From Bureaucrat to Villainess: Dad's Been Reincarnated!

Episode 8

Every good anime series needs at least one maid episode, right? Why else would Grace invite Anna to stay at the Auvergne estate over summer vacation, other than for her to dress and act as her subservient maid? Despite his lifelong nerd identity, Kenzaburo thankfully doesn't have secret degenerate motivations to see Anna (and later on himself as Grace) in maid uniforms. Kenzaburo's slightly wonky idea is for Anna to experience what life is like as a maid to a noble family so that when she potentially becomes queen (with Prince Virgile dumping villainess Grace in preference for Anna's heroine character), she'll know how to efficiently utilize servants of a lower social status. Kenzaburo even imagines noblewoman Grace as former-commoner Queen Anna's lady-in-waiting.

Of course, this episode's main joke is that Anna's understanding of the entire situation is a complete reversal of Grace's. She assumes Grace is training her, intending to have her by her side once Grace becomes queen. While Kenzaburo desperately tries to contrive instances for Anna to bond with any of the game's main male options, she clearly has eyes only for Grace. This is none more obvious than when Anna (apparently as part of her maidly duties) lies atop Grace's bed, greedily drinking in the scent of her perfume, “feels like I'm melting in her embrace,” and becomes more than a little… excited. Kenzaburo's daughter watches with growing unease: “I'm starting to worry about this route.”

While the episode's main thrust concerns all things maid-ly, we do get some extra snippets about Grace's mysterious mother, Jacqueline Auvergne. She's currently “recuperating” at the family villa. Does that mean she's unwell or perhaps exhausted for some reason? From maid Mathilde's flashback, we see a kind Jacqueline hire her as a younger woman for her magic hand-warming skills, which eventually prove invaluable with her acting as human hair curling tongs. There's a reason Grace's curls are so immaculate! Child Grace is also adorable. So how did she become a villainess? That mystery is yet to be revealed.

What we do finally see is the “real” Grace in Kenzaburo's dream, locked in a cage, as she appears in the opening credits. Is this merely a metaphor for her emotional state, or is the real Grace's soul truly incarcerated somewhere? Is Grace trapped in Kenzaburo's comatose body while he inhabits hers? Is Kenzaburo's true role here to rehabilitate Grace and eventually return to life in his own world, having improved Grace's life? Hopefully we'll find out in later episodes.

Much of this episode's runtime is taken up with surprisingly detailed world-building that Kenzaburo's daughter notes wasn't in the original game. We learn about the Auvergne estate and how the Duke employs three hundred servants (and their families), with young servants learning life skills on the job. The show almost seems to argue for the positive aspects of benevolent autocracy (essentially the concept of “Noblesse Oblige”), with everyone benefiting from the ruling nobles' riches. That sounds a little too much like “trickle-down economics” to me, a concept I don't believe has ever been convincingly shown to work in the real world.

Grace's world exists as a fictional, idealized 19th-century Europe (with magic and a degree of meritocracy). Perhaps the ruling classes there have a vested interest in caring for their vassals and, indeed, likely profit if the country runs well. Benevolent nobles are less likely to be lynched or to trigger revolutions.

Our real world isn't so rosy, however, with stupendously rich, amoral, multi-billionaire oligarchs no longer tied to estates in single countries, existing outside of the rule of tax law. This modern “noble class” has no reason to ensure the happiness of the working classes because almost nothing and no one can touch them, hence our inexorable decline into an eternal, dark, corporate dystopia. Let's not turn this into another anti-capitalist rant, though. Bureaucrat to Villainess is roughly one billion times more entertaining to watch than Trillion Game, overly simplistic, naive economics notwithstanding.

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