OH MY GOD, THIS IS SO HOMO EROTIC ... or something.

That's exactly what I thought when I read the title of “The Villainess, Cecilia Silvie, Doesn't Want To Die, So She Decided To Cross-Dress!”. Obviously, I was expecting some boys to be into the other boy, who is actually a girl - but thankfully that doesn't happen.

I can tell you that because unfortunately I had about 8 hours of 'free time' and couldn't do anything else in that time except look at my cell phone. So I read this out of utter boredom, even if it's about kissing men, I could just stop again!
Instead, this is the story of a rather clumsy young woman who is destined to die. She's revived as the antagonist of an otome game (i.e. one of those 'innocent protagonist arrives at school and is romanced by all the men if she makes the right choices' games), who dies in litrally every route (depending on which boy the protagonist goes for, we're talking different 'routes') - so she decides to avoid all the trouble by disguising herself as a boy, as this way she can avoid becoming the target of her various potential killers in the first place. However, as the viewer, but not Cecilia, the protagonist of the story, soon realizes, the plan backfires on all levels.

Unfortunately, you have to admit that this type of story is no longer rare, I've only reviewed one here. And to be honest, that's also the biggest criticism of the manga. The setting seems extremely generic at first - apart from my fear that it would develop into KISSING MEN. Unfortunately, it also starts out rather generic.

But soon a story develops that seems more like a parody of the various genres that play into it. Instead of a calculating, all-knowing and planning protagonist, Cecilia is scatterbrained and accidentally lets everything get out of hand, underlining this with wonderfully exaggerated facial expressions that always make you smile. Instead of the 'prince charming' that all the women fall in love with, we get a woman in disguise playing her 'prince charming', which makes all the women fall in love with her, while some guys keep telling her that she's just acting weird - the irony behind it was kind of delicious. It goes on and on and the story keeps the reader on their toes with (for the genre) unexpectedplot twists, which I don't really want to spoil here.

Finally, I would like to praise how long the chapters are. Despite a meagre 24 chapters, I sat with it for about 3 hours, which is a lot for a manga/manhwa/manhua.

Summary: If you're not averse to such stories, I can recommend “The Villainess, Cecilia Silvie, Doesn't Want To Die, So She Decided To Cross-Dress!” as an unusual adaptation of the idea of 'reincarnated as an antagonist in an otome game', but this is by no means a manga I would recommend outside of that description. Accordingly, I give it an average of 6 out of 10 points, even though I can't really criticize much, my praise is also rather meager.

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