Why is the demon lord never evil in isekai anymore?

The demon lord has been defeated, retired, reincarnated as a villager, hired as a receptionist, and found running a café, and in every one of those stories he turned out to be the most reasonable person in the book. Somewhere in the last fifteen years the isekai demon lord stopped being evil, so what did he become instead?

What the demon lord is

The maou, the demon king, is the final boss of Japanese fantasy: the being at the far end of the map whom the summoned hero exists to kill. In web novels he's now more often the protagonist, the love interest, the victim of a smear campaign or a tired administrator with a staffing problem. The title survived. The villainy didn't.

Where the demon lord came from

The word is older than the games, but the games fixed the shape. Console role-playing games of the 1980s gave a generation of Japanese children a hero, a princess and a demon lord at the end of the world, and the summoned-hero story that isekai grew out of is that game's plot with a Japanese teenager pasted onto the hero. The demon lord was the far wall of the map: not a character, a destination.

There's an older strand too. A sixteenth-century warlord signed himself as the demon king of the sixth heaven, and Japanese fiction has never quite decided whether that was a threat or a joke. The demon lord as a title someone gives himself, half in menace and half in play, has been in the water for a long time, and web novels drink from it.

Why the demon lord is a job title now

The change that made everything else possible was treating maou as a rank rather than a nature. In a lot of web novels the demon lord is simply the ruler of the demon side, the way a king is the ruler of the human side, and demons are a people with towns, food and taxes. Once the demon lord is an office, anyone can hold it: a reincarnated office worker, a slime that grew too strong, a girl who inherited it, a gamer stuck in his avatar.

And once anyone can hold it, the story stops being about killing him and starts being about what the job involves. The demon lord novels we like best are workplace novels: the lord has generals who don't get along, a treasury that's empty, a border with a hero on the far side of it, and no one to complain to. That's a very different book from a quest, and it's the book the genre wanted to write.

Why the hero is the villain now

Turn the demon lord into a person and the hero becomes a problem. A summoned boy sent to kill the ruler of a neighboring nation, on the say-so of a church or a crown, is either a dupe or a war criminal, and web novels have spent a decade drawing that conclusion. In story after story the villain turns out to be the kingdom that did the summoning, the church that declared the war, or the god who set the two sides against each other for reasons of its own.

This is the genre arguing with itself. The first wave of isekai took the game's premise at face value. The second wave looked at that premise, a child taken from his home and pointed at a stranger with a sword, and found it monstrous, and the demon lord's rehabilitation is the cheapest way to say so. If he was never evil, then everyone who sent the hero was lying, and the hero's whole life was a mistake somebody else made.

The kinds of demon lord you'll meet

A spotter's guide, from most to least menacing:

• The demon lord as the protagonist's avatar: a player stuck in a villain's body, terrifying by accident, decent by choice.
• The retired demon lord: defeated or resigned, running a shop, teaching, or hiding in a village, and dragged back in by someone who needs him.
• The demon lord next door: a neighbor, a classmate or a maid who happens to be the demon king, in a story where nobody else finds this alarming.
• The demon lord as landlord: a dungeon master or a nation-builder whose "evil" is a business plan, with adventurers as customers.
• The demon lord as love interest: the villainess's fiancé, the summoned girl's captor, the misunderstood tyrant of a romance where the hero is the rival.
• The demon lord who is actually evil: rare now, and when he appears the book usually makes a point of it, as if to say it remembers.

Why it works

The rehabilitated demon lord gives the genre a character it badly needed: someone powerful who is also tired. The reincarnated hero is strong and new; the demon lord is strong and old, and old is where the comedy and the sadness both live. He's seen heroes before. He has opinions about the current one. He knows the war is stupid and can't say so, because the office requires him to be the war.

He also lets the book hold two things at once. A demon lord who is a person doesn't make the humans villains, only frightened, and the best of these stories are about two sides who would get along if their institutions let them. That's a grown-up plot inside a genre that's often accused of having none.

When the demon lord story goes wrong

It goes wrong when the rehabilitation is a wink. A demon lord who is "not evil" in the sense of being a soft, harmless mascot has lost everything that made him interesting; the good versions keep him dangerous and make the danger a burden rather than a costume. Making the humans stupid so that the demons can be right is the next failure, and the story becomes a lecture with horns. Then there's the title that means nothing, so that being the demon lord is a fun fact about the protagonist and never once costs him anything.

And it goes wrong when the book forgets the hero. If the demon lord has been rehabilitated, somebody was sent to kill him, and that somebody deserves a scene. The books that remember the boy with the sword, and let him be as much a victim as the man he was pointed at, are the ones that actually finish the argument the genre started.

Reading the next one

The next time a demon lord walks into a story, ask what the title costs him. If it's a burden, a job, a reputation he can't put down, you're reading a book that has thought about power. If it's a joke, you're reading a book that's borrowed a costume, which can still be fun on a slow evening. Either way, the final boss has moved into the neighborhood, and the neighborhood is where the stories are now. You can read it in Crossleaf.