JZ :
Honestly I’ve never thought of Ainz as evil. He has a Machiavellian philosophy to be sure, which through our modern perspective we might consider evil, but given his situation is actually rather gentle. He holds the power to easily beat the whole world into submission, but chooses not to because that would mean 100x more bloodshed and 1000s of times more suffering than the methods he does use. “If cruelties must be enacted, then they should be carried out all at once” the spell he used to kill 170k+ soldiers was brutal yes, but it was the right call bc it resulted in more fear, less pain and fewer overall deaths than a protracted war. Later after the war was reignited, he held back when attacking perimeter cities, because only the capital and its defending army needed the absolute devestation treatment in order to convey the message to surrounding countries. When they set the trap in Nazarick for the adventurers and he personally killed that party in the arena, he took zero joy in it, he did it because the plan required it, and he followed a hunters honor type of mentality to not waste their deaths. That poor girl may have been a great and morally upstanding person just trying to protect her sisters, but had Ainz not gone with the trap plan, then both her and her sisters likely would’ve died in a war between nazarick and the empire. Those little girls lost their big sister and that’s very sad, but if Ainz was actually evil then they likely would’ve watched their sister die protecting them while the city burned down around them. So yeah he’s no saint, but he’s not evil, if you think good people don’t sometimes kill innocents in the service of their own country, then you’re blind to the grim bleak reality of war. At the very least, I firmly believe Ainz is way less evil than Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu are
2026-10-27 23:44:41