I'm In Love With The Villainess continues to be one of the most fun and exciting series around. The romance and action both are elevated going into volume 5 with a big slice of drama as the stunning princess Marnaria comes into town. This butch woman was Clair's first crush and Rae is hella jealous about it.

The action is really amazingly depicted in this volume, I think the fights were really fun and they weren't over used. The drama was well executed and while I knew what Marnaia's true intentions were the whole time and never doubted my read I still found the way she got to Rae to be very compelling. Aonoshimo's art continues to be a total banger with stunning work on all the characters and amazing use of expressions, action, backgrounds and space to depict the depth of the emotions at play.

This volume touches on queerness again in brief and the moments here are pretty good. I do wish that Rae and Manaria could have had more time to talk about being lesbians and that the word Lesbian saw any use at all here instead of the words queer and straight exclusively but it was for sure more than we get from many manga.

Manaria is my favorite character in the series so far, she is utterly charming and very OP in a way that I just adore. I hope she gets a happy life and a happy ending of her own. Overall, a great climax that I think will be a great ending point for the anime.