Literature / Akuyaku Reijou no Naka no Hito

The villainess and the reincarnated one

Emi Kobayashi, an ordinary girl who loves otome games, wakes up and finds herself as Remilia, the villainess of the otome-game app The Star Maiden And The Knight of Salvation. Emi scrambles to avert the destruction of the world and her own downfall!

… In spite of her efforts, the heroine of The Star Maiden, who is also a reincarnated person, strikes at her, and Emi is accused of trying to kill the heroine in addition to breaking the engagement. Instead of Emi, who lost consciousness due to the shock, Remilia, who was watching over her from inside, wakes up and takes revenge on the heroine and her former fiancée prince who hurt the lovely Emi.

Akuyaku Reijou no Naka no Hito (literally The One Within the Villainess), is Web Serial Novel written by Makiburo with a manga adaptation by Shiraume Nazuna.

The webnovel is completed and can be found here with additional Bonus stories, while the manga can be found here.

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Warning: A good portion of the Tropes elaborated here contains spoilers from the completed Webnovel. You have been warned.

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Akuyaku Reijou no Naka no Hito has the following tropes:

• A Birthday, Not a Break: In the original game, Anhel lost his little brother, Klimt, on his 140th birthday.
• Adaptation Expansion: The manga expands some of Remilia's adventures to prepare for her revenge on the reincarnated Pina such as her journey to the Kingdom of Dwarves and recruiting the merchant who sold Pina the love potions she used to quickly win over Williard and the other love interests, along with the whole school as quickly as she did. It also expanded on some moments that are only briefly touched upon in the original webnovel, such as Sophia's Ship Tease with Anhel's little brother, Klimt.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Emi's reaction to Remilia and Angel's fate is bawling her eyes out at the unfairness they have to experience and wished that they had a better fate. Remilia even lampshades it.
  Remilia: Be it the villainess Remilia and Angel, I believe Emi's too empathetic with villains.
• Always Need What You Gave Up: The love interests, who thanks to Emi's efforts are in even better states when they enter the academy than they would have been in the game world, all find the rest of their lives not panning out after abandoning her.
  • Prince Willard ends up losing the right to the throne to his older brother, and loses the love of his life to another man.
  • Claude is pretty much a duke in name only, with no political power, no new ideas for policies without Emi's help, is most likely going to inherit debt from the Glaupner family once their declining income stops being enough to support their lavish lifestyle, and doesn't even have the right to call Remilia his sister anymore since she was removed from the house.
  • David loses his own fiancée, who was disgusted by his betrayal of Emi, and becomes even more estranged from his older brother, when previously their relationship was on the mend. In addition, his prized fighting skills have atrophied due to always having to escort Pina.
  • Stefan, without Emi's emotional support, fails to make any headway in advancing either his career as a magician or a musician due to his social awkwardness.
• A Lighter Shade of Gray: Remilia would have been far more ruthless in her attempts to get revenge on the reincarnated Pina if not for Emi's influence. So due to Emi, Remilia ends up being on the lighter scale of Grey-and-Gray Morality by the start of the story. That said, Remilia is still prone to her Anti-Hero tendencies once in a while.
• All-Loving Heroine: Emi is one as her own reaction to Remilia's canonical fate and kindness being what motivated Remilia to eventually take over control of her body by her Condemnation event and make a move to get her revenge on the reincarnated person behind Pina for Emi's sake. Not only that, Emi is just so kind and loving that she eventually helped the love interests of their own problems early on. Even after awakening, Remilia also played up this image as much as she could to others unaware of the fact that both souls are sharing a body as she feels that it's what Emi would have done. Emi also similarly pitied and cried at Angel's fate of him killing his own little brother in a frenzied state and Remilia plans to save the Demon King for Emi's sake as well.
• And I Must Scream: A bonus story reveals what happens to the original Pina when Rina takes over her body. Pina is aware of everything Rina has done but she can do nothing but watch as Rina hurts everyone involved to a point of hating her own body that her soul has to be taken away to the Spirit Realm to recover. Thankfully, Remilia eventually searches for the original Pina's soul with the help of the spirits and helps her to get reincarnated as her child.
