From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated!

Episode 4

Finally - some answers to viewers' burning questions! Most importantly, why is the otome game Kenzaburo is trapped in called "Love and Beast?" Sadly, it isn't a veiled reference to the male love interests' amorous proclivities, merely that each character summons their own magical familiars during the course of the plot. Heroine Anna summons her own, apparently bog-standard, generic Pegasus winged horse with a vibrant mane matching her own hair color, while Grace summons something weird. That leads us on nicely to answers about what's really going on with Kenzaburo.

From the opening sequence prominently featuring Kenzaburo's wife and daughter, we could intuit they'd be important to the ongoing plot, and those suspicions are certainly confirmed here. In a similar way to Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte, Kenzaburo is very literally in the actual video game  -  not merely a world based on it. He's inside his daughter's console, and his family can watch his exploits on their big living room television. In the "real" world, Kenzaburo's merely comatose, his mind active only in this digital space. Surely that means his mind will eventually return to his original body, leaving the "real" Grace to wake up to a ready-made harem of adoring fans of both sexes?

When Grace summons what appear to be tiny doll versions of both Kenzaburo and Grace instead of a magical familiar, both in-game onlookers and anime viewers are justifiably confused. It's only when mystical pink hands appear through a ghostly floating TV screen and mush them together that they coalesce into a handily-non-standard dual magic- wielding Ancient Dragon, with the power of both fire (from Grace?) and water (from Kenzaburo?). We later learn the mystic hands belong to Kenzaburo's daughter, who jumps at the chance to help her father in his new guise.

Can I just state here that Kenzaburo has the most delightful family of uber-geeks? We already know Kenzaburo's pop-culture knowledge surpasses the ken of mere normies, but it turns out his wife Mitsuko is a bonafide isekai fangirl of mastermind proportions, name- dropping multiple genre classics, and genetically his daughter Hinako is confirmed 100% geek. Mitsuko takes no convincing that her husband's soul now inhabits the body of a fictional otome game villainess; to her that seems completely legit.

While this episode isn't as laugh-a-minute bonkers as the previous installment, that's not to say this isn't also very entertaining. Kenzaburo's musing about reloading the world to get the magical beast he wants seems to have unmasked him as an inveterate gacha gamer. We also get to see Kenzaburo's daughter reacting very entertainingly to last episode's terrible dad puns  -  of course she's mortified. Episode four does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of plot development, and while it's not as out-and-out comedic as previous episodes, it's still very interesting and clever. I like that we finally get an explanation of what those egg things from the first episode were, too.

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