Light Novel / Ascendance of a Bookworm

Myne with a book.

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All Urano Motosu has ever wanted to do is read as many books as she possibly can. After she finally manages to become a librarian, her greatest friend suddenly betrays her: During an earthquake, the stacked up books near her fall down and crush her to death. Her dying wish is that she can be reborn and keep reading more books. Well, she gets half of what she wanted: Rebirth, but as a poor, illiterate and sickly child named Myne in the medieval period.

Not only is Myne incapable of reading, there's almost no writing to be found. Books are a privilege of the wealthy as they have to be written or copied out painstakingly by hand and only the wealthy could afford such a thing. Fine. If there are no books, then she'll have to make them herself. Unfortunately, paper and ink are also much too expensive to get, meaning she'll have to invent them and anything else she needs. But Myne's read a lot of books in her lifetime, and has been doing crafts since she was a child (the first time around), so she knows what to do, and even how to do it sometimes. But her resources are limited and her knowledge isn't perfect, so that means a lot of trial and error. And a little help would be appreciated, which she gets in the form of a neighbor boy named Lutz.

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But her odd knowledge and apparent genius do not go unnoticed. Her rapid inventing and need for materials soon attracts the interests of those above her station. From merchants who seek to profit from her craft, to nobles and religious leaders who wish to exploit her for their own ends.

And there's another problem, too. Remember the part about being sickly? That's important. Not only is Myne weak, tiny and prone to fevers if she exerts herself or is exposed to bad weather, but she's also prone to a mysterious fever that will rampage through her body. A fever that seems tied to how determined she is. It can be kept at bay through sheer willpower, but this "solution" won't work forever. More than the books, if Myne cannot defeat this illness she will truly die once more.

The light novels are available in English from J-Novel Club and Bookwalker. An anime of 14 episodes produced by Ajiado was released in October 2019. A second season aired in Spring 2020, and a third has been announced.

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A Spin-Off manga series, Ascendance of a Bookworm Official Comic Anthology began in 2019.

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This series provides examples of:

