Literature / Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?

From Left to Right: Reina, Pauline, Mavis and Mile

All Kurihara Misato ever wanted was to be normal. For her entire life, no one would even try to be friends with such a superior person. When she graduated top of her class, ready to enter the top university, she thought at last she'd find people who wouldn't be intimidated. But as she left, she saw a little girl fall in front of a truck, dove to save her, and found herself in a "heaven-like place" in front of a "god-like being". Thanking her for saving the child, he offers to reincarnate her in a magic world with any powers she wants, to which she immediately replies "Please just make me average to this new world!".

Thus begins her new life as Adele von Ascham, later known as Mile, a noble girl desperate to live a normal life as a normal girl, and find normal happiness by her own efforts. Unfortunately, this "god-like being" decided to "average" across all living beings in this world and gave her half the physical and magical power of an Elder Dragon, roughly 6,800 times that of a normal human, along with making her a mid-ranking noble and thus higher in social status than the majority of humans.

Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! (私、能力は平均値でって言ったよね!, Watashi, Nōryoku wa Heikinchi de tte Itta yo ne!), is a Light Novel written by FUNA and illustrated by Itsuki Akata. Originally a Web Serial Novel from Shousetsuka ni Narou, it was acquired by Earth Star Entertainment on May 14, 2016. At the time of writing there're 17 volumes published. A Manga adaptation started in August 5, 2016, drawn by Neko Mint and published also by Earth Star Entertainment through its Magazine Comic Earth Star, with 4 volumes as of October 2019. Both Light Novel and Manga were licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment starting in June 12 and June 24, 2018, respectively. There's also a spinoff Manga titled Didn't I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?! Everyday Misadventures!, drawn by Yuuki Moritaka. It was also published in Comic Earth Star, and licensed by Seven Seas Entertainment in English.

An anime adaptation aired in Fall 2019 directed by Masahiko Ohta, his first adaptation since Yoake Mae Yori Ruriiro Na in 2006 that isn't a Slice of Life. Crunchyroll licensed the series worldwide outside of Asia.

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Didn't I say to list the tropes in this light novel?

• 20 Bear Asses: The Crimson Vow's first quests in school and the Hunter's Guild are to bring in ten horned rabbits and as many rock lizards as they can find, respectively. The merchant involved in the second quest tried to mark the rock lizard corpses down for damage, but Pauline one-upped him and found a better offer.
• Academic Athlete: Misato always excelled at everything, sports and academics alike. As Adele/Mile she retains her intelligence, and with her power there's no one who would seriously challenge her athletically.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Inverted. Part of Adele/Mile's power comes from the fact that she actually understands the underlying mechanisms of magic, unlike normal humans who rely more on trial and error. Early on, her attempts at pretending to be average would fail, because even when she thought she was holding back, she kept doing things that seemed outrageous or impossible to others, like reproducing someone's custom spell immediately after seeing it used once.
• A-Cup Angst: Both Adele/Mile and Reina demonstrate this, especially when they discover that the ten-year-old innkeeper's daughter Lenny is bigger than the two of them combined.
• Adaptation Deviation: The anime features a lot of changes to the plot of the Light Novel. Some of the biggest examples are how the Crimson Vow originally join up for the first time, and anime-exclusive plots such as the requisite Beach Episode.
• Adaptation Distillation: The anime skips the initial arcs of the light novel where Mile attends Eckland Academy and her early days as a rookie hunter. Instead it skips straight to the Hunter Prep School and the formation of the hunter team the Crimson Vow, since this will be the status quo for much of the rest of the story. It moves this to a flashback in Episode Five, giving all the characters' backstories at once.
• Adventure Guild: They call it the 'Hunter's Guild' but that's the only difference.
• After the End: The world has achieved advanced civilizations several times, and then, each time, collapsed to below stone-age levels with mere handfuls of survivors. It was the constant repetition of catastrophic collapse that led the "gods" to intervene with a form of pseudo-magic. The frequency of the destruction was so severe in fact, that some suspicions began to arise of some external influence. And that's why in Web Novel Chapter 200, the nanomachines panicked and begged Mile to rapidly intervene when a spell was cast to open a gate to another world, though at her authorization level they are not actually able to give her any further details about the matter, though in Chapter 203, Mile suspects that these concerns may be directly related to the decision to send her here, and that the Loophole Abuse used to give her powers may therefore have been quite deliberate.
