Only Villains Do That is a fantasy web serial that (somewhat) lovingly mocks the isekai genre. The plot revolves around a Japanese-American musician, Seiji Omura, being whisked away to become the Dark Lord in service of Virya, Goddess of Evil. It is being written by D. D. Webb, who began to publish it on Royal Road in February of 2021. As of 2023, it is still being published.
We meet our assigned-Evil protagonist, Seiji, and his assigned-Good foil, Yoshi, waiting for a train out of Tokyo in Akihabara Station. A random Alpha Bitch drops her phone, and while Yoshi tries to offer it back, Seiji calls her out for berating someone trying to help her and throws the phone at her. This accidentally throws her into an oncoming bullet train.
Then things get weird.
Time Stands Still (which Yoshi and Seiji use to save the girl). Yoshi and Seiji are chosen to be the hero and villain of a Cosmic Chess Game designed by two goddesses Sanora and Virya. The goddesses have complete control over a hollow world called Ephemera, but can only visit and steal player characters from an insignificant blue planet called Earth. Seiji tells his new goddess Virya to go fuck herself, and gets promptly tortured into compliance. As the villain, Seiji gets Ephemera's three classic superpowers and a signature ability, which in his case is the power to combine some types of spells into a single combo spell. He also acquires a lizard familiar he calls Bilbo - now called Biribo (because Virya loves mocking Japanese accents). Then Virya literally drops Seiji into Ephemera. There is screaming involved.
Seiji lands in Donut, an island hellhole rampant with banditry and corruption, next to a dead spell merchant and the two bandits who killed him. After a chase scene, Biribo manages to steal enough spell scrolls from the corpse for Seiji to fight back. Seiji learns Heal, which is a deceptively effective panacea spell that can heal almost any nonlethal problem, barring amputation and death. Seiji combines this with a basic fire cantrip spell to learn his signature spell, Immolate, which tortures a (living) person to death by fire before resurrecting them in perfect health. Seiji also learns how to summon slime monsters, tame monsters, and Enjoin, a spell that links the powers of the caster and their target so long as they are sexually attractive. Naturally, Seiji sets the two bandits, Kasser the ex-architect and Harold the ex-blacksmith, on fire.
Seiji quickly takes control of Kasser and Harold's bandit gang. The other members are the leader Rocco, the mastermind Sakin, the leper Donon, the strongwoman Goose, and Goose's ward Twigs, while earning the loyalty of the adventurer they captured, Aster Delavada, by freeing her before she could be raped by Rocco and then giving her some of his powers, primary of which is Blessing of Strength, the power to unlock and use magic artifacts. Aster uses her new power and her dead party's artifacts to turn Rocco into a steak soufflé. They then turn the ruined fortress they were squatting in into a proper base.
Seiji and Aster travel to Donut's capital city of Fflyr Delmathys, Seiji constantly asking questions about how this strange world works, and discovers that oceans don't exist, bedrock is sacred, nighttime isn't very dark, and the measuring system of Ephemera is fucked up. Seiji's initial plan is to pose as a nobleman and ingratiate himself with a noble currently on underworld business. This plan immediately goes to shit when the nobleman tries to murder a gutter urchin for sport, leading Seiji to immolate the bastard while Seiji and Donon kill the nobleman and his bodyguard. The urchin, Gilder, explains that the nobleman was the son of Fflyr's greatest Crime Lord Olumach, and Seiji had prevented him from making a payoff to Fflyr's greatest Crime Lady Grey, which accidentally sparked a city-wide gang war. Oops.
After visiting the local Adventurer's guild and meeting Fflyr's hometown superhero, Rhydion, Seiji discovers Yoshi and his standard adventuring party, and pisses off their arrogant elven noble archer Flathwyn into starting a bar brawl. Double oops. Seiji ingratiates himself to the corrupt cops and suggests the 'heroes' spend a night in jail.