Tropes A-M

• Acceptable Feminine Goals and Traits: Women in this world do work for a living, but both commoners and nobles expect that a woman will be a wife in addition to anything else she does. Effa tells Myne that she won't be "a beauty" if she can't cook and sew, and after she joins the temple and is forbidden to marry, Ferdinand nonetheless tells Myne that she'll have plenty of suitors once she turns fifteen, because her vast stores of mana make her an excellent marriage prospect among noble families.
• Accidental Discovery:
  • Myne finds out that trombe seeds are actually mana-altered taue fruits simply from picking a taue fruit for the first time and seeing it absorb her mana. It's implied that this was unknown before because commoners don't have the mana needed to change taue fruits into trombe seeds, while nobles don't participate in the yearly festival that involves handling taue fruits. The discovery is important because her best paper is made with young trombe branches and the only safe way to harvest them entails cutting them down as soon as they start growing.
  • The creation of the setting's first Talking Weapon happens that way. Rozemyne donates her mana to a manablade while thinking of giving it an attribute she associates with Ferdinand. When donating mana to a manablade turns out to be a more delicate operation than she realized, Ferdinand is called over to make sure she didn't mess things up and uses his own mana to examine it. The combination of Rozemyne and Ferdinand's contributions result in a weapon that speaks with Ferdinand's voice.
• Adaptation Distillation: The light novel main series removes some of the side chapters that were part of the web novel series. They were later published in side story collections.
• Adaptation Explanation Extrication:
  • The light novel explictly mentions that the closest thing Myne was able to find to a tomato in her world is a yellow vegetable, which means anything made with enough of it to keep the color will be yellow, as well. In the anime, the mostly yellow color of the pizzas looks like a random detail.
  • The light novel explicitly states the reason the temple orphanage's pre-baptism children don't have any gray shrine maidens to look after them, while Myne was able to make two gray shrine maidens her attendants. The youngest orphans used to be cared for by gray shrine maidens who got pregnant from their Sex Slave duties alongside the children born from those pregnancies. After the purge resulted in less revenue for the temple, all gray shrine maidens without any Sex Slave potential were sold or disposed of in other ways to save money. Those caring for the children were among those who were disposed of, while the gray shrine maidens Myne took on as attendants are among those attractive enough to be kept around. That distinction isn't explicitly stated in the anime, resulting in vague remarks about gray shrine maidens being disposed of when explaining the lack of caretakers for the youngest orphans, only to have a later scene of the same episode have Ferdinand tell Myne to hire a gray shrine maiden to teach her manners.
• Adapted Out: The anime just plain got rid of several minor characters from the novel:
  • Shuu, Urano's Cloudcuckoolander's Minder and Only Friend, who by the nature of the plot only showed up in the prologue and his own Perspective Flip chapter.
  • As a stepping stone between being home all day and getting her job helping Otto at the city gate, Myne is left with a babysitter named Gerda who otherwise watches over a bunch of toddlers. In the novel, Myne's cover story for already knowing how to make baskets is that Gerda taught her how to do it.
  • Freida has parents, at least one aunt, and at least one uncle. Myne meets the parents and brothers during the novel version of her stay at Freida's house, but the anime leaves out the parents and gives the brothers a non-speaking cameo. The aunt and uncle are known of due to her grandfather's marriage offers to Benno's family that are only mentioned in the novels.
• Adult Fear: Myne's parents and any adults closely involved with her life experience this.
  • For her family, they have to face the harsh reality that she might die from her “illness” and they are powerless to help her.
  • If Myne is abducted by nobles from another territory, neither Benno nor the highest ranked noble of their territory could do anything about it.
  • When Effa enters labour, Gunther's prays for it goes well since the family already had previous miscarriages before and after Tuuli and Myne were born.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Mostly involving Myne and her use of mana, because for most of the books her knowledge of magic starts and stops at "If I wear a magic ring and invoke the name of god or goddess and spend some mana, then magic happens".
  • As the most egregious example, she is able to invoke the blessings of the divine Mother and Father of the pantheon (Goddess of Light and God of Darkness, respectively) and all 5 main gods (including the God of Life) during one spell, despite the fact that invoking more than one god is extremely taxing and makes the chance of success drop sharply, thanks to the gods having sharply delineated areas of influence and not liking to "play" together - doubly so when invoking the God of Life in a blessing with any other of the divines, since he's the pantheon's Black Sheep and nobody likes him.
  • In Part 3, Volume 1, during Rozemyne's first magic lesson, she restores a feystone that burst into tiny pieces by gathering the pieces and imagining them to be clay, which she can then put together again. Ferdinand, who moments ago told her that what she's doing is futile, is left dumbfounded and ends the lesson immediately because he's getting a headache after witnessing what Rozemyne just achieved.
  • In Rozemyne's second lesson, she manages to create her highbeast. The form of the beast however is a flying car, which she imagined based on something she remembered in her past life(the Catbus). Nobles assume that a highbeast needs to have wings to fly, but since Rozemyne's imagination is not limited by this thought, she created something that was deemed impossible. Come Part 4, more people at the Royal Academy see her highbeast. Since they have already seen that it's not impossible to create highbeasts without wings, some start to imitate Rozemyne and achieve similar results.