• Amazon Brigade: We meet at least three all-female hunter parties in the light novels. The Wonder Trio (registered as D-ranked hunters), the Crimson Vow and the Servants of the Goddess (both C-ranked parties). One of the side stories indicates that the Crimson Vow is inspiring other all-female parties.
• Arranged Marriage: Pauline is nearly forced into one by the businessman who murdered her father and stole his business from her family. Fortunately Mile, Reina, and Mavis come to her rescue, and Lord Austien, Mavis's father, gives Pauline the opportunity for her revenge by defeating the viscount and businessman in combat. Mavis' family later tries to get Mavis in one, but Mile manages to trick her fiance into breaking the engagement.
• Artistic License – Statistics: In the light novel, Adele accuses God of this. She asked to be "average" in her next life. Statistics recognizes four properties as falling under the notion of "average": the mean (mathematical average), the median (the middle of a statistical distribution), the mode (the largest category in the distribution) and the mid-range (the midpoint between the highest and lowest data points). God's Loophole Abuse allowed him to go with the mid-range (which is considered to be mostly useless and is rarely used due to how much information it ignores and how sensitive it is to outliers), granting her abilities that put her way, way past the 50th percentile. Depending on distribution, it can easily fall anywhere between the 75th and 95th percentile of all living things on the planet.
• Bag of Holding: A variation. Mages may learn Storage Magic, to drastically cut down on logistical woes. It's so rare and highly prized, even complete newbies can instantly skip years of necessary experience and work to Rank C if they have just that spell. Many adventuring parties, merchant groups, and militaries are also willing to pay good money for a mage exclusively for this, any other skills and magical competencies are a bonus. Adele/Mile's notably, incredibly overpowered version is detailed in the characters page.
• Badass Adorable: Adele/Mile is a cute preteen who can put up a good fight against an Elder Dragon. Her friends in the Crimson Vow also fit, as all are exceptionally skilled Hunters as well as cute teenage girls.
• Beach Episode: The anime has one, when the Crimson Vow go on vacation and decide to spend it outside the inn. Mile, as usual, tries to invoke as many tropes as possible, such as the swimsuits, the fact that there's never much swimming, and all the usual beach-side activities like sunbathing. Unfortunately for them, the universe has a very medieval, very conservative attitude to how much skin their bathing suits show off, which Mile realizes only too late.
• Beast Man: One of the sentient, humanoid races of the world. Their features vary greatly, from much more wild, feral individuals who could be easily mistaken for non-sentient animals, to Little Bit Beastly folk who are totally human besides prominent features like ears and tails.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Mile wished that, in her new life, she'd be average. She did not, however, specify the standard by which "average" was to be measured. So her wish was interpreted to give her a mid-level noble rank with golden ratio looks and the average magical powers taken from the weakest magical creature (a paramecium) and the strongest magical creature (an Elder Dragon). The result is, in short, her getting the exact opposite of what she actually wanted.
• Berserk Button: Several characters
  • Do not call Reina a child or treat her like one (unless you're an older woman who's saved her life).
  • Pauline gets real mad when money is wasted, and she does not forgive dishonest merchants.
  • Adele/Mile has zero tolerance for bad writing. If she sees a Deus ex Machina, she will rant until she's breathless.
  • In the anime, never try to mock Adele/Mile of her chest size. It doesn't end well.
• Best Served Cold: Pauline's mother accepted being the lover of the man who orchestrated her husband's murder. She did this so that she could afford to raise her young children. And when they were of age, she planned to do her final duty to her late husband by avenging him.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Adele/Mile, and Pauline as well.
  • Mile is very nice and sweet, and more polite than most due to remembering her Japanese Politeness, but if she feels it appropriate she will not hesitate to crush those that anger her.
  • Pauline is soft-spoken and sweet. But she's also the sort who opposes killing enemies because they won't suffer enough. And if she hears even one word disparaging her friends, she will rip you to pieces.
• Blessed with Suck: Misato's new incarnation was gifted with powers thousands of times greater than the typical human. To her, with her desperate desire for a normal life, this could not be worse, especially because said power oftentimes throws her into situations that will inevitably make her even more famous and remarkable than she was in her past life.
• Breath Weapon: While Mavis is unable to cast magic outside her body, she does manage to cast a dragon's fire breath, causing the nanomachines inside her to produce a flame spell. This spell is quickly forbidden by Mile however due to the potential damage to her body.
