A Livid Lady's Guide to Getting Even Volumes 1-7 Light Novel Review

When Crown Princess Elizabeth Leiston's fiancé has her arrested, Ellie doesn't get mad—she makes a plan to get even. After a daring dungeon escape, she defects to the neighboring Yutear Empire and establishes the Traitre Commercial Firm. Utilizing a combination of soft power, political prowess, and formidable ice magic, Ellie enacts her revenge with zero regard to any innocent bystanders that may die as a result. But as Ellie acquires friends, allies, and even an adoptive daughter, she must come to a reckoning. Can she survive the weight of revenge on her conscience now that she has a family of her own?

A Livid Lady's Guide to Getting Even is translated by Rymane Tsouria.

When Crown Princess Elizabeth Leiston's fiancé has her arrested, Ellie doesn't get mad—she makes a plan to get even. After a daring dungeon escape, she defects to the neighboring Yutear Empire and establishes the Traitre Commercial Firm. Utilizing a combination of soft power, political prowess, and formidable ice magic, Ellie enacts her revenge with zero regard to any innocent bystanders that may die as a result. But as Ellie acquires friends, allies, and even an adoptive daughter, she must come to a reckoning. Can she survive the weight of revenge on her conscience now that she has a family of her own?

A Livid Lady's Guide to Getting Even is translated by Rymane Tsouria.

Awful men in positions of power are destroying our world and us along with it. Wouldn't the world be so much better, so much more peaceful, if women were the ones in charge?

Hold that thought.

A Livid Lady's Guide to Getting Even: How I Crushed My Homeland with My Mighty Grimoires is a seven-volumes-and-counting light novel series that's seemingly designed to counter that fantasy. Give a woman the same power that men have, and she'll be just as ruthless. This girl-power fantasy stars an infinitely competent heroine with overpowered magic and all the intelligence, business know-how and connections to rebuild her world in any way she likes. And the way she decides to rebuild that world comes with a steep cost to regular people.

At its best, Livid Lady is an addictive revenge tale that offers satisfying stories of a brilliant woman giving dumb idiots their just desserts. Over time it expands into fascinating political intrigue, exploration-worthy worldbuilding, and a blossoming cast of enjoyable characters that goes as deep as it goes wide. But at its worst it's a pile of villainess tropes in a trenchcoat that never truly makes Elizabeth answer to the contradictions of her character. Elizabeth was victimized, but her answer is to victimize many more people in turn—even if she is a “good” slaveholder, she has a slave. Even if she kills people who deserve it (and many more who don't deserve it), she does so while they beg for their lives. It's a female power fantasy but it isn't feminist. GIRL POWER! BLOODLUST! SLAVERY!

If you've read any stories in the villainess genre, you'll recognize the tropes in Elizabeth's story. Like so many of these stories, the opening scene features the idiot prince publicly accusing crown princess Elizabeth, who is quietly holding the entire kingdom together with tireless work and brilliant politicking, of crimes toward his new mistress, a pink-haired interloper from impoverished origins. After Elizabeth is sent to rot in the dungeons, all the while still completing her paperwork to keep the kingdom running, she realizes rescue isn't coming. What's more, the citizens of the kingdom who she has dedicated her life to supporting, believe the filthy rumors about her. Something in Elizabeth breaks and she decides to leave the country, change her name to Ellie, and devote herself to tearing down the kingdom that so ungraciously received her life's work up to this point, then discarded her.

But they picked the wrong woman to wrong: nobody realizes that Ellie doesn't have only one Divine Artifact, but seven! With these seven grimoires, each one containing a godlike skill that puts her strength on par with the most elite of adventurers, Ellie has more than enough power to crush not only her former kingdom, but the entire world if she'd like. She can cast spells of any aspect, hypnotize people into doing her bidding, store and transport an infinite number of objects, and multiple other skills which, by themselves, would be the subject of an entire light novel series. After seven volumes of Livid Lady, Ellie has only revealed five of her seven grimoires. She might be the most overpowered villainess I've read about yet.

