BillyClark

After making such a big deal out of him having to be damaged to 40% to use life shield and to activate his power, the way they showed it this time, he can use life shield to get down to 20% directly from 100%. I realize it’s just a mistake, but it’s obvious that whoever wrote this doesn’t give a shit. Super low effort and insulting to the audience. Did they not review the scripts for the earlier episodes in this season before writing this one?

However, once again, Ruche’s part makes this more enjoyable. The scene where the dreamlord bites its own tail was very entertaining.

And things were inconsistent in even this one episode. Death needle was cast three different times and all three times were different in important ways. The second time, the magic circles appeared immediately, which didn’t happen the first time, and Elymas pointed out how there is a moment before death needle casts when the dream lord is vulnerable.

The final time, Elymas had already started his attack, and the paralysis wore off, I guess because of all of the insufferable standing around wasting time, and from him not upgrading his character beforehand, when it was convenient. But then, it casts death needle, and I say to myself, “Oh, there is a moment here when it’s vulnerable, just like Elymas said a very few minutes ago.” Nope. A needle shoots out instantly.

How can it be different every time? Was this animated by AI?

Reading your comment about the evolution, it made me realize that the most surprising thing is that it can evolve after its HP reached 0 and they got XP for killing it.

That’s weird enough by itself, but it’s also quite different from the previous example we saw, where it evolved just by eating corpses and never died.

I’m strangely enjoying Ruche’s progression. I can’t really put my finger on why. I think if it wasn’t for Ruche, I’d have stopped watching.

I predicted before that this anime would end up like DBZ, and somebody suggested that it would be somewhat different with a small spoiler that I won’t repeat here. But so far, it’s just like my prediction. Elymas gets stronger. Elymas defeats enemy. Enemy somehow isn’t defeated and gets way stronger. Elymas unlocks new superpower. Over and over.

But somehow, the presentation in this episode feels more like Dr. Stone to me. It’s just this one guy who knows all of the secrets, and he comes up with the exact right answer at every turn.

This game that the world is based off of is a very weird game that doesn’t work, IMO. The dream lord is not instanced, but shared between all parties, and it’s got a mechanic that only works when it kills a lot of adventurers? That just seems like a bad game design to me. Those MMO raids are always more about learning the boss’s mechanics, and then executing them. If the game is designed to always wipe some parties, all of that design will go to waste when the mechanic is understood. So, I don’t think it would be designed like that.

Also, NineSwords implied it but didn’t directly say it, but only a noble with a schtappe could have kidnapped Rozemyne once she was in her highbeast.

For this episode… why did grandpa become comically dumb for that scene? A strange bit of slapstick comedy, I suppose.

That’s a bit of wtf from the anime’s perspective, but Bonifatius is supposed to have always been like that. He’s a musclehead who doesn’t completely realize his own strength, especially when he’s emotional. But unlike, say Angelica, he’s not really even normally that much of an idiot. It’s just like he has this big blind spot, and that’s why you heard in this episode that he was warned off of touching Rozemyne, who would be easy for him to accidentally kill, just randomly.

In this episode, it wasn’t animated for obvious reasons, but when Bonifatius punched the attacker in the hallway, it actually bashed his head completely in, and IIRC, that guy’s body struck and killed another attacker. He basically just killed them because he was upset and there were enough of them that killing some wouldn’t make a difference. And again unanimated for obvious reasons, when he unmasked Joisontak, he is supposed to have accidentally ripped off part of his face.

If I’m following correctly, I think the use of the secret passage is the first piece of evidence that specifically indicts Georgine as assisting in the immoral schemes of the pro-Georgine nobles.

That’s not absolutely proven to the Archduke’s family, so they don’t really have that evidence. If they did have the evidence, they’d have executed two nobles instead of one. So, really, the use of that passage is only a supposition that has been animated just for the audience. And from the audience’s perspective, we already have seen some of the immoral schemes of pro-Georgine nobles, like their plotting against Wilfried.

