Reaction Shot: My Next Life As a Villainess E07 (or, FFVIII is that you?!)

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I got up to about twenty of my favourite ships and chose not to count further

... I squinted at my fandom lists and realised that maybe three-quarters of my ride-or-die ships involve one or more of the participants being temporarily dead, actually dead, never real in the first place, stuck in a metaphorical box for anywhere between a year and a couple of centuries, a casualty of a time-loop and/or shunt to an alternative timeline, or otherwise just stuffed far away from the reach of the people that love them.

And my favourite fiction tropes are "Mutual pining" and "Slow burn".

Why do I cause myself this pain?!

On the plus side, it does seem to be six people and a shoelace!

I don't know if I can turn to fic to soothe me over My Next Life as a Villainess, because I want further shenanigans where everyone is in love with Catarina and she doesn't notice, the kids have fun with political reform (and by "the kids" I will also allow Duke and Duchess Claes tearing a strip out of both Keith and Anne's family), or, like... Catarina somehow ends up living in a lovely house with her harem, a garden, and a library full of the most torrid romances ever put to print?

... Or stories about her and Sophia publishing romances under a fake name, which Mary knows and no one else does and no one can understand why Mary occasionally starts hyperventilating over these books because is this what Lady Catarina's into?!

Or Geordo being like "Okay, there's a date for the wedding!" and the Claes family going "NOPE, BANNED, THIS CANNOT HAPPEN!" while Catarina's like "But I thought you were cancelling the engagement? Don't you want to marry Maria?" ... And then everyone discovers that Catarina is convinced that her entire friendship group is going to end up married to Maria and no one quite having the words to explain how badly wrong she's got this. Especially not Maria, who can't understand where this idea came from and has no idea where to look. (I just want the universe to continue to kissblock Geordo because his suffering pleases me, okay.)

Or very domestic fic where Catarina, Sophia, Mary, and Maria open a bookshop/café and the student council president does their books and Alan and Geordo come in for open mic nights, and Nicol and Keith are only allowed in at very strategic points where the café can actually cope with the number of people who come in to creep on them.

... I just simultaneously want everyone to be happily married to Catarina and for no one to have ever actually acknowledged that they have feelings out loud, and for Catarina to not have ever noticed that she's married even when she's and I don't know how to thread this needle or what filters I'd need to put in place to find it. Or what degree of Catarina reciprocating ANYONE'S feelings I'm okay with.

(Like, there's just over a hundred fic for it on AO3, and my main impression is that most of it is based off the light novel, and that name spellings are not standardised between the novel and the anime, which is going to drive me slightly up the wall.)