Overlord and the Hell of Getting Everything You Wanted

I discovered anime because I was stuck in Daytona Beach with a nine-month-old.

My parents have gone to Daytona just about every year for as long as I can remember. They dragged me there a dozen times as a kid. Once I was old enough to have a choice, I stopped going. Then I got married, had children, and discovered that apparently I once again no longer had a choice.

I still don't like Daytona Beach.

About two years ago we were staying at the same resort where my parents have owned a timeshare for twenty years. My son Will was nine months old and deeply dissatisfied with the accommodations. He had reached that wonderful age where he was mobile enough to get into everything but possessed absolutely no judgment about what ought to happen once he got there. He was always hungry. I spent a lot of time rotating through whatever food in the room could safely be fed to a baby and trying to keep him entertained.

He was lovely when he fell asleep on my chest.

I hardly ever watch television, but this turned out to be a decent environment for it. I found Delicious in Dungeon on Netflix, which was the first anime series I'd ever watched. I loved it. Then I ran out of episodes and found Overlord.

The premise is shameless.

A Japanese salaryman stays logged into his favorite MMORPG until the servers shut down. His friends have long since left the game, but their guild headquarters remains, along with the characters and treasures they spent years building together. When midnight comes, instead of being disconnected, he finds himself inside the body of his character: Ainz Ooal Gown, an undead wizard of obscene power. The Great Tomb of Nazarick has become a real place. Its NPCs are alive. They are brilliant, powerful, mostly monstrous, and fanatically devoted to him.

I understood the appeal immediately.

I've spent plenty of time power-gaming. Left alone with a game I like, I will happily disappear into some theme and optimize the hell out of it. There is something deeply satisfying about building a character according to a coherent idea, finding the interactions the designers didn't quite anticipate, collecting the right equipment and watching the numbers go up.

Now imagine all of that became real.

Every hour spent tuning the build suddenly counted. Every rare item was an actual artifact. The ridiculous guild base you built with your friends was now a fortress. The character you had pushed toward the limits of the game was your body.

Of course I kept watching.

Netflix ran out of seasons before Overlord ran out of story, so a man who hardly watches television subscribed to Crunchyroll because I needed to know what happened next to the damn skeleton.

I enjoyed it immensely.

It also made me feel vaguely filthy.

That feeling never quite went away.

At first I blamed the obvious thing. Overlord is a shameless nerd power fantasy, and perhaps I was experiencing the appropriate amount of embarrassment for being a grown man thoroughly entertained by it. That explanation worked well enough that I didn't examine it very closely.

It stopped working later.

There are lots of power fantasies, after all, and I don't think there is anything especially wrong with them. Odysseus was not an accountant. Sometimes it is fun to watch somebody impossibly capable encounter a problem and beat the shit out of it.

Overlord is particularly good at this when evil encounters its bigger brother.

Some necromancer or dragon or monster arrives convinced that it occupies the upper reaches of the food chain, and we already know it has made a terrible mistake. I enjoyed those scenes. I still do. Watching Shalltear get pointed at the creatures attacking the dwarves and proceed to stack bodies is badass. Her duel with Ainz is one of the better fights in the series.

The Great Tomb itself is neat. Of course it is. It is what happens when a bunch of obsessive MMO players are allowed to construct an evil guild headquarters without adult supervision. The floors have themes. There are enormous arenas, lavish living quarters, maids, bizarre ecosystems, ridiculous defenses, treasures accumulated over years and insect-themed torture chambers because apparently somebody was very committed to the bit.

Aura and Mare are another matter. Their creator decided the boy should dress like a girl and the girl like a boy, which is one of those anime decisions that makes me shake my head and mutter something about the accursed isles of Japan.

Demiurge I disliked immediately.

Part of it was aesthetic. He is named Demiurge, for God's sake. He wears a red suit, has spiked hair and little round Trotsky glasses. He looks like significant effort was expended trying to design something that a thirteen-year-old would consider impossibly cool. My first reaction to him was mostly cringe.

Then I figured out what the scrolls were made from.

The show doesn't linger over this. Demiurge has established a facility where human captives are being used to manufacture magical scrolls from their skin, with healing magic allowing the process to continue. The language around his projects is often euphemistic enough that you can miss exactly what is happening if you aren't paying attention.

That was about where cringe turned into a cold hatred, and it only got worse.

Demiurge is clever, competent and absolutely loyal to Ainz. He is also almost perfectly comfortable turning anyone outside Nazarick into material. People can become information, leverage, experiments, resources or examples with essentially no moral friction.

