent for climbing, and knowledge of the otome game Fortune Lover, which Catarina uses to alter events in order to avoid the Bad Future ensured for her in the game itself. These awakened memories have also caused a Mental Fusion within Catarina, combining the monkey girl's Blithe Spirit with Catarina's original bratty attitude to create the current Catarina's kind personality.
• Popularity Power: Played humorously in that Catarina is confused or unaware every time her popularity power is working for her. When some girls approach her with bullying accusations, Catarina ends up being proven innocent by all the friends she has made while she flails about and gets hungry. This is also why she's always with the student council, and how she's allowed into their office; Catarina doesn't have the academic marks to be a student council member, but literally every member of her inner circle of friends does, so they just let her in and allow her to observe their work. She's even a key part of some student council events because most of the rest of the student body like her, too.
• Positive Friend Influence: To all of her friends, where they became better people than their game counterparts. This also extends to Atsuko back when they were both alive on Earth.
  • Catarina's free-spirited nature helped improve the lives of the suitor characters of Fortune Lover, curing Geordo's boredom and isolation, Alan's inferiority complex, Keith's loneliness, and Nicol's family issues, saving them from becoming a sadist, a bitter rival, a playboy, and a paranoiac, respectively, like they were in the game. She also saves Sirius/Raphael by insisting that he is a genuinely good person instead of a vile dark mage, which helps him to drive out the ghost possessing him before he can commit any crimes.
  • She has also made an impact on her supposed fellow romantic rivals. As a child, she has already befriended Mary and Sophia, helping them become less dependent on, respectively, Alan and Nicol, as well as giving them another source of comfort where everybody else shunned them for being, respectively, the daughter of a marquis's second wife and an albino. And as a teenager, she quickly becomes Maria's chief protector against those who would look down on the latter for her lowborn roots, as well as helping Maria reconcile with her mother. They also all fall in love with her.
  • Within her household (besides Keith), she was also a positive influence, helping her parents Millidiana and Luigi realize they truly loved each other and clear any misunderstanding about Keith's adoption, gave Tom, the family gardener, a reason to live, and helped free her maid Anne from her psychological conditioning (and a horrible Arranged Marriage).
  • Even back in her previous life, the "monkey girl" was responsible for bringing Atsuko out of her shell in middle school, and while her death devastated Atsuko, Atsuko resolved to live her life to the fullest and wished that she'd be able to reunite with her friend again, eventually resulting in her reincarnating as Sophia alongside the monkey girl's Catarina.
• Power Stereotype Flip:
  • Catarina has an affinity for earth magic, but she is an airheaded Genki Girl with poor impulse control and long-term planning skills. The only thing about her that really screams "earth magic" is her farming hobby, but she only picked that up in the first place because she mistakenly thought it would make her magic stronger.
  • She eventually gains dark magic powers, but instead of becoming a Lady of Black Magic, she remains her usual self and mostly uses it to play with her puppy familiar. Characters note that she actually has a greater affinity for dispelling dark magic than actually using it.
• Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: How she views her relationships with most of her female friends, namely Mary, Sophia, and Maria. Funnily enough, this seems to work as a double-edged blade for her female suitors. On one hand, they can get away with greater gestures of affection, like hugging and hand-holding, without coming off as inappropriate, unlike Catarina's male suitors. Mary in particular takes full advantage of this. On the other hand, any attempts to make their romantic feelings for her known, including a blatant Love Confession, will just have Catarina chalking it up to them displaying their "platonic" love for her.
• Rags to Riches: In a manner of speaking. Catarina is basically the "monkey girl" in personality at least, who has transitioned from a middle-class Japanese family to being a ducal heiress and potential Queen Consort.
• Redemption Equals Life: Catarina schemes with this in mind; by avoiding the doom flags triggered by Catarina's villainous behavior, she will avoid both death and exile.
• Reformed Bully: Downplayed. When she was first introduced as a little girl before hitting her head, she was pretty obnoxious and bratty to the maids when they didn't give her a pink ribbon instead of a blue one, and threatened to have them fired. This behavior goes away after hitting her head and regaining memories of her previous life.
