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The story
Episode 5 of ‘The Enraged Lady Has Sworn Revenge’ set 5ch’s anime live-chat board abuzz. As the show’s brutal revenge scenes — which claimed the lives of 85 residents, including children — sparked backlash, some viewers branded protagonist Ellie ‘nausea-inducing evil.’ The discussion soon expanded to cover the original novel’s sales figures and comparisons to Overlord.
What people said
A beautiful genius noble lady, cast aside by a broken engagement and thrown in prison, seizes the ultimate grimoire and wields her connections, wealth, and military might to strike back at her betrayers. An exhilarating, come-from-behind revenge fantasy begins now!
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That's basically a given at this point.
After that she'll probably go found her own magic nation, just like Ainz did (Overlord's protagonist).
And then she'll destroy the Empire too, huh.
A walking disaster incarnate.
Never mind that the Kingdom's army was massacring civilians too.
And on top of that, Robert was the one who commanded it.
I actually like Ellie.
Cornering people with brains is fine, but going full brute-force chaos is fun too.
They'd probably welcome Ellie with open arms if she settles the score with the Kingdom for them.
After the Empire sentenced her to death, Ellie headed for the Servas region — territory the Kingdom used to rule over…
There are a ton of people who'd be in trouble if they couldn't pile on anonymously anymore, so it's stubbornly kept off.
Just for letting Robert kill this girl, Elisabeth deserves to die a thousand deaths.
Even though they're doing the exact same thing lol
The main story just isn't interesting, honestly.
It's only getting attention right now because of the graphic violence.
Dude, come on — Ainz goes and pulls off stuff on a scale that's not even comparable, all just to secure a rune-workshop business deal (a nod to Overlord's dwarven runecraft arc). He's simply in a different league.
Selling so well they can't even publish the total print run. (i.e. it's actually selling terribly)
On Amazon, Yodobashi, Rakuten — even just within the HJ Bunko imprint rankings, riding the anime-adaptation boost, only volume 1 barely scraped into the top 30. Draw your own conclusions.
I don't know the details, but even with the flood of anime adaptations lately, there are countless "Narou" web novels out there — surely something has to show a certain level of popularity before it gets an anime, right?
I checked the wiki and it turns out this one won an award in the "Shousetsuka ni Narou" category of the HJ Novel Award, first half of 2021.
The books only started coming out in 2022, the content toned down the graphic violence compared to the web version, and it's still unfinished — I feel like the secret's hiding somewhere in there.
Simple answer — the only HJ Bunko title without an anime that can actually publish real cumulative sales figures is "Kuro no Senki."
So right now they're basically adapting whichever titles they want to push.
For reference, series like "Seirei Gensouki" and "Eiyuu Ou" have sold over 4 million copies each.
Guess it might have some promotional effect.
Personally I have zero interest in picking up the source material though.
Like "Woltenia Senki," for instance.
If Ellie had killed the children herself, at least her resolve for revenge would come through, good or evil aside, but as it stands it just feels shallow.
So this is what "nausea-inducing evil" actually looks like.
Nausea-inducing evil, and on top of that she doesn't even realize she's evil — the darkest kind of villain there is.
Nobody stops to think about the age or gender of the bugs they step on.
That's the category they fall into for her.
That's NOT self-inflicted, dammit!!
I think the type of villainess is different.
Those are more like targeted assassins, while this one's closer to a killer-for-pleasure type.
Funny how "Futsutsuka" barely does any actual revenge and yet it's way more satisfying to watch.
Say what you will about Ryuunosuke Uryuu and Gilles de Rais from Fate/Zero — psychopaths who turned little girls into human organs — but at least they understood how differently they saw the world compared to everyone else, got their own hands dirty, and shouldered the hatred themselves. That's a lot better.
They're nothing like this pathetic trash, who massacres people for petty, self-satisfying reasons while worrying about how readers will see them, too gutless to even smile in front of a kid's corpse.
Yeah, they were completely twisted, but in their own way they still showed a certain respect for the lives they took.
In most other works where a kid gets killed off, there's usually some reason on the victim's side — they're a villain, a side character, whatever.
In this one, the kid, the maid, and all 85 ordinary townspeople who died didn't do anything at all.
so the author got scared and put a stop to the slaughter — there won't be any more of it.
Even the psychopath fans got bored, and that was the end of that.
Seriously?
Yeah, letting reader feedback steer the story is trash.
It's free to read — just let the author do whatever they want until it's finished.
Seriously?
Same goes for this thread too, honestly — does nobody realize this is just a "story"?
They probably would have if the royal family had ordered it, but at that point Ellie's house outranked Robert's.
Won't she just escape though?
Background and Key Points
The genre here is Japan’s long-running “isekai revenge/villainess” boom, and this show sits downstream of two overlapping traditions: the “Shousetsuka ni Narou” web-fiction platform, where amateur writers post serialized fantasy for free, and the light-novel-to-anime pipeline that scouts hits from it. “The Enraged Lady Has Sworn Revenge” won an HJ Novel Award (Hobby Japan’s imprint, HJ Bunko) in the first half of 2021, didn’t get print volumes until 2022, and is still unfinished — a much thinner pedigree than genre giants like Overlord, whose Ainz Ooal Gown is the reference point posters kept reaching for, or HJ Bunko stablemates like Seirei Gensouki and Eiyuu Ou, each reportedly past four million copies sold.
The thread wasn’t really split on whether the violence was excessive — most agreed 85 dead townspeople, including children, is extreme even by revenge-fantasy standards. The actual fault line was about culpability: whether Ellie is a compelling dark protagonist because she owns her revenge, or something worse precisely because she orchestrates the killing through others and never gets her own hands dirty, which posters contrasted unfavorably with even Fate/Zero’s serial-killer characters.
What outside readers likely won’t catch is the sales joke: “selling so well they can’t even publish the total print run” is sarcasm — Japanese publishers routinely tout print totals for hits and go quiet on underperformers, so silence signals weak sales, not success. Also worth knowing: posters noted the author reportedly walked back the story’s violence after reader backlash, meaning the version airing may already be a softened cut of a harsher web original.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and summaries of the 5ch (Anime) thread “The Enraged Lady Has Sworn Revenge. #5”.
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