I enjoyed this episode, and overall, I liked this season, with a few somewhat major complaints about the animation mostly. Others will be upset that they rushed the story so much, and especially that they skipped so much important character development.

Like in this episode, they skipped directly to her teleporting to the Royal Academy. There is a ton of important character development that needed to happen, even just after her waking up until her going to the academy. They showed her limp on the bench, but they didn’t show her reaction to essentially becoming a quadriplegic, or her reaction to everybody growing up for two years while she stayed the same. She lost two entire years and went from a girl who basically needed a wheelchair to get around to becoming a quadriplegic. I’m guessing their plan is to recap it in the beginning of the next season.

They didn’t show Rozemyne’s struggles to finish getting ready for school despite missing two years.

However, I completely understand their need to move the story along and not end on a huge cliffhanger.

As for the animation in this episode, I will say that there was one very simple thing that they never got correct. I don’t even understand how they can mess it up, but I think every single filled feystone showed in this episode was the wrong color, except Rozemyne’s highbeast feystone. The feystones coming out of the jureve should be yellow, not black, because they’re full of Rozemyne’s mana, which is yellow. The feystones that Wilfried and Charlotte were using in the religious ceremonies should also have been yellow, but they were green for no apparent reason.

Replying to myself, but watching the animation of Rozemyne getting captured makes me think that the LN’s version has some problems, too.

Because it seems like the LN’s version of her being captured relies on Lessy being physically smaller than shown in the anime, but in order for Angelica to ride on top of Lessy, which is essentially in the same scene, you would think that it would have to be about the same size as shown in the anime.

It is possible that in the process of Rozemyne fighting the net, Lessy could have gotten less mana and shrunk. Maybe that actually did happen in the LN and I just forgot. It’s also possible that Lessy was just already very small, and Angelica was riding on the top of a vehicle that was essentially smaller than her. That’s not inconsistent with the way magic works there, but it would surely look very strange.

So, I guess the animators thought they’d fix the problem by having Lessy a reasonable size and having Rozemyne exit like she had just wrecked her car. But that doesn’t really make sense.

That “net” that captured Rozemyne’s highbeast is supposed to be the same as the net that Ferdinand used on the night of Schutzaria…..

I had thought it was supposed to be a schtappe transformation, but according to a wiki, it’s more similar to the bands of light spell. They shoot out of your schtappe. One is a single band, and the other is a net. But both are linked back to your schtappe, at least while you’re casting them.

So, anyways, they screwed it up in both episodes. Previously, Ferdinand didn’t even have his schtappe out and it wasn’t connected back to him. And in this episode, it wasn’t really a net.

Also, what’s the deal with Rozemyne completely exiting Lessy when she was captured? I think even anime-only people will think that’s super weird. She was just yanked out of the sky with a net, so the guy who made the net should be right there, and it’s not like Lessy can be damaged in a crash, and he’s clearly agile enough to just stand back up if Rozemyne hadn’t just been tossed around the cabin due to her not wearing her seatbelt.

I guess if you had french doors and opened the “wrong” door, it would be similar to a reversed deadbolt.

I would like to take this moment to talk about the absolutely ridiculous plot device called the White Tower.

Why imprison somebody out in the woods instead of like in a special place in some other building? It’s hard for me to think of a lore-friendly in-universe answer that makes any sense. I think it’s out in the woods with no guards simply because that makes it easier for Wilfried to commit this crime.

Only the Aub’s family can enter? How does Veronica get her food? They’re not going to waste mana teleporting things back and forth. If they have an attendant doing it, one of the Aub’s family would need to go there every time to open the door. And hauling food out into the forest several times a day sounds like a hellish job. If an attendant is doing it, they need to be escorted by the Aub’s family, but it would be even weirder for the Aub’s family to do it themselves.

When Georgine visited Veronica, Veronica looked well-groomed. As a noble, that means that she has an attendant grooming her. But again, that runs into the same problem. How do they get in? Who’s letting them in?

