Technically, this is “7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!” Most of that title’s red herrings anyway. The important thing is that this is an absolutely phenomenal piece of writing and a beautiful work of animation.
Rishe has lived six lives. Upon dying, she loops back to her most embarrassing moment – her engagement being publicly broken off by her country’s doofus of a prince. What was devastating the first go-round is now just a waste of her time. What will she do with this life? She’s been a merchant, medic, scholar, maid, hunter, and in her last life, she disguised herself as a man and became a knight. The only problem is that five years into each loop, she dies as a result of widespread war. In fact, the cause of that war is Prince Arnold of Galkhein, who directly killed her in her sixth life.
Maybe in this seventh life, she’ll just take things easy. That is, if a chance meeting doesn’t cause Prince Arnold to propose to her. Her conditions for marriage are that she can laze around as much as she wants, and that he can’t touch her without her permission. He agrees, but despite the title, there’s not much lazing. Rishe immediately gets to work as Galkhein’s new princess, using what she knows to learn why the war starts and work toward avoiding it.
The strange thing is, while Arnold is a warrior with a streak of coldness and is certainly threatening, he’s also empathetic, pushes through measures designed to help the poor, and has little patience for nobles trying to abuse their power. It’s a far cry from the picture of a warmonger Rishe has drawn of him in the past. Some of her assumptions hold. Many don’t.
“7th Time Loop” contains some of the best character writing in any series going, animated or live-action. There’s a bracing ballroom dance scene where Rishe tests Arnold freshly after he announces her as his fiancee. Ignore the clip title; Crunchyroll tries to make every title a meme. The scene is more about strategy than romance for Rishe. Look how exquisitely the dance itself is animated:
He might win the dance, but she uses it to extrude information about him that plays out in the following scenes. I’ll set that aside because it gets a little spoilery, but there is a beautiful dialogue shortly after where Rishe drinks wine that jealous suitors have laced with spicy red peppers. Arnold asks her why she’s still drinking it if it’s ruined. Because the wine will have lost its purpose if it’s not drunk. So he swigs it down with her. It’s a reflective moment of her attitude toward each of her lives, that each of them has to be full, have purpose, be felt down to each detail, good and bad.
He finishes the wine to…share in the burden? Understand her perspective? Protect her from pain? Or because it annoys him? To prove he’s as tough as she is? Because he wants to talk and it eliminates a distraction? We know the answer to this is the answer to how he will either support or fail her in this life. This one scene is a key to the entire series; it metaphorically answers the mystery that she’s trying to figure out. But it’s impossible to tell just from this. It could be kindness. It could be impatience. It’s too early to give us that big of an answer.
It is a towering piece of writing captured in just a passing moment inside a scene that has several other more immediate things it goes on to do. But that attention to character dynamics inhabits every detail of the series, and Rishe’s experience in so many avenues often allows her to plant seeds of ideas episodes ahead of when she’ll need to use them.
That doesn’t mean anything comes easy for her. She puts in work. She never knows if that work will truly pay off or not. Some of her gambits are dicey, and need to fall back on less desirable Plan Bs. She’s a good negotiator, but five years as a merchant doesn’t mean she’s as good as a lifelong one. She’s a skilled sword fighter, but she already knows from how her sixth life ended that she doesn’t hold a candle to Prince Arnold’s skill with a sword. But she also knows these limitations and when to shift from using one piece of experience over to another. Living so many lives has given her a thorough sense of herself. She can also take the risk of being firmly committed to her courses of action. What’s someone going to do? Send her back for an eighth life?
Rishe is one of the most complex realizations I’ve seen of an assertively feminist character within a fantasy world. She’s experienced being royalty, being a professional, and barely scraping by. She’s traveled the world’s cultures in one life, kept in one place as part of a community in another, and surrounded herself with the sick and injured in yet another. Every death, she’s brought back to the moment where hope is torn away from her, caring less each time and simply becoming excited at the possibilities of what she’ll do with this life.
Time and again Rishe calls out elements of privilege and holds them up for that person – and often, everyone else – to see. She makes arguments about gender education gaps, medical access, and for economic investment in those living in poverty, all within the bounds of a fantasy world and in ways that make sense to the plot as it’s happening.
Sometimes we see these messages applied in more modern ways to a fantasy world, and that’s good, too. Sometimes things need to be overt, speak from the outside-in, and break bits of the genre that deserve to be broken. That’s needed.
Doing it in other ways that fold seamlessly into the fantasy world isn’t better or worse, it’s just different. Rather than applying our perspective to the fantasy, it allows the arguments to be made through the fantasy world’s perspective. If a character can make those arguments successfully in a world wholly different from our own, it lends those arguments the strength of that additional perspective. Rishe makes those arguments from the inside-out of the fantasy. We need both ways of doing that, and this is one of the best examples of that inside-out approach that I’ve seen.
Her relationship with Prince Arnold is more unpredictable and could go any number of ways. Yet she holds her own in it and creates her own agency within it regardless of his approval. It’s the scenes where she’s handling her own business where Rishe shines, creating a community that can begin to prevent a war, hand in hand with relentlessly creating opportunities for others.
I honestly can’t say enough about the writing. “7th Time Loop” is adapted from Touko Amekawa’s light novel series and she knows how to write consequential, involving scenes that test and reveal relationships. She knows how to give the audience answers to our questions ahead of time but keep the key for reading those answers to herself, so that we anticipate the moment when another scene might give us part of that key and we can start to make more connections.
The animation is sharp and clean, using a really full color palette, and with a very choice eye for when to go for broke and push its boundaries. That dance above is breathtaking. The animation of eyes in this is particularly stunning, and they know it. There’s a shot in the fifth episode of an eye welling up with tears that captures the feeling of that moment in a way that’s staggering. And, like so many details in the series, it means far more than it initially lets on.
The title is still a bit weird to me. “7th Time Loop” makes perfect sense. “The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy”? She’s not a villainess. She hasn’t been a villainess in any of her lives. I assume that’s there because the villainess-with-meta-knowledge genre is popular in anime right now. Her insistence on a carefree life lasts like…one scene before she decides she’s way happier making medicine and going undercover with the maids and trying to solve unemployment and stopping a war. She’s literally the hardest working character in a show right now. Arnold is her worst enemy for maybe an episode before he’s really just more of a mystery. Maybe enemy, maybe love, maybe all of the above. But it is a catchy title, I’ll give you that.
This is THE standout anime of Winter. It might actually just be the standout new show of Winter, across the board. It seemingly came out of nowhere. It’s from two newer animation studios: Kai and Hornets. There’s not a whole lot of fanfare about it, though strong word of mouth seems to be building its audience steadily. The writing is astounding, the animation choices are often surprising. I’ve said that like five times already, it’s worth saying again.
There’s some other new anime I like this Winter, and maybe three or four really good ones, but this is on a rarefied level of quality. “7th Time Loop” is on a “Frieren” level of storytelling, though with very different goals in mind and very different approaches to fantasy. I cannot laud its writing enough, nor recommend “7th Time Loop” highly enough.
“7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy!” is on Crunchyroll.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 