Episode 11 – 7th Time Loop: The Villainess Enjoys a Carefree Life

It’s a lesson that romances trade in us not learning: some bad boys just can’t be fixed. That’s how it seems as far as Arnold is concerned – Rishe has been trying her level best to convince him not to destroy Coyolles, crafting a technology-based deal with Prince Kyle. Still, Arnold’s entire reaction is to ask why he would bother when he could just invade Coyolles and take it anyway. It doesn’t even seem to occur to him that leaving the whole “war” bit out would drastically reduce the costs involved or that an alliance may in the long term be more beneficial than an unwieldy empire. Arnold seems to believe at his core that he’s a warmonger, and that means that going to the field of battle is just what he does.

Is it what he wants to do? Almost certainly not. The one line about how he came out onto his balcony armed with his sword because he thought that the fireflies were enemy torches says more about him than anything else he’s uttered throughout this series, except perhaps his slightly later statement about how as a child he wanted to gouge out his own eyes because they looked like his father’s. The latter tells us a lot about his dysfunctional childhood and the torments he was subjected to almost more than his scars, and perhaps that’s why he can’t help but see twinkling lights not as beautiful, but as dangerous. Virtually nothing in his life before he met Rishe was good or kind. Everything held a trap or a terror. He had to live by expecting terrible things would happen to and around him. He may be trying to work his way out of that mindset by daring to hope that marriage to Rishe will be good, but we can also still see him preparing for the worst. The way Arnold refers to Rishe as “my future wife” indicates his disbelief that the future will ever come to pass.

Rishe, who has given up on that whole “carefree life” thing, may still be a bit concerned about Arnold potentially being her “worst enemy.” She doesn’t want to be, and everything she does is in service of making sure that he doesn’t become the man who facilitated her death six times before. Interestingly enough, she also seems like she’s starting to feel like those previous six existences were all to give her the skills she needed for this one: her statement to him that she’d keep coming back again and again with new talents and knowledge to offer is a tacit admission of that. It’s also meant to reassure Arnold that she won’t leave him, something that we can see is a concern of his based on that possessive statement “my future wife.” The burden is on Arnold to trust Rishe and that may be harder for him to do than even he knows.

If Kyle is too naïve, Arnold is too cynical. Rishe falls somewhere in the middle, trying to reconcile those two states within herself. She wants to make everything work out, but she knows that that may not be possible. That said, her technology plan does seem to err on the naïve side of things – why would Arnold stick with watches or clocks when he could use them to create weapons? It seems almost silly, especially given what she knows Michel is up to. True, she’s working with Theodore to catch Michel before he can present his findings to Arnold, but there are no guarantees, and now that she’s planted the clockwork bug in Arnold’s ear, things could be even worse than she anticipated.

Is Arnold capable of change? He’s certainly able to have warmer feelings than he thought, given his reaction to Rishe’s little balcony-hopping stunt. But unless he can believe in his own softer side, all the beautiful wordless scenes in the world won’t be enough to prevent Rishe from having to go through an eighth loop.

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