I consume media in bursts. I’ll read or listen to a book in two days, finish a series in a week or two. Often I’ll jump between books, podcasts, videos, or series and return weeks, months, or years later. This can lead to re-reading or re-watching something enough to frustrate me, but distance in time and life experience can show some media in a better light than I first encountered it. In a different post I’ll talk about my experience with the Millennium Series and my struggles to get beyond the first chapters of The Girl Who Played With Fire. In the last year I’ve been reading through the Overlord light novel series. I remember watching the anime in college and liking it, but only on a subsequent rewatch in the last years did some elements of it resonate with me on a deeper level. Throughout the series we see Momonga change and increasingly align mentally with his physical undead form and further embody Ains Oowl Goan. His initial motivation for finding other players in this world is twofold, self/guild preservation and to reclaim the camaraderie and kinship of his best times with his guildmates in Yggdrasil.
I understood these motivations when watching this previously, but didn’t truly connect or empathize with Momonga. When I was in high school and community college, I played an online game called NationStates. It was a mechanics-light political simulation game and satire, with most of the interactivity and community surrounding it in the metagame and created/continually fueled by the players. You’d answer policy questions to create a nation, pick a flag, a name, a motto, national currency and animal, and you’d receive a caricature of a your chosen political ideology. Your nation was placed in a region with other nations, and at any time you could move regions for whatever reason you like. Over time you could answer more of these questions to further mold your nation. You might move regions to roleplay with other similar nations, or make friends and move between regions with them. There are forums on the site, but many regions made separate forums and role-played governance to make decisions for the region as a whole, did character roleplay, or just hung out on forums or the regional message boards together. This was where I was first introduced to role-playing of several types, and I loved playing a character, or a nation leader, or just going by a name I thought was cooler and desperately trying to be cool and make people laugh.
I made some friends who were all pretty close in age and life circumstances in one region, there was a lot of drama and political intrigue, but the feeling of community and being accepted for my actions and my writing/role-play was what I felt I had always missed. I wasn’t me there, I was an idealized version of me without these insecurities (so I told myself). My ability to connect, persuade, bring together or drive apart people in this community was my asset, and akin to the petty power plays of moderators in subreddits upon reflection. Of course I was young and immature, and by the point I realized these follies and the sheer amount of my real free time I was dedicating was untenable, the natural bonds of our community began to fall apart. Regardless of our work to draw more people in to keep this self-sustaining community going, with key figures in our group leaving to attend to their real lives, it disintegrated. This was normal and is the way of all communities in time. Yeah some might be able to keep going, but ask the older members of the group if it feels the same as when they were neglecting their responsibilities at the beginning.
For a time after I told myself I would try to bring the group together again, or build another and foster that same sense of community, companionship, friends across the globe chatting and playing silly games together. No effort was successful in truly recapturing that feeling and I resigned myself and figured it was inevitable. I refocused my efforts on making new friends, finding new hobbies, studying and working. I was set on finding and creating this community or circle of friends in real life. As I got older, worked more, left college and moved, I realized the obsessive dynamic and dedication of the inner circle of my old online community was a flash in the pan. It couldn’t be replicated, and shouldn’t, at least for my own sake. There’s nothing wrong at all with online friends, or being part of a tight-knit online community. The problem was the dedication brought fervor and obsession, neglect of the relationships I cared about, and escapism in a time when my reality was worth experiencing and addressing with my full attention. I accepted that I was just me here in the real world, and that the people around me loved me for me, not just the side I wanted to show. That people worth my attention and time were around me and out there to be found.
To break the cozy realization and tie this back to Overlord, I understand the world in Overlord outside of Yggdrasil is dystopic. Dystopic to the point of a player of Yggdrasil building trees in the Tomb of Nazarick, because they don’t get to see them in the real world. When I read or watch Overlord now, I feel in my bones that yearning for community and camaraderie that Momonga-cum-Ainz Oowl Goan feels. I know how fleeting that feeling is and how alluring the pursuit can be. How his changed nature and true solitude as the only known player of Yggdrasil and the last once-human remnant of his guild Ainz Oowl Goan renders that whisper of humanity left increasingly desperate for connection. I may well be misinterpreting some of his motivation or forgetting some important element I’ve not mentioned here. However it’s fascinating to see this combination of loneliness, the undead Overlord urge to exercise dominion, and how these goals may merge or be merged in his mind. How willing he becomes to sacrifice others and his gradual lack of empathy as he embraces this role.
It’s easy to think about how short-sighted this rejection of what’s under your nose is when considering obsession and addiction in the real world, but having that power in Yggdrasil, that distance and expectation from subordinates, knowing how dystopic the real world is in-universe, and his lack of knowledge of how he got where he is now. Could you resist?