• Animal Motif: Remilia has a spider motif, representing her slowly and carefully building up her revenge against those involved with Emi's downfall, much like a spider weaving a grand, intricate web. Appropriately, one of her first acts after the condemnation is to send out an army of spiders to spy on everyone in order to keep apprised of events. Remilia also had crows as her familiars in the original "Star Maiden" game, representing Remilia's grudge of having been wronged like a crow remembering who had done it wrong. However, the current Remilia changed that to have spiders instead as spiders can stealthily gather information for her better than a crow would.
• Anti-Hero: Remilia, thanks to seeing Emi's memories and how much Emi is a fan of her character in her original life and genuinely love her, becomes one over time as she showcase her true calculating nature and made use of what she saw through Emi's memories to slowly take her revenge on Pina and all the men that had betrayed Emi.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: The true Remilia was perfectly content to watch Emi live out a life of happiness for both their sakes. However, when Pina undoes all that work and Emi is left comatose from heartbreak, the soul of Remilia takes control back and decides to utilize Emi's foreknowledge of the original Star Maiden game's events to completely and utterly destroy Pina in retribution.
• Babies Ever After: The bonus chapters show that Remilia has two children with Anhel who are the reincarnations of Emi and the original Pina, whose souls Remilia retrieved from the Spirit Realm due to their Despair Event Horizons earlier in the series sending them there to recover.
• Becoming the Mask: While initially borrowing and using Emi's All-Loving Heroine Remilia act to play the part of the hero in her quest for revenge, Remilia comes to appreciate the feeling of doing good deeds. This is best exemplified in her bid to win over Anhel. Chapter 15 of the manga adaptation shows that despite spending so much time manipulating him, Remilia started to genuinely love him for his earnestness.
• Best Served Cold: Remilia ultimately follows a slow and careful plan in order to get her revenge on the reincarnated Pina for completely breaking Emi, and the game's love interests for betraying her, when she takes back possession of Remilia's body.
• Cruel Mercy: Pina's, or rather, Rina, the soul reincarnated into Pina's body's ultimate fate at the end of the story. Remilia tells Anhel that she'd rather let Pina live... but Anhel, understanding what Remilia truly means, has Rina condemned to a Fate Worse than Death.
• Cry for the Devil: In-Universe, this is how Emi feels for the fictional Remilia. When Emi is reincarnated, she resolves to make Remilia's life perfect so she won't have to suffer the loneliness and rejection which drove her to villainy in the first place.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check:
  • Discussed by Emi in a side story, where she notes Remilia was so smart and gifted, she probably could have just easily found happiness and success outside of being engaged to Willard instead of being relegated to a villainous role she was in the story.
  • Remilia, when she used a spell under Anhel's guidance to peer through past memories see how the reincarnated Pina acted to get her way to condemn Emi, she notes that the reincarnated Pina could actually make herself to be a good actress, but she has a too strong tunnel vision in getting her dream harem due to being reincarnated as the heroine of Star Maiden to think of any other future routes for herself.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: The Reincarnated Pina is one to "Canon Heroines" who are revealed to be a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing underneath their kind mask" or their body is inhabited by a Jerkass reincarnator in similar genre's of stories. In most of these stories, the "Heroine" usually gets to have some upper hand through some level of protagonist plot armor as the canonical protagonist against the ones the readers are following. While this starts out to be the case early in the story, it is eventually revealed that the reincarnated Pina only managed to succeed through using cheat items to get her way and when Remilia cuts her source off, the reincarnated Pina can't actually win over the rest of the kingdom inhabitants as easily as she used to and ultimately lacked the charisma that the original Pina would have had due to being a sociopath with No Social Skills and didn't bother to work with what skills and abilities she currently had after her reincarnation. Just because one is reincarnated into the canon "heroine" of the story, doesn't mean that you'd get the benefits and skills that the canon protagonist would have had on the get go.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The story ends with Remilia finally getting her revenge for Emi, and going on to have a happy life with Anhel, the demon king, and the reincarnated souls of Emi and the original Pina as her children.
