The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash (最弱テイマーはゴミ拾いの旅を始めました, Saijaku Tamer wa Gomihiroi no Tabi o Hajimemashita) is a Light Novel written by Honobonoru500 and illustrated by Hama. First a Web Novel serialized in the Shousetsuka ni Narou website on November 2018, it was acquired by TO Books a year later, on November 2019. It has an ongoing Manga adaptation by Fukino in TO Books' own manga website Comic Corona on February 2020. An Anime adaptation was announced on November 10, 2022, produced by Studio Massket, and it began airing on January 12, 2024 with Aina Suzuki and Mutsumi Tamura in the lead roles. Crunchyroll has licensed the series as part of its Winter 2024 Anime Season.
In this fantasy RPG-like world, people are given a defined class as they come of age, with a class and rank system based in stars. The better the rank and stars, the better received the people are.
But for a young girl named Ivy...it was not. Although she had some memories about a past life, she couldn't remember anything of it. The class that was given to her was "Tamer", the weakest one of all classes, and without stars to boot. Scorned and neglected by her own family and village, the only one who cared for her was a fortune-teller who lived nearby, who also gave her the means to survive in the wild, far away from her parents' abuse.
But one day, the fortune-teller suspiciously "died", and Ivy was being hunted for the crime of being "starless". After learning that she would be next, Ivy packed things up and ran away from the village. Soon, she befriends a particular slime on the way, taming it, and both set up in a journey to survive in this world.
Seven Seas Entertainment has licensed both the Light Novel and Manga adaptation on October 25, 2019, and June 14, 2020, respectively.
The Weakest Tamer provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents:
- In the original novel, after learning she's a starless Ivy's parents start treating her more and more badly, until her father starts outright viciously beating the five-year-old girl while her mother does nothing to stop him. The potions the fortune-teller gave her may have been the only thing keeping her from being killed, and fortunately she leaves home shortly after this.
- Zigzagged in the anime as Ivy is kicked out of the village before any physical abuse can begin. However, her father is selected by the village head to kill her and is eager for the chance to do so. Her mother does try to plead with her husband to not be verbally abusive, but seems more focused on her own grief than Ivy.
- Adaptational Angst Downgrade: The abuse suffered by Femicia (pre-series Ivy) is significantly downplayed in the anime. She is kicked out of her home the same day she is discovered to be starless and starts to live on her own at the forest so she never suffers the beatings, but she still suffers emotionally from being cast out and hated.
- Androcles' Lion: After Sora saves the life of a mortally-wounded Adandara (a 2 meter+ pantherine creature) by healing it while Ivy took care of it, the dreaded beast becomes protective and loving toward them. She names it Ciel.
- Animal Theme Naming: Ivy's home village, Ratomi, and a few of the nearby villages, towns, and cities have the term "rat" in them.
- Asshole Victim: The residents of her home village, and the village chief in particular, are all Jerkasses who physically and emotionally abuse Ivy and put a bounty on her head, all solely because she is starless. They also deliberately refuse the fortune teller the medicine needed to save her life because she took pity on her. No one's particularly upset when the village's entire economy collapses from killing off the person most vital to their agriculture and spending all their money on the bounty.
- That goes especially true for the adventurers who stalk Ivy for the reward money and drive her out of the first town that was ever nice to her and where she had been hoping to settle down. They end up getting getting lured in and eaten by a tree monster at the end of the episode.
- Bag of Holding: The normal ones hold more they seem able to as well as making their loads lighter and stopping time for the items within, keeping potions and food from degrading. The inferior/degraded ones don't stop time and seem to vary in their carrying capacity and ability to lighten loads. At one point Ivy finds ten in a dumping ground, but only five of them are any use to her. At the end of the Otorwa Arc, her adventurer friends gift her several brand-new ones.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: It's implied that part of the reason Mira surrenders is because Ivy defended her from the twins when they mocked her for only taming slimes.
- Bewildering Punishment: At age 5, Ivy is taken by her parents to the local temple to appraise her inherent skills, as is the norm. She learns she has [Tamer] and no stars, and her second skill slot is empty. The next morning, without explanation, she wakes up on her own. Since nobody bothered to wake her, she finds that her place at the kitchen table is missing, and when she's seen downcast and confused, her father yells at her that the rest of the family are the ones troubled by her "failure" and she gets the ever-loving shit beat out of her, forcing her to head to the nearby woods to find food to feed herself. Eventually, even coming home to go to bed starts getting her beat around too, so she takes to the forest, full-time. The only one who will treat her kindly is the fortune-teller who saw this coming, but not why. Then the fortune-teller is denied life-saving medicine for the "crime" of associating with her and her father conspires with the village chief to kill her, both of them deluding themselves into believing she'd somehow be happy to be struck down like a rabid animal.