• The Chosen One: Ironically, it's not the main character. Rather, Misato finds out that the girl she died saving was The Chosen One, a special child gifted with certain knowledge and inspiration that would prevent her world's civilization's inevitable collapse, instead allowing them to grow indefinitely and colonize other star systems.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Adele/Mile in a nutshell. Her friends from Eckland Academy even developed an "Adele Simulator" by which they could predict her actions almost perfectly by lowering intelligence, fully separating from common sense, and increasing carelessness by a factor of five.
• Comedic Underwear Exposure: At one point, Mile is standing on her head, in a skirt. Her teammates quickly hold up said skirt once they get over their shock.
• Crapsaccharine World: Sure the world looks like a typical Isekai fantasy world, but you also have kidnappings, bandits are very common and trade routes being very dangerous, and the power balance of the world is so out of balance that half the power of an Elder Dragon is considered the average. It gets worse when Mile finds out that not only has the world suffered multiple advanced civilizations collapsing no matter what the gods do, even introducing magical nano machines did nothing and it's at the point where the gods have just gave up trying to fix it.
• Combat Pragmatist: The entirety of the Hunter band the Crimson Vow. In their eyes, if someone needs to be killed they'll not hesitate to kill them. But more often, they aim for easy attacks that cause more pain than damage, such as creating clouds of capsaicin aimed at enemies' eyes, mouths, and various other orifices; creating scalding hot water orbs that will seep through plate armour, through clothes, and directly onto the skin; or filling tough, difficult to remove military boots with sharp rocks.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Mavis manages to discover on her own how to cast a dragon's fire breath. However, generating such massive amounts of heat inside a closed system like the human body required complex and dangerous reactions, which resulted in not only heat but a few small particle beams. Upon hearing the nanomachines' shaky reassurances about the damage to her body, Mile desperately convinced Mavis to use the technique only as a last resort to save a life.
• Decomposite Character: A whole team of them. In the novels the protagonists fight the Roaring Mithrils hunter band for the graduation test matches; in the anime they're replaced with an unnamed team of thuggish hunters with similar skills. Comes across as Adaptational Villainy at first until after the fight it's revealed that the Roaring Mithrils are a different group.
• Deconstruction: Of the isekai genre, which pokes fun at a lot of the cliches. The protagonist is a female and an overachiever, as opposed to a male NEET. Her disappointment in her previous life is due to being bored at excelling at everything rather than being a Loser Protagonist. When she got hit by that fateful truck, Misato specifically asked to be average in her next life, but thanks to God pulling a Loop Hole Abuse still managed to make her overpowered. Her supporting cast consists of an Amazon Brigade rather than an Unwanted Harem and they form a Dysfunction Junction as all of them have a Dark and Troubled Past.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Played for Laughs in the anime. Mile convinces her friends to go to the nearest beach on vacation, up and including wearing bikinis. She is unaware that her old world's values do not apply in her new life.
• Deus ex Machina: At one point the Crimson Vow is trying to help a trio of orphaned sisters who need a cook to be able to keep their inn running but have lost the ability to trust outsiders, and just as they run out of ideas and hope, the sisters' twin childhood friends walk through the door, home from a three-year apprenticeship to a skilled chef in the capital.
• Ditzy Genius: Adele/Mile may be smart, but she has absolutely no common sense. An "Adele Simulator" for figuring out her thought process explicitly has "subtract common sense" in its formula.
• Doing In the Wizard: All magic is actually nanomachines, though no one besides God and Mile is aware of this.
• Dysfunction Junction:
  • Adele's father had her mother and grandfather killed so he could usurp the viscount title, then hid Adele away and brought in a mistress and her daughter as his new wife and child, neglecting and bullying her until she was old enough to be shipped off to Eckland Academy. She eventually had to leave the academy and take on the identity of the Hunter Mile to avoid being killed when her identity was revealed.
  • Pauline's father died when she was young and a cruel merchant forced her mother to be his mistress, and planned to send Pauline off to be some influential individual's mistress.
  • Reina's father was killed by bandits and she was raised by a band of Hunters. These Hunters were then double-crossed by the merchant they were hired to protect and killed by another group of bandits, who then intended to sell her as a slave; the trauma is what finally brought out her true power.
