Or you can go with the original web version's ending, where Arche becomes a sex toy of Shalltear for a while, but was eventually released into the 6th floor. The sisters were sold as slaves to a mine for a while, but were offered to Ainz as sacrifices, and he gave them over to Arche, where they lived... umm... unreported upon ever after.
Alternately, you can just pretend Vol 7. doesn't exist, because it has Ainz holding a giant idiot ball the whole time to the point it derails his character, and is just a Shoot the Shaggy Dog Story where characters that are introduced in this book accomplish nothing of note before getting killed and thus never matter to anything else in the story. Outside of maybe introducing some of the Five Worst, you could edit the whole arc out without any impact on the story at all.
Rather than a idiot ball didn't he lured them on demiurge request? (For the sole reason of having a excuse to invade/demand compensation from the empire?)
But yeau it does make him come more over as a hypocritical bastard, at least more than usual.
Rather than a idiot ball didn't he lured them on demiurge request? (For the sole reason of having a excuse to invade/demand compensation from the empire?)
But yeau it does make him come more over as a hypocritical bastard, at least more than usual.
The way he acts in the last couple chapters are still a massive character-derailing idiot ball, though.... and I'm going to spoiler-rant for a bit, because I REALLY want to get how much I hate this arc off my chest.
I mean, for one, there's absolutely no reason someone as cautious and paranoid as Ainz/Suzuki to use real adventurers/workers working for another country to test his defenses. I mean, who does an alpha test by going live? He could have done some "in-house" testing by just telling some of his mid-level servants like the Pleiades to try a run, and it would've not only been a better stress test of their defenses against a higher-level party, but it would've meant he didn't reveal the extent of his defenses if anything went wrong.
If he was going to get so upset that those "dirty little thieves with their FILTHY fucking FEET" were going to come to Nazarick, then... why INVITE those thieves, again? It's not like there weren't other options for how to test the defenses - he could have even just lured some mindless beasts into the dungeon. Yeah, it was Demiurge's idea, but Ainz's the absolute master and has the final word, and threw a wrench into Demiurge's ideas in the previous story, even, by ordering the execution of the abducted townspeople instead of being turned into a flesh factory.
He declares it's a "mercy" to kill Arche because "in Nazarick, death means the pain stops"... but that's kind of undermined by the fact that literally all the other (actually much worse) thieves are the ones that get quick, painless deaths, while the ones who actually impressed him are the ones that get the horrific torture. In fact, outside of Arche, the trend seems to be that the horrificness of their death is directly proportionate to how long they last in the book.
The most weasely backstabbing adventure group? Painlessly killed nigh-instantly by Old Guarders. The sadistic racist rapist slaveholder guy? He gets his arms cut off for a few seconds before having his head crushed. (And his slaves, the only people you could hope would get a good ending, get to live happily playing around with Aura and Mare.) The fairly decent guys from Heavy Masher who didn't really do anything wrong but also were total nameless redshirts? Either eaten from the inside out by cockroaches or tortured to death by Neuronist. (They don't even tell you WHICH nameless guys get which, and there's two whose deaths are TOTALLY unexplained, because Maruyama cared about them so little he didn't even bother to mention how they died.) Roberdyck, the most self-sacrificing character outside of Climb that Maruyama has written? Mind-altering magic test subject until his brain melts. Hekkeran and Imina's fate is actually unclear, in that it's not clear how long it takes them to die from being a host - obviously, it's basically the same as the cockroach death if they're killed very quickly, but reaches "I Have No Mouth" levels if they're kept alive as an insect breeding ground for their natural lifespans (especially the elf).
Speaking of "I Have No Mouth", if you read the wiki, apparently, the Silk Hat that Ainz gives Arche's head to is a type of epic-level plant monster similar to a Brain Collector (one of the only D&D monsters that truly gives me nightmares), in that it wears the heads of wizards in order to absorb their knowledge and spells, meaning her death may be even more horrific than it at first appears.
But what really had my jaw on the floor wondering how he could be THIS STUPID was when he actually was caught by surprise when Hekkeran said they were invited, and he actually bought it. At the moment that it happened, I was screaming at the book, "YOU were the one that invited them, DUMBASS!"
Then he goes and unleashes Rubido for literally no reason other than Albedo asking in a goofy way, in spite of keeping her back for very good reason up until then, cementing this as the "Ainz acts like a flaming idiot the whole time" story arc.
