Characters in Torture Princess: Fremd Torturchen.
open/close all folders
Protagonists
Elisabeth Le Fanu
Captured by the Church, she was placed under a geas commanding her to slay the fourteen ranked demons that had entered the world and formed contracts with mortals, but this serves only to delay her inevitable death at the stake—a fate she welcomes. To assist her in her task, she crafts a golem out of clay and her own blood and summons into it a "sinless soul": namely viewpoint character Kaito Sena.
- Adaptational Curves: Downplayed. She's modestly endowed in the light novel but ends up a little more buxom in the manga. Mangaka Hina Yamato mentions having been inconsistent with her bust size in the liner notes.
- Animal Motifs: She compares herself to a wolf. In the manga, she's occasionally drawn with perky dog ears when especially happy (such as the first time she tries Kaito's custard pudding).
- Badass Creed: "I am the proud wolf and the lowly sow." She expounds on it further at one point: "Having lived the cruel and haughty life of a wolf, I shall die like a lowly sow. For that is the choice I made."
- BFS: Her weapon of choice is an executioner's sword
that she conjures out of Hammerspace with her magic. - Blood Countess: Elisabeth was the Delicate and Sickly child of a noble family in a Gothic Horror setting when her Evil Uncle Vlad tricked her into consuming the heart of a demon, which healed her body but left her wracked with pain that was relieved only by torturing others. She eventually killed the entire population of her town in an orgy of violence that transformed her into a being called the Torture Princess: a haughty, black-clad young woman who thrills in violence and is able to conjure torture and execution implements out of Hammerspace, which she quickly turned on her uncle and the demons he worshiped.
- Blood Magic: Demon magic consists of what Charles Stross would term "algemancy" ("pain magic"), and after having consumed demon flesh, Elisabeth gained the ability to generate mana by inflicting pain on others. Her transformation into the Torture Princess came about as a result of generating so much magical power through such means that she metamorphosed into a partly demonic being herself, thus becoming able to generate her own mana without brutalizing other people. She slaughtered her entire hometown to achieve this.
- Boxed Crook: She faced being burned at the stake for her crimes against her own people, but the Church put a stay on her execution and demanded she hunt down and slay the fourteen ranked demons and their contractors. Her execution gets stayed again at the end of volume 3 courtesy of Kaito's Zero-Approval Gambit, and then finally cancelled altogether by La Christoph at the conclusion of volume 6: she's retasked with hunting down demon-worshippers, who begin to run rampant after the protagonists stop the apocalypse.
- Burn the Witch!:
- One of the execution implements she can conjure is a burning stake. She uses this to slay Vlad at the climax of volume 1.
- It's also the fate that awaits her once her task is complete. She's taken to her execution ground and the fires set in volume 3, but is "saved" when Kaito springs his Zero-Approval Gambit.
- Byronic Heroine: Verging on Villain Protagonist. She's a deeply intelligent, charismatic, cynical and indomitable young woman of otherworldly beauty.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Elisabeth's death sentence was suspended so the Church could use her as a Demon Slayer. She will' still be executed once she outlives her usefulness, which would normally be a disincentive were it not for her being a Death Seeker.
- Dark Action Girl: She's a Torture Technician and Demon Slayer who fights with a BFS and summoned torture implements.
- Death Seeker: She proudly states that she sees her own death sentence as just recompense for her crimes: she did horrible things to countless innocents, and the world has every right to exact vengeance. She even tells a priest at her first attempted execution not to pray for her to be saved. In an unguarded moment in volume 3, she reveals she really just wants her hellish existence to end.
- Dressed Like a Dominatrix: Her preferred outfit consists of a very revealing Little Black Dress that nearly completely exposes her chest. She also wears thigh high boots with heels and stockings.
- Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: She's extremely pale, bordering on gray, and has pitch-black hair, giving her an eerie look fitting for her title as the Torture Princess.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: She can regenerate from just about any injury. In her second battle scene in the series, the Knight disembowels her with a sword through the abdomen in a surprise attack. Her response is to laugh maniacally, rip the organ remnants free, and inflict a Curb-Stomp Battle.
- Hammerspace: Exactly where her various summonable torture and execution implements come from is never addressed.
- Magic Skirt: Despite her Little Black Dress being short below and virtually nonexistent above, and the tendency for Dramatic Wind to accompany her spells, she manages to avoid any Wardrobe Malfunctions apart from a one-panel Panty Shot in the manga when she kicks open a door at the top of a staircase with the point-of-view looking up the stairs.
