The entire purpose of her trying to make books in the first place
- In her previous life she was an avid reader, not a writer. So what good would being able to produce books even be for her? So she can keep a diary or something? If she really wanted books what she should have done was focus on re-inventing things that could make money so that she could afford to buy books.
- If there's one thing bookworms are all about, it's sharing books and spreading the love of reading. Not only that: The more people who can read and write, and the cheaper books are to produce and procure, the more books she has in the long run.
- A more economic matter: The book that was shown early in the story had a cost in the gold coin range. Even with her selling the hair decorations made during winter, her earnings were only in the silver coin range. Making her own books actually makes sense, since not only would she gain money a lot faster, but all the inventions she would need to get there would also make a lot of money (paper, ink, printing press, etc.).
- Not to mention that, by producing the means to make books at a fraction of the cost that books used to cost, it would be easier for other people to make books, meaning more books would be made and sold for cheap prices. (Or she can just take a few copies of every title she prints for her personal collection.)
The temple, the Devouring, and magic tools
- On the one hand you have victims of the Devouring, who need to use magic tools to survive. On the other hand you've got the temple with magic tools they want used. Seems like someone would notice that these groups could solve one another's problems.
- It's a fine idea if devouring commoners can expect a decent treatment and to be allowed to commute from home like Myne, however as Benno and Freida explained, the more common treatment for devouring commoners is becoming a slave or mistress. Myne is treated well due to both the mana and the financial assistance she brings to the temple, not something most commoners can provide and even then she faces a lot of contempt from her fellow blue robes.
- Devouring victims who survive long enough to be useful are extremely rare. In theory it would be possible to test every baby at childhood, but doing so would reveal that mana is much more common among commoners than the nobility insists, which would threaten their grip on power.
Obligatory Poison Test
- In Part 2 Volume 2, Ferdinand visits the orphanage director chambers and gifts Myne bedding and instruments. She offers him tea and cookies, which Ferdinand enthusiastically eats. In retrospect, this seems weird considering that Eckhart later reveals that Ferdinand is actually justifiably paranoid about poison, but when he visits Myne he doesn't let her test the cookies for poison, nor does he teach her about poison testing or does it when they later have lunch. While the tea poison test can be handwaved by the fact that it's Fran who prepared the tea, the cookies were made in Myne's kitchen. At that point Ferdinand didn't see Urano's memories yet, so he didn't fully trust her yet. The obligatory poison test for nobles is introduced in Volume 3 when Karstedt invites Ferdinand to dinner at his estate, so that seems to be an oversight of the author that she forgot to correct in the light novel adaptation.
- He didn't trust her that much but at the same time trust her enough to not test for poison because she can't hide it and shows everything on her face. She also needed him to protect her.
- At that point in the story, basically everyone who is around Myne with any regularity is loyal to him, and especially the people working in the kitchen. She wouldn't have had any opportunity to poison him - this is basically his "house."
- Fran's side story from the end of Part 4 reveals that Bezewanst tried to poison Ferdinand when he first entered the temple, only to have the poison sent right back to his own kitchen. Since then, blue priests are forbidden from making their attendants enter each other's kitchens and food poisoning has disappeared from the temple.
Sister Margaret
- Sister Margaret was the orphanage director before Myne. As the reader learns at the end of Part 2, she regularly raped her attendants and eventually killed herself, as she was not able to return to noble society. This begs the question of why she was sent to the temple in the first place. She owned a hidden room, which means she must have had a ring and enough mana to operate it.
- It's possible that her family didn't have enough money to spend on the noble education of all of their children and Margaret was either the child with the least mana, so she wasn't worth investing on, or she just had less mana than expected by her station, also it could be that she was the child of a wife who passed away and her stepmother decided to send her away so her own children could be prioritized... Or maybe the orphans were not the first young boys she had molested and her family disowned her by sending her to the temple as punishment, after all it is a sad truth that children are most likely to get sexually abused by family members or close family friends than by strangers.
- What also is left unanswered is when exactly she killed herself. Arno's side chapter alone gives two pieces of information that seem to contradict each other. On the one hand, it claims Ferdinand entered the temple after Margaret's death. On the other hand, it says Margaret killed herself because sleeping with her apprentice attendants made her unable to rejoin noble society, which suggests it happened around the time at which multiple blue priests and shrine maidens were being called home after the purge. However, Ferdinand has been explictly stated to have joined the temple both not that long after graduating from the Royal Academy and some time before the purge-induced mana vacuum, which would seem to contradict him not overlapping with Margaret.
- One possibility is that Margaret's opportunity to return to her family either had nothing to do with the war at all or was caused by one of its early casualties rather than by the purge that happened after it ended. The consequences of sharing her bed with her apprentice attendants would have been the same once the fact had been established. In other words, all that would have been needed to create the stated circumstances of Margaret's death was a missed opportunity to rejoin noble society, that opportunity doesn't have to have been the purge itself.
- The answer is simple: She had a child with a commoner, meaning her mana is just that low(since having a child meant the mana capacity of the two are similar), she is so despair that she killed herself while pregnant. It has nothing to do with the purge nor simply sleeping with grey priests, it is specifically being pregnant from it showing the seriously lack of mana.
- Muddying the waters even more is a story from Fran's perspective at the end of Part 4 that indicates that Margaret was still around during Ferdinand's early days at the temple, but the isolation of the orphanage director's chambers meant that her attendants didn't know much of what was going on among the other blue robes. This version of things at least has the merit of making the purge an option for Margaret's missed opportunity to rejoin noble society.
- Arno is an Unreliable Narrator, especially where Margaret is concerned. His interpretation of why she killed herself, in particular, shouldn't be taken as fact.
- One possibility is that Margaret's opportunity to return to her family either had nothing to do with the war at all or was caused by one of its early casualties rather than by the purge that happened after it ended. The consequences of sharing her bed with her apprentice attendants would have been the same once the fact had been established. In other words, all that would have been needed to create the stated circumstances of Margaret's death was a missed opportunity to rejoin noble society, that opportunity doesn't have to have been the purge itself.
Becoming too old to get married during a mana shortage
- The conflict around Brigitte's marriage came partly from the fact that if she didn't get married by the time she was twenty years old, her chances of finding a husband would allegedly drop to barely more than zero. However, noble society is currently so desperate for mana that blue shrine maidens young enough to get married were being called back home less than a couple years before Myne joined the temple. Was a woman who is a mednoble and a giebe's younger sister really going to have her prospects drop that low from reaching her twentieth birth season alone?
- Noble society is built around tradition, not by doing the most pragmatic thing. If tradition says that a woman should be married by a certain age and she isn't, then in the eyes of noble society there must be something wrong with her.
- Probably she didn't mean "literally unable to marry anyone" but "unable to get a marriage that could be considered remotely respectible." Plenty of people would be desperate to marry her, sure, but the sort of marriage that is appropriate for a blue shrine maiden would be a deep humiliation for the family of a mednoble.
Zasha's coming of age
- During her baptism, Myne's narration states that Zasha is going to "reach adulthood" the next day. However, while asking around for ideas for Rosina's coming of age gift the following winter, Myne assumes "Zasha must be coming of age soon", which suggests it hasn't happened yet. Did the author forget the first statement when she wrote the second one? Was there a translation issue in either instance?
- Translation issue. The WN talks about Zasha duing Rosina's coming of age because Myne asked Lutz what Zasha got as present, not about Zasha coming of age soon.
