Why Villains Are Destined to Die's Ending Landed It an Anime

In July 2026, the Korean webtoon Villains Are Destined to Die finished its main story at chapter 214, closing out nearly five years of serialization that began in 2020. On August 9, Kakao's Japan-facing platform Piccoma announced that the completed series is becoming a TV anime.

No studio has been named, and there is no air date. What makes this greenlight worth explaining isn't the anime itself — it's that the whole story, all 214 chapters of it, was already finished and drawn before anyone agreed to adapt it. That is rarer than it sounds.

A webtoon is a Korean-style digital comic made for scrolling down a phone screen, usually in color, rather than paged left to right like a printed manga. Most webtoons that land anime deals are still adding new chapters when the deal is announced. This one wasn't.

The problem most webtoon anime deals never get to skip

Most anime greenlit from an ongoing manga or webtoon go into production years before the source material ends. A studio has to guess how far the story will have moved by the time a season airs, against a chapter count that keeps climbing after the deal is signed.

When weekly episodes catch up to a series that is still being written, the usual fix is padding, flashback episodes, slower pacing, or arcs invented for the show alone. Writers covering the anime industry have documented this repeatedly across long-running series, where studios either insert filler or compress chapters to keep from overtaking a source that hasn't caught up to its own ending yet.

None of that is a hypothetical risk. It is one of the most common complaints about long-running anime, and it happens specifically because the source material and the show get produced on separate, unsynchronized timelines.

Why studios pay a premium for an ending that is already drawn

None of that risk applies here. Whoever produces the anime inherits a story with a confirmed beginning, middle, and end — including which of the game's love interests protagonist Penelope ends up with, and how she escapes the death that every other route in the story hands her.

That means a studio can plan a fixed number of episodes or seasons against a known target, instead of an open-ended one. It is the difference between adapting a finished novel and adapting a column that is still being written week to week.

It also simplifies everything downstream of production. A distributor negotiating international streaming rights, or a publisher planning a merchandise line, is working from a story whose shape will never change again, since nothing about the ending gets rewritten to fit a season order.

The greenlight came bundled with the ending, not before it

Outlets covering the news framed the anime and the finale as one story, not two separate ones: the series ended and got adapted in the same announcement window. That is a deliberate sequencing choice, not a coincidence of scheduling.

A studio or production committee greenlighting an ongoing hit is betting on momentum that might fade before a show even airs. Greenlighting a story after it has already delivered a complete, positively received ending is closer to buying a track record than placing a bet.

The more common path in this industry is the opposite: an adaptation gets announced while a webtoon is still mid-run, timed to ride whatever attention the series has at that moment. This deal instead waited for the strongest possible proof of concept, a finished story that readers had already judged, chapter 214 included.

From a web novel about a doomed otome villainess

The property started as a web novel by author Gwon Gyeoeul, then became a webtoon illustrated by SUOL, with both versions published by Korean publisher D&C Media starting in 2020. The premise: a university student wakes up inside an otome game — a dating-simulation genre, usually aimed at women, where the story branches depending on which male character's route the player follows.

She finds herself cast as Penelope, the game's villainess, whose fate on nearly every route is death — at the hands of her brothers, the prince, or simpler means. The story follows her five-year attempt to survive a script that was never written to let her live.

The "villainess" genre that made her survival worth watching

Villains Are Destined to Die belongs to a wider wave of Korean web fiction built on the same premise: someone is reincarnated as a story's designated loser and tries to rewrite an ending stacked against them from the start. Well-known titles in the same genre include:

• The Reason Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion
• Who Made Me a Princess
• I Shall Master This Family

What sets this title apart within that genre is less the premise than the ending. It resolved every route the game offered rather than trailing off or getting cancelled mid-run, which is a more common fate for long-running web serials.

Nearly five years and 14.8 million views

By the time it ended, the original web novel had drawn more than 1.7 million views and 145,000 likes on its platform, while the webtoon adaptation reached 14.8 million views and 1.5 million likes.

It also won the Smartoon category at the Piccoma Award 2026, an annual prize the platform hands out based on sales, readership, and likes. It shared that category with other major hits on the service, including Solo Leveling: Ragnarok and The Bastard of Swordborne.

Those numbers are why Ize Press, the Korean-webtoon print imprint of American publisher Yen Press, kept releasing physical volumes on schedule through the finale — its ninth English print volume shipped August 18, with a fourth novel volume due in September.

No studio, no cast, no air date yet

What Piccoma actually confirmed on August 9 is narrower than some headlines suggested. Alongside the news, the platform ran a promotional giveaway of newly drawn illustrations by SUOL, which is marketing for the announcement itself rather than a sign of anime production progress. The announcement was a greenlight, not a production reveal, and several basic details are still unannounced:

• Which studio will animate the series
• Who will voice Penelope and the other leads
• When the anime will air, and in what format

That gap between an anime being confirmed and an anime actually being cast and scheduled is normal at this stage of a project. It also means the real test — whether a finished source story actually produces a well-paced show — is still ahead.

A spin-off is coming, after a break

Gwon Gyeoeul and SUOL have said they plan to return with a spin-off once they have taken a break from the main series, so the franchise's webtoon side is not fully closed even though the main story is. It is not yet clear whether that spin-off will connect to the anime's story or run separately from it.

International readers also don't yet know whether the anime will be simulcast abroad the way many recent Korean webtoon adaptations have been, or licensed to a streaming service on a delay. That detail alone will shape how, and how quickly, the story that just ended in Korea reaches audiences elsewhere.

It is also unclear how much of the 214-chapter run a first season would even attempt to cover, since no episode count or season structure has been disclosed. For now, the finished webtoon is a complete pitch; the anime built from it is still an open question.

Web Novel vs. Webtoon, by the Numbers

Frequently asked

When does the Villains Are Destined to Die anime come out?

No release date has been set; Piccoma's August 9 announcement confirmed the adaptation but named no studio, cast, or air date.

Who is Penelope in Villains Are Destined to Die?

Penelope is the otome game's villainess, whose fate on nearly every route is death, and the story follows her five-year attempt to survive that script.

Is Villains Are Destined to Die getting a spin-off?

Author Gwon Gyeoeul and illustrator SUOL have said they plan a spin-off once they take a break from the main series, though it's unclear if it will connect to the anime.