• Evil Is Petty: A sidestory reveals that the reason the reincarnated Pina, Rina, goes out of her way to undo all of Emi's work is out of a petty dislike of Emi being too much of a Nice Girl for Rina's liking.
• Fate Worse than Death: Rina's ultimate fate. Her throat gets burned out to rob her of her voice, she's sentenced to hard labor in the mines for the rest of her life, her face gets disfigured, and she's tortured and raped daily by all the people whose lives she had ruined, all while being kept alive through the constant usage of drugs and unable to even beg for someone to kill her. Remilia also still hasn't let up on her vendetta in the slightest, concocting horrific new methods for Pina's jailors to torture her with, and when Pina finally starts feeling numb to her pain, Emilia begins tampering with her dreams, mocking her with visions of how she could have easily coasted by with the life she wanted had she just not hurt Emi out of simple pettiness.
• Freudian Excuse: The original Remilia suffered intense Parental Neglect from her parents who only saw her as a political tool due to her vast magical abilities, which caused Remilia to become obsessed with Williard, her fiance, in a desperate attempt to obtain that love. Fortunately for her, Emi was able to save her before she would fall to become her canonical self.
• Genre Deconstruction: Emi's time in the story follows the standard "Reborn as Villainess" Story where someone reincarnates as the villainess, cleans up her act, and makes the lives of those around her better in the process. Then the "heroine" also turns out to be a reincarnator and starts tear apart everything she built up, the people she helped prove to be Ungrateful Bastards and (albeit under the influence of love potions) help her do it, leading to the fated Condemnation happening anyway. This leads to the real villainess taking over and using Emi's knowledge to create a world that while on paper leaves the world better off, also leaves all the friends that Emi made sans Sophia even worse off than before as punishment for their betrayal.
• Gone Horribly Right: Pina, the reincarnated one at least, didn't like the idea that Emi was acting completely off script from her role as the villainess, so she decides to use cheat items to put the story back on script, resulting in Emi being driven into despair. However, doing so results in Remilia (who was more than content to let Emi take over her life otherwise) taking over her body again shortly after and she decides to truly be a villainess by destroying Pina in turn tenfold.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Emi doesn't understand why Pina is framing her. However, unlike many examples of the trope, this just serves to make Emi uncomfortable. She starts avoiding Pina wherever possible, which only makes painting her as a bully easier in the long run.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: The original Remilia suffered from parental neglect and her loneliness and feeling unloved is what drove her to be a villainess in the original game. Fortunately for Remilia, Emi truly loved her character in the original game and pitied how Remilia was never able to truly shine as a person due to this lack of love, her kindness and love was able to help Remilia from most of the issues that would have made her the villain of the story. It's for this reason that Remilia was so outraged at the reincarnated Pina for breaking Emi to a point of no return and finally regained full control of her body to plan her revenge.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Due to the Katakana used for his name(アンヘル), Angel's name is often translated as Angel or just as Anhel.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite Emi's efforts to avoid Remilia's canonical fate, the story sets itself to the course by the fact that the canon heroine, Pina, is also a reincarnated person like Emi and she is far too determined to make sure that all of Emi's previous fruits of labor will be turned to nothing due to her berating Emi for supposedly trying to destroy the canon setting of "Star Maiden".
• Ironic Hell: In one of the sidestories of the novel, the original Pina was revealed to be a victim of constant sexual harassment for much of her life, and later rescued and taken away from her Abusive Dad who did nothing to help her when she was found to be the new star maiden... but the reincarnated Pina, Rina, who has no knowledge about the hell that the original Pina suffered, had no qualms to sleep with men to get her way for a harem, something that the original Pina hated due to her own past. And after the Laser-Guided Karma hits Rina, she now suffered from the very same past that the original Pina had escaped from and wouldn't have been subjected to it had Rina been a decent individual.