• Reincarnate in Another World: She's a Japanese high school girl who was killed in a traffic accident and then reborn in another world that is the same as an Otome Game she was playing before she died.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Catarina is actually right for thinking that this is the friendship ending after Maria confesses to her at the graduation party at the end of volume 2, because as far as she knows, instead of being distant from each other as the original timeline, all of the characters are close friends here, and Maria doesn’t show attraction to any of them. What she completely misses, however, is that it was thanks to Catarina being the central figure that everyone was united around her and became friends in the first place, and that Maria is in love with her.
• Sacred First Kiss: After Rufus (a.k.a. Sora) gives Catarina a love bite on her neck (with her thinking it was a bug bite), Geordo, unwilling to lose her to any other love rivals and no longer wanting to take it slow, gives Catarina her first kiss in front of all their friends to their surprise (and Keith and Mary's horror).
• Scars Are Forever: Invoked but averted. Geordo and Catarina become engaged because he accidentally scarred her forehead, which could have had an effect on her marriage prospects. However, within a few years the scar is entirely gone.
• Screw Destiny: One of Catarina's key motivations is to avert the terrible fates in store for her character, going to such lengths as picking up farming to be self-sustaining if exiled, and swordplay to avoid getting killed by Geordo in the bad ending to his route, completely oblivious to the fact that she already has, and continues to, screw destiny in many ways while remaining oblivious about the changes to the people and world around as a result.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Inverted. At the Magic Academy, Catarina has permission to come and go as she pleases from the Student Council room despite not being a member. However, it's because her friends on the Council get the school faculty to agree to it by threatening to deny them the usage of the room. Catarina herself didn't ask for it and has no idea why she was given such a privilege.
• Shipper on Deck: Catarina ships literally every pairing that doesn't involve her because she is so dense and doesn't see said characters' affections for her. It also doesn't help that she Thinks Like a Romance Novel. In particular she pushes Alan×Mary, and is admittedly upset she accidentally stole the Event Flag the couple was supposed to have in their childhood.
• Shipper with an Agenda: Catarina interferes with Maria's love life because in half of the routes that involve her in Fortune Lover, Catarina met a terrible fate. Catarina's Insane Troll Logic concludes that if Maria winds up with any of the capture targets (especially Geordo or Keith), then the same fate will befall her despite the circumstances being completely different this time. She also ships Alan×Mary partially for this reason as well, even though the former's route didn't involve Catarina at all (barring a brief mention about how she and Mary are supposed to have a frosty relationship).
• Siblings Wanted: In her previous life, Catarina was the youngest of three children (as well as the only daughter) and had always asked her parents for a younger sibling. As such she is incredibly happy when she meets her adoptive little brother Keith for the first time (with a hint of dread due to him being responsible for her death or exile in his route). She stands in direct contrast to the original Catarina, who bullied Keith out of hatred for him taking away their parents' attention.
• Spoiled Brat: Subverted. When the news she's hired by the Ministry of Magic comes out, there are rumors of her being a spoiled brat who got her position through her connections. Larna's coworker Laura is disabused of this belief when she meets Catarina for the first time; she sees the latter as more weird than spoiled.
• Split-Personality Team: Catarina's inner mind council, a group consisting of five different aspects of her personality (her fearless side, spineless side, happy side, studious side, and the mustached, robed "chairman Catarina" with a fake mustache conducting the meetings) who try to come up with various plans together to save Catarina from her future doom. Though an omake reveals that, despite this attempted differentiation, they are all literally the same persona; so instead of split-personas, they are just a bunch of exact copies pretending that they are different.
• Stock Shoujo Heroine: She's a perfect embodiment of the otome game Reincarnate in Another World version of the archetype. Catarina is a simple-minded and incredibly clueless girl who was reincarnated as the bully/rival in an otome game who is also doomed in all endings, but her kind heart and energy completely overturns the game's original storyline as the love interests, love rivals, and even the original heroine fall head-over-heels in love with Catarina. She also has a huge appetite for sweets.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Luigi considers her personality similar to Milidiana through a "Not So Different" Remark, and she also got her hard features from her mother. On the other hand, Tom considers her Nice to the Waiter trait is identical to her grandfather's.