And all of this was to prove... what, again? That low-level adventurers aren't a match for high-level monsters? Isn't that something that has been proven by literally everything that has happened in this story?! Again, this whole story arc is just a waste of time because there's ZERO drama in absolute red shirts getting red shirt deaths. This sort of story would only work if it was some sort of tragic death of a character the readers have gotten to know and care about, but anyone who's gotten this far into Overlord knows not to get attached to brand new characters whose death flags are piling up from the very instant they are introduced. I mean, Arche all but declares "I'm just one more mission from retirement!" as her intro! Everything that follows from that is just shooting the shaggy dog that everyone knows is a shaggy dog. Maruyama's response to being told he can't get cheap tragedy by killing off obviously doomed characters seems to be "why don't we make them even MORE totally helpless and innocent red shirts?!" by dragging in the little girls to die, too, and making the parents even more cackling supervillains.
Meanwhile, he's done absolutely nothing to develop (and actively sabotaged the characterization) of any of the characters that actually matter in this story. Most of the Pleiades in particular DESPERATELY need to be given some sort of characterization in the main story arc, because they've literally got nothing to their personalities besides being loyal to Ainz and being psychopathic monsters.
It's always been the worst part of Overlord that even his disposable definitely-doomed greedy human henchmen are better, more fleshed-out characters I instantly like more than the supposed major characters from Nazarick who, with the sole exception of the few that rail against their programming in some way (that is, Cocytus, Sebas, and Demiurge), they're all just completely boring non-characters. I don't give a shit how "their personalities reflect the people who made them", that doesn't matter if the people who made them don't matter because they aren't in the damn story! What matters is that the characters who ARE there have a personality that entirely consists of "I have no personal whims besides following the personal whims of the one guy with a personality" and "I like torturing people for the giggles because I am EEEEEEEEEVIL" and absolutely nothing else.
Doylist explanation: The whole series took a left turn into torture porn.
(The kind that make BoVD and BoEF look like masterpieces. Maybe even FATAL.)
Don't joke about FATAL. I was there, man. I saw things.... The horror... The horror... (Seriously, just reading the rulebook has been known to cause SAN loss. Five brave reviewers were reduced to gibbering wrecks by that rulebook.)
I get the sense it's less "suddenly, Moriyama got into his torture kink" and more that he felt he had to pad it out into a whole story becuase it already was one. (Although I don't know why, book 8 is broken into two different stories, and he could have probably just made another short arc to make book 7 into a series of shorter stories, including some of those bonus stories from the anime DVDs where he gave the Pleiades some actual screentime and personality traits they DESPERATELY need to become worthwhile characters.) He just felt that the original endings were too fetishy/nonserious, so he made everything as grimdark and SRS BSNS as possible, even if it means throwing Ainz the idiot ball to make it happen.
Anyway, yeah, as I had said in another post's comment thread, it's better to just think of the series as a Horror story told from the perspective of the monsters at this point. It just doesn't really work from any other angle than seeing it as being like the later Freddy Kruger movies where they're all about letting Freddy throw out one-liners while having increasingly over-the-top death scenes.
Still, when Moriyama goes into a page of backstory about how some elite mook has such-and-such a backstory and superpower only to be smushed like a grape by Sebas in one sentence before it goes into the next character's page of backstory before dying in one sentence, it's kind of funny. When 2/3rds of a whole book is backstory for a character where the only dramatic question is "how elaborate will the death scene be?" then it's just TEDIOUS.
Meanwhile, the supposed major characters are the least-fleshed-out characters in the whole story, and it's just maddening. (Albedo in particular is a giant void of any kind of personality traits besides "Ainz-saMAAAAA!" to the point that it's clear she's ONLY there for the fanservice wish-fulfillment in a series that otherwise is blessedly free of it.)
The way he acts in the last couple chapters are still a massive character-derailing idiot ball, though.... and I'm going to spoiler-rant for a bit, because I REALLY want to get how much I hate this arc off my chest.
I mean, for one, there's absolutely no reason someone as cautious and paranoid as Ainz/Suzuki to use real adventurers/workers working for another country to test his defenses. I mean, who does an alpha test by going live? He could have done some "in-house" testing by just telling some of his mid-level servants like the Pleiades to try a run, and it would've not only been a better stress test of their defenses against a higher-level party, but it would've meant he didn't reveal the extent of his defenses if anything went wrong.