The dangerous part is that he doesn't need Ainz to share his appetite for cruelty.

He only needs Ainz to approve the plan.

This becomes a problem because Ainz is, underneath several feet of skeletal monstrosity, still recognizably a Japanese geek.

That is one of the things I like about him.

His body has changed. His emotional life has been altered. His power is ridiculous. But some salaryman operating system continues running underneath it all. He worries about appearances. He tries to behave as a proper superior. He doesn't want to disappoint the people working for him. He sometimes has no idea what is happening and would rather die—which presents certain technical difficulties—than admit it in front of his subordinates.

This is the basis of one of the show's best recurring jokes.

Everyone thinks Ainz is a genius.

He isn't an idiot. He's reasonably intelligent and cautious, and he has years of game knowledge that are genuinely useful. But Demiurge and Albedo believe they serve an intellect so far beyond their own that anything they don't understand must be evidence of a deeper plan.

Ainz makes some vague remark.

Demiurge's eyes light up.

Of course.

The implications.

The elegance.

The sheer scope of Lord Ainz's vision.

Everyone else is impressed.

Ainz is standing there internally wondering what the fuck Demiurge is talking about.

It works because the joke is relatable. Who hasn't nodded along for thirty seconds too long and found that the social cost of admitting confusion has somehow tripled?

The trouble is that Ainz is an absolute monarch and Demiurge commands monsters.

Ainz can end the misunderstanding at almost any point. He can say that he doesn't know. He can admit that there was no grand plan. He can tell Demiurge that whatever atrocity has just been inferred from his stray comment was not, in fact, the product of his unfathomable intellect.

Again and again he doesn't.

He is embarrassed. He is afraid of disappointing them. He feels responsible for the creations his friends left behind. He wants to be the ruler they think he is. Then Demiurge supplies a perfectly intelligent explanation for why the awful thing is necessary anyway.

Nazarick must be protected. Ainz has responsibilities to its inhabitants. Other powers are watching. Weakness can invite aggression. Failure to punish one enemy may endanger everyone later. Sometimes the argument is even correct as far as it goes.

I find this much more interesting than a demon sitting on somebody's shoulder whispering that murder is fun.

Very few serious evils require us to decide that evil is good. It is generally enough to find some real good, place it above everything that should limit it, and become increasingly inventive about what must regrettably be done in its defense.

Ainz loves Nazarick.

That isn't the problem.

The problem is what eventually becomes permissible because he loves Nazarick.

The show kept making this harder to ignore by introducing me to the people it was about to feed into the machine.

The Swords of Darkness are an early example. They could have been disposable adventurers used to move Ainz between plot points. Instead we spend time with them. Ninya has a sister she wants to find. The group starts to become familiar. Then Ainz finds what Clementine has done to them.

The Lizardmen get even more attention. I remember initially wondering why the hell the show had wandered off to spend so much time on a bunch of lizards. Then they started becoming people. They have politics and loyalties and rivalries. They fall in love. They have leaders worth following. They are frightened and brave and would very much prefer not to be exterminated.

Even Cocytus notices.

Arche gets the same treatment from another direction. We know about her parents. We know about her little sisters. We know why she needs money. Then she enters Nazarick as an intruder, and the machinery has a category for intruders.

The show does this too often for me to think it doesn't know what it's doing.

It gives the victims faces.

Then Nazarick does what Nazarick does.

The Battle of the Katze Plains was where that old feeling of disgust first reached something like saturation for me.

And the damned thing is that the spell is cool.

Ainz finally gets to cut loose in a way the series has spent a long time promising. He casts an absurdly powerful spell into an army and explains what is happening partly in the language of the game. The scale is enormous. Tens of thousands of men simply cease to be a military formation.

Then the Dark Young arrive.

These gigantic demonic goat things begin running down the routed soldiers, and Ainz, apparently pleased with the result, starts goading the Imperial side into applauding.

The show is still doing everything it can to keep the nerd part of your brain engaged. Look at the spell. Look at the summons. Look at the reaction of everyone who has just discovered what kind of creature is standing beside them.

Meanwhile, men are being crushed by the thousands.

Gazef Stronoff eventually challenges Ainz to a duel. Gazef is a proper heroic warrior and knows perfectly well that he is going to die. The setup has all the dignity of a final stand.

Ainz kills him so effortlessly that it feels like shooting a rooster with a shotgun.

I remember sitting with both reactions at once.

That was cool.