• Adopted into Royalty: At the end of Part 2, Myne signs a contract with Sylvester, turning her into Rozemyne, the daughter of Karstedt and adopted daughter of Sylvester Aub Ehrenfest.
• Aerith and Bob: Runs the whole spectrum from real world names like Otto, Mark and Ferdinand, names that sound like they could be variations on real names like Benno, Tuuli or Myne herself to full fantasy names like Bezewanst (the given name of the High Bishop).
• Anger Born of Worry: Pretty much any time Myne gets ill from not taking care of herself, her family and friends will yell at her. Benno is especially prone to yell at her due to her ignorance of social norms.
• Animal-Vehicle Hybrid: When Rozemyne creates her highbeast, she make one looking like a hybrid between a red panda and a car rather than going for the standard "horse or Horse of a Different Color with wings" design. She was inspired by the Catbus, but went for a red panda because the thing looks so silly by the setting's standards that she was forbidden from making the animal part into something that resembles her noble adoptive family's sigil, which is a feline. Benefits of the form include having a roof over her head in bad weather, having the one-seat variant be small enough to use in larger hallways and being able to modify it to accomodate as many people as she wants, while a regular highbeast's carrying capacity maxes out at three people.
• Apology Gift:
  • After finding Myne unconscious in the temple's repentance chamber after having locked her in it for a day as punishment, Ferdinand gifts her a bedding set for her orphanage director chambers. There is a pragmatic element to it because only the wood part of the bed was left from the previous owner. By that point, Myne has already collapsed while in the temple too many times to be able to use the fact that she sleeps in her own home as a pretext to not have a proper bed in her chambers.
  • After Rozemyne collapses while trying to keep up with Wilfried's impromptu "Ditch the Bodyguards 101" lesson that involves running, Wilfried's bodyguard Lamprecht feels responsible for the situation. When Rozemyne wakes up, Lamprecht gifts her with a book she will be able to finish before the end of the period during which she's expected to rest, which was given to him by Ferdinand when he asked him for advice on what would make a good gift for Rozemyne.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: It is hinted early on (and then seen later) that nobles are above the law in this series. Tuuli is worried at one point that her parents would be killed as she was told that nobles can have peasants executed for simply annoying them.
  • When Myne visits the temple with her parents at the end of Part 1, the High Bishop's personality goes from nice to cruel when he sees he will be dealing with peasants, leaving Myne shocked and wondering if this is how nobles truly are. What's worse, in Part 2 it's noted the High Bishop isn't even a true noble - he had too little mana to be considered part of the nobility, and was forced into the temple. This is one of the reasons he has such resentment against Myne - she gets to act like a noble, because she has so much mana that only the High Priest, an actual noble, is the only one who can match her.
  • In Part 2, Volume 2, Myne encounters Shikza, a knight who pulls a Bodyguard Betrayal on her, when he learned from Bezewanst that she is a commoner who was given blue robes. He was originally an apprentice blue priest because of too low mana levels, who lucked out and was accepted back into noble society. Myne earlier using her mana to bless the Knight's Order only makes him hate her more, as if she is flaunting her status to him.
  • At the end of Part 2, a noble from another duchy plays this trope to the letter. He sneaks into the temple with the help of the High Bishop, and forces, what is effectively, a slave contract with one of the orphans who has mana, and attempts to do the same to Myne.
  • It is not a completely universal trait. The lords ruling Illgner, a small, rural county are presented as approachable and affable, enough that their rapport with who they rule more closely resembles good neighbors rather than masters and slaves.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Damuel receives one as part of the "The Reason You Suck" Speech he gets from Ferdinand after letting the higher-status Shikza bully Myne for being a commoner. "Would you have done the same if you were ordered to protect a member of archduke's family?" The question is relevant because Damuel had both the time and the means to get someone of higher status than Shikza involved, and Ferdinand considers that he didn't do so because deep-down, he viewed Myne as someone of lower status than him despite otherwise treating her nicely enough to have no problem explaining things to her.
• Art Shift:
  • Myne's Imagine Spots are done in a Chibi format, to differentiate from the reality around her.
  • Downplayed, but used in the anime, as characters who use Myne's shampoo formula have hair highlights rather than flat colors to indicate the hair being clean. This shift usually happens after Myne finally befriends them.
• Backhanded Compliment:
  • In Part 2, Volume 1, when Myne confesses that she doesn't trust her new attendants from the temple to deliver her donation, Benno manages one of these:
    Benno: For someone who's typically clueless, you're being surprisingly careful.
  • In Part 2, Volume 3, Rosina is about to come of age, and Myne wishes to gift her a present. When she asks Ferdinand for help, he murmurs:
    Ferdinand: That is a rare sensible question from you.
• Bathroom Search Excuse: Played literally. Myne is left alone in a medical room after fainting and, upon waking, sets out to actually look for the bathroom. She finds it, but it has no water, and so she goes looking for someone to bring more and ends up by genuine accident in a part of the temple meant for people of higher status than her, only managing to go further into it while trying to get back to the medical room. This incident results in her stumbling upon the temple's small library, which is a big find considering the world in which she now lives.