If he was going to get so upset that those "dirty little thieves with their FILTHY fucking FEET" were going to come to Nazarick, then... why INVITE those thieves, again? It's not like there weren't other options for how to test the defenses - he could have even just lured some mindless beasts into the dungeon. Yeah, it was Demiurge's idea, but Ainz's the absolute master and has the final word, and threw a wrench into Demiurge's ideas in the previous story, even, by ordering the execution of the abducted townspeople instead of being turned into a flesh factory.
He declares it's a "mercy" to kill Arche because "in Nazarick, death means the pain stops"... but that's kind of undermined by the fact that literally all the other (actually much worse) thieves are the ones that get quick, painless deaths, while the ones who actually impressed him are the ones that get the horrific torture. In fact, outside of Arche, the trend seems to be that the horrificness of their death is directly proportionate to how long they last in the book.
The most weasely backstabbing adventure group? Painlessly killed nigh-instantly by Old Guarders. The sadistic racist rapist slaveholder guy? He gets his arms cut off for a few seconds before having his head crushed. (And his slaves, the only people you could hope would get a good ending, get to live happily playing around with Aura and Mare.) The fairly decent guys from Heavy Masher who didn't really do anything wrong but also were total nameless redshirts? Either eaten from the inside out by cockroaches or tortured to death by Neuronist. (They don't even tell you WHICH nameless guys get which, and there's two whose deaths are TOTALLY unexplained, because Maruyama cared about them so little he didn't even bother to mention how they died.) Roberdyck, the most self-sacrificing character outside of Climb that Maruyama has written? Mind-altering magic test subject until his brain melts. Hekkeran and Imina's fate is actually unclear, in that it's not clear how long it takes them to die from being a host - obviously, it's basically the same as the cockroach death if they're killed very quickly, but reaches "I Have No Mouth" levels if they're kept alive as an insect breeding ground for their natural lifespans (especially the elf).
Speaking of "I Have No Mouth", if you read the wiki, apparently, the Silk Hat that Ainz gives Arche's head to is a type of epic-level plant monster similar to a Brain Collector (one of the only D&D monsters that truly gives me nightmares), in that it wears the heads of wizards in order to absorb their knowledge and spells, meaning her death may be even more horrific than it at first appears.
But what really had my jaw on the floor wondering how he could be THIS STUPID was when he actually was caught by surprise when Hekkeran said they were invited, and he actually bought it. At the moment that it happened, I was screaming at the book, "YOU were the one that invited them, DUMBASS!"
Then he goes and unleashes Rubido for literally no reason other than Albedo asking in a goofy way, in spite of keeping her back for very good reason up until then, cementing this as the "Ainz acts like a flaming idiot the whole time" story arc.
And all of this was to prove... what, again? That low-level adventurers aren't a match for high-level monsters? Isn't that something that has been proven by literally everything that has happened in this story?! Again, this whole story arc is just a waste of time because there's ZERO drama in absolute red shirts getting red shirt deaths. This sort of story would only work if it was some sort of tragic death of a character the readers have gotten to know and care about, but anyone who's gotten this far into Overlord knows not to get attached to brand new characters whose death flags are piling up from the very instant they are introduced. I mean, Arche all but declares "I'm just one more mission from retirement!" as her intro! Everything that follows from that is just shooting the shaggy dog that everyone knows is a shaggy dog. Maruyama's response to being told he can't get cheap tragedy by killing off obviously doomed characters seems to be "why don't we make them even MORE totally helpless and innocent red shirts?!" by dragging in the little girls to die, too, and making the parents even more cackling supervillains.
Meanwhile, he's done absolutely nothing to develop (and actively sabotaged the characterization) of any of the characters that actually matter in this story. Most of the Pleiades in particular DESPERATELY need to be given some sort of characterization in the main story arc, because they've literally got nothing to their personalities besides being loyal to Ainz and being psychopathic monsters.
It's always been the worst part of Overlord that even his disposable definitely-doomed greedy human henchmen are better, more fleshed-out characters I instantly like more than the supposed major characters from Nazarick who, with the sole exception of the few that rail against their programming in some way (that is, Cocytus, Sebas, and Demiurge), they're all just completely boring non-characters. I don't give a shit how "their personalities reflect the people who made them", that doesn't matter if the people who made them don't matter because they aren't in the damn story! What matters is that the characters who ARE there have a personality that entirely consists of "I have no personal whims besides following the personal whims of the one guy with a personality" and "I like torturing people for the giggles because I am EEEEEEEEEVIL" and absolutely nothing else.