- Beyond the Impossible: Without having any "stars" in her tamer skill, Ivy shouldn't be able to tame monsters at all, yet she chances upon the impossibly weak slime Sora... and after playing with it for a bit, she tames it, to her surprise. Since nothing is really known about that particular species of slime, due to its fragility, she chooses to keep it secret when she's in town.
- Boring, but Practical:
- Ivy's past self encouraged her to do a lot of running and build her stamina, which turns out to be useful when she has to start wandering.
- Ivy becomes very adept at trapping wild mice and does so often. For one thing the meat can sell for a good price because when dried it's a popular ration with healthy demand and most people in the area prefer to hunt bigger game for profit, and for another she's a small kid and a couple of wild mice make a solid meal. Her inner voice also advises her to dress the meat and wrap it up neatly, which keeps it fresh and makes less work for the shopkeeper, earning her a bit of extra money.
- Bowdlerise: While Ivy suffered near-death abuse by her own father, the worst she gets in the anime from her Starless status revelation is being thrown out of the house by her siblings and driven out of her village be everyone else.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Blue potions heal and prevent infection, green potions reduce pain, red potions heal illnesses and all potions go drastically off-color (often murky black or white) when they've gone completely stale.
- Comedic Sociopathy: As part of the plan to capture The Moles in the guard, the commander and his second use a magic item that shoots capture nets that can electrify whoever is trapped in them. As they demonstrate the latter feature, a bunch of guards ask why they are being punished when they are among the innocent, and the second apologizes with a smile - as he keeps electrifying them.
- Conspicuous Consumption:
- Since potions have short shelf lives and are cheap and easy to obtain and make (at least the blue and green ones), people tend to throw them out when they get a bit old and lose some potency rather than after they've gone stale and are completely ineffective. They're also used to train and practice the act of potion-making, with less-than-satisfactory results getting tossed out. As such, a search through a village dumpster can yield dozens of low-quality blue potions. Though they're less effective than fresh or perfectly-made potions, they still work, and Ivy is pleased to get them—needing to drink four or five potions to get the same effect as one hardly matters when she can collect, as mentioned, a few dozen every day. Besides, Sora will drink tons of blue and red potions at a time no matter how far gone they are.
- This seems to be the case with a lot of magical items as well, as there are many places where adventurers have dumped their old stuff. Since slimes can eat either inorganic or organic matter, the world has fortunately not been overrun with garbage.
- Cool Big Bro: Ratlua of the Blazing Swords seems intent on adopting Ivy as his little "brother", and is quite fun and eager to help Ivy.
- Crapsack World: Travel between towns is dangerous as there are monsters and bandits on every road. Superstition is rampant. Criminal groups kidnap people and sell them into slavery. In fact, Ivy has to flee her home town because when she came back from the temple, at age 5, her family acted as if she didn't exist, on a good day because she was found to be a "starless" monster tamer, meaning the fact that she tamed Sora, at all, is a minor miracle, and was treated by her home village as if merely looking in her direction would invite god's wrath.
- Critical Existence Failure: Broken/Crumbled Slimes like Sora are a variant of slime which are perfectly healthy (if physically weak to the point of not being able to turn themselves over under their own power) but perish if you so much as poke them, and generally have a lifespan of a single day if they're lucky. However, a steady diet of blue potions seems to have improved Sora's constitution considerably.
- Cruel Mercy: In order to convince the crowd to not lynch the members of the enslaver organization, the city guard commander tells the former that the latter will be forced to work as slaves for the rest of their lives. After all, killing them would mean their suffering would only last a few moments - their fate is bound to be much worse than that.
- Cursed with Awesome:
- A variant: Since Ivy's too weak to kill the poisonous snakes the chemist pays for, she has to trap them alive, which makes them ideal for his medicine—unlike the damaged and tattered specimens adventurers bring in. As a result, he pays top radal for them.
- Ivy learns in Episode 12 of the anime that Broken Slimes are so weak that they die if a 1-star Tamer tries to tame them because they have too much magic - Ivy being starless is the only reason Sora survived being tamed.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Sora is very good at detecting creatures and people that might wish harm to Ivy.
- Exact Eavesdropping: While sneaking around the village, Ivy luckily hears the mayor talking to her dad about how they've discovered she lives in the woods and their plans to kill her.