Jesus Christ.

And I kept watching.

That tension turned out to be more interesting than either reaction by itself.

Later, when I started thinking seriously about why Overlord had bothered me so much, I ended up approaching the problem like an engineer because apparently I cannot help myself.

I started thinking about the waveform of a fantasy.

Take whatever the fantasy promises and extend it. Turn up the amplitude. Let it run for longer than the story would normally permit. Where does it run out of headroom? What starts getting compressed to preserve something else? Where does distortion enter?

Try it on Ainz.

Wouldn't it be nice if all that time you wasted getting good at a game suddenly translated into real ability?

Sure.

What if you were enormously powerful?

Sounds fun.

What if almost nobody could hurt you?

Better.

What if you never aged?

What if everyone working for you was astonishingly competent?

What if they were completely loyal?

What if beautiful women wanted you?

What if rulers feared you?

What if nobody around you could comfortably tell you that you were full of shit?

Keep going.

Overlord does.

This is what eventually made Re-Estize so ugly for me.

Ainz knows the Kingdom. He spent part of the early story walking around it disguised as the adventurer Momon. He took jobs there. He traveled with ordinary people. He became one of its heroes.

The Momon disguise lets him see the place at street level. A kingdom viewed from a throne is territory, population, resources, military strength and policy. A kingdom viewed from the road is taverns, villages, adventurers, shopkeepers, frightened people, annoying people, brave people and people trying to get home.

Ainz has seen both.

Then Nazarick decides to destroy it.

The Kingdom tries to surrender.

That should matter.

It doesn't, because by then the destruction itself is useful. Nazarick wants the rest of the world to understand the consequences of crossing it, and a country that surrenders but survives communicates the wrong lesson.

So they kill them anyway.

There is something worse here than the ordinary proposition that you may live if you kneel.

Re-Estize kneels.

Nazarick has found a use for the corpse.

This is also why I don't find Ainz's competent government much of a defense, though it makes him more interesting.

The Sorcerer Kingdom can do genuinely good things. Different races can live under the same law. Ainz can suppress predation, impose order, reward useful work and create conditions under which subjects may live better than they did under previous rulers.

Fine. Good, even.

The catch is that every one of those goods exists downstream from Ainz.

Justice is welcome until justice would bind him. Mercy is admirable until mercy becomes inconvenient. Peace is desirable until slaughter has greater strategic value. Submission itself is enough only until the example made by refusing it becomes more useful.

There is no court of appeal above the throne.

That started sounding very familiar once I stopped thinking about Overlord principally as a story about an evil ruler and started thinking about eternity.

That took me a long time.

I did not finish my first viewing and announce that I had discovered a Catholic theory of Overlord. I mostly knew that I had enjoyed something that repeatedly disgusted me and that I couldn't quite explain why.

The word hell came much later.

The Catholic conception of hell is not fundamentally a dungeon where God thinks up sufficiently nasty things to do to people He dislikes. Hell is the final catastrophe of a will that will not have God. It is separation made permanent.

That permanence changed the way I saw Ainz.

He is immortal, or close enough for the distinction not to matter here.

Suppose this keeps going.

The friends do not come back.

The servants remain servants.

Every successful bluff makes the next confession harder. Every atrocity that benefits Nazarick becomes evidence that such calculations work. Every time Ainz accepts worship he knows he doesn't deserve, he practices being the thing his subjects believe him to be.

Give him a hundred years.

Give him a thousand.

What exactly is left at the end?

This is where the fantasy stopped looking desirable to me.

Ainz has escaped death by becoming a corpse.

He has escaped weakness and become almost untouchable.

He is surrounded by people who adore him and has almost nobody who can stand beside him as an equal.

Even the sexual joke starts looking bleak if you stare at it too long.

Albedo and Shalltear are gorgeous women who desperately want a skeleton.

This is objectively funny, and Overlord gets plenty of mileage out of it. Ainz has somehow achieved the harem fantasy in a body lacking some rather important equipment for enjoying a harem.

Albedo makes it darker. Immediately before the game ended, Ainz edited her character settings as a joke so that she would be madly in love with him.

Then she became real.

He knows exactly why she loves him.

Imagine receiving absolute romantic devotion from a woman while knowing that you personally typed the devotion into her source code.

What the hell are you supposed to do with that?

Ainz has become desirable beyond the dreams of the lonely man he once was, and the desire cannot give him what he was lonely for.

That pattern is everywhere.

He has admiration without honest correction.

Loyalty without equality.