• Stronger Than They Look: In addition to her arm strength when climbing trees and working daily on her farm/garden, the anime version of her going to the lake with her friends/love interests shows she's also very good at boat rowing. She was able to single-handedly leave Alan, Maria and Keith in her wake, speeding from one side of the lake to the other with no chance of them catching up.
• Sweet Tooth: Catarina will eat sweets until she throws up if Keith doesn't stop her. Her hunger for sweets is so great that, when she and most of the cast got trapped inside a Tome of Eldritch Lore that sates its victims' desires, it cannot keep up with her and releases them.
• Talking to Themself: She regularly hosts conferences with five alternate personas in her head to review events.
• Tender Tomboyishness, Foul Femininity: This is the difference between the original and "monkey girl" Catarina's in a nutshell. The original was a proper young lady and cruel Alpha Bitch, while the "monkey girl" is an unabashed tomboy who is unfailingly kind to everyone she meets.
• Through His Stomach: Catarina is absolutely obsessed with food, especially sweets, so one of the best ways for somebody to get into her good graces and endear her to them is to be good at making food, doubly so if they can bake good sweets. Maria being a great baker, alongside her being a total sweetheart, is how she gets Catarina's appreciation and protection.
• Toast of Tardiness: Played With. While dreaming of her past life, Catarina witnesses the "monkey girl" running Late for School riding off on her bicycle eating a cucumber instead of toast.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She was a tomboy in her previous life (a result of her having two older brothers), and this carried over once her memories reawoken. She enjoys climbing trees, fishing, and farming, but she's also a big fan of old-fashioned romance novels (which is how she initially bonded with Sophia).
• Took a Level in Kindness: Catarina used to be a huge brat, albeit a very well-mannered one. Following her head injury and remembering her past life, she becomes a kindhearted and friendly girl, though in exchange she also turns into an impulsive airhead.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Catarina's love of sweets is so bottomless and her self-control so nonexistent, the magical Tome of Eldritch Lore that had temporarily trapped most of the cast within, "A Tale By the Name of Desire", suffers a Brown Note from trying to provide her with an infinite amount of sweets and eventually spits her and the rest of the cast out.
• The Troublemaker: Lady Catarina is not only the main character, she is, as her own mother refers to her, something of a troublemaker. She has a habit of roping her friends from royalty and nobility into doing domestic chores and farmwork, has somehow earned the romantic affections of all those around her, regardless of gender, while remaining oblivious to their attraction, and has been known to invoke a "three-second rule" for food that has fallen on the floor, to her mother's eternal dismay. All that being said, she is perhaps the most beloved character in-universe, despite, or perhaps even because of the trouble that her whimsy and disregard for social status tends to create.
• True Blue Femininity: Played with. On one hand, it shows Catarina's kind and caring nature. But on the other hand, she can be pretty "unladylike" and is prone to be quite tomboyish.
• Tsurime Eyes: Catarina thinks she has a villainous face because her eyes are upturned. To everyone else, this just makes her look a bit intense since they're still quite pretty.
• Unfit for Greatness: Catarina sees herself as unworthy of possessing a noble title and definitely unworthy of being the fiancée of a Prince...or heavens forbid...a queen. At first glance, many other people also agree, due to her "unladylike" behavior, dense wit and poor impulse control. But, everyone who comes to know her agrees that despite not being the "perfect picture" of what a noblewoman should be, Catarina's heart, and her ability to help people and draw their support and loyalty, is the true mark of what a woman of nobility should be.
• We Want Our Jerk Back!: Thoroughly averted. Absolutely no one, not even the father who doted on her, thinks that Catarina's sudden change in personality as a result of apparent brain damage is a bad thing; her mother is exasperated with how she went from a "brat" to a "troublemaker", but appreciates the positive impact she had on the Claes household. For her part, while Catarina does identify as Catarina rather than her previous life, that life has had more of an influence on her.