Even with her comically overpowered abilities, it's easy to be on Ellie's side, at least at first. As she sets up her on-the-nose commercial firm Traitre, she runs into many obstacles in the form of idiots. She's the only realized character in a narrative full of careless strawmen. Time and again, antagonists (who are all men) underestimate Ellie and swiftly receive their well-deserved comeuppance. “At the end of the day, you are a woman,” is an insult Ellie is often on the receiving end of. They believe with the confidence of your average mediocre man that they can match Ellie, unaware she is basically a god in human form. Many of Ellie's adventures read like stories on Reddit's r/ProRevenge, a forum where people share gratifying (but probably fake) tales of absolutely crushing morons who never knew what hit them. Those stories are meant to satisfy your craving for justice by simplifying people down to their basest traits: the legendary OP, the reprehensible subject of revenge. Livid Lady scratches that same itch.

But as the story progresses, her actions are less justified. Ellie is perhaps the most morally gray villainess I've seen in an otome story. She's a villainess with a body count: 103. And that's only counting CHILDREN she's killed. She bought and owns a slave who she refuses to free (doing so would be disrespectful to her slave, Ellie believes). She believes orphanages are a source of cheap child labor for her company, but also adopted an orphan, Alice, who is her darling pride and joy. While fiercely loyal to her entourage, Ellie doesn't care if innocent bystanders die in her singleminded quest for revenge.

In my favorite scene in the series, during Book 4, Ellie's longtime rival Roselia takes her to task for her hypocrisy. She points out that Ellie has a child, but has no problem harming other people's children. She observes that Ellie's logic—that it's OK to betray people who betrayed her first—is “the logic of the weak… You're strong, strong enough to laugh in the faces of those who'd betray you. So why are you acting like a weakling?” Ellie thinks that since people disparage her as “just” a woman, it's OK for her to fight back. But when you're as powerful as Ellie, with seven mighty grimoires, at what point do you realize you've gone from the oppressed to the oppressor? I thought that this moment would be a turning point for Ellie, especially when she promised Roselia she would stop. This made it all the more upsetting when she continued to harm and kill innocents for three books afterward with a cheap workaround—she used her grimoire to hypnotize herself into not realizing she was doing so.

Throughout the book, many of Ellie's actions can be described as war crimes. Volume one sets the tone with a shockingly cruel maneuver, in which Ellie appears to sincerely forgive a knight, then kills all of his men in front of him, then hypnotizes him so he becomes a mass murderer (starting with his own family) the moment he picks up a sword. As the story progresses, Ellie demonstrates her ruthlessness as well as her sheer strength through dungeon crawling, fighting on the front lines in a war, leading the charge in an invasion, and many other feats that remind us she is a coldblooded killer. While she and her squad of boss babes (including her loyal maid, her beastkin slave, her apprentice merchant, a drunken but powerful sister of the church, a class-A lady adventurer, a female doctor with a giant axe named Period, a skilled dwarf who wants to become a weaponsmith despite the backward dwarven belief that women can't smith, and many more) devise a recipe for chocolate, or aqua-silk, or other luxury goods that miraculously nobody else has thought of making before, Ellie's killing intent sits dormant in the back of my mind. When she meets the closest thing the story has to a love interest (a beastkin man who feels like somebody's Gary Stu due to extremely rare features like a dragon horn, a wolf tail, and elf ears), I almost pity that man.

Ellie's adventures are always exciting, and well-conveyed through Rymane Tsouria's compelling translation of Hagure Metabo's quick-paced prose. Still, I couldn't shake my lingering unease as I wonder what kind of atrocity she might commit next. Girl power stories have appeal because they're about victimized women turning the tables. But all-powerful Ellie was never in danger, poking holes in whether this even counts as a revenge narrative. All of the characters in this book rise or fall based on Ellie's whims. This is supposed to be a story about fairness, but it falls apart when you realize only one very powerful main character gets to decide what's fair.

The story's strongest attempt to portray Ellie as a victim despite everything lies in its glimpses into the Yutear Empire's future, in which Ellie (known now only as the Silver Witch) has faded into legend. Hundreds of years in the future, denizens remember the Foolish Prince (Ellie's ex-fiance) but historians still argue about whether Ellie herself actually existed, even as they continue to enjoy the many fruits of her labor in the form of luxury products, advanced technology, and robust transportation networks. These moments of time-travel are frustrating because they show that the future is no more enlightened than the present—it is equally difficult for people to believe a woman could be competent, even when they're shown all the evidence.

This story is still ongoing so there's room for it to grow and to fill in the blanks that inform why even after all of Ellie's feats, she's less than a footnote in the annals of history. Judging the books solely by what's available now, Livid Lady could have said a lot more about feminism and the ethics of utilizing the tools of the oppressor, but at the end of the day its overwhelming thesis is an elementary “girls rule, boys drool.”