I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss (Light Novel), Vol. 1

⚠️ TW: attemped rape.

First of all, if we're talking about the story alone, it deserves five full stars. I just can't get enough of villainess isekai stories, especially if it involves retaliation against the dumb men who dump them for another girl. This book follows all the necessary steps to have a good villainess story. The main character, Aileen, is smart and elegant. The love interest, Claude, is a taciturn demon lord whose emotions show through the weather instead of his face, while also slowly awakening as a do-S. Fun. Due to his quiet personality he doesn't get that much spotlight in this volume, but since it's just the beginning, I'm sure he'll get more development in the next books. The other necessary factor in any villainess story is her ability to be independent, and it's also present here since Aileen always has business in mind.

The side characters are also very likeable, especially Almond the crow. Not the prince, the saint, and the knight though. They can choke. That trigger warning above is caused by none other than the prince, so he can choke more than the other two.

So, why did I rate this 4★ if I liked it that much?

The translation.

Look, I can overlook stiff translation. Even if every sentence that starts with “in the first place” or “to begin with” sounds extremely unnatural and would be much better with proper rewording, it still wouldn't bother me as much if only the translation didn't fail to grasp context and ended up with a wrongly translated line. I actually marked this wrong in my updates, it was at 59% mark instead. In any case, it was not correct and it bothers me greatly because who knows what else got lost in translation. It's also inconsistent at some parts. At one point the translation would use the word “consort”, only to change it to “second wife” later on and stick with that for the rest of the book. It makes the entire thing feel like an amateur job, which is unfair to the author since they did craft a wonderful story that got harmed by subpar translation.

Please fix this issue in future volumes, at least through a meticulous editing or proofreading to prevent this from happening again.