• Ironic Name: The last love interest, the demon lord, is given the name Angel.
• Jerkass: The reincarnated Pina fits the trope to spades due to being selfish and entitled to the world of "Star Maiden" due to being reincarnated as the canonical heroine. A side story reveals that before her death and reincarnation, Rina was just as much of a jerk in her old life as she is in her reincarnated life as Pina as she found joy in bullying and harassing people before she was forced to drop out of college due to her harassment being exposed and refused to believe that any of it was her own fault. The original Pina, however, averts this.
• Jerkass Gods: The Lord of the Heavens is directly responsible for the bad state of the world. He kidnapped the Goddess of Purification, preventing her from healing her father and stopping the miasma from spreading, and killed any deity who objected to him, all because the goddess refused to marry him.
• Lady and Knight: Sophia — David's fiancée, student council president, and would-be queensguard — gives up her royal position and engagement in favor of this relationship with Remilia. She was the only person absent from the school during Pina's reign who was deeply affected by Emi's acts of kindness, and so remains loyal to her.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Remilia makes it her goal to make sure everyone who had a part in the Condemnation pays for what they did to Emi.
  • Pina or rather Rina, the Big Bad who drove Emi into an emotional coma just because she couldn't stand not being the "heroine", gets to watch as the reverse harem she built slowly falls apart without the help of the cheat items she used to help build it, and she's prevented from doing anything of note because Remilia does everything before she has a chance, along with Pina being too lazy to do anything not "plot-related" or spend time away from her harem. As the coup-de-gras, Pina gets subjected to her own Condemnation when at a ball to celebrate the new alliance between humans and demons, she's caught attempting to influence the Demon King with (fake) demon intimacy perfume, her own lovers are cured of their love potion intoxication by the drinks served at the party, her actions in framing Remilia, including trading sexual favors, are exposed in front of the public, and in the end she's declared a devil who possessed the Star Maiden and incarcerated. Her final fate is to be sent to work in the mines for the rest of her life, where she's tortured while awake, while in her dreams she's shown visions of the life she could have led if she weren't so vile so that she'll be tormented even more when she wakes up to reality. Also, it's noted that Rina lost her Star Maiden status because of her cruel actions toward Emi caused the real Pina to despair to the point of breaking her soul off from her body, which also meant the Star Maiden powers disappeared with her.
  • The original male love interests were all influenced by Pina's love potions, but all that did was make them fall in love with Pina. They still made a conscious choice on some level when they decided to help Pina with the Condemnation and torment a girl who was nothing but kind and supportive to them. As a result, they're stuck with a loathsome woman for several years while their association with that same woman shoots their career prospects through the foot in various ways. In the end, they're all stuck in mediocre roles and jobs (at best) with the knowledge that they alienated the most important woman to their lives with their actions and destroyed everything she helped build for them.
  • While the Glaupner family (and the kingdom as a whole) never played a direct role in the Condemnation, Remilia still holds them partly accountable for all the small ways they let the event happen. Thus, she contents herself with simply letting the kingdom fall into decline so that she'll be able to pick up the pieces and build a better world for the sake of Emi.
• Last Girl Wins: Gender inverted example. Anhel, the secret target of the original game, falls in love with Remilia through her efforts to save his country and people. He is who Remilia ultimately marries, favoring him for falling in love with the Remilia that Emi had worked so hard for, and showing a sincere effort to help prove her innocence.
• Light Is Not Good: The Reincarnated Pina, due to her position as The Chosen One and having a self-centric Jerkass personality fits the bill. This is averted with the Original Pina who is revealed and shown to be a genuine Nice Girl in the side stories and is horrified by Rina's actions using her body and being unable to do anything about it to where the soul falls into despair.
• Living Lie Detector: Angel, the secret love interest of the original Star Maiden game, has the ability to see through lies. Though it still had limits and prone to Loophole Abuse.
• Loophole Abuse: Angel's Living Lie Detector ability means that he can see through any lie that is spoken, but Metaphorically True words can still bypass them. Remilia used this to get through Angel and gain an ally out of him.