  • Mavis is the best off of the lot. The youngest child and only daughter of a family of knights, she grew up not wanting to be a knight's lady like her father and brothers expected, but to be a knight herself. When they wouldn't let her, she ran away from home to become a Hunter, as high-ranking Hunters can end up knighted as a result of their deeds. She and her family still love each other, but they don't understand her, and occasionally try to force her to give up her dreams and become a more traditional lady.
• Easy Logistics: Subverted. As mentioned in Bag of Holding, Storage Magic is highly prized for the logistical concerns it solves, any mage that can reliably produce drinking water from thin air is an extremely valuable asset for travelers (more so if you can produce hot water), and many of the rates of compensation for quests and materials takes into account just how difficult it would be to actually get there and back, whilst keeping it in good condition and not damaging anything along the way.
• Epic Fail: In a somewhat backwards fashion—the main Running Gag is Mile's complete failure to come off as anything close to ordinary. Try as she might to be a "normal C-rank hunter," it always backfires spectacularly; her exploits attract a lot of attention, and her schemes to give other people the credit never work out (though she usually thinks they worked).
• Even the Girls Want Her: Mavis is a skilled swordswoman and absolute Bifauxnen, and she gains at least a few devoted female admirers. In a sidestory in the Light Novel, when Mile's classmates from Eckland Academy try to arrange a suitable first date for her, the Class Rep specifically mentions she cannot date women for the scandal it would cause, to the palpable disappointment of a good portion of the class.
• Exact Words:
  • Misato asked for her abilities to be average. However, she didn't specify average on what scale. She expected to be a 5 on a scale where 10 is peak human. Instead she's a 5 on a scale where 10 is peak dragon, and peak human might barely qualify as a 3. This isn't an "average" by any normal definition, which she herself points out, but God works in mysterious ways, apparently.
  • When Mile's two friend groups have a "comedy battle" to see who can make her laugh the fastest, Aureana tells a quick joke, but Pauline wins by tickling her. The rules did not forbid physical contact.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • While the humans, elves, and dwarves get along just fine with each other, the beastmen see the three of them with suspicion and hostility (though not to the point of outright war or murder), and it's been implied that the feeling is mutual when a human innkeeper with a beastman daughter is always ready and prepared to deal with discrimination against her.
  • Demons are distrusted and feared by all other races, due to their incredibly high magical and physical capabilities. It's explained that once upon a time, the five races were in relative harmony with each other, until the sheer difference in power sparked jealousy, and eventually drove a wedge between the demons and everyone else.
• Fastball Special: During a fight with a Wyvern, Mile decides the best way to overcome its incredible speed, intelligence, and flying skills by throwing her friends at it. In order, Reina misses and ends up covered in Wyvern-pee after it soils itself from shock and fear; Mavis ends up cutting into its tail but doing little damage otherwise; and Pauline passes out mid-flight, but thanks to Mile casting a Beehive Barrier on her, ends up turning her into an incredibly effective blunt-force missile that knocks both of them out of the sky.
• Fiery Redhead: Reina's red hair perfectly matches her personality, one described as so passionate and fierce that she was able to overcome a relatively lower magic level with just the force of her own passion.
• Fingertip Drug Analysis: Reina tries this with a spice she and Mile distill from her "hot" water spell. Since what they had cooked up was pure capsaicin, she quickly regrets it.
• Formula with a Twist: This story has a protagonist who doesn't like her New Life in Another World Bonus because she was a former friendless Child Prodigy who just wanted a normal life with friends. Thus she goes out of her way to pretend she is a normal human in the world, despite the fact that she is magically 6800 times more powerful.
• Functional Magic: Magic in the story follows clear rules: the world is filled with divinely-created nanomachines that listen for "thought-pulses" and carry out the wishes therein. The stronger the pulse, the longer it's maintained, and the clearer the image of what is to be done, the more powerful the nanomachines' reactions will be, resulting in a greater response.
• Fun with Acronyms: "Demons" in this world aren't what you'd normally think of as demons, they're just another humanoid species like elves or dwarves. "Demons" is short for "decidedly magical persons."
• Gone Horribly Right: Happens a few times, often with Mile, but also with other characters.
  • When Marcela first meets with Adele she's concerned about her monopolizing the boys' attention, as she and the other noble girls are somewhat desperate to make connections that could lead to marriage proposals, thus avoiding being dumped on some old man looking for a trophy wife or mistress. Her friendship with Adele eventually leads to such fame and success that Marcela is actually troubled by the abundance of proposals, even finding the princes of the country attempting to court her.