• Weak, but Skilled: Since her ability as an earth mage isn't particularly strong, Catarina focuses on learning swordsmanship (but has yet to utilize it) and using her wits in the case for an event that would kill her.
• Weirdness Coupon: Milidiana is about the only person who tries to rein in her eccentricities, with little to no success; her suitors just watch her drift off into Council of Catarinas meetings inside her head, ramble about doom flags, dragoon them into harvesting her crops or otherwise be a total Cloud Cuckoolander without more than a wry comment or gentle smile. Presumably most of them are used to it after knowing her for at least half a decade, and Maria is such a Nice Girl that it would honestly feel out-of-character for her not to just roll with it.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?:
  • Her innate elemental magic is earth, but she can only create small bumps in the dirt. As a child, her "Earth Bump" cantrip measures up to 2-3 cm (an inch), while as a teen, she raised it up to merely ten centimeters (almost four inches).
  • Later, when she gains dark magic she starts off with the ability to summon darkness... which creates a "Dark Bump", effectively a floating 3D ink blot about an inch in diameter.
    • It later becomes Heart Is an Awesome Power, as her dark familiar Pochi can become a massive and fearsome combatant, and she gains the ability to dispel dark magic easily (which even powerful light magic users would have trouble doing).
• What You Are in the Dark: While Catarina's primary motivation is to avoid her doom flags, her relationships with most of her friends prove that this is not the only reason she has won over so many people with her kindness. In particular, Keith and Maria are the only ones whom she specifically befriended to avert her doom flags, and even then, she's gone out of her way to care for them beyond that. Catarina's denseness and impulsiveness make it impossible for her to act against her true nature for long, and her first instinct is always to treat people with love and kindness. She even won over Geordo by accident despite the fact that she failed his route in her previous life. Further, during a nightmare in which she sees all her friends die, Catarina states that she would gladly accept her doom if it will save them. And finally, the fact that she was completely unaware of Sirius/Raphael's route and still managed to win him over is conclusive proof that, even without the threat of exile or death looming over her, Catarina is a genuinely Nice Girl.
• When She Smiles: Catarina is not particularly unattractive, but when she smiles she ends up making other people, generally girls, fall for her.
• Womanchild: Catarina actually considers herself to be 32 years old, given her past life died at seventeen, awakened to her Past-Life Memories eight years into her second life, and is already fifteen at the start of the game's events. Yet she still acts her physical age in all situations, and sometimes even less as even as a young adult she still has a tendency to act like an overactive child. Brain damage may or may not be to blame.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: This is the main concept of the series and the source of most of its humor.
  • Catarina – or more accurately, the girl who became her – thinks she's been transported to a scripted world with only horrible fates awaiting her at the hands of her friends for being the evil rival. And she'd be right… if it wasn't for the fact that her just being aware of this has sent the plot completely Off the Rails. Everyone rather likes this sweet-natured oddball, meaning most of the scripted events no longer happen as planned, but she still considers herself to be an outside observer at best to their romantic hijinks while remaining completely blind to her own.
  • In the anime-original dungeon exploration test, Catarina also suggests deliberately searching dead ends first, as every RPG player knows there'll be Inexplicable Treasure Chests and whatnot off the main path! The rest of the cast are all utterly confused, as the exam is a Time Trial.
• "X" Marks the Hero: The injury that awakened Catarina's Past-Life Memories and set her down the path to becoming the story's protagonist left her with an X-shaped scar on her forehead (though it has already faded as a teenager).
• Yuri Fan: Her favorite romance novel is "Sophia and the Emerald Princess". Though based on how she described it compared to Sophia talking about a similar story later, she seemed to completely miss the yuri subtext and see it as a platonic story involving two girls, as usual when it comes to Catarina.

Tropes applicable to her Fortune Lover counterpart. (And On the Verge of Doom! prior to Chapter 1.)

Game Catarina

• Accidental Hero: While she's nothing that could be considered remotely "heroic", it's mentioned in On the Verge of Doom! that she forced Anne to stay with her despite Baron Shelley's efforts to marry Anne off, which unintentionally ended up saving Anne from a potentially horrible Arranged Marriage.