Security without vulnerability.

Immortality without the ordinary life of a living man.

And an empire full of the children of his friends.

That last one hurts.

The whole reason Ainz remained in YGGDRASIL until shutdown was that he missed them. Nazarick mattered because they built it together. The empty guild hall was full of evidence that other people had once been there.

When the Tomb becomes real, he does not get his friends back.

He gets what they made.

Their creations remember them. Their personalities carry traces of them. They are living memorials to people Ainz loved.

And they call him Lord.

There is an image near Nigredo's chamber that confused me the first time I saw it.

A blue-hooded woman with a nimbus is holding a child.

I immediately thought Mary.

Then I noticed the child's face.

I backed the show up and paused it.

The face is ruined.

At the time I mostly dismissed the whole thing as the sort of foreign religious imagery that turns up in Japanese media because Christianity apparently looks exotic from the other side of the Pacific. I filed it away with all the other things anime occasionally does that make me wonder what exactly Japan thinks is happening in Christianity.

On my second trip through the series, when I was already considering this essay, I got to that scene again.

Mary.

A child.

No face.

If that's Mary, that's Christ.

The face of God is gone.

I don't know what the animator meant by it, and for what I'm doing here I don't particularly care. That is what I saw.

Nigredo is standing nearby looking like an escaped nightmare, and she is one of the people in Nazarick willing to plead for vulnerable human lives. The grotesque woman asks for mercy. The beautiful, magnificent, overwhelmingly powerful things around her are often the ones explaining why mercy is impractical.

And above it is a mother holding a child whose face has been obliterated.

By then I had spent four seasons watching the same thing happen in another form.

Ninya becomes a corpse.

Arche becomes an intruder.

The Lizardmen become a military problem.

Re-Estize becomes a message.

This is what abstraction does when it goes rotten. A person becomes a category, the category becomes a variable, and the variable can be optimized.

I work with systems. Abstraction is indispensable. You cannot reason about anything sufficiently complicated while holding every concrete detail in your head. You build models precisely by throwing information away.

The danger is forgetting what you threw away.

Christianity puts a human face in the middle of everything.

Not humanity in the abstract. A particular man, born to a particular woman, in a particular place. God gets hungry. God gets tired. God can be touched. God can bleed.

God makes Himself small enough for His mother to carry Him.

Ainz goes the other way.

That was when the whole thing finally came together for me.

The problem with the fantasy is not that it fails.

It works.

Ainz gets the power. He gets the fortress. He gets the loyalty. He gets the beautiful women, the army, the wealth, the reputation, the kingdom and the immortality. The ordinary humiliations of being a weak, mortal, dependent human being fall away one after another.

Keep extending that condition and I don't see heaven at the end of it.

I see a man increasingly unable to receive anything he did not first place beneath himself.

That is hell.

And once I saw it that way, Demiurge and Albedo became almost embarrassingly easy to place. Whatever they are in the literal cosmology of Overlord, in this reading they make very effective demonic wardens.

They don't keep Ainz in hell by locking the door. They help make sure he never wants to leave. Demiurge can turn almost any atrocity into prudence if given enough premises, while Albedo surrounds the throne with a devotion so absolute that admitting weakness becomes painful. Neither needs to overthrow Ainz's will. Quite the opposite. They serve it magnificently.

A prison from which the prisoner desperately wants to escape is one thing. This one tells him he is the Supreme Being, assures him that every concession to pride is evidence of wisdom, and asks what else it can do for him.

So hell it is. Not merely because the place is crawling with demons. Not because the protagonist is a skeleton. Not because people are tortured and killed, although Nazarick supplies plenty of that.

Because the fantasy can continue forever.

Ainz can spend eternity surrounded by beings who worship him, protecting a monument to friendships he can no longer have, ruling subjects who cannot judge him, desired by women he cannot really receive, becoming safer and greater and less reachable with every passing century.

Nothing has to collapse.

That is what finally got me when I thought about the waveform. I had been waiting for the fantasy to break down somewhere, as though enough power would eventually expose some contradiction and the whole thing would come apart.

It doesn't have to.

It can settle into its final shape.

I think back occasionally to that hotel room in Daytona.

I didn't know any of this then. I was feeding Will whatever nine-month-old-compatible food we had accumulated, keeping him out of things he shouldn't be in, and watching a Japanese salaryman become an immortal dark lord because I had run out of Delicious in Dungeon.

Eventually the little man would tire himself out.

He'd fall asleep on my chest.

I'd keep watching the skeleton.