This is all a lot of to-do just to have some weird prison in the middle of nowhere. If you can have all of these rules about who can enter on a building way out there, then you can have the same rules on a closer building, where it’s not such a hassle for somebody from the Aub’s family to go open the door when needed.

Realistically, the blame lies less on Wilfried than on Veronica and Sylvester, who raised him poorly. But you’re right. Usually, when the Aub sucks, everybody else pays for it, and that didn’t happen here.

Another person who doesn’t get the punishment he deserves is Oswald, who didn’t really even show up in this episode. He’s Wilfried’s head attendant. Earlier, we heard that Wilfried’s attendants are always chasing after him, but where were they in this episode? Letting him run free around nobles of all factions? Ridiculous. Oswald should have been instantly fired for allowing this to happen, at the very least.

The pace of this season is either 1000 miles an hour or walking pace. In the past, they cram-packed shitloads into a single episode, and now they spent an entire episode on Wilfried’s white tower shenanigans. And they previously spent an entire episode on Georgine’s visit. These are two of the most important events to progress character and plot, but they are not action-packed like you’d expect from an anime.

So, my guess is that the author, Miya Kazuki, or somebody else who deeply cares about this story has made some stipulations about which events need to be given the most time. It’s good that they were able to spend at least a little time here, but I wish they could have spent a little time on all of the other fairly important moments in the rest of this arc. But I also understand that they probably want to rush this arc, because if they can get a next season, I think that’s where the anime would probably have the best chance of catching on.

And since no review this season is complete without me shitting on the animation, I’ll point one thing out. There’s one scene where they shoot a deer with a bow and arrow, which would be fine, but the arrow hits it in the stomach area and it immediately drops dead. No, that is not how that works.

At least the animators were able to make Rozemyne very slightly taller than Charlotte, which is an important detail to Rozemyne, who is always shorter than everybody else.

No big surprises this episode. We finally got to learn the reason that the Heavy Knight is the best class, because you can fight with it like normal until you hit 40% HP, and then you can consume 20% of your HP to qualify for the game’s highest risk, highest reward upgrade without risking actually dying each time. So, he becomes a defensive class that does as much damage and is as fast as the most offensive class. It does seem stupidly overpowered.

It also feels like the balance is weird if the most offensive class only does 115% more damage than the most defensive class. But being 115% faster seems like it would be huge.

Also, I go on enough about Elymas making dumb decisions. I didn’t see any real dumb decisions in this episode. I still stand by my statement that it was dumb to antagonize Malice. She’ll probably kill his father to become head of the house and then come after him as soon as possible. But that decision was last episode.

This episode, all I can say is that his thanking his father for raising him actually felt like a smart decision. I mean, logically, it seems his father would have abided by the agreement to leave him alone, regardless, but it seems like a good idea to try to be on good terms with such a powerful lord… even if he’s not long for this world because Malice will probably kill him pretty soon.

If his father… was he called Aizen? If Aizen was smart, he’d be looking at Malice as an enemy right now, because he’s the only thing in the path of her obsession. But we learned in the last episode (and I guess somewhat in the first episode) that Aizen is not the least bit smart and even his own butler looks down on him for his stupidity.

At any rate, all of my curiosity about the basic ideas behind this anime has now been satisfied. I’m confused that there’s another episode this season. It feels like if this anime keeps going, it will end up following the classic DBZ path. “I’m losing a fight against a better enemy. This lets me unlock my next superpower.” Rinse and repeat.

Some of the writing in this series betrays some very human emotions. Like, logically, Georgine should be angriest at her mother Veronica. Sylvester didn’t really do anything other than being spoiled by Veronica. But it is very natural to be angriest at the person who takes what you believe to be yours. It also doesn’t make much logical sense that Georgine, who is now first wife of a major duchy, would be interested in stealing a backwater foundation, but it’s very natural for a human to be obsessed with the thing they felt was taken from them. It’s so refreshing to have antagonists, who you can at least understand their motivations.

