Elsa was adorable in this chapter, my batteries are recharged

How is it even possible that Elsa never learns her name? Someone has to menton Evies name eventually.

At this point, we just have to suspend our disbelief for it. The author is committed to the bit, so we'll just have to accept that as the story progressed, it ended up that they spent some extended time together in the past, and whoops, that didn't go with Elsa not knowing Yvonne's name. Gotta write around that, but what can you do, it's just a problem of episodic writing.

Honestly I like it a lot, there's just something quietly hilarious about Elsa not knowing Yvonne's name. At the start it could still be assumed that they only met briefly but the longer they're together the more and more of a Rube Goldberg machine of "oh yeah I gues despite having lived in her house and gotten to know her family and noble standing I never managed to catch the required information to actually be able to infer who exactly she is" this becomes.

It certainly makes it look like Elsa never thinks too hard about anything that's happening around her.

It's also hilarious to think of everyone suddenly no longer being able to use anyone's name. Imagine her mum and dad and all of their friends, family and tutors being like, how long do we have to play this game?

NIce!!

Imagine if Lena just said, "Please Bully Me, Miss Villainess" and gave into the yuri potential of apprenticeship with Olivia, we coulda avoided all this darkness. Yuri is always the answer. Psshhh

But then no Eevie so eh

last edited at Nov 12, 2023 4:39AM

Oh, so that hooded lady wasn’t Elsa!

It was her mom.

And this is what we're here in the past to see.

This is so interesting. They were a makeshift family, torn apart. Now the "sisters" have fought and seemingly betrayed one another. It seems like Olivia either forced part of the curse onto Lena as part of her revenge, and in order to free her mother; or Lena ended up doing so on her own? Can't wait to learn more and I might reread the series first to catch up on all the small details I might be forgetting. We've seen purification magic earlier in the series, for example. It's always fun to go back and see the breadcrumbs that were already planted and planned. It's becoming clearer that this has been in the works for quite a bit. Really enjoying this arc into the past. As always, it just needed the room to play out a bit first, to breathe. A lot of good world building and likely more to come.

last edited at Nov 12, 2023 7:08AM

Drawing at the highest level, I'm getting high

Oh, so that hooded lady wasn’t Elsa!

It was her mom.

So you think Elsa is Olivia's daughter? That would explain her demonic traits, but why would Olivia even have a child? She has shown zero interest in anything except magic and her teacher's legacy so far.

So given that Elsa's hair has the same shade of pink as the Sage did, I'd imagine that they're related somehow maybe that Olivia succeeded in essentially allowing the Sage to be reborn as Elsa after breaking the seal. Though at that point the question becomes where did Olivia go after that.

(thanks to @cogito for writing this up, I'm copying it from discord for the forum readers here)

Let me try to summarize everything we know at this point:
--Curses "amplify the darkest recesses of a person's inner self."
--15 years ago, the Demon Lord invaded the human realm. They were stopped by the sage Bella, who could "purify" the Demon Lord's undead soldiers but as a result took on curses until she collapsed right before the final battle.
--Sometime after this, Bella adopted the half-demon Olivia in order to use her as the receptacle for her curses. But she came to love Olivia for real, and to avoid turning her evil, chose Lena to be the receptacle of her curses instead. This is why Lena is currently dying.
--At some point after Lena got married, Bella went off to defeat the Demon Lord. Apparently, her body was then used as "part of the seal in order to contain the curse" -- presumably the Demon Lord was sealed as well?
--In order to save her mother's soul, Olivia attempted to break the seal, but was stopped by a group of magicians including Lena.
--Now, in the present, Olivia (presumably) did something that has caused the curse on Lena to worsen.

What hasn't been confirmed but seems likely:
--In the "original game," Lena died to the curse, around the time of this flashback arc. Presumably that's due to whatever Olivia is up to.
--Yvonne and Elsa will somehow free Lena from the curse, preventing her from dying. (This, presumably, is the reason Future Elsa sent Yvonne back to the past in the first place.) This of course would require finding a new receptacle for the curse -- Yvonne herself, perhaps? As an otherworlder, she may be an exception to the curse's negative effects...
--Whatever they do will also lead to the Demon Lord losing their powers, becoming a girl, and turning into Faye in the future.

Olivia's fate is still very much up in the air, though. It does seem likely she has some sort of relationship with the main cast. Her being Elsa's mother is a plausible theory, but there's some strong counter-evidence too; she doesn't seem like the type of person who'd have a kid, and she even says directly that Bella is her only family. I would therefore like to propose a couple of other theories:
--Olivia might literally be Elsa. We already know time magic exists in this world. It's possible the climax of this arc will involve time-regressing Olivia to infancy and sending her to the past, or perhaps doing the same with her reincarnation or something. Elsa being half-demon could explain why she's so talented in magic as well.
--Alternately, the character Olivia is related to might not be Elsa but Yvonne. One aspect I still find notable is how Yvonne is apparently super susceptible to possession. (Presumably this is why she got possessed by the protagonist from our world in the first place.) This "susceptibility to possession" strikes me as similar to how demons apparently become evil if they get cursed -- and despite how important it is we still don't know many details about what this "curse" actually is. It would also be kind of a neat twist if all this lore was really about Yvonne and Elsa in the end truly is just a random orphan girl who happened to be born with OP magic powers.
(Also, in defense of Olivia, Lena seems to have been her only friend, and she betrayed Olivia by stopping her from freeing Bella from the seal. It's understandable to me she would go to this extreme to free her mother. I'm sure Lena doesn't hate her either.)