• Love Redeems: Remilia, seeing Emi's memories of her peaceful and loving family life before her death and all the love that Emi had for her that she wished for a happier ending for Remilia is what allows Remilia herself to heal from all the Parental Neglect she suffered and was saved by Emi, allowing Remilia to be firmly heroic with shades of morally gray actions in her path to take revenge on those who wronged her. Emi also had done this to all the game's romantic love interest by being an All-Loving Heroine herself, but unlike the case with Remilia, it didn't stick too long due to the reincarnated Pina's actions putting all her efforts back to square one.
• Metaphorically True:
  • Angel and Remilia's story for the miasma is claiming the miasma was the result of the actions of the Lord of the Sky, while the creator deity's powers were exhausted holding off the miasma. The miasma was actually caused by the creator, but it was true the reason the situation got to that point was because of the Lord of the Sky kidnapping the purification goddess Renge and then killing multiple other gods that tried to protest, allowing the creator deity's miasma to spread further. They come up with the story to keep the deity's faith among the demons from being shaken while he's recovering his power.
  • To cover up the fact that Pina and Remilia are reincarnated at some point and the original Remilia having taken over after Emi's emotional coma, Remilia tells the people that Pina was possessed by a demon, destroying what is left of the original Pina's soul, who then proceed to mind control the love interests and change the contents of the original Star Maiden's prophecy in an attempt to destroy the world... which marks true to the most part that the reincarnator behind Pina is a self-centered Jerkass who still thinks that the world is but a game and cares little of the fact that the world she is brought into is no longer a game, but a new reality that is indeed in danger of collapsing because of her not fulfilling her duty as the Star Maiden. Remilia also told the kingdom and Anhel that she inherited memories of "the one who will save the world" and how the presence of the "demon" did not exist in those memories to mask how Remilia comes to know about the foreknowledge of the world near intimately and hide Emi's reincarnation.
  • This is the only way to bypass Angel's Living Lie Detector abilities. Remilia had been speaking words that are true from a certain viewpoint to Angel, both as the original Villainess Remilia, and as a Remilia who had learned what it is like to be genuinely loved and had been saved by Emi.
• Mirror Character: Remilia and Pina, or rather, Emi and Rina, are this as they have reincarnated from the real world and become a character in the game app The Star Maiden And The Knight of Salvation and similarly Sharing a Body with the actual canon character that they are reincarnated to. The difference is that Rina took over Pina's body at the start of the canon story of "Star Maiden" proper, leaving no room for Pina to be able to interfere and actually stop Rina from doing her heinous actions and ended up thinking that the world is just like the game and tried to make her harem fantasies a reality since as heroine, everything in this world should all be for her. Emi, on the other hand, reincarnated earlier than that with Remilia's soul watching over her progress and seeing her memories, with Emi's kindness moving Remilia so much that Remilia eventually awakens and takes over control to get revenge on Rina and serve justice for the kind-hearted Emi. Pina is basically a potential look to Remilia if Emi didn't reincarnate and shared a body with Remilia earlier before the start of the game, and if the other soul is a selfish, self-centered Jerkass.
• Morality Pet: Emi becomes one to Remilia herself and the story all happened because the reincarnated Pina broke Emi to such a point she essentially goes comatose from despair that Remilia is driven to get revenge on her.
• More than Mind Control: It's revealed that the cheat item Love Potion that Pina used to win over the male love interests and the rest of the school doesn't actually make the target completely blind with obedience to the person who gave the love potion to them, meaning that the love interests, including Remilia's actual fiance, Willard, went along with the brainwashing caused by the love potion on their own accord in some level. The Extra stories reveal that Pina made use of the love interests own hidden insecurities about Emi's All-Loving Heroine persona and the achievements she did to ensure that everything goes well.
  • Another Extra story reveals that the Star Maiden's powers had also been passively improving the love potions' effectiveness. However, said powers were tied to the soul of the real Pina. Once Pina's soul is separated from her body after the Condemnation, the Star Maiden's powers vanish, which is implied to have also played a factor in Rina's standing collapsing.
