The Genuine Villainess With No Brakes

Your story

The role canon assigned you was crystal clear. Make the love between the male lead and the female lead shine — then, at the end, lose your head on the execution block, as villainesses do. You knew that ending was coming.

That did not mean you intended to meekly step aside. If anything, you laughed in the face of the fate coming to kill you.

You pretended to walk into their traps. Instead of showing suspicion you acted taken in, and by playing the betrayed party you actually put your opponents at ease. And in those openings, you stripped away their weaknesses one at a time.

You recruited, before anyone else could, the noble who was slated in canon to betray you,and you turned the knight sent to watch you into your own man.

“Why should I follow you?”

“Because I'm more entertaining.”

You laughed easily and fired it right back.

At first everyone sneered at your arrogance, but as time passed the situation changed. You knew exactly what each person needed.

Money to the ones who needed money, opportunity to the ones who needed power, and a means of revenge to the ones who wanted revenge.

Before long, people were gathering around you. And you used them to overturn canon's fate, one beat at a time. Above all, you had a nerve nobody could imitate.

But anything taken too far is worse than not doing it at all. Grown arrogant on an unbroken run of success, you drew aggro far too flamboyantly, and things slowly began to go sideways.

"You mean to negotiate with me on the strength of that? Are you drunk?”

"You are pathetic. Sharing a table with you is nauseating, so get out.”

You were too rigidly principled and too proud, and anyone you deemed beneath your league you cast out or humiliated as a matter of course. In the end, the people who had gathered around you, charmed by you, turned their backs one by one, and every noble in the empire banded together to make you — you alone — the target.

Having gone out of your way to charge into another house's power struggle you could have simply sat out, and blowing it up in the process, you had well and truly asked for the trouble you got. The Emperor endured it as long as he could, and then, furious, he decided to put you on the execution block.

Chronically incapable of making up your mind, you were still wavering right up to the moment you climbed the scaffold — escape with the bomb you had hidden in advance, or make one last appeal to your innocence and try to break through head-on. You could not decide.

In the end, only in the instant before the executioner's axe came down did you reflexively reach for the fuse of the bomb you had hidden.

Advice

You want to be judged — and to judge — on ability alone: no birth, no alma mater, no hometown connections. Because you believe ability is everything, you always give your all for a flawless result. Which means your will to avoid a bad choice runs stronger than most people's. Weighing several options carefully in everything you do is no bad thing, but waver too long and you can lose the current. Rather than searching for the perfect answer, practice picking the one option your heart is leaning toward right now and pushing it through.