I do have one major complaint about the animation in this episode. The net that Ferdinand used during the hunt is supposed to be a transformation of his schtappe. It’s not some spell that he’s casting out of his hand that causes a net to appear. It’s supposed to be similar to a fishing net, what I’d call a “casting net”. You throw it and it spreads out in a big circle, but you have a rope that you keep in your hand that goes to the center of the net, and when you pull the rope, the net grabs whatever is inside into a pouch so you can draw it back towards yourself.

The reason this is important in this episode is that Ferdinand is supposed to have caused all of those feybeasts to explode through the rope. If you could just make a net appear around anything and then cause the insides to explode, that would be stupidly overpowered. If it’s a weapon that has a somewhat limited range and that actually needs skill to use, and could be defended against, then it’s more reasonable. Ferdinand had to send his mana down the rope that he was still holding in his hand, so it’s also something that is only possible for a person with archnoble levels of mana.

Finally, an episode that doesn’t force you to skip forward most of the time.

Elymas continues to be plagued by his own stupidity, but it seems like the anime finally gives us an explanation for his stupidity. It’s genetic. His entire family is as dumb rocks. Even the family butler looks down on everybody in the family for their stupidity.

Elymas wasn’t absurdly stupid in this episode. He just made the sort of average stupid decision many of us would make in the heat of the moment by agreeing to fight Malice, but the most likely outcomes for him are bad. The only good outcome I can see is if his father sees his power and reinstalls Elymas as the head of the family. But Elymas thinks that is not an option and that he’s going to be done with the Edvaughn family after this.

So, possibility 1: Elymas loses. Malice obviously kills him or at least maims him permanently. Clearly a bad outcome.

Possibility 2: Elymas wins. Is Malice really going to abide by their agreement when she becomes head of the family? No. Her obsession will only grow because he’s defeated her. Elymas gets nothing except more pressure. The same goes if Elymas doesn’t clearly win, but his father is forced to stop the match and say that he’s shown his power. This is a bad outcome.

Possibility 3: Elymas kills Malice. This works well if Elymas returns as head of the family, but he’s claimed he’s done with the family. So, all he’s done is killed the next lord. He’d probably be executed. Bad outcome.

Possibility 4: Elymas ruins Malice. I guess this is the other possibly marginally good outcome. His victory either scars her physically or mentally so that she’s afraid of him. It seems like she’d be sending assassins after him until she gets him. Not as clearly a good or bad outcome, but it’s not an outcome that I’d be going for in his situation.

So, overall, I think Elymas’s decision to fight was a rather stupid one. The probable outcomes are pretty bad, and he’s immediately exposing the skillbook that he just purchased. I’m sure it will all work out for him, but I don’t think he should expect that it will all work out for him. It’s like he made a decision that relies on plot armor to be a good decision.

This is the type of episode I’ve been wanting this entire season. This episode feels like the anime took a moment to just breathe. Some people might complain that even this episode did too much, but I think it’s reasonable, considering the rest of the season.

I wonder if they rushed through so much other stuff just so that they could give Georgine’s visit more time to push the plot forwards.

One thing I liked about this episode is that, at the beginning, Georgine, talking about Rozemyne, insults Sylvester’s bad parenting, especially his laziness, leaving her to be raised by Ferdinand. And then, at the end of the episode, Georgine is proven right, but it was Wilfried. Wilfried was indeed raised extremely poorly, and that’s why he made the mistake in saying his farewells to Georgine, and the underlying reason for that is very related to Sylvester’s attitude about leaving all of his work to other people.

This type of thing is so important to good storytelling. The protagonists are not perfect, and sometimes they’re extremely flawed. The antagonists are fully fleshed out, thinking individuals. Sometimes, when you really think about a well-written story, you realize that literally the only reason the protagonists are seen as the good guys is that the story is written from their perspective, and that if the story was written from the opposite perspective, you’d believe the other side was the good guys.