• Next Life as a Fictional Character: Emi Kobayashi passed away from an accident and reincarnates as Remilia Roze Glaupner, the Villainess of the mobile Otome game app "Star Maiden". Emi's not the only reincarnator as the Heroine, Pina, is also a reincarnated person.
• Not a Game: Remilia does treat her world like a game but only insofar as it relates to the setting. She recognizes the value and autonomy of the actual people living in it, contrasting Pina's reincarnator. What lets Remilia fulfill her revenge is that everyone believes she is the world's savior through her actions, rather than Because Destiny Says So.
• No-Sell: Demon products do not work on other demons. Because of this, Remilia creates a village with demon folk forced to flee their homeland knowing they won't fall under Pina's influence from the love potions. Even those with demon lineage are immune to said effects, as Remilia notes the first prince, Willard's brother, has some demon ancestry from his mother's side and therefore Pina didn't target him because the potion wouldn't work on him. While there is a product that can work on demons, it requires ingredients only found in the demon realm and Remilia uses said knowledge to convince Anghel to not allow the export of the materials, therefore preventing Pina from potentially making that product.
• Past-Life Memories: Remilia makes use of Emi's past life and knowledge of "Star Maiden" to carefully plan her way throughout the story, especially by stealing The Chosen One position from Pina.
• Power Degeneration: When a god directly uses their powers on the mortal plane, they start to become fatigued and build up a sediment in their bodies. Most gods decided to stop interfering directly and returned to the heavens, but The Creator had used built up so much sediment he could not return, forcing to remain as his body deteriorated and began releasing massive amounts of miasma. He had made plans for this eventually, but they were derailed by the Lord of the Heavens.
• Pragmatic Hero: In contrast to Emi's All-Loving Heroine, the true Remilia doesn't have moral incentives for the things she is doing, because every action she takes is in service of her revenge. However, that revenge takes the form of saving the world before the Chosen One can, thus practically all her actions are heroic by necessity.
• "Reborn as Villainess" Story: At the start, Emi was the person who had full control over Remilia's body after reincarnating, which played the trope straight. The twist being that the actual Remilia is still around as another soul and entity in their body, but she was ultimately content to allow Emi to stay as her had Pina not driven Emi into despair, which is when Remilia regains control over her body.
• Reincarnation: Both Emi and the original Pina are reborn as Remilia and Anghel's children, allowing both to live the life that Rina denied them both with her actions.
• Screw Destiny: Remilia's plan to avenge Emi is to slowly and methodically replace Pina as The Chosen One, which she easily manages to do.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Sophia due to having been away at the time of the condemnation was not affected by Pina's brainwashing and therefore was able to see the situation for what it was. In dismay and disgust over what happened to Emi, especially after investigating, she allows herself to get kicked out of her family and resigns as a knight to support Emi instead rather than a kingdom that would condemn someone like her.
  • Jim, the second Prince and Willard's brother, after seeing how callously his brother treated Emi! Remilia in favor of the reincarnated Pina after her condemnation and not being convinced of Emi! Remilia being evil due to Pina's brainwashing, on top of how he is overworked to handle the reincarnated Pina's poor spending, he chose to leave the Palace on his own accord and refuses to put up with his brother anymore. Granted, however, the real Remilia had been helped convince him to snap out of his long broken faith of his brother.
• Selective Obliviousness: Jim, though he is Locked Out of the Loop regarding the full chronology of Remilia's condemnation and Willard's part in it, he followed and helped Willard out of faith in the old Willard before the reincarnated Pina brainwashed him. A small dream the real Remilia concocted help snap him out of it as he realized that the brother he used to admire and trust is gone the moment he condemned the woman he used to love with his whole heart for another, prompting him to leave the kingdom and leave Willard to fix his own mess.