• Alpha Bitch: Catarina is one of the worst bullies in the Magic Academy, and even leads a Girl Posse of bullies looking down on commoner students, but especially Maria.
• Asshole Victim: In the Keith and Geordo routes, she either gets exiled or killed in, respectively, the good and bad endings. Either way, she is so nasty a person her fate is more cathartic than tragic; if anything, her death in the bad endings is only a bad thing because it causes either suitor to break up with Maria and exile themselves out of shame.
• Big Sister Bully: In the game, Catarina would verbally abuse her adopted younger brother Keith during their childhood, leading to his growing resentment of her to the point of murder in the bad ending to his route. "Monkey girl" Catarina in the current story is the complete opposite.
• Book Dumb: As described by the current Catarina, the game counterpart holds terrible grades. The light novel, however, suggests that she's too obsessed with getting into Geordo's good looks to focus on studying.
• Breakout Villain: Apparently Catarina was popular with the players and was given a larger role in the sequel Fortune Lover II as the main villain in all of the routes instead of just being a rival character in some of the routes.
• The Bully: Catarina was not only an Alpha Bitch but in the Geordo and Keith routes she takes delight in making Maria's every day a living hell.
• Cain and Abel: She's definitely the Cain to Keith's Abel because she bullies her little brother.
• Daddy's Girl: One of the vanishingly few good qualities about her is that she genuinely loves her father Luigi, but she still managed to twist that into something darker because she abuses his spoiling nature and him adopting Keith filled her with jealousy about the boy stealing away Luigi's attention.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Gender-inverted. Millidiana encouraged and seemingly participated in Catarina's bullying of Keith, believing him to be her husband's bastard child.
• Disposable Fiancée: She is this to Geordo in his route, playing the obstacle between Geordo and Maria that Maria (as the Player Character) needs to overcome.
• Driven by Envy: In both the Geordo and Keith routes, her growing resentment against Maria over the latter freeing either suitor from her clutches reaches its climax in the endgame, where she tries to outright murder Maria, leading to the suitor either condemning her to exile (good ending) or outright murdering her (bad ending).
• Entitled to Have You: Game Catarina exploited her engagement to Geordo, as well as the scar on her forehead, as leverage to keep him tied to her. Current Catarina has no such interests, especially given her potential future if she continues to lord it over Geordo.
• Flat Character: Every other major character in the game had various things in their backstories influencing how they became what they are, with all of them having more to them beneath the surface, even some that the "monkey girl" wasn't aware of. That said, Catarina appears to be the sole exception. Nothing we've seen so far points to her having anything to her character beyond being a Spoiled Brat-turned-Alpha Bitch Hate Sink, with it likely being because the game developers didn't feel there was any need for anything else about her character since her entire purpose was being a villainous rival—any more would risk her getting Unintentionally Sympathetic.invoked
• Foil: Catarina serves as this to both Maria and the other rival characters.
  • Maria is an exceptionally compassionate and talented commoner who can win the hearts of noblemen and princes. Catarina is a Jerkass noblewoman with terrible grades, and not even Catarina's fiance loves her.
  • Mary is willing to respect her fiance Alan's decision to get together with Maria, but Catarina is highly possessive of Geordo and jealous of Maria. Mary is the victim of abuse by her older siblings, whereas Catarina is an abuser.
  • Sophia has a close relationship with her older brother, and must be befriended in order to win Nicol's heart, while Catarina abuses her adoptive brother Keith and serves as the rival on his route.