But actually showing everyone independently connecting those dots would slow the story to a crawl, so I don’t mind the shortcut.

One alternative that doesn’t slow things down much is they’re taken into a private meeting room and the whole conversation happens in private. Then, when they’re coming out of the room, the entire guild quiets down, and are looking at them with greedy eyes, and maybe the MCs project and think to themselves, “They know we made a lot of money.”

Or, they leave the guild after the private meeting, and when they’re in the restaurant afterwards, that asshole adventurer comes up to them and makes an ass of himself in an even worse place, and tells them that everybody in the guild knows they defeated the dungeon and made a lot of money.

Anyways, I’m not really a writer. It’s a lot easier to throw out ideas than it is to write the scenes using the ideas. Like you said, I also can’t really blame the anime for doing it the way they did. I just personally don’t like the trope. I don’t think I’m precisely their target audience.

I dislike the trope where the hero goes into the guild and everybody learns too much about them because their conversation with the receptionist is overheard by everybody.

Like, everybody had to hear that they earned 10,000,000 gold just from the bounty and that they didn’t think it was that much?

I get it that probably the bounty was public knowledge, and probably everybody would learn through gossip that Elymas’s team defeated the dungeon, and that this is just an easy way to add drama, but I don’t think story writing is supposed to be just easy and cliches. Good fantasy story writing is predicated on a believable world that’s been lovingly and carefully crafted, but the guild here is just so hard to believe even in the context of that world.

And speaking of easy and cliched writing, Malice is suddenly obsessed with Elymas? That makes zero sense to me, at least only watching the anime. If she was really that obsessed, why wouldn’t she have killed him rather than letting him leave home at the very beginning of the anime? The moment she let him go, he’s much harder to kill because, for example, first she has to find him.

Good story writing gives the viewer or reader reasons why something might happen. It’s not enough for the first episode to say that Malice is crazy and hates Elymas. That’s different from being obsessed with him after she’s already taken everything from him and exiled him. The viewer or reader needs to understand characters well enough to understand their actions. The fact that she already let him go needs to be explained.

But again, this episode had a part that I really enjoyed, which was the negotiation with the shop owner. And just to compare it to those other two parts, it feels like a consistent and realistic part of the world, and you have gotten a great glimpse of how all of the characters involved would act. It was just fun and lovely. Whoever wrote that scene has the ability to write really well. I don’t understand how there is such a huge difference in quality, scene to scene.

The recap in this episode was like 9 minutes long. That’s too long.

And then, the fight itself was crazy stretched out. It was two attacks with zero counter attacks, but it lasted most of the rest of the episode.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about this anime is the way that Elymas seems to be unable to use his common sense or any knowledge that he gained from living in that world for his entire life, and he purely makes his choices based on his knowledge of the game. It’s hard to fathom that his entire life in that world made no difference to him from the entire time since he got his class to this episode, and that has made him act inconceivably stupid, I guess.

So, the fact that he’s starting to overcome this weird mental block that doesn’t really make much sense in the first place, well, it’s a good sign for this anime. Elymas has actually realized that he’s not just playing a game, and it’s not completely governed by game rules. I have no idea how he didn’t realize it up to this point, but at least he’s there now.

I was thinking the anime is giving enough detail to vaguely understand the world, but that it didn’t feel like good world building.

It’s disappointing to hear that an anime-only experience feels lost. If they don’t do a good enough job, they might not have a next season. It would be like stopping the story right after the introduction.

This episode was too rushed.

I don’t greatly disagree with some of the overall plot decisions they made, such as combining two different Damuel scenes into one. And some of the specifics about how they gathered the egg.

But they changed the way Ferdinand fought the lizard creatures, which is actually a relatively important but minor plot point from Rozemyne’s perspective. I think this was done this way because the episode was cramming too much stuff in, and so they didn’t have time to show the correct scene. But the important thing is that, after this episode, Rozemyne now has slightly different knowledge compared to the LN. I’m guessing they’re planning to just let this go.

