Naga the Serpent (白蛇のナーガ, Sāpento no Nāga) is a fictional character in the light novel, anime, manga, radio drama and game versions of Hajime Kanzaka's media franchise Slayers, who was introduced in Dragon Magazine in 1990.

[5] The name she is best known by is in reality an alias of Princess Gracia Ul Naga Saillune (Japanese: グレイシア＝ウル＝ナーガ＝セイルーン Gureishia Uru Nāga Seirūn).

Naga is a few years older than Lina and takes great pride in her much more voluptuous appearance, but like her she has numerous character flaws, often played for comedic purposes.

In the anime series Slayers Evolution-R, Naga appears as a cameo character named Nama (ナーマ), voiced by Kawamura in Japanese and by Eva Kaminsky in English.

[6] After the funeral, the traumatized Naga found the outfit she currently wears inside her mother's closet,[7] and shortly after this, she left home to learn the ways of the world and gain more magic powers.

The novels describe Naga as a remarkably beautiful young woman of about 18 or 19[10] years with a distinguished appearance, long hair (either dark-blue, violet or raven black), and intelligent blue eyes.

The large magic sword[10] that she carries around is purely for a show, and can be only used defensively for blocking and parrying, due to Naga's hemophobia after witnessing the killing of her mother; in effect, she has a severe aversion to the sight of blood which can cause her to faint.

Naga's inflated ego, her carefreeness and vanity, recurrent appetite for good food, considerable greed for money and magical treasure, frequent and excessive drinking of alcohol, and often-displayed overconfidence along with her notable lack of common sense (including a notorious[18] tendency to have her careless and ill-considered spells to backfire), all mean she often gets herself, and Lina, into trouble.

She enjoys creating golems (even if they usually do not turn out very well and sometimes go berserk and turn against her), has developed several of her own spells (including Bogardic Elm, Freeze Rain, Gu Ru Dooga, Mega Vu Vraimer, Void Breath and Vu Raywa), and her most common spells to use are water/ice-based (such as Freeze Arrow) in contrast to Lina who uses fire-related ones.

"[11] She also has a strange ability to control jellyfish,[3] and is surprisingly highly skilled at hand-to-hand combat (punching and kicking), as well as very talented artistically and good at cooking.

Naga's uncanny potential to survive any peril[14] practically unscathed was at first very surprising to Lina, who has actually left her for dead on a few occasions, before she got used to it and began to take it for granted.

Hajime Kanzaka was originally going to make Naga appear in The Battle of Saillune (volume 4 of the main novel series) but had a trouble to implement this idea properly.

[23] Naga also appears in the first volume of Kadokawa Shoten Tsubasa-published alternative series of Slayers children's novels written by Nambo Hidehisa, where her outfit was redesigned to be a less skimpy (wearing a miniskirt instead of a thong) by the artist Yuji Himukai.

provides a closure to the entire Slayers saga, with the retired Lina and Naga, now elderly in their eighties (with almost all other characters already dead) and vacationing together.

The battle ends in both of them trying to cast top-level black magic spells (Naga's Dynast Brass and Lina's Dragu Slave) but breaking their own hips in the process.

A typical plot of a Lina and Naga anime story features them as mercenary companions-opponents (that relationship being very fluid) meeting weird strangers who then hire the two against each other for their own hidden purposes.

As described by Jason Thompson, "the two bickering heroines go on dungeon crawls, work as maids and waitresses, search for 'bosom growth potions,' and fight the occasional bad guy.

Naga-themed single CD A Skilled Rival Conceals Her Claws (能あるライバルは爪を隠す, Nou aru raibaru wa tsume wo kakusu) (KIDA-109) was released by King Records in 1995.

[56][57][58] Naga is well known classic representative of manga and anime tendency for having an openly seductive enemy or rival for a virginal female protagonist.

[59] She was described as "walking fanservice" by Citlin Donovan from The Mary Sue[60] and as "a definite favourite for almost all of male part of the audience" by Polish magazine Kawaii.

"[24] In 2006, Chris Beveridge of Mania.com listed the absence of Naga in the Slayers TV series as one of the ten reasons it "will always suck," stating that "besides her wonderful costume that brings about a lot of great eye-candy when it comes to cosplayers, she typified the kind of 'anime laugh' that only a precious few have.

"[62] Crunchyroll's Nate Ming noted Naga for her "incredibly dominant, overbearing presence,"[63] and Krzysztof Wojdyło of Polish magazine Otaku placed her first of his 2012 ranking of top ten buxom characters in all manga and anime, noting that how despite her "rather dark past hidden under her constant smile and somewhat psychotic behavior," she has still remained "probably the most fun and memorable character" on that list.

[64] That same year, Anime News Network's Lynzee Loveridge also included Naga's outfit among the most impractical fighting regalia for her spaulders.