• Hate Sink: Game Catarina is an incredibly stuck-up Alpha Bitch who took delight in making the lives of everyone around her, especially Maria, miserable, in turn making her the perfect cathartic target for exile or murder in the eyes of players of Fortune Lover. So much so in fact, she's brought back for the sequel, now sporting edgier clothes and dark magic. invoked
• Hated by All: Considering that all of her routes involve being exiled or dying, it really shows how unpopular she is in the game.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: It's quite downplayed since she could only use her earth elemental casting to create bumps in the dirt to trip Maria at certain intervals.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Current Catarina's belief that she has a villainous face comes down to two factors. One, she has Tsurime Eyes. Two, her eyes are a light blue that she thinks to look harsh and cold. Nobody else really agrees with her on either and barely even knows that she thinks that. The extra illustration of volume 1 of the manga definitely does invoke this, however. It also veers into Creepy Blue Eyes whenever she's being incredibly nasty.
• Infant Sibling Jealousy: Played with, given that the younger sibling is adopted and there are only a few months between them. In the game, Catarina was incredibly jealous of Keith stealing away Luigi's affection.
• It Meant Something to Me: In the game, Catarina does have feelings for Geordo, although they're still very shallow and possessive. On the other hand, Geordo is only engaged to Catarina so that he has someone to point to in order to discourage fangirls.
• Jerkass: Nothing else could better describe her character. She treats everybody as beneath her, views everyone else as existing only for her own benefit, and does everything in her power to make Maria's life miserable. Small wonder that every route involving her, she becomes an Asshole Victim.
• Joker Immunity: Was such a popular In-Universe Love to Hate villain for fans of the original game, she gets brought back in the sequel, despite getting killed in several routes in the first Fortune Lover. Further, even in the Good End routes of Fortune Lover II, she only gets arrested rather than killed off or exiled this time around.
• Karma Houdini: While she does experience a Karma Houdini Warranty in the routes for Geordo, Keith, and the Harem, in Alan and Nicol's routes she gets away with having bullied Keith and numerous other people for years, and continues to bully others, because she doesn't get directly involved in those routes. Meanwhile, she's a partial-houdini in the Friendship ending, as while she still doesn't get any direct comeuppance there, Maria befriending everybody, including Geordo and Keith, results in Catarina's influence over the other characters being erased, leaving her with nothing to prop up her ego.
• Karmic Death: In the bad endings to the Geordo and Keith routes, she gets murdered by, respectively, her fiancé who she keeps under her thumb and her adopted younger brother she abused.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Likewise, in the good endings to the aforementioned routes, she is condemned to exile with the authority of either suitor.
• Love to Hate: In-Universe, Catarina became an incredibly popular Hate Sink among the players of Fortune Lover, to the point despite being a Self-Disposing Villain who died in several routes, she got brought back as the Hidden Villain of the sequel.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While game Catarina clearly disliked Maria, given the revelations about the secret fifth route and its suitor, it becomes increasingly ambiguous as to how much of the depths to which she would stoop, trying to maim and even kill Maria, was of her own volition, and how much of it was under the influence of Sirius/Raphael's dark magic amplifying all that negativity in an attempt to distract Maria from paying attention to him and possibly derail his scheme of revenge.
• My Sister Is Off-Limits: Gender Inverted. When playing in Keith's route, Catarina disapproves of Maria dating her adoptive brother, but only because she finds the idea of a commoner becoming connected to her noble prestige insulting.
• Never My Fault: It wouldn't be surprising coming from her, which attributes to her doomed routes in the game.
• Obviously Evil: Between her Icy Blue Eyes and Forehead of Doom, it's pretty obvious that Catarina was deliberately designed to be walking bad news.
• Rich Bitch: The game's Catarina is the embodiment of the "bitchy noblewoman who treats everyone like dirt" stereotype.
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: In the sequel game Fortune Lover II Catarina returns from exile wielding powerful dark magic seeking revenge against Maria and serves as the main villain in all of the routes. In the game's bad ending Catarina and Maria Mutual Kill each other in a duel while the rest of cast fall prey to dark magic.
• Self-Disposing Villain: Her sense of entitlement and resentment over anyone who would break her control (such as Maria) not only alienated her from most characters but ultimately becomes her undoing, resulting in either her exile or death without Maria actually having to do anything to Catarina herself.
• Smug Smiler: Being an arrogant noblewoman with too much entitlement, smugness is practically her default expression.