And they ignored a lot of the religious stuff, like how they had to go collect the egg on a certain day, or what Liedenshaft’s wrath would be. Rozemyne at this point is supposed to be pondering the difference between the religious view and what might be called a scientific view.

They did get a lot of the emotional stuff between Damuel and Brigitte pretty correct.

I think they did a kind of a shit job with the Effons and the Effon hunt. They’re supposed to be headbanging trees that initially seem to be singing death metal or something, but when you approach them, it turns out it’s just horrible screaming.

Also, the part where Rozemyne attacked the Nanseb showed her swinging her mana knife way too hard. She’s putting her mana into it, so it just goes through like a hot knife through butter, and she knows it. With that blade and her enormous mana in it, she won’t have trouble cutting almost anything. What’s shown in the anime looks far too dangerous for the sorts of things that she’s allowed to do.

Well, Elymas was unbelievably stupid again this time, but at least it was in the most cliched heroic way.

You know, there’s a reason why, in every RPG style anime and game, that they have a rule that nobody has to save a party that made a huge mistake and got in way over its head. Even IRL, people don’t generally sacrifice themselves if they can tell that others got in trouble because of their own stupid mistake.

We’ll probably learn that those two adventurers are important people, somehow, because that’s the most cliched thing that can happen, but realistically, you know, a smart person in that situation would figure that the best solution is to run out and let the already doomed team “delay” the boss.

The thing I don’t get is, if they’re computer animating, why do they still have to have so many shots where they’re just standing completely still and talking, even in situations where it would be so much better to be moving?

“Oh no, the ‘Dreamlord’ (pronounced ‘Master’ in Japanese) is about to very slowly stroll up in only a few minutes. Those two incredibly injured, limping adventurers on the verge of death only outran its minion by a whole lot. The best thing to do is to just sit here and talk about how much it will kill us, rather than running straight away.”

I thought the illustrations from the knight stories would basically be Ferdinand with different hair for plausible deniability, but those illustrations are just straight-up Ferdinand. With Haldenzel looking like it’s about to become a city dedicated to printing pictures of Ferdinand, his control over illustrations of himself might just be out of his hands, regardless.

This season, I’ve complained about the animation so much that I figured I’d give them a sort of a back-handed compliment. The chairs are still too big for Rozemyne to sit in by herself, as they are supposed to be, so I think that anytime she’s in public, she is supposed to have to have an attendant lift her into a chair. But I think you’d only want to animate that if you have an unlimited budget, and it would also have the possibility of changing the pace of the story.

So, the obvious answer is simply don’t ever animate her sitting down or getting up unless you’re prepared to pay that animation penalty. But in this episode, they showed Rozemyne interacting with chairs a few times, and she sort of sits normally, but has to lift herself up with her hands on the seat of the chair. I don’t think Rozemyne would ever do that at this point in the story, but at least she’s not inelegantly crawling up onto the seat like they animated her doing in the episode where she first created her highbeast.

She should have an attendant lift her up, but they way they animated it, it will probably just slip past most people’s attention. So, a more reasonable tradeoff than I’d have expected from these animators.

This next thing I’m mentioning was the same as the LN, but it just boggles my mind that there is any world where a woman could go through all the effort to break off her engagement, and then her former fiance can propose to her again and almost force her to accept it within the normal rules of their society. Like, I could see it if he had blackmail material or something like that, but it looks like everything was out in the open in this case. If he had that much sway, then it seems like he could have stopped her from breaking their previous engagement and saved all the trouble.

This was explained in the LN as him intentionally trying to put her into a bad situation where she’ll inevitably harm Illgner with her reaction, forcing her to accept, but I really don’t buy it. If the guy you broke up with were to approach you, it seems like you should be able to say whatever is noble-speak for “fuck off,” without even needing to listen to him.