Oh, so that hooded lady wasn’t Elsa!

It was her mom.

So you think Elsa is Olivia's daughter? That would explain her demonic traits, but why would Olivia even have a child? She has shown zero interest in anything except magic and her teacher's legacy so far.

I mean, the demonic traits, the natural talent for magic, the strong resemblance, and the fact that Elsa’s caretaker was a demon. It’s possible that Olivia could have had a child during the period between her master’s funeral and her confrontation with Lena, and simply left it to an orphanage (as you said, her only interest seemed to be saving her teacher).

Although, as I say it, I am starting to like the theory stated above that Elsa could be Olivia’s attempt to reincarnate the Sage (either as a direct reincarnation or as a vessel), since that would explain why demonic activity is starting to pick up. The Sage was supposedly using her spirit to seal the Demon King, and if that spirit is now in Elsa…

I would also count that as being as her “daughter,” albeit not quite in the way I originally thought.

Not-so-bold prediction:

The "Villainess System" is the curse made manifest in a very annoying (for Yvonne) form.

Well, that sure just upended a whole lot of... something. Very curious how Olivia will end up related to Elsa. And Evie, for that matter...

The "going to the past arc" is getting so interesting!

Not-so-bold prediction:

The "Villainess System" is the curse made manifest in a very annoying (for Yvonne) form.

It certainly works for it to be a curse considering it apparently corrupts people. (Mostly demons, but they did talk about darkness in people in general).

(thanks to @cogito for writing this up, I'm copying it from discord for the forum readers here)

Let me try to summarize everything we know at this point:
--Curses "amplify the darkest recesses of a person's inner self."
--15 years ago, the Demon Lord invaded the human realm. They were stopped by the sage Bella, who could "purify" the Demon Lord's undead soldiers but as a result took on curses until she collapsed right before the final battle.
--Sometime after this, Bella adopted the half-demon Olivia in order to use her as the receptacle for her curses. But she came to love Olivia for real, and to avoid turning her evil, chose Lena to be the receptacle of her curses instead. This is why Lena is currently dying.
--At some point after Lena got married, Bella went off to defeat the Demon Lord. Apparently, her body was then used as "part of the seal in order to contain the curse" -- presumably the Demon Lord was sealed as well?
--In order to save her mother's soul, Olivia attempted to break the seal, but was stopped by a group of magicians including Lena.
--Now, in the present, Olivia (presumably) did something that has caused the curse on Lena to worsen.

What hasn't been confirmed but seems likely:
--In the "original game," Lena died to the curse, around the time of this flashback arc. Presumably that's due to whatever Olivia is up to.
--Yvonne and Elsa will somehow free Lena from the curse, preventing her from dying. (This, presumably, is the reason Future Elsa sent Yvonne back to the past in the first place.) This of course would require finding a new receptacle for the curse -- Yvonne herself, perhaps? As an otherworlder, she may be an exception to the curse's negative effects...
--Whatever they do will also lead to the Demon Lord losing their powers, becoming a girl, and turning into Faye in the future.

Olivia's fate is still very much up in the air, though. It does seem likely she has some sort of relationship with the main cast. Her being Elsa's mother is a plausible theory, but there's some strong counter-evidence too; she doesn't seem like the type of person who'd have a kid, and she even says directly that Bella is her only family. I would therefore like to propose a couple of other theories:
--Olivia might literally be Elsa. We already know time magic exists in this world. It's possible the climax of this arc will involve time-regressing Olivia to infancy and sending her to the past, or perhaps doing the same with her reincarnation or something. Elsa being half-demon could explain why she's so talented in magic as well.
--Alternately, the character Olivia is related to might not be Elsa but Yvonne. One aspect I still find notable is how Yvonne is apparently super susceptible to possession. (Presumably this is why she got possessed by the protagonist from our world in the first place.) This "susceptibility to possession" strikes me as similar to how demons apparently become evil if they get cursed -- and despite how important it is we still don't know many details about what this "curse" actually is. It would also be kind of a neat twist if all this lore was really about Yvonne and Elsa in the end truly is just a random orphan girl who happened to be born with OP magic powers.
(Also, in defense of Olivia, Lena seems to have been her only friend, and she betrayed Olivia by stopping her from freeing Bella from the seal. It's understandable to me she would go to this extreme to free her mother. I'm sure Lena doesn't hate her either.)

TY TY so helpful because I was getting a little lost with everything going on XD

what the fuck is going ONNNNNNN

woahh so much is happening-

ohhhh elsa takes on the curse doesnt she

ohhhh elsa takes on the curse doesnt she

Well ... future-Elsa seemed to have some kind of time limit she was restricted to outside of time travel, so, maybe that was the effects of the curse.
Gonna go back to see exactly what kind of things she said to herself.

The black and red VFX on the curse "chains" in this chapter are the same as on the Villainess System's UI. Coincidence?

last edited at Nov 27, 2023 2:54AM

Got a feeling this curse is related to the villainess system.

Now the story's getting juicy

Sometimes I forget this is a isekai so when our heroine’s mother falls into slumber I have to wonder if they’re aware it’s not technically their mother but still acts like she is