• Smug Snake: Despite her prideful nature, Catarina is suggested to be fairly incompetent and unlikeable. Her magical proficiency, in particular, is pathetic for someone so proud of their heritage, and she's not that great of a student in academics either.
• Spoiled Brat: As a little girl, Catarina used to be pretty horrible because she was pampered so much, with her only getting worse when she got older.
• Stupid Evil: From what we see of her, she doesn't seem much smarter than her kind counterpart. Whatever her plans are to torment Maria and her suitors, they inevitably lead to her death or exile.
• Took a Level in Badass: In Fortune Lover II Catarina returns from exile wielding powerful dark magic comparable to Maria's light magic.
• Toxic Friend Influence: She's this to pretty much everyone in the game, but especially to Geordo. The only positive effect she was ever shown to have on anyone was inspiring Sienna to be proud of her magic, and even then it still led to her taking part in bullying Maria.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: In a game where the other romantic rivals, Mary and Sophia, at least had sympathetic backgrounds and personalities, Catarina sticks out like a sore thumb for being an incredibly stuck-up Alpha Bitch designed to be despicable on both ends of the fourth wall.

Tropes applicable to her On the Verge of Doom! counterpart.

On the Verge of Doom! Catarina

• Ambiguous Situation: Expanding on the question as to whether Catarina is still really herself or is now the "monkey girl" in her role (see her main-story entry above), on one hand, Geordo mentions that she has always been not given to thinking things through, while on the other hand, Maria thinks she has become a completely different person.
• Amnesiac Dissonance: By the time she got her Past-Life Memories back, Catarina was already firmly established as a horrible Alpha Bitch, which deeply embarrasses her even before she realizes it puts her in a dangerous position.
• Amnesiac Villain Joins the Heroes: Downplayed. Technically, Catarina remembers everything about her current past, and it's actually regaining memories of her previous life that sparks her change. However, even before realizing anything about Fortune Lover, Catarina expresses confusion about why she was bullying Maria only moments before and later can't even think of any reason she bullied so many people out of spite and jealousy. It's also suggested that Catarina is so impulsive a person, she doesn't think too deeply about any decision she makes, especially when said decision was not in sync with her true character.
• The Atoner: Unlike the main series, where Catarina was merely a Spoiled Brat until the head injury but never matured into a bully, here she's already been a massively abusive bully for several years, especially in regards to Keith. While she doesn't remember why she did it she still feels horrible about how much of a jerk she was, and tries everything in her power to make up for it, except many people find it almost impossible to believe she's truly reformed at first, especially Keith
• Big Sister Instinct: She immediately jumps to Keith's defense when she sees him about to get stabbed by a Yandere girl he had previously flirted with. It's what helps him consider that she may genuinely be sincere in her desire to make up for bullying him.
• Closet Key: Mary's dialogue indicates that, after meeting Catarina, her affection for Alan is slowly replaced with love for Catarina. The final scene indicates that Mary taught herself the male portion of the dance just on the off chance that she'd get to do with Catarina — something which her fiancé reacts to with incredulity.
• Dumb Is Good: Double Subverted. Before regaining her memories, Geordo describes Catarina as both stupid and selfish. Ironically, these traits are exactly why he believes that she's changed and that her attempts to make amends are genuine: the Catarina he knows is far too stupid to put on so elaborate a ruse.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Played straight with Maria, helped by Maria's All-Loving Heroine nature and Catarina's attempts to make up for everything the original Catarina had done.
  • Defied by Keith, since years of familial abuse and neglect can't be erased by a few kinder-sounding words and attempts to spend time as a family, with it taking a ton of effort for them to get anywhere close to reconciling, and even then he only opened up to the possibility of her atonement being genuine,it takes a lot more time of her showing how sincere she is before he actually forgives her.
• Engineered Public Confession: Noelia starts the "trial event" that led to Catarina's exile in the game, listing all of the crimes Catarina is accused of. However, since this version of Catarina actually was guilty of these things before her change, Catarina starts apologizing immediately. Noelia then smugly claims that she was going to dismiss the charges because there was no evidence, but since Catarina is confessing, then she has no choice but to mete out punishment. Luckily, Sienna runs away and comes back with Maria and Geordo to put an end to the farce.
