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I’ve been watching “A Livid Lady’s Guide to Getting Even” separate from my group. I have a bit more room for trash in my schedule.
That said, I feel kind of odd about the show. It sort of reminds me of my issue with Overlord: We follow the protagonist most of the time as someone to root for, then they do some absolutely heinous things that feel like they came out of nowhere, then we go right back to them being vaguely sympathetic. I’d say it’s one of the problems with doing a villain as protagonist TV show because it’s hard for time spent with the protag not to make a connection. However, I feel like there have been some good examples of shows where the protag is the bad guy or becomes the bad guy either due to a “road to hell is paved with good intentions” or “corrupted by circumstances” plot devices.
The one that most comes to mind is Breaking Bad. It’s a long road from push over high school teach and family man to ruthless drug kingpin and we’re there every step of the way to see how it happens.
This show and Overlord don’t really feel like that. The protagonists just kinda do evil shit every once in a while and nobody really acknowledges how fucked up that is. The most recent episode really hammered that home for me.
idk, I’m just overthinking a trash show. It’s just that sometimes I can’t help but watch some of these and think of what they could have been with more competent… everything.
I’m hard-dropping that one after the last couple of episodes. Killing innocents on purpose and without remorse to get revenge on a third party is just Not Acceptable.
I find Overlord a lot less disturbing, possibly because Ains himself isn’t directly responsible for a lot of the most heinous stuff (his servants tend to be a lot nastier than he is, and seldom tell him exactly what they’re doing), and possibly because most of the people he ends up killing aren’t total innocents and are usually given a chance to fight back. (Plus, we have no idea what being stuck in a lich’s body does to the human psyche, so he has at least that much excuse for the evil he does do outright and knowingly.) And it was obvious from the beginning that Overlord wasn’t taking place in a nice world.
Buchigire Reijou, on the other hand, started out in a much lighter register, as typical villainness stuff where most of the nastiness is social and political and what combat there is doesn’t get particularly gory, and then the protagonist suddenly went full Kingdoms of Ruin on everyone’s asses without even nearly enough buildup to justify it. It just doesn’t work.
That’s the thing that made me start thinking about this. There’s almost an interesting angle there with his body seemingly mysteriously changing how he feels, but they never do anything with it. I think some kind of internal struggle and mystery around it could have been a good plotline. I didn’t finish watching it, but there was another trash isekai about a guy becoming an evil boss from a video game he played (A Wild Last Boss Appears) and there was a bit of that going on with the personality of the real character he’s inhabiting slowly overtaking his own. Although at least for what I saw, they didn’t really do much more with that either.
Things in that one aren’t quite as they seem, from what I understand, with a few things being revealed toward the end of the first season (second one starts in October), and I think I also read some relevant spoilers dropped here. Maou-sama, Retry! is another one with pretty much the same plotline, where it’s also pretty clear that there’s Something Going On in the background.
There’s been no indication of that kind of thing so far in Overlord, though, as far as I know. There seems to be no reason for Ains being dumped into his game persona, and no sign of anyone who might be responsible.