Do we like Vivaldi?
A character from Alice in the Country of Hearts (2007)
Our score: 4 out of 10. A fabulous queen with a soft spot for plushies and a loyal streak toward Alice. She also sentences servants to the chop over tiny slip-ups. We'd back her, but from a safe distance.
Alice in the Country of Hearts is a Japanese otome game, later adapted into manga and anime. It is a twist on Wonderland in which Alice is pulled into a world of rival territories, and the people there are drawn to her. Vivaldi is the Queen of Hearts and rules the Heart Castle. She is based on Lewis Carroll's famously short-tempered queen.
Like her Carroll counterpart, she is quick to order beheadings of servants over small mistakes. She uses the royal 'we', and she is demanding and dangerous. That alone keeps her score well below the heroes' end of the scale.
There is more to her than the tyrant act. She loves cute things like rabbits and plushies, and she keeps a hidden room full of stuffed animals. She is also elegant and perceptive, and she understands other women easily. She is the only female character to get her own route in the games, and it focuses on her friendship with Alice rather than romance. She is charming company, but a risky boss, so she lands at a 4.