- Expy: A woman that Ivy meets at the Blazing Swords' camp, Mira, looks extremely similar to Malty S. Melromarc and at first seems sweet and friendly, but turns out to be a malicious kidnapper aiming to capture Ivy and sell her as a slave. Unlike her, she actually realizes her mistakes and makes a Heel–Face Turn.
- Face of a Thug: When Ivy arrives to Ratome, she's scared of the gate guard and the guard at the adventurers' field because of their looks, never mind the way the former treats an alcohol smuggler at the gate. Both of them turn out to be good people, the former helping her find a decent second-hand tent at a reasonable price, and the latter protecting her from a bunch of thieves and giving her a high-quality potion to apologize for not intervening sooner. Similarly, several guards and adventurers at Otorwa are quite scary at face value, but they become very protective of her after meeting.
- Foreshadowing:
- Just after Ivy's parents start treating her differently, the hungry girl finds fruits which taste extremely sour, though she remembers them as having been sweet before. See Self-Fulfilling Prophecy for the lowdown.
- In the anime's fifth episode, when Ivy mentions she comes from Ratomi people note she was lucky to escape. This foreshadows the collapse of the local economy because of the terrible fruit harvest.
- Functional Magic: People seem to have degree of magical ability outside of their jobs, which they can use for things like starting fires.
- Future Shadowing: In the flashback in Episode 3, Femicia's brother mocks the fortune teller because she only has one star, foreshadowing the problems Femicia will have when she's shown to be starless.
- Genre Savvy: Ivy's previous incarnation was an experienced gamer and sometimes sees things coming before she does, such as needing to build her stamina and warning her to prepare for the worst after her parents' reaction to finding out she's starless.
- God Is Displeased: Ivy mentions a picture book which describes God smiting a person for their sins of being starless. We see no evidence that she's done anything to warrant this in her case, however.
- Gold–Silver–Copper Standard: The place Ivy lives in has copper dals, silver gidals, and gold radals. One gidal equals to 1000 dals, and 1 radal equals to 10 gidals. Coins also come in different forms depending on their value.
- Healing Hands: Minus the "hands". After consuming a large number of blue potions, Sora develops the ability to heal injuries by enveloping them. He's also started eating red potions, which cure illnesses.
- Hearing Voices: Ivy's past self exists as a voice in her head who sometimes speaks to her.
- Hope Spot: Ivy stays several days in the first town she finds after escaping from Ratomi and ponders living there, since everyone she's met so far is quite nice to her. However, when she sees the Wanted Posters of her in several shops and several bounty hunters she knows are trying to capture her, she realizes she won't be safe there and leaves.
- Implausible Deniability: After Ivy tells her adventurer friends about her suspicions of Mira, they find her and her siblings using a magical device to block sound, but when asked, Mira says the merchant was only asking for directions. This only serves to make her look more suspicious.
- Important Haircut: Ivy does this at the beginning of the story, in order to disguise herself as a boy and symbolically shedding her life in Ratomi and embracing the new, including her Meaningful Rename.
- Indestructible Edible: Unlike in most media, this is averted with potions, which decline in quality until they hit the point where they become useless. Blue and green potions seem to go bad more easily than red ones, since they're mentioned as being especially light- and heat-sensitive and wind up in dumpsters more often.
- Inept Mage: As a starless, Ivy's got practically no magic to her name, even for her Taming job. Theoretically, one should be able to increase their magical power and their reserves of magic with practice, but that either doesn't work for Ivy (and she's tried, as you might imagine) or the improvement is so insignificant she hasn't noticed.
- Intergenerational Friendship:
- The fortuneteller of Ratomi started out as the only person who knew that Ivy remembered her previous incarnation, and blossomed into The Mentor/Parental Substitute for the three years Ivy spent living in the woods nearby.
- She also becomes friends with the Blazing Swords and Thunder Kings adventurers.
- Internal Reveal: Ivy reveals that she's a starless Tamer to her friends in Otorwa. Much to her relief, they are amazed at everything she's been doing when she's technically a "weak" person.
- The Jinx: Starless people are considered bad enough omens for some people to think they belong dead, which is one reason Ivy has to watch out.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- After indirectly murdering their fortuneteller for associating with the starless pariah Ivy, and spending tons of money to try and get someone to kill an eight-year-old girl, Ratomi village goes bankrupt. Ain't that a shame?
- The members of the enslaver organization are punished with being turned into slaves.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the anime, when Ivy talks to her previous life's voice, she does it in a way that she seems to speak to the other side of the fourth wall.
- Magikarp Power: As a no-star tamer, the weakest slime is probably the only monster Ivy can tame. Said slimes are rare and normally die quickly, so fragile that even rain and wind can kill them. But after being tamed and fed stale potions by Ivy, Sora steadily grows stronger and develops abilities normal slimes do not have.