I know what you’re thinking, they screwed up Stenluke and old BillyClark is going to come here and shit all over the episode. Well, too bad. Although they departed from the LN, and pretty drastically, I’m just considering this to be the Stenluke version from the anime. For the narrative purposes, I don’t see why it won’t work.

And I know what you’re thinking, they previously said that Rozemyne has more mana than the archduke, so she is going to be a mismatch for Wilfried, who hasn’t even gone to the Royal Academy yet. It’s still years away for him. They made it look like Wilfried was directly giving mana, and he’d probably be putting his life at risk to do that with Rozemyne. Well, you’re right about that complaint, but in the previous episode, they did make him use a feystone, even if they completely messed it up. So, at least I can pretend like he was using the mana from a feystone. That feystone fuck up was from the previous episode. It was so bad that I honestly think they need to redo that entire scene from that episode. But this one, you can just pretend that the feystone was hidden under Wilfried’s hand or whatever.

No, I’m sorry but whatever was wrong with this episode is completely overshadowed by the scenes of Rozemyne reading in bed.

Plus, we got to see Bonifatius confusing the shit out of Rozemyne. We got to see Tuuli getting ready to go to the Gilberta company, and we’re reminded of how important she feels her promise to Myne was. You can really feel Tuuli’s motivation. We got to see Otto finally introduced to Rozemyne as well as the birth of the Plantin company. We got to see Ferdinand pinch Rozemyne’s cheek and Benno scolding Rozemyne.

Probably my biggest complaint about this episode is that they didn’t emphasize how important that one-of-a-kind book that Rozemyne made was to her. I believe that was actually the first book she tried to write on the clay tablets, and it’s only now finally finished. My second biggest complaint is probably that they crammed too much into one episode.

Although I tend to complain about all the details they get wrong, I think the heart of the story is rooted in the very realistic motivations and emotions of all the characters. The details can be problematic because they distract from the story when you mess them up.

That’s fine, though, if she leaves after understanding her worth.

You were just saying that they were going to make 20m on the first day, so even if he has her for one day, and gives her her fair worth, which let’s say is 20%, then he’d have the 16m after one day, and she’d have 4m, as well as an understanding of her value. He’d have set up himself to achieve his goal much faster.

And if she understands her fair value, as well as his value, she’s not going to leave his team, anyway. 20% of his team is going to be worth more than, let’s say 50% of other teams, and let’s not forget, that’s only if she can actually convince the other teams that she’s worth that much.

She said in this episode that she couldn’t live on 20%, and if she goes with a different team and demands a lion’s share, that team is going to have to make those same calculations on whether they’ll get enough to live.

And one more obvious thing, Elymas is going to get the absolute best build. He would have already had it had he been allowed to stay in his family house. He understands everything about the build and can fully explain it, but nobody is willing to listen.

She’d have the same problem. She’s already had the same problem. That team she was with ignored her contribution and assumed they got the lucky drop only because of themselves.

What you’re describing is really the way a small child understands things. “I need food and I have a $20 bill, so if you have a bag of peanuts, then I just have to give you the $20 and I can eat.” They don’t actually understand the deal they’re making. The $20 that the child has is worth far more than the bag of peanuts.

Him giving her 80% is a terrible deal for him. Him giving her 50% is a pretty bad deal for him. He’s worth far more than her. We know this because the premise is that he’s going for the #1 most broken build in the game.

That woman at the shop already agreed to hold onto the skill book for him. He doesn’t need a teammate this urgently, even if she has chosen a broken skill.

An adult, or even an older teenager, unlike a child, should be capable of empathy, and should try to consider things from the other person’s perspective.

He didn’t need to go get her all hot-blooded. She wasn’t going to leave all that money on the ground. Going in with full intensity is only going to scare her. He could just wait for her friends to dump her, or for her to beg her way back in, and then offer her some calm help when she comes back for the money.

And not only is 80% objectively too much, it’s the sort of thing that would frighten a person further. Most other people would think that they’re getting scammed.