  • When the Crimson Vow are fleeing a camp of beastmen, Mile decides to delay them with a stink bomb. She gathers feces and has the nanomachines adjust them to maximize the compounds that produce stench, then seals it in a jar designed to burst with a touch. Thinking it's an artifact stolen from their camp the pursuers grab the jar, and it works all too well, leaving the entire band either unconscious or trying to vomit out their lungs. Days later when the Vow returns to the camp for a serious raid, said band finally makes it back and despite having desperately washed as hard as they could, the stench was still enough to make everyone retch. Made all the worse for Mile as her sense of smell is far stronger than the average person's.
• Hidden Buxom: Lenny, an innkeeper's daughter, is ten years old and at first looks typical for that age, but when the girls convince her to join them in a new bath they'd built, she's revealed to be quite well-endowed, already moreso than Reina and Mile combined.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Aside from the first episode, every episode's name is a question beginning with "Didn't I say...".
• Indentured Servitude: Mentioned in the light novel repeatedly as a criminal sentence in lieu of capital punishment. It blurs the line because for one, people who capture a criminal whose sentence is slavery receive a stipend from the state but on the other hand there are multiple levels of indenture. Some of them are effectively under house arrest and paid a nominal wage while they work off their sentence. Others are put into outright slavery with no rights or privileges. In the latter case, these are criminals who at bare minimum would have otherwise merited a life sentence.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Misato/Adele/Mile's most fundamental desire. Growing up the kids all avoided her out of feelings of inferiority, while all the adults tried to use her for personal glory. When she got to reincarnate, the only wish she had was to be average in this next world.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: The main motivation behind Misato's desire for normalcy; Misato felt that her abnormally exceptional looks and skills are the reason she was unable to make friends, so she figures that if she could become a normal girl she could make friends on her own.
• I'm Taking Her Home with Me!: Mile and the Crimson Vow can be very possessive of cute kids. When they spend a while at an inn with a five-year-old cat-eared girl running the desk, they become extremely attached and, when they finally leave, her father barely stops them from taking her with them on their travels.
• Knighting: It's not unheard of for high-ranked adventurers to be granted knighthoods or titles as a reward for their years of services - Mavis actually decided to be an adventurer in the hopes of one day becoming a knight like her father and brothers, as she didn't see any other feasible path to that goal.
• Lampshade Hanging: Mile does this constantly, pointing out tropes like Tsundere, forcing a Beach Episode to completely hit every standard cliche, and so on.
• Literal Genie: Rather twisted here. Misato asked the "godlike being" to make her abilities average to the next world. At first the god tried to convince her that this would be a bad idea as average people didn't fare well in this new world. When he was unable to convince her otherwise, the god decided instead to define "average" as "half the highest value possible", giving her physical and magical powers thousands of times greater than other humans.
• Look Both Ways: Misato is killed by the infamous reincarnation truck while trying to save a little girl, which is actually lampshaded in-universe.
• Loophole Abuse: "Make my abilities average" was interpreted as "the average between the magically weakest and magically strongest creatures on the planet," giving her abilities that of half an elder dragon, quite far above average (and even exceptional) humans.
  • "God" also interpreted her wish to be an "average" girl by having Adele born to the family of a Viscount (the middle rank of the peerage) and giving her looks that fulfill the the Golden Ratio making Adele a "universal beauty".
  • Mile begins to suspect that this may have been more than a stupid Literal Genie matter when she begins to learn of concerns possessed by the nanomachines and the godlike beings that the frequency of this world's past destruction may indicate some unknown influence that could occur again.
• Lost in Translation: The anime version is packed full of references to classic manga/anime and Japanese memes, most of which go right over the translators' heads resulting in some rather strange dialogue.
• Medieval Stasis: The "gods" filled the world with nanomachines creating a pseudo-magic in hopes of helping the world to grow indefinitely without collapse, but instead it grew to a medieval level and then stagnated.
• Mood Whiplash: The show switches between wildly comical and dead serious almost without warning.
  • Episode 5 begins with a completely serious tale of Reina's Dark and Troubled Past...and segues into Mile and Pauline's "wow" reaction and Mavis' fountain of tears.
  • Episode 6 has Mile go on "a class trip" and madly buy souvenirs. In the next scene, there's been a bandit attack, and the adorable toddler they met learns that her beloved grandpa isn't coming home.
• Mugging the Monster: The Crimson Vow gets assailed by overconfident bandits and thugs so frequently that it's practically a Running Gag.