• Hates Being Alone: Suggested; at one point Catarina finds herself on the outs with her Girl Posse, and when she asks some other girls if she can sit with them, they apologetically turn her down because they're too frightened of her. She finds herself feeling so lonely and miserable without anyone around that she starts following Sienna wherever she goes, not having anyone else to talk to.
• Irony:
  • Geordo refuses Catarina's request to break off their engagement because he still wants her as a shield, using her previous arguments for how he should take responsibility for her long-gone scar against her.
  • Geordo also quickly figures out that Catarina's sudden change-of-heart must be genuine because Catarina is too stupid to plot out something so elaborate or avoid acting out on her whims.
  • In the main series, Catarina never figures out the obvious cause-and-effect that the only reason Geordo and Keith kill her is because she tries to kill Maria. In VoD, she actually figures this out rather quickly and decides that exile is the more important of the two endings^note As Catarina's personalities point out, exile could still happen if people seek to punish Catarina for her past behavior. Considering that Keith still bitterly hates Catarina, she's right to be worried. to avoid since she'd now never do such a thing.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: When Keith is assaulted with a knife, Catarina rushes to his rescue...by dropping her wooden training sword to instead trip said assailant with her "Earth Bump". Gerran, her swordsmanship teacher, promptly scolds her for such a ridiculous decision, and an embarrassed Catarina declares that at least things worked out well.
• Lethal Chef: In an effort to make up for Maria, Sienna and Mary convince Catarina to try and make sweets as a token of apology for trampling Maria's. Catarina, however, is completely hopeless as chef and the other two girls wind up doing all the work while Catarina merely cleans up after. In an aside, Catarina also realizes that nobody let her cook in her previous life, either.
• Must Make Amends: Catarina says that regardless of how her destruction flags turn out, she still has to do her best to apologize and make up with the people she's wronged, because she could never live with herself if she didn't at least make a sincere effort.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Here, Catarina, having regained her memories while bullying Maria, is appalled at having spoiled the latter's muffins, and goes on to profusely apologize to her.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Catarina tries to make up for having bullied Maria by defending her from further bullying while wearing what she thinks of as an "impenetrable disguise", namely a large headscarf that hides her face, but not her hair or clothes. After she ropes Sienna into helping her, she gets her to wear one too, albeit not without Sienna protesting they don't actually need them. When Maria reveals she knew they'd been "secretly" helping her, Catarina's taken completely by surprise.
• Reformed Bully: Here, she doesn't regain her memories until after she's already at school, and in the middle of bullying Maria, no less. This ends up making her look like a rather extreme example to all outsiders. This happens after she's bullied Keith for seven years, so he isn't nearly as willing to accept her apologies at first.

• Reformed, but Rejected:
  • Catarina doesn't regain her Past-Life Memories in this series until after she begins attending the Magic Academy, which means that she spent at least seven years being a terrible person, and already had the reputation of a bully before the semester was well underway. She attempts to convince people that she's changed, but they understandably don't buy it or think she's plotting some new cruel prank.
  • Even when people finally start believing that her change-of-heart was sincere, many of her former Girl Posse members, as well as other cruel and elitist characters, still begin to resent and hate Catarina because they are disappointed that she suddenly turned into a "wimp".
  • Catarina's trial scene goes differently in this version as well. Because Catarina actually did do the things she's being accused of, she quickly breaks down and apologizes for her actions. This allows Noelia to feign shock that Catarina is confessing, and quickly claim that her apology is meaningless without action (implying that Catarina should renounce her status as a ducal heir). It's ultimately thwarted when Geordo and Maria (the only two people to firsthand witness Catarina's change of heart) arrive and prove that Catarina's words have been backed up by her actions, and Maria once again threatens to reveal the bullies whom have done worse things to her than Catarina ever did.
• Took a Level in Kindness: To an even more drastic extent than in the main series, in that her turnover occurred in the middle of bullying Maria.

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