- Named After Somebody Famous: A double example. Her name is a portmanteau of the historical female Serial Killer Elizabeth Báthory and 19th century Irish horror novelist Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, known for being the author of Carmilla.
- Nephewism: Her Evil Uncle Vlad adopted her after her parents died (he's strongly implied to have murdered them). She even calls him "Father" in a flashback.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: Notably has this attitude to herself just as much as anyone else.Elisabeth: (to Vlad before killing him) Despots are killed, tyrants are hung, and slaughterers are slaughtered. Such are the ways of the world. The demise of torturers should be garnished with their own screams as they sink to Hell with no chance for salvation. Only at such a time is a torturer's life truly complete. "Death by burning"—a fitting end for you and me.
- Petal Power: Her spells are typically accompanied by showers of rose petals.
- Platonic Life-Partners: Played with and kind of muddled. Her relationship with Kaito initially starts off very businesslike, growing into platonic as the story moves forward. Kaito is more obviously very much attracted to her, though it's complicated by both his status as her servant, half assed protégé, later half assed enememy, later savior. It even culminates in not just a date during the invasion of the capital, shows itself a pang of brief but intense jealousy when Kaito and Hina consummate their marriage via their blood connection, to Kaito outright declaring his love for Elisabeth at the climax of Volume 5 before freeing her. In short, the two have a very complex relationship that is not purely platonic and goes right past romantic love. It's not exactly familial either.
- Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: In combination with her red eyes, it's said to give her an otherworldly beauty.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Her irises turned red as a result of her metamorphosis into the Torture Princess.
- Sickly Child Grew Up Strong: When she was young, she was frail, frequently bedridden, and prone to coughing up blood (possibly afflicted with tuberculosis). Eating demon flesh provided by Vlad healed her illness, but left her wracked with pain until she started torturing people to death under Vlad's direction.
- Stock Light-Novel Calamity Princess: Elisabeth is a very dark take on this archetype: a haughty aristocratic woman who tortured countless innocents and gained her powers by doing so.
- Stripperiffic: Her Iconic Outfit is a black dominatrix dress that leaves her bust completely nude but for strategically placed straps.
- Summon Magic: She primarily fights by conjuring chains and stylized torture devices and execution implements out of Hammerspace (exactly how this works is never addressed).
- Teleporter's Visualization Clause: Unless Elisabeth has a teleportation circle written in her own blood on the far side, she can only teleport to places she's familiar with. Since Kaito's body was made with her blood, he has her scribe a teleportation circle into his belly so he can summon her into Clueless Ray Faund's torture dungeon, then recreates the circle from memory to summon her to deal with Vlad.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Organ meat, appropriately enough. She's appalled at Kaito's inability to cook it, and subjects him to a torture chair after learning he also used her expensive wine in the failed preparation. Hina fortunately proves quite capable. She also has a sweet tooth, and Kaito manages to get smiles out of her with custard pudding.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Flashbacks reveal that even before eating the demon heart, she was prone to killing cats and shredding stuffed animals.
- Vapor Wear: Her Stripperiffic outfit leaves her chest completely bare, with straps covering the naughty bits.
- Where I Was Born and Razed: Elisabeth tortured the entire population of her hometown to death in the process of becoming the Torture Princess.
Kaito Sena
"Why are you looking at me like you've found your next meal?"
The series' primary viewpoint character. An impoverished and horribly abused Japanese seventeen-year-old, Kaito Sena starts the story being choked to death by his father. As he dies, he has a vision of a black-haired girl strung up in chains and a straitjacket before a crowd demanding her death. Moments later, he awakens in a golem body crafted by that same girl: Elisabeth Le Fanu, the "Torture Princess". Initially summoned to serve as her butler (at which job he proves to be terrible), he starts to impress her with his cleverness and adaptability, ultimately becoming her trusted assistant and confidant.
- Abusive Parents: Kaito's father was a small-time gangster and alcoholic who not only liked to beat his son, but would hire him out to be beaten by others.
- Blood Magic: In volume 3 he figures out he can generate power for spells by torturing demon contractors instead of innocent humans, which nets him and the Kaiser enough power to achieve his goals.
- Deal with the Devil: In order to lift the Power Limiter curse the Grand King puts on Elisabeth in volume 2, he forms a contract with already-vanquished Kaiser, the only known demon stronger than the Grand King.