Honostly,for me Ainz (alongside most of Nazarick) stopped developing after the brainwashed Shalltear fight. Also was the last time we actually felt tension from the main character. (Kinda sad that the whole thing was just a tease, and Nazarick was never in any real danger, even the so called "hope of humanity" isn't really a danger to them)
But i lost any kind of respect for him when he attacked innocent lizard villages in season 2 for the sake of "finding a player, a world item wielder, to see if he can create stronger undead from their corpses"? For a guy who tries "respecting" the memories of his former guild he really does "flip flop" alot. Also never believed in the whole "i don't feel anything" because it's obvious he does get emotional (like how he got angry when Evileye hurt his precious maid or happy seeing his minions getting along, heck he even kills you if he thinks you are annoying him which is obviously a emotion).
It is kinda sad that this series devolved into this, i would have loved them actually doing something with Ainz "paranoia", the guardians or other npc's actually more objecting each other (considering the difference of karma rating and some actually being nice and honest) other than being a "yes man" or psychopath. What would some of the evil fantasy racist guardians reactions be when they find that the world they believed in and are created from is nothing more than a game created by humans lol, the irony...
At least in a horror story, the monster is consistent (most of the time).
Honostly,for me Ainz (alongside most of Nazarick) stopped developing after the brainwashed Shalltear fight. Also was the last time we actually felt tension from the main character. (Kinda sad that the whole thing was just a tease, and Nazarick was never in any real danger, even the so called "hope of humanity" isn't really a danger to them)
But i lost any kind of respect for him when he attacked innocent lizard villages in season 2 for the sake of "finding a player, a world item wielder, to see if he can create stronger undead from their corpses"? For a guy who tries "respecting" the memories of his former guild he really does "flip flop" alot. Also never believed in the whole "i don't feel anything" because it's obvious he does get emotional (like how he got angry when Evileye hurt his precious maid or happy seeing his minions getting along, heck he even kills you if he thinks you are annoying him which is obviously a emotion).
It is kinda sad that this series devolved into this, i would have loved them actually doing something with Ainz "paranoia", the guardians or other npc's actually more objecting each other (considering the difference of karma rating and some actually being nice and honest) other than being a "yes man" or psychopath. What would some of the evil fantasy racist guardians reactions be when they find that the world they believed in and are created from is nothing more than a game created by humans lol, the irony...
At least in a horror story, the monster is consistent (most of the time).
The biggest problem is he is so hung up on his PRECIOUS FRIEEEENDS that he ignores or snaps at anyone who tries to be nice to him so he can isolate himself and mope some more, like with the Blades of Darkness who, as soon as they reminded him of his friends, he snapped and pushed them away only to start acting like he cared about them only AFTER leaving their corpses to rot. (And if you aren't reading the LN, he never explains why he didn't just throw down Res spells right then, either, waiting for the lizardmen to try it out, where it seems like a gaping plot hole he never did so before.)
I mean, if it was deliberate satire of the isekai genre, it would be one thing, if it were deliberately making fun of how these worlds seemingly exist JUST to gratify the egos of the audience's surrogate by saying how awesome they are all the time and instantly being popular and getting all the girls by making a character who seriously never does or can get all the girls. However, it still seems more just a subversion "villainous protagonist", instead. His motivations just don't make sense, and that gradually isolates the reader from the "One Sane Man" they're supposed to be sympathizing with.
And yes, the realization that they are game characters would be interesting, and they've actually hinted at it before, with stuff like talking about how BubblingTeapot is a voice actress, and how that means she "creates characters' souls" and such. However, it doesn't seem like Maruyama's really going to roll with that as a major theme, instead focusing upon the whole "the same thing we do every night, Pinky: Try and take over the world!" That said, it probably woulnd't tear them up to hear they're video game characters, especially since they seem to fully understand how they were programmed, and what parts of their personality was left vague in their backstories so that the blanks were filled with traces of the personalities of their original creators. What would actually devastate them would be knowledge that their "gods" were all a bunch of human wage-earners who just had a smattering of expertise in fields like art design, and that they weren't some sort of superior race. (In fact, on the wiki, it talks about how Maruyama said that actual Homo Sapien humans went extinct in Overlord's world a long time ago, and that the survivors are mixed-blood humans with magical powers that are vastly more powerful, so the Supreme Beings are actually inferior to the "insects" that Nazarick rules over and slaughters for the giggles.)
So yeah, the most I'm hoping for in the end is that the whole thing comes apart at the seams when Demiurge and Sebas finally cannot reconcile their differences any longer, and Nazarick is destroyed in a massive civil war just like the Eight Kings of Avarice before them, since that would actually show off a bit of pathos on the part of the main characters.