An adult might not consider all of those things, but they’d at least know that it would be stupid to try to recruit a person in a way that scares the shit out of her and should make her think you’re trying to scam her or abuse her.

I’m conflicted about this anime, because I like the basic idea of an MC who has deep knowledge about the RPG system a world uses.

I like the setup for this anime that the other characters are thinking things through and trying their best, but it would be impossible to find a broken skill somewhere down a skill tree that was otherwise terrible. Because, like they’ve shown, if you mess up your skills, your life as an adventurer may simply be over.

People playing that as a video game would be able to try every build, but nobody in that real world would risk screwing up their entire life to figure out what’s the best.

An anime setup like this one really makes me want to watch until the end so I can see how broken he becomes and how he shows up all the people who doubted him. And it wouldn’t be the same to simply watch the last episode of the season.

But I have come to detest anime where the MC is a complete dumbass, and Elymas seems to be the stupidest person on that planet. Why would he offer her 80% when he needs to make money and she thinks she’s worthless? Maybe her build is broken, but he’s going for the most broken build and he also has broken knowledge. If she actually knew the Elymas’s isekai situation, she’d be ecstatic for a 20% cut. Not only would she become rich, but Elymas could guide her to choose the best skills going forward. So why would he offer her 80, and even before confirming her build? I think a smart person could have easily convinced her to go for 20, which would probably be in the neighborhood of fair, and if he’d feel guilty about it, anything up to an even share.

It’s also weird that Elymas is so smart when it’s about the RPG aspects of the game, and the rest of the time, he doesn’t seem like he’d be smart enough to put his armor on correctly.

I also think that over-exaggerated reactions in an anime are typically there to appeal to like 10 year olds. It’s fine to have them in there occasionally, but Elymas is having them several times per episode.

I find myself hitting the skip forward button all the time. Stupid overreaction? skip. Pointless flashback? skip. Long CGI pan? skip. At a certain point, I’m not even watching it.

I’m not sure why he overreacts to the price of the skill books. He had just seen that healing potions were more expensive than expected, and that skill books were only available on the black market. And then, they turn out to be only double the price from the game. Then, he shows obvious reactions to the skill book he wants which lets the shop keeper charge him whatever she wants.

She said it was rare and that only an oddball would want it, which is like saying that it will never sell. There’s tons of room for negotiation.

Imagine a world where he wasn’t a complete moron, and he saw the book, and then calmly asked her about it. He could negotiate the price down instead of up.

I got so far through this episode that I almost had hope that it would finish without any large complaints.

The mana replenishment room registration feystones can just be added like that from outside the mana replenishment room? That makes no sense. Any noble could sneak in if it was like that.

And then, almost immediately after that, they had what I consider a major error, perhaps the biggest error of the season. Something that makes no sense at all the way it was presented. What was the deal with that feystone that Sylvester gave Wilfried inside the mana replenishment hall? I think to the average viewer, it’s incomprehensible.

Sylvester gave Wilfried an empty feystone and told him to fill it. Which Wilfried doesn’t do. Then, Wilfried holds the feystone under his hands while doing the replenishment. THIS MAKES NO SENSE. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?????

But what it’s supposed to be is that the feystone was already filled with mana, and that Wilfried was using his mana to push the foreign mana out of the feystone into the magic circle, instead of using his own mana to do the replenishment. So, the feystone also should have been animated shining with a color like it was already full of mana, but instead it was shown to be empty, which makes no sense.

The anime made it look like Wilfried was filling that feystone with his mana as well as doing the replenishment, which would be absolute nonsense.

I tried listening to the Japanese, and unless I am mistaken, it actually said the same thing as the English subtitles. Man, my Japanese listening could use some work. I wish they had Japanese subtitles.

I’m not overly concerned if the anime simply diverges from the LN a bit, but it at least needs to make sense by itself. One of the things I like the best about Bookworm is that its world building is done so well. Almost everything makes sense. I don’t want several main characters to be participating in complete nonsense and acting as if it makes sense. It totally ruins the vibe.