- Every Man Has His Price: He almost pulls a Face–Heel Turn near the end of volume 1 when Vlad offers him a golem of his own father to torture to his heart's content. Kaito changes his mind after Vlad animates the golem. After facing down three ranked demons, his father turns out not to scare him anymore: he's just a sick, petty man whom Kaito deems Not Worth Killing.
- Golem: Elisabeth crafted his body out of clay and her own blood, summoning his soul into it after he died.
- Good Thing You Can Heal: Being a golem animated by Elisabeth's blood, he can come back from pretty much any injury as long as he doesn't lose too much blood. Escalates to full on Resurrective Immortality after Elisabeth coughs up her own heart for him to swallow as she's being entombed in the Diablo pillar at the end of volume 5.
- Guile Hero: Kaito is perceptive enough to see through demonic illusions by Spotting the Thread, and is very good at thinking of creative uses for magic and his golem body based on their observed properties.
- Lethal Chef: Justified. The kitchen ingredients Kaito has to work with in Elisabeth's castle kitchen aren't the same as Earth ingredients, but the Translator Microbes in his golem body are too effective and translate them for him as their closest equivalents. And as he points out to Elisabeth, organs aren't easy to cook well to begin with. He's actually a passable cook if he has a proper recipe, but the only thing he knows how to make without one is custard pudding (which he was taught to make as a child by one of his father's girlfriends).
- Made of Iron: Much like Elisabeth, Kaito is so used to pain from his previous life that, even discounting the durability of his golem body, he can take a tremendous amount of punishment before even being seriously hindered. With his golem body, he shrugs off limb loss and disembowelment without losing his cool. His father would literally carve information into his skin with a knife when he didn't want him to forget it, which Kaito himself has Elisabeth do when he has trouble remembering her castle's floor plan. Midway through volume 1, he has her carve her teleportation circle into his stomach as part of a Zany Scheme, and as a result he is able to reconstruct it from memory at the climax of the battle with Vlad.
- Magical Incantation: "...La."' Used any time he casts any spell in the later volumes.
- Missing Mom: Kaito's mother was never in the picture: Kaito isn't even sure whether she ran away or if his father killed her, too.
- New Life in Another World Bonus: His golem body is an idealized version of his Earth body: in other words he has the body he would have had at his age if he hadn't spent the better part of his life as his father's favorite punching bag. He also has a powerful Healing Factor that, much like Elisabeth herself, lets him recover from nearly any injury that isn't immediately fatal.
- Official Couple: With Hina. She's programmed to treat him as her lover, but he falls in love with her in return over the first couple of volumes.
- Platonic Life-Partners: Played with and kind of muddled. Kaito and Elisabeth share a very complex relationship that isn't purely platonic and goes right past romantic love. It's not exactly familial either. For Elisabeth, Kaito is both her first real, true companion and First Love. For Kaito, Elisabeth is his hero, object of eternal gratitude, family, and kindred hurt spirit.
- Reincarnate in Another World: And happy to be. Elisabeth summoned his "Sinless Soul, stricken down in a manner most foul" from modern day Japan into her Überwald world to be her assistant on her quest. The isekai element was an explanation Keishi Ayasato's editor came up with for why anybody would willingly help Elisabeth with anything, and Kaito has no desire whatsoever to return to Earth.
- Resurrective Immortality: Elisabeth coughs up her own heart for him to swallow when she's entombed in the Diablo pillar at the end of volume 5, escalating his existing Healing Factor to full-blown immortality.
- Robosexual: He gets into a romantic and sexual relationship with Hina, an automaton programmed to view him as her lover.
- Sealed Good in a Can: He ends the apocalypse in volume 6 by forming contracts with both God and Diablo, sealing them and himself in a crystal at the World's End—along with Hina, who broke in while it was forming so her husband wouldn't be alone in his eternal slumber.
- Shonen Hair: Young man, messy mop of brown hair.
- Their First Time: Loses his virginity with Hina while staying with the beastmen in volume 4.
- Translator Microbes: The spells animating his golem body include one that translates the languages of Elisabeth's world for him. It actually works a little too well, causing him to mistake cooking ingredients for analogous but different ingredients he's familiar with from Japan.
- Zero-Approval Gambit: At the end of volume 3 he interrupts Elisabeth's execution, publicly reveals his contract with the Kaiser, and declares himself the enemy of mankind, knowing that the Church will have to issue another stay on her execution and command her to hunt him down—meaning she stays alive that much longer.