- Magitek: Chapter 6 of the anime has Ivy opening an account in a bank, which gets her a metal plate she can use to get money like a credit card.
- Meaningful Rename: The main character chooses to rename herself "Ivy" because it's a plant that, no matter how much it's stepped on, it still grows strong.
- Mentor Archetype: The fortune teller becomes one for Femicia, teaching her how to survive on her own in the forest.
- Mercy Kill: Ivy's father reasons that she should be thankful to be killed because it means she'll be returned to the gods who will remove her curse.
- Minor Living Alone: Ivy had to flee into the forest at age 5, and is travelling on her own in a world with monsters roaming the streets between towns, starting at age 8, because her parents would beat her for so much as looking downcast because her place at the kitchen table disappeared when she came back from the temple with only one skill, and "starless" at that. Then at age 8, she learned the fortune teller, the only person in her town who treated her kindly, was denied life-saving medicine and died. THEN her own father and the village chief began conspiring to murder her, so she fled the area entirely.
- Monty Haul: Zigzagged: On the one hand, magical items and potions seem to be relatively easy to create and maintain, in comparison to other fantasy worlds, with dumpsters being full of such items. On the other, the quality of magical items and potions erodes over time until they eventually become useless, though the time it takes seems to vary depending on the item.
- Mundane Utility:
- Tamers can use their monsters' abilities to do remarkably normal jobs, such as delivering mail or getting slimes to eat trash.
- People use magic for things like creating water for their animals or making a fire for cooking.
- Murder by Inaction: After she falls ill, the fortune-teller of Ratomi is denied the red potion which would have saved her life by the village head because of her association with the starless Ivy.
- Named by the Adaptation:
- The anime revealed that Femicia was Ivy's original name from before she ran away from her home village.
- Ivy's hometown's future teller is called Ruba in the anime.
- Never My Fault: Ivy's home village, especially the chief, all blame Ivy's "starless" feature for all their woes. Fact is, the village chief is both corrupt and incompetent. It was only the local fortune teller that was keeping the village afloat with the signature crop. Denying her medicine for associating with Ivy is what dooms them to abysmal poverty. The nearby towns don't believe the chief's self-serving narrative, tearing up Ivy's wanted poster every time the village chief sends it out.
- Older Than They Look: When Oght learns Ivy is almost 9, he's shocked because he thought she was 7.
- Potion-Brewing Mechanic:
- Although it's unclear what exactly making a potion entails, blue potions in particular are implied to be incredibly easy to create, considering they teach children how to craft them for practice and even these throw-away potions have some efficacy.
- Ivy doesn't know how to make potions herself (yet?), but she does have knowledge of healing herbs which are better than nothing and help stretch out her supply.
- Protagonist-Centered Morality: Justified. Ivy is a sweet, sensitive, 8-year-old girl whose only "crime" is wanting to live when her home village decided to kill her because she was found to be "starless." People who are good to her are usually kind and decent. People who want to harm her are obviously scum.
- Reincarnation: Ivy has memories of a past life, supposedly.
- Rite-of-Passage Name Change: Part of the process of naming a tamed creature is giving the creature a name while announcing your own. The main character (who didn't think she could even tame a creature to begin with) gives the Broken/Crumbled Slime she tames the name "Sora", and chooses a new name: "Ivy", rejecting the name her abusive parents gave her.
- Running Gag:
- Since Ivy looks so young but acts so mature, people keep asking if she's really nine.
- Every time Ivy gets a reward, she counts how much it is worth in field rats.
- Secret-Keeper: When Ivy was a small(er) child, Ratomi's fortune-teller explained to her that she was one of the rare people who had memories from her former incarnation and that she ought to keep it secret. As such, she was the only other person who knew about it.
- The leaders of Ratome's city guard, Oght and Veravera, know Ivy is a starless Tamer, and keep it secret because they can tell Ivy's a good kid and that she doesn't deserve the shit she would be put through if the secret were revealed.
- Ivy reveals Sora to the Blazing Swords and Thunder Kings, which both groups agree to keep secret on account of how rare he is.
- Ratlua finds out that Ivy is a girl.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Ivy's home village drives her out, treating her as the harbinger of calamity, even her own father prepares to come at her with a sword "because she'd be happy to be sent back to god," and for good measure, the village chief denies the village fortune teller some much needed medicine so she dies because the fortune teller is the only one who treated Ivy kindly, and helped her prepare for her long and dangerous journey. SURPRISE! The fortune teller can tell the future and is indispensable to the village economy because she's the only one who can tell when their signature produce is at optimum ripeness. Picked a day or two too early and it will never ripen. Picked a day or two too late and it's spoiled rotten. It isn't long before the village economy tanked thanks to the death of said fortune teller.