Seiji decides to start his Dark Crusade by hiring the (actually second-)lowest class in the country - whores. For extra blasphemy, Seiji acts like Jesus (complete with quoted scripture) under his Healer persona, heals the prostitutes of their john-inflicted abusive beatdowns, hires the ones willing to fight for the Dark Lord while sheltering the ones who don't, and arms them with illegal crossbows to mimic a modern guerilla fighting force.
Over time, Seiji manages to slowly capture and recruit Olumach's field bandits while cracking down on Lady Grey's city gangsters with Immolate and slime cannon spells, with the occasional criticism from Aster to keep his murderous impulses in check. They inflict vengeance upon the many outlaws for all the times they abused, short-changed, and outright murdered the prostitutes. Seiji has an epic battle with Lady Grey which ends in a tie.
In response to Seiji's dismantling of her criminal empire, Lady Grey decides to murder five children who happened to be friends with Seiji. Wracked with guilt and anger, Seiji swears to end Lady Grey himself - and Uncle Gently, the orphanage owner who sold those children to Lady Grey.
Uncle Gently is humiliated, exposed of his miserly hoarding of precious cargo from his starving orphans, and repeatedly set on fire before finally being outright crucified.
Lady Grey's final spiteful act is to goad the local catfolk into waging war on Seiji's gang. Sakin and 12 others of Seiji's crew are killed, in addition to twelve casualties of the suckered catfolk. Seiji responds by accidentally setting the forest on fire, then hunting down Lady Grey and stuffing a healing slime down her lungs, killing her slowly with healing-prolonging drowning and a neck snap for good measure. Then he kills the catfolk field commander for trying to throw his most annoying warrior under the bus. An investigation reveals that a drow has been trying to join the gang, but her independent attempt at making peace with the catfolk accidentally pissed them off, which made it easy for Lady Grey to incite war.
In the Stinger, it is revealed that the Orc clans have a few psychics with the Blessing of Wisdom power, and happened to witness Seiji setting a forest on fire while ironically whispering his declaration of death. Completely misinterpreting the situation, the Orcs are convinced the new Dark Crusade will be an ultraviolent total war and prepare to raise hell on everyone. Triple oops.
Over the course of the war, they discover that Jardak is a Void Witch, a being who has made a Deal with the Devil, and by divine decree the Sanorites and Viryanites must temporarily unite when evidence of the Void appears to eradicate any and all traces of the Void. The new anti-Void coalition fights against the Goblin King's Dragon, Hoy, an insufferable bullying psychopath who intentionally gets most of his forces killed while attempting to capture and corrupt the shrines into becoming Void beacons. After a few tries and failures, Seiji and Hoy accidentally reach the Void, and to the reader it is revealed the world of Ephemera is in a dimension tangent to one from The Gods Are Bastards (one of the author's previous works). Seiji collects a new spell from the Void that lets him obliterate Hoy by summoning a giant functioning white cargo truck.
Seiji attempts to debate King Jardak down to undo the loyalty of his followers before he feels pushed into a corner and sacrifices the souls of his followers to the Void, but is foiled again by his hyper-effective drow stalker, who unleashes a revolution and pushes Jardak into a corner. Jardak summons his demon patron Ozyraph (who appears through a fold in space like a Paper Mario cartoon) and orders her to squish Yoshi and Seiji, but she reveals that he went too far and breached his contract, allowing her to devour his soul. Unfortunately, that also meant a few dozen souls of Jardak's followers were also up for grabs.
Seiji's strongest spells are picked up and flicked away by Ozyraph, and the rage-filled punches of the goblin Zui do nothing to faze her. After a few minutes of panicking, Seiji convinces Sneppit to fight a legal battle against Ozyraph. Sneppit realizes that Ozyraph is contractually required not to take anything more than souls from the goblins, including intellectual property, yet simultaneously in possession of intel about the hero and villain which she is also contractually required to take to the Void King, meaning she has effectively pigeonholed herself into eventually breaching her own contract, which saves the followers and earns their loyalty.
