7th Time Loop

Spent last weekend trying to make up for lost sleep and bingeing 7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life Married to Her Worst Enemy! in both anime and light novel form. The title is misleading; rather than a villainness, the main character is a disgraced noblewoman who gets stuck in a time loop beginning with her unjust exile and ending with her inevitable death five years later. The days and manners of her death are never the same due to the different routes she takes, but they're always a consequence of a fixed event: the ML usuruping the throne of the Emperor and starting a large-scale war. In the FL's sixth loop, she is killed by him personally and immediately transported to her seventh loop where she decides to take a new path, runs into the ML and, in a series of strange events, accepts his sudden marriage proposal.

The main tension is in the FL wanting to use her new position to hijack the ML's warmongering efforts, and the ML having unreadable (but no doubt shady) motives even when he's transparently attracted to the FL and more human around her. In every arc, we meet characters whom the FL has previously met in her past loops and uncover a little bit of the bigger political conspiracy that connects them. It's also all very, very YA... six volumes in, this so-called battle couple and their equally powerful allies have yet to kill anyone... The ML has at least canonically killed people in a previous war and in his traumatic past, but in the present day he and everyone else just knock all the bad people unconscious.

I thought the anime was enjoyable in a "light and mindless" shoujo canon way, and the light novel more interesting as you got to see the characters' thought processes. I felt that the FL's OP-ness was more well-executed than the standard transmigration/timeloop manga; even the improbability of the FL acquiring all her skills in five-year increments grew on me when we saw how the time limit ate at her and gave her the fear of her next death and the anxiety of not knowing exactly when or how she'd die. The worldbuilding is meh, the cases formulaic, and the romance increasingly less interesting, but I do like the thread of mystery surrounding the loop and the ML, as well as the emotional storyline of the FL dealing with her survivor's guilt by forcing the "everybody lives" fix-its in the present loop.

Now going through The Apothecary Diaries, which is a denser read now that I'm past the parts I've read in the manga. I'm finding the translator's notes at the end interesting! But I might slow down and take a break because I've been too unproductive... And anyway Arcane S2 is coming out imminently.