I may be bad, but I'm perfectly good at it.
Summary:
- Isekai jumped onto another seemingly fresh idea.
- The villainesses were present in isekai from the very beginning.
- Now the genre is oversaturated and we need to add spice to it.
Once again, we contradict ourselves by calling isekai a genre, while it's actually just a premise. But over the years this premise grew so much and became so huge that it can be considered a genre of its own, and now has a plethora of sub-genres that may help us understand whether the show fits our personal tastes or not. One of such sub-genres is villainess reincarnation — one that got extremely popular in recent years.
Otome games were one of the earliest isekai
Isekai as we know it now is mostly based on a male power fantasy, but in its early years it was mainly targeted at girls through otome games. Usually, in these games the main character had a flock of boys to conquer and a rival who also was planning to get her hands on that harem. And modern obsession with villainesses is a nod to the roots of the genre: it's just now, in this otome game we're playing not as the main heroine, but as her rival.
This is openly explored in a My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! (Otome Game no Hametsu Flag shika Nai Akuyaku Reijou ni Tensei shiteshimatta...), in which the girl whose story we follow is reborn in a world of Fortune Lover — an otome game she loved. But she's reborn not as the main character, but as the main antagonist, and her fate is doomed from the beginning. Thankfully, her extensive knowledge of the game helps her to avoid the unhappy ending — to an extent — and to change the routes of lives of other characters.
The girl in I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss (Akuyaku Reijou nanode Last Boss wo Kattemimashita) follows an even more daunting fate: she didn't know she was reincarnated at the beginning of the series, but after being defeated and the game starting anew, she understands what she has to do in order to survive and tries to take action.
Popularity has its drawbacks
These are just two of the recent shows that gained popularity, and with the popularity comes blandness. More and more authors are trying to explore this concept, and more and more fail to add something new and exciting to it, instead just diluting the sub-genre and fortifying the tropes that become boring and too repetitive quite fast. Right now the market of villainess isekai is oversaturated, and maybe we need something like female-lead Overlord to make it feel fresh once again. Create something akin to a female power fantasy, maybe?