For both her accomplishment and her skills, Sneppit is promoted to Chancellor of Seiji's organization. Seiji decides to promote Zui to Goblin Queen, due to her spirit in trying to fight Ozyraph to save the souls of goblins who previously wanted her dead. Seiji also meets the drow, Queen Velaven, the former regent of Donut's local dark elves, who was ousted by a usurper for being too generous. Seiji admonishes her for constantly being a loose cannon that got people killed, putting her on probation.
Seiji hires the cat beastmen to save them from an invasion by the ousted wolf beastmen. Then he hires the wolf beastmen to save them from starvation and a zombie invasion, but only after murdering their shaman and her son for enslaving and torturing a half-beastman kid. All of the above now live with the recovering goblins, who are busy reverse-engineering Seiji's truck for technological uplifting.
Rhydion hires Seiji, Aster, a hunter, and a priestess on a classic quest to find out where the zombies are coming from. They make contact with the squirrel beastmen, who require a divination from a soothsayer to determine their intentions. While Rhydion declares his faith in the goodness of people, Seiji realizes he has faith in the darkness of people - faith that their anger and hatred, when tempered with reason and unity, can overcome anything.
The party reaches the lair of the zombies' master, and discover some strange things. The zombies are actually slimes, magically possessing corpses, and technically alive enough for Seiji to control. The zombies' master is a former confidant of the former Dark Lord Yomiko, a vampire, and a crazy Yandere pining for her former girlfriend. The mansion's servants are sapient giant spiders, who spend their time producing quality silk bolts. And the center of the lair has a Void shrine, implicating the master as either a shrine guardian or a Void Witch. The party is tricked into entering the Void from the shrine, and while Rhydion attempts to brave the Void, Seiji incurs brain damage from poking the Void with his mind (again) and gains an entire grimoire's worth of overpowered electric spells. Ozyraph finds them and decides to throw them back to Ephemera, and the party votes to bug out.
Archduke Aethwyn and his wife greet Seiji with a boorish three-day party, doing everything they can to passively insult him. Aethwyn explains his philosophy of power; though everyone in his corrupt court loathes him, they fear the domino effect of setting a precedent for nobles being treated like any other criminal even more. To 'celebrate' Seiji's attempts at manipulating the nobles into clothing the poor, Aethwyn proposes a classic Olympics tournament with contestants performing in the nude - in dead winter. Either the commoners offer up their champions as sacrifices to a tortured and humiliating death by exposure, or they lose their relief supplies. Seiji almost loses his mind, but manages to insult the Aethwyns by calling them boring. Then they manage to make him lose his mind by ordering Aster to strip naked and sword-dance. Aster almost manages to keep calm as the local pontiff calls Aethwyn out, but also froths when the pontiff requests she repent to Sanora. Aster proclaims the goddesses are jerks and his religion is false, and they leave.
The squirrel beastmen arrive at a decision: they would join Seiji if he could give a viable answer to how he would pull the Dark Crusade off with the bare minimum of forces. Seiji explains his master plan is to turn his criminal empire into The Syndicate, effectively conquering the criminal underworlds of all nations while leaving the civilians generally untouched. They can rule from the shadows without being squashed by the many armies. This is enough to convince the squirrels to join.
The crusade decides that plan A to thwarting the Aethwyns' nightmare schedule of an Olympics game is to convince the other factions to collectively disagree to the policy.
The Dark Crusade's first point of order is to recruit or deal with the vampire. It turns out she's a massive Hikikomori due to a 150 year-long self-imposed isolation, and that most of her evil deeds (inspiring cannibalism in the local banditry, releasing zombie swarms) have been essentially, faux pas borne of ignorance. Her master plan is to bring Yomiko back from the dead. While most of the Dark Crusade considers this impossible, Seiji decides to pay her in research materials for a resurrection side-project.