- Skewed Priorities:
- When Ivy sees the Wanted Posters with her face, her first reaction is to how she looks like in them.
- Ratomi village's harvest failed due to the fortune teller's death. Rather than using what money they have left to hire a new fortune teller for the next harvest, they spend it issuing bounties on Ivy.
- Spanner in the Works: Ivy ends up becoming this for the slavery conspiracy - her friendship with Sora and her suggestions help the guard and the adventurer's guild find who are The Moles and bring an end to it all.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: Tamers are supposed to be able to speak to their animals and sense their intentions, but Ivy can't do this with Sora (as far as she can tell). Whether or not this is because she's starless or due to Sora's own peculiar qualities is unclear.
- Spider-Sense:
- Although Ivy has very little magic to her name, it's enough to make her able to sense the presence of others and how dangerous they are, which seems to be something anyone can do. However, because of her low reserves, if she casts even one spell, she cannot use this ability until her magical power restores itself.
- As Sora grows more powerful, it seems he becomes really good at detecting the presence of other beings.
- Spotting the Thread: Due to her youth, her Past-Life Memories, and being new to the problem, Ivy is able to point out things no one realized.
- If the slavery conspiracy has been around for more than a decade, then Green Wind can't be the only ones behind it.
- When she learns that a noble recommended Green Wind, she points out how little sense it makes that it happened after just one job. Thunder King and Blazing Sword realize that the noble is involved in the conspiracy, because he also hired them and made many questions about them, in a clear attempt to see if they could be recruited.
- After it turns out there are several guards also involved, she points out that the ones that got involved in investigating the conspiracy's headquarters could have simply helped hide the evidence. Ivy ends up finding a secret room that contains three coffers full of money and lots of documentation that allows the guard to find who is in on it.
- Stealth Expert: Years of experience living in the forest have made Ivy able to hide her presence very well, which saves her life on numerous occasions.
- Stupid Evil: The chief and his loyalists in Ivy's village. Despite knowing how crucial the fortune-teller is for them, they punish her with Murder by Inaction for helping Ivy; then they make it impossible to bounce back from their ruin, by continuing to post costly bounties on Ivy.
- Sunk Cost Fallacy: After Ivy's fled the area and the economy of the village of Ratomi tanks, the village chief repeatedly submits "Wanted" posters of Ivy to the adventurer's guild for ever increasing nonsensical reasons, presumably thinking that if Ivy is brought back to the village and killed, this will somehow return the village to prosperity. The reason this behavior fits the trope is that each and every submission becomes more expensive as the adventurer's guild investigates each claim, and finds the village chief less and less trustworthy with each submission. It eventually reaches the point where the adventurer's guild just decides to ignore his village in its entirety.
- Supreme Chef: Thanks to her experience, Ivy is a very good cook, capable of amazing even experienced adventurers.
- Sweet Polly Oliver: On the advice of the fortune-teller and the voice of her past self, Ivy allows people to think she's a boy. The only person to spot this so far is Ratlua.
- Un-person: After Ivy's discovered to be starless, the villagers of Ratomi treat her this way, except for the fortune-teller.
- "Wanted!" Poster: Ratomi village starts issuing wanted posters for Ivy. Likely because they haven't seen her much for the three years she's been living in the forest, most of them are drawn to make Ivy look cartoonishly villainous or ugly.
- Whole Episode Flashback: Episode 3 is mostly dedicated to Ivy dreaming of her past and what led to her exile and escape.
- Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Ivy's parents start treating her differently as soon as her starlessness is revealed, eventually descending into outright abuse. She once imagined her own mother saying that she would be better off not being born.
- Wise Beyond Their Years: Despite being eight years old (becoming nine a few months into her travels), Ivy proves to be quite competent and able to point out details other people missed. Part of it is thanks to her Past-Life Memories, but most of it is all her.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: After buying a high-quality secondhand tent, Ivy is accused of stealing it by a group of adventurers she's never seen who demand she give it back. After the leader is caught lying by Roygourd the guard, it turns out that this particular group of adventurers were thieves wanted for pulling off this scam numerous times in the past.
- Wrong Context Magic: Most slimes eat organic matter. Some rare slimes can eat inorganic matter. No slimes are supposed to be able to eat both, but Sora eats potions in glass bottles. Slimes aren't supposed to be able to heal people, but Sora can. Justified in that he's a variant of slime that usually dies when the wind hits it too hard, so no one's been able to study them much.