• Sharing a Body: Remilia was put in this state when Emi reincarnated into her body. Unlike most examples, it's majorly positive with Remilia being content watching over Emi and her endeavors. That is, until the reincarnated Pina shows up. This also turns out to have been the case with Pina, but with the much more horrifying implications on the original Pina's end being forced to watch Rina do horrible things using her body.
• The Sociopath: The reincarnated Pina is a textbook example of one. Unlike most depictions of the trope though, she is neither charming nor cunning. She has No Social Skills and refuses to learn them, and instead constantly tries using canned lines and scenarios from the game, even when it's obvious they won't work. She ultimately has to resort to drugs, bribes and sexual favors to get her way. Once she loses access to her drugs however, it quickly becomes obvious to everyone, even those she's already influenced, how vile a person she is. Even in her past life as Rina, she spent it bullying and lying to others to get her way until she was finally caught in college, at which point she became a hikikomori and died of heat stroke because she refused to leave her room after the AC unit broke.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Downplayed Trope, beyond the facial features, Williard's two brothers, Elhasha and Jim, had black hair instead of blonde.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Initially, the reincarnated Pina was able to succeed in condemning Emi through using the cheat items from the merchant shop to win over the whole school and the love interests, but once Remilia cuts off that supply, Pina's actions grew far more limited and she can no longer appeal and charm people to win any allies over like the original game does, which isn't helped that she is a sociopath with No Social Skills. Games are one thing, but the world she is in now isn't a game world, but a new reality. Without the drugs, her real nature becomes quickly apparent to others. In contrast, because Remilia still had holdovers and skills to fall back on from all of Emi's efforts, she was able to quickly turn things in her favor with her own resources despite being stripped of her noble status. Likewise, the fact Pina used such unnatural means to win everyone in the school over makes Sophia (who was away at the time) alarmed and suspicious enough of her to join Remilia instead. It's also shown multiple powerful figures outside the school have been criticizing Pina because of her lack of merits and accomplishments and how she's been exhausting the treasury for her indulgence.
  • In the original game, Pina was able to travel around the world with her love interests because the threat of the miasma, Remilia escalating things, and the fact that only Pina could purify it meant that they had no other options. Since Remilia is not only not trying to destroy the world now and is in fact preemptively saving the world by solving its problems and taking out the origin of the threat before it becomes a real issue, there's no "plot" for Pina to follow. Because all the love interests have obligations that supersede anything that's not an immediate threat to the world, none of them have any time to leave the kingdom, and because Pina refuses to do anything that doesn't involve the "plot" or hanging out with her harem, she's stuck doing nothing.
  • The Extra stories reveal that the love interests all let themselves be brainwashed by Pina because despite finding her loathsome, even with the use of love potions, they thought they could all use the Condemnation as an opportunity to "take Remilia down a peg" due to their insecurities, some of them believing they can use the opportunity to have Remilia themselves, and that once everything is over the incident will essentially be water under the bridge for a kind and remarkable person like Remilia. As it turns out, there's only so much emotional heartbreak a person can take, and even if the real Remilia never took over, what they did was help a sociopath bully a sweet, innocent woman into a coma. After things don't pan out as planned, they stick with Pina under both the love potion's influence and the misguided belief that Remilia will come back and forgive them. In the end though, Remilia spells out to their faces that, even if they were under the influence, they still proved themselves the kind of people who would betray their dearest friend and formally cuts off all ties from them, and nobody can raise any objections because they realize she's right.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth:
  • Emi is an All-Loving Hero who is doing her best in her position and reincarnation as Remilia to make things better and said trait ended up saving Remilia herself, unfortunately, the reincarnated Pina decided to ruin that to pieces and she was put into an emotional coma.
  • The real Pina, much like Remilia, was entirely conscious inside of her body when the reincarnator Rina took over. Unlike Rina, Pina was a genuine Nice Girl and thus she did not enjoy Rina going around being a tactless fool, ruining the life of an innocent girl, and sleeping around, all in what's supposed to be her own body. As Rina commits more and more vile acts, Pina's soul begins to disassociate from her body until the Condemnation, when Pina's soul entirely splits off and is escorted by the Star Maiden's guardian spirits to the Spirit Realm to recover. She ends up staying there for 15 years, too afraid to reincarnate into another awful life, until Remilia finds her and offers to guarantee that she'll reincarnate as her child.