Hina
"You can rest easy. Everything is going to be okay, Master Kaito. No matter what happens, I'll protect you."
A automaton of clockwork in the form of a buxom young woman, Hina, as Kaito names her, was created by Vlad Le Fanu as a plaything and servant for Elisabeth. In volume 1, Kaito finds her chained up at the bottom of Elisabeth's treasure room while searching for a weapon to wield, and accidentally activates her, causing her to go berserk. Elisabeth restrains and resets her, and she imprints on Kaito, now viewing him as her lover.- BFS: She swings a gigantic halberd around like a toothpick.
- Clockwork Creature: She's a Ridiculously Human Robot composed of clockwork and magic.
- Exotic Eye Designs: Her eyes are pupil-less and reflective like the surface of gemstone.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: She has platinum blonde hair, and is easily the nicest and most pure-hearted person in the series.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: At the end of volume 1, she's prepared to shut back down when Kaito is about to change sides, on the grounds that he tells her doing so would make him happy. She comes back with a vengeance when he changes his mind and calls for her.
- Meaningful Name: "Hina" means "light" or "sun" in Japanese.
- Meido: Her normal clothes are a stereotypical French maid outfit.
- Naked First Impression: She is completely naked when Kaito first lays eyes on her.
- Ninja Maid: She's an automaton who is equally talented at cooking and cleaning as at chopping up demons with her halberd.
- Official Couple: Kaito falls in love with her over the first couple volumes, culminating in them becoming a couple.
- One-Woman Army: She can quite literally hold off armies of demonic underlings by herself.
- Perfectly Arranged Marriage: Her POV chapter reveals that even before imprinting on Kaito per her programming, she was aware of his approach in her standby state and hoped he would be the one to awake her.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: She's an automaton, yet her body is fully functional up to and including being capable of producing children, at least according to Elisabeth.
- Robot Girl: She looks and acts like a teenage girl, despite actually being an automaton.
- Robot Maid: She's an automaton built to serve Elisabeth and do household chores.
- Sexbot: She was built as a plaything for Elisabeth.
- Significant Wardrobe Shift: Usually dressed as a stereotypical meido, she spends the climactic battle of volume 2 dressed in a wedding gown◊ following her Relationship Upgrade with Kaito taking full effect.
- Their First Time: Has her first time with Kaito in volume 4 while staying in the beastmen realm.
- We Named the Monkey "Jack": Kaito names her after a dog he knew for a short time on Earth, one of the few bright spots of his first life.
Demons
In General
- Our Demons Are Different: Demons are portions of Diablo, the world's destructive force, and have to be summoned into the world from another plane through a ritual involving demon flesh and then form contracts with humans, who become known as Contractors. They can either merge fully with their contractors, or act as separate beings, and are also able to craft other humans into monstrous forms called underlings.
The Knight
"How unfortunate. Here I was, hoping to torment your servant, the one you worked so hard to acquire, before your very eyes."
The first, and weakest, of the fourteen ranked demons to war with Elisabeth. His contractor is a young knight who battled Elisabeth on the Plain of Skewers.- An Arm and a Leg: Elisabeth kills him by chaining him up between four flesh-beasts that rip all his limbs off. She then burns his body (along with what's left of the town) for good measure.
- Beard of Evil: His demonic form is a wizened old knight with a long, bushy beard.
- Cerebus Call-Back: He gets one in volume 3. His contractor turns out to have been Commander Izabella's younger brother, driven to form a pact with the Knight after he rode out with an army to battle Elisabeth and was mortally wounded.
- Flesh Golem: He launches raids against Elisabeth's castle first with an underling resembling a nuckelavee, then with giant beasts composed of conglomerations of his victims' flesh. Elisabeth weaponizes his own beasts against him to rip him limb from limb.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: He manages to surprise Elizabeth with a lance through the gut (changed to a sword in the manga). It's the first and only hit he manages to land on her.
- Spotting the Thread: He approaches Kaito and Elisabeth wearing the guise of his contractor, and offers to take Kaito under his protection. Kaito sees through it, recognizing the look in his eyes as similar to men he knew in his previous life who would pass up a warm meal to beat up a kid. For her part, Elisabeth takes issue with him claiming to be a survivor of the Plain of Skewers, on the grounds that she's pretty certain she didn't leave any.
- Starter Villain: He's killed off in the same chapter where he first appears and mainly exists to establish the demons' motifs and methods, and how destructive they can be to anybody who isn't practically a demon herself.