• Mundane Utility: Water magic is commonly used to generate drinking water; Mile and friends take this up a notch by using magical water to run a miniature hot spring facility. Normal mages can't generate enough water to fill it, but they can still use fire magic to heat manually-transported bath water.
• New Life in Another World Bonus: Knowing the trope, Misato asked for "average abilities" to be her "isekai bonus." The god-like being gave her what she asked for, in a manner of speaking.
• Oh, Crap!: When Mile ends up facing an Elder Dragon. At first she's utterly terrified because she remembers her thought pulse and strength were "half that of an elder dragon". Then she realizes she's half the strength of the strongest of the Elder Dragons, meaning she's not necessarily so bad a match against a single one, and she starts fighting back, even scaring the dragon to a degree. Then two more elder dragons show up...
• Our Demons Are Different: Demons are just another humanoid race with especially powerful physical and magical capabilities, and notable physical attributes such as horns on their heads. There's nothing more supernatural about them than the other races, and in fact, "demons" is an acronym for "decidedly magical persons."
• Our Nudity Is Different: Mile comes from our world, where a bikini is no big deal when you're at the beach. In the new world, swimwear is customarily pretty all-covering, which causes problems in the Beach Episode when people start freaking out at Mile's designs.
• Our Orcs Are Different: They actually follow the standard pretty well with two exceptions. Orcs are non-sentient, mindless monsters(we hope)and ... they actually taste like pork and are actively hunted for food.
• Pædo Hunt: Starter Villain Arledy kidnaps several little girls in the hopes of making her own harem, though she claims that she only wants to admire their beauty and she would never actually rape them. The heroes' first mission together is rescuing her prisoners.
• Physical God: When Adele accidentally casts an "impossible" technique in front of the princess and her entourage, she pretends to be this in order to avoid being persecuted, captured, or worse. As usual, it backfires on her when this only makes the King and the Princess determined to find her at all costs, especially as Adele makes a mysterious disappearance shortly after.
• Potty Failure: A Wyvern the party fights is so shocked to see a human flying at it like a missile, it pees itself in shock and fear, much to Reina's misfortune.
• Questioning Title?
• Running Over the Plot: Much like other isekais, this is how the story starts. Misato dies after saving a kid from an oncoming truck.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: In episode 3 of the anime, the Crimson Vow have to face off against the B-rank hunters of Lady Alredy, as part of their graduation ceremony. The first three rounds end with the B-ranks being overwhelmed or intimidated to surrender, all without breaking a sweat; the final round between Mile and the swordsman leader ends before it even begins, when the latter runs out of the arena as fast as he possibly can.
• Shout-Out: As Misato had been a serious otaku, there are inevitably plenty.
  • When one adventure ends, she decides that since the "episode" is about to be over she should practice her naked cape dance.
  • She's absolutely shocked to meet Bundine, the butler of the Aura estate.
  • When a girl comes up to her carrying a giant, spiked metal club she can't stop herself from quietly singing "Pi piru piru piru..."
  • When the girls finish exploring the western nations and decide to head to the eastern end, Mile immediately starts referring to their new path as their "Eastern Project".
  • When Mavis loses an arm fighting elder dragons, Mile offers a choice between full regeneration over a month or building a powerful prosthetic and making her the ""6,000 Gold Woman".
  • When asked about the prospect of having to kill people, she responds with "But I refuse/Daga kotowaru.", complete with an Art Shift on her face.
  • In the first episode, Mile compares some thugs to the "End of the Century Chronicles", calls Mavis "Onee-nii-sama" like Mill in Maze Megaburst Space, and trolls a fellow tourist couple that her hand was supposedly destroyed in a double shoutout to Roman Holiday and the classic Dungeons & Dragons module "the Tomb of Horrors". She recognizes and Lampshades tropes wherever she sees them.
  • In episode 2 the references come at a rapid pace: Ace Attorney, Dragon Ball, Berserk, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Knight's & Magic, and Kung Fu Panda.
  • In episode 4, Mile can't admit the names of the freezing spells she teaches are from a show similar to the Ultra Series.
  • In episode 5:
    • Adele asks the nanomachines to choose an avatar. She dismisses their first attempt, a flat-shaded polygon person, by saying it makes her want to throw it into a vat of molten steel. She asks if it can instead take the form of the critter who accompanies the "gotta catch 'em all" guy or the critter with the Kansai accent who accompanies the girl with the capture cards.
