Title: Flirting With the Villain’s Dad

Author/Story: Dalseul

Artist: Via

Rating: General

Genre: transmigration/isekai, fantasy, romance, comedy

Hosted On: Kakao (KOR), Tapas (ENG)

Official Link(s): Official Raw, Official English

Official Summary:

Ack! I’m trapped in this webnovel, “Brigitte Wants to be Happy!” No prob, I KNOW what’s gonna happen so I’ll just—wait. I’m not Brigitte? I’m her aunt, Princess Yerenika?! Uh-oh. I’m stuck 20 years before the main plot… and everyone in my generation ends up tragically dead! Her parents, dead. Me, dead. Villain’s dad, King Euredian, dead. A-ha! That’s the key. I just need to prevent the villain from being born… time to break out some seduction schemes and flirt like my life depends on it!

My Thoughts:

Princess Yerenika, the female lead of Flirting With the Villain’s Dad, is such a mood. Even though she’s basically a tiny pink puffball, she’s basically one of the most relatable characters I’ve seen in an isekai/transmigration series so far… solely because of her reactions to the incredibly hot dad of the future villain of the book she’s been dropped into.

Everyone who follows me on Twitter – and some of y’all who follow me on TikTok – know that I am locked and loaded when it comes to the hot dads of my favorite Korean webtoons. I read a ton of fantasy webtoons and so I am constantly coming across some dashing duke or eagle-eyed emperor who’s the dad (or dad figure) to one or more characters in the series. These characters are so hot that long before I was out here shaking the fence posts and wailing “Let me in, I just wanna be Toji Fushiguro’s Non-Binary Third Wife”, I was simping for the fine dad-shaped lines in so many Korean webtoons.

Yerenika technically doesn’t have a choice but to simp. Or to get the king, Euredian, to fall for her instead of the villainess he marries in the original novel. It’s either that or she, and everyone in her generation in the novel/fantasy world, will die an utterly tragic death. So she chooses to actively try to build a relationship with Euredian that keeps him away from the villainess – without ever thinking that she might become the guy’s wife and mom to his kids if she succeeds – because that is how she saves her future and his life as well.

Flirting With the Villain’s Dad is also a romantic comedy. Yes there are scenes of darkness and danger and some excellently crafted angst, but one of the main beats across the story so far is… the push and pull between Yerenika and Euredian as they struggle with their feelings for one another. There are hijinks. There’s snark. There’s him lifting her and moving her, a thing I personally love. The characters vibe very well together, honestly, and their scenes are entertaining and engaging. I know they’re just lines on the screen but you really haven’t lived until you’re halfway through a 100+ chapter webtoon and you’re like “wait, I don’t want these people to end up together? I don’t even want to read about them”.

This was not the case with me and the mains because they’re entertaining, yes, but I also need to know that they get a happy ending!

Beyond the cute comedy of the romance and the way Euredian is helpless against Yerenika’s big ole eyes, what I’m also interested in with Flirting With the Villain’s Dad is how it handles predestination, religion, and oppression as strands in the same braid, more or less. The goal of the villainess – as I understand it sixty chapters into the series (with just over fifty more to go before I catch up) is that as a black mage who’s oppressed by the divine power of the god responsible for protecting Yerenika and much of the world around them… she wants to make the world a space for her people. She’d watched something utterly tragic and borderline genocidal occur when she was a little girl and as a result, she believes she needs to exact revenge on them all by gaining access to the god to then kill him. It’s very Supernatural of her to want to kill god, let me just say.  

This is tied in with how Yerenika is an outsider challenging and changing the novel as written years before it’s even set to take place in order to protect herself and, later, the lives of the people she loves. She hears the voice of the main god all the time and he’s a presence in her life, but it’s definitely interesting to balance the god joking with Yerenika and the fact that his world has no room for dark witches/mages to the point where they’re executed on sight. Not very benevolent and I wonder if there’s a “chicken and the egg” kind of component where we learn more about why light and darkness are this much at odds with one another.

One of my favorite things about transmigration stories remains watching the main characters deal with predestination and their role in the universe. In our regular lives as readers, we don’t feel as if we’re part of the story – unless we’re dealing with unreality or something like that and then… oof. We’re largely aware that we’re not SIMs or characters in an otome game. But when it comes to transmigrators, sometimes they have to follow a particular path to a certain point (like with Shen Yuan when he’s dropped into the world of Proud Immortal Demon Way in  The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System). Or they’re subject to hauntings and consequences for rewriting the story like with the later parts of Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion. It feels kind of rare that you get a transmigrator hero like Ailette in The Perks of Being an S-Class Heroine who has gamed the system and has tons of freedom without needing to worry as hard.

Predestination is its own character, practically, in works like these and Flirting With the Villain’s Dad isn’t actually a huge exception? Because Yerenika has to deal with her anxiety around her role in the universe every time the story seems to be going in its original direction or Euredian seems like he’s about to fall for the villainess’ traps.

Overall, I really like Flirting With the Villain’s Dad because it’s so incredibly me core. I love a good villain, true, but what I love even more? A hot villain’s hotter dad. I cannot wait to read more!