Yeah, seconded.

Seems legit, yeah.

Yep

I dunno, that makes all reincarnation stories isekai, and they're not really.

Then again, people call time travel isekai and that's not.

it's not an isekai, but like, in a way that mostly only demonstrates the shortcomings of "isekai" as a genre label

why can't it just be called villainess genre then?

it's right there. villainess reincarnation isekai and villainess OU time travel are both... villainess

mostly just because I have a cynical suspicion that the time travel ones are just trying to technicality their way out of being called yet another villainess isekai while functionally being the same thing

True, though then we get to otome isekai that aren't villainess stories being labelled as such.

Like a lot of people skimmed the plot synopsis of Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion and called it a villainess isekai because it's about a woman sent to another world in the body of a fictional character and having to navigate high society to prevent her own death...

...but Raeliana isn't the villainess in an Angelique knockoff, she's the victim in a murder mystery.

in any case, shout out to doctor elise for figuring out a way to take both options, which somehow wraps around to making it interesting again

i mean that's why in manhwa (which is where raeliana & doctor elise originated anyway) those things are all just rofan/romance fantasy genre, and whether it's transmigration or regression is just a specific trope

it's the same thing w/ the power-levelling genre, some of those are transmigration, some are regression, and some are neither (idk what term to use for "dungeons and/or video game mechanics suddenly appear in the real world" reverse isekai i guess???) so it's silly to divide them by that

I've heard "video game mechanics in the real world" referred to as "system apocalypse"

ohhhh system apocalypse is a good one