    • When Mavis is asked to share her backstory, Mile throws out the phrase "Watashi ki ni narimasu!"
  • Episode 7: Mile asks Mavis if she has friends named André or Maria.
  • Episode 9: The episode parodies Blend-S, Thunderbirds, and Rascal the Raccoon.^note referencing the anime, not the book as she would be more familiar with it, and we don't have a page on the book.
  • Episode 10: Mile references Tomorrow's Joe.^note "help me get these gloves off", Idol group Graduations, and Devilman.
  • Volume 5 contains a short story about fighting miniature dolls called "Doll Wres" (Plawres Sanshiro).
  • In Volume 9, when Mile meets a pair of elves, she calls them Vulcans. Reina tells her to stop mixing up fantasy and reality.
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Pauline seems sweet and soft-spoken, but she'd rather torture people than kill them, and she clearly enjoys seeing her enemies in pain. An example of this is her offensive spell that is basically dumping scalding hot water on her enemies, perfect for seeping through plate armour, into leather and underclothes, and making them wish it killed them. On the positive side, this leads her to strongly favor debilitating attacks that can subdue enemies non-lethally (if painfully), or substantially weaken powerful foes, such as when she fought a powerful demon by quietly casting a blast of wind to carry large amounts of capsaicin directly into his rectum, while desperately stifling her laughter.
• Stock Light-Novel Hero: Adele von Ascham (born Misato Kurihara) is a rare female example which lampshades and parodies this trope. Being an overachieving student who is burdened with high expectations in the real world, upon performing a Heroic Sacrifice to save the life of a little girl from being struck by a truck, Misato meets God and is given the chance to reincarnate. However Misato requests in her next life she be as average as possible. But the Creator's idea of 'average' has her reincarnated as Adele, a girl with power that is exactly half of the highest possible value, which is still still massively overpowered compared to everyone else.
• "Super Sentai" Stance: The Crimson Vow do this in the anime OP, complete with colored smoke explosions.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: A point of contention for the party is that Reina considers killing bandits to be somewhere between "karma" and "pest control," while the rest of the party refuse to kill humans unless absolutely necessary.
• Tragic Keepsake: In the anime, Anne gives her merchant grandfather a protection charm before he's due to leave the city again on an urgent delivery job. Less than a day later, the caravan is almost completely slaughtered, with Reina only managing to find the protection charm on the ground, buried in dirt. Subverted in that he's actually still alive; he happened to be taking a leak in the bushes when the bandits attacked, letting him run away and try to make his way through the woods.
• This Is My Name on Foreign: Misato's name (in kanji) comes from the Japanese term for a nautical mile. Accordingly, she renames herself Mile when pressed for a new identity on short notice.
• Transformation Sequence: Offered by Mile to Reina and Pauline when they complain that Mavis's started to stand out more than them. Both angrily ask who would accept a technique that involved getting naked in front of friends and foes, no matter what sort of Scenery Censor or Lens Flare Censor techniques she builds into it.
• Tsundere: Reina and Marcela. Marcela leans more on the mild side.
• The Usurper: Adele's father, the current Viscount Ascham. The right of succession belonged to his wife and by shoving Adele (the rightful heir) aside in favour of Prissy, he is essentially removing the noble bloodline from House Ascham. This is a serious crime in feudal society and gets him in deep trouble once it is exposed.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: The kidnappers face off against the girls again during a 1 on 1 tournament in episode 3. Reina, Mavis, and Pauline were clearly outmatched during their first encounter. Six months later however, after a bit of Training from Hell from Mile, all three of them deliver a Curb-Stomp Battle instead. By the time the fourth person is supposed to duel against Mile, he instead runs out of the stadium as fast as possible. Their boss fights Mile instead, but also ends up losing really badly, so much so that she promised to turn herself in for her crimes.
• Wham Line: At the end of Episode 4.
  Reina: Have you ever killed anyone before?
• Wife Husbandry: Turned around in one arc. When two boys return from a three-year apprenticeship at fifteen, it's revealed that two sisters they grew up with had deliberately established their future before they left at twelve. Not a big deal for the thirteen-year-old, who would have been ten at the time, but the other sister is eight and would have laid her claim on him at the age of five.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Alluded to when the Crimson Vow are talking backstories, and Reina and Pauline have told about their quests for vengeance. Mavis sadly says, "They say a child of strife, is strife."

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