• Too Happy to Live: Downplayed in that Emi doesn't actually die, but since her reincarnation as a young Remilia, Emi had been doing a lot of good progress in trying to make things better for Remilia with Remilia noting that all is well and good. That is, until the canon heroine arrives and reveals herself to be a reincarnated person and is a huge Jerkass determined to make sure things stay as the game canonically dictates and destroy Emi emotionally for supposedly going against the "game" and what's supposed to be all for her as the heroine. This results in Emi falling to an emotional coma and Remilia taking over when Emi's soul is out of commission.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Remilia views the original love interests as this concerning Emi as despite everything Emi did to help them be in a better position than they were in the original story, they allowed themselves to essentially become brainwashed by Pina and ultimately drive Emi into despair due to their own insecurities relating to Emi. Remilia therefore has no issues with allowing them to suffer for their actions in the end.
• Unscrupulous Hero: What Remilia becomes after re-awakening. Every action she takes is for the sake of getting her revenge on the reincarnated Pina and the love interests. However, she also takes actions that she believes will help build a better world and tries to present herself as an All-Loving Heroine because she believes that's what Emi would do, such as dealing with the various game story events before they became bigger issues.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Remilia holds the love interests as equally accountable as Pina for Emi's fate since the love potion only affects their opinion of Pina, meaning that they're just the kind of people who would betray and abandon their dearest friend even without the love potion's influence. Remilia spells it out to them when she formally cuts all ties with them in the end, and the love interests while horrified at what they've done, all realize that she's absolutely right since they all had some sort of agenda going into the Condemnation and they all just assumed that Emi would somehow bounce back and forgive them for their betrayal.
• Wham Line: This occurs to Emi when she finally meets Pina, and it's a start of Emi's Break the Cutie and Remilia's eventual awakening.
  Hey, you're a reincarnator too, aren't you?
• What If?: An extra story of the webnovel involves Remilia and Anhel's children dreaming of a world where Rina never hijacked the original Pina's body, revealing that Emi's own journey and struggle to earn a happy ending for everyone would have succeeded had it not been for the factor of the reincarnated Pina interfering and undoing all her work, and subsequently putting Emi to an emotional coma and having the original Remilia take over in revenge for Emi.
• White Sheep: Sophia, David's original fiance, was the only individual in the Academy who is unaffected by Pina's brainwashing of the whole school due to being away by the time the condemnation event took place, and thus eventually went searching for Remilia in order to help her.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: This is ultimately the downfall of the reincarnator controlling Pina. By nature of the fact that Villains Act, Heroes React, the plot of the otome game can't take place, because Remilia knows too much about the game world to make the same mistakes as her original counterpart.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: As revealed in a side story, the original Pina was subjected to an abusive father and faced with sexual harassment until she was discovered as the Star Maiden and taken away, which would have meant Pina's life would have started to turn for the better. Unfortunately, not long after this happens, Rina takes over her body and poor Pina is forced to watch Rina in her body take means to ruin Emi's life until she finally gets overcome with despair and separates from her body entirely.
• You Can't Fight Fate: The reincarnated person behind Pina undoing all of Emi's work to reach out to the canonical love interests and having to end up in the Condemnation event has Emi in such a shock due to all her efforts getting undone that the actual Remilia finally takes over. However, it is downplayed by the end of the web novels along with the extra stories: Remilia correctly assumes that the reincarnated person behind Pina only cared about dating, and so she makes no progress on fulfilling her destiny as the Star Maiden. This allows Remilia to completely usurp her role in saving the world. The side stories also reveal a reason why the drugs were so effective was because of Pina's Star Maiden powers, indicating said status was tied to Pina rather than Rina. So when Pina separated from her body following the Condemnation event, Rina consequently lost her status as the Star Maiden as well.