• Beam-O-War: A short-lived one at the end of Part 2. Ferdinand is so much stronger than Count Bindewald that it can hardly be called a duel and more a Curb-Stomp Battle.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Urano used to joke that the way she wanted to go out was crushed under an avalanche of books. Then one day it happened.
  • When a blue priest ransacks the temple's book room, Myne spends some time wanting the man's head on a pike. As Rozemyne, she ends up needing to make the decision to execute a group of people who actually committed an execution-worthy crime and is required to be present when the execution is carried out. She hates every bit of it.
  • Myne shows interest in reading books about magic, but Ferdinand tells her those books are for those who have graduated from the Royal Academy, which only noble children can attend. There is a workaround, but it's mutually exclusive with Myne staying with her family and she eventually gets her hand forced into using it.
  • When Myne tells Benno that another blue priest, Sylvester, wants to visit her workshop, Benno is excited to meet him and wants more information about him from Myne. When he gets to meet Sylvester, he freezes up and gets scared because he has already met Sylvester before on official archduke business and recognizes that Sylvester is incognito.
  • In Part 3, Volume 1, after a very successful meal at the Italian restaurant, Sylvester asks Rozemyne how she wishes to proceed regarding the printing business. Rozemyne wants to create an orphanage and a workshop, similar to the temple in the capital, so she can send gray priests over. Sylvester approves and, in addition to her request, orders the construction of a chapel and a monastery. What Rozemyne doesn't realize is that by asking for a miniature temple, the building has to be created by archducal magic and is maintained by Rozemyne's mana. Thus, the building is the direct property of the archduke and his family, and attacking it is treason punishable by death. After the citizens of Hasse attack the monastery, Rozemyne has to deal with the consequences of their treasonous actions and execute the perpetrators, which clashes with her own values.
  • In Part 3, Volume 1, Lamprecht visits Rozemyne to tell her how jealous Wilfried is of Rozemyne and how he wishes he could have it as good as her. Lamprecht asks her to do something about it. In the next volume, Sylvester orders Ferdinand to cheer up Rozemyne after she got depressed about the situation in Hasse. Rozemyne uses all these circumstances to bait Wilfried into switching places with her for a day. Wilfried and Lamprecht get humiliated, and Sylvester gets an earful from Florencia, Rihyarda and Ferdinand for his Parental Neglect.
  • At the end of Part 3, Volume 2, Rozemyne manages to free up Ferdinand's schedule a little and suggests that he use the extra time to start training a successor as High Priest, hoping it would result in her needing to do less work for him and Ferdinand taking up her High Bishop duties. Ferdinand admits it's a good idea, only to promptly set his eyes on Rozemyne.
  • A craftsman asks Rozemyne to say everything that goes through her mind when it comes to improving the printing press, in case it helps him get new ideas. Rozemyne decides it's a good time to mention the most far-fetched ideas she has.
  • After Rozemyne reminds Ferdinand that if one person cannot replace him, they could always train more than one, Ferdinand decides to train two blue priests as his successors as High Priest. Then Rozemyne notes that the plan for her life is not to stay in the temple forever and that she will have to go to the Royal Academy in a couple of years. Ferdinand suddenly gets thoughtful, with a very scary look in his eyes... Come next meeting, he reveals that he won't be taking Rozemyne's position as a High Bishop: He will be returning to noble society in a couple of years himself, once the blue priests he is training now are good enough to become both High Bishop and High Priest. Rozemyne gets a headache.
  • Upon meeting Charlotte in Part 3, Volume 5, Rozemyne wishes to become a Cool Big Sis for her and earn her approval. Charlotte does start practically worshipping her sister, but that happens after she wanted to fill the shoes Rozemyne left behind after being forced to go into a Deep Sleep. Whether it's managing the playroom during winter socializing, Mana Replenishment for the foundation or her work as High Bishop, Rozemyne's accomplishment are so extraordinary that Charlotte's confidence in her skills quickly crumbles.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • In Part 2, Volume 2, Ferdinand arrives just in time to save Myne before the trombe that has sprouted absorbs too much of Myne's mana.
  • In Part 2, Volume 4, Ferdinand appears in time and stops Bezewanst and Bindewald's attempt to kidnap Myne and turn her into their slave.
  • At the end of Part 3, Rozemyne, Angelica, and Cornelius rescue Charlotte from a kidnapper.
  • At the end of Part 3, Bonifatius appears to rescue Rozemyne. He ends up almost accidentally killing her, but Ferdinand catches her before she hits the ground fatally. He then brings her to the temple to give her an antidote against the poison she was forced to take and puts her in her jureve to start the healing process.
• Bilingual Bonus: A lot of the names and spells are of German origin. People who know German will sometimes learn the meaning of things before they are explained.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The head of the merchant guild and his granddaughter are very friendly to Myne, but they're also looking out for ways to exploit her knowledge. If she was in better health, they'd forcibly adopt her and take her from her family. However, it's later subverted in some side chapters: While Freida and her grandfather are both pretty greedy, they're also very concerned about Myne and Benno respectively but tend to alienate people.
• Blackmail: Played for Laughs in Part 3, Volume 1. Rozemyne doesn't want her guards to learn that taue fruits can absorb mana and turn into trombe seeds. This is why she takes Damuel with her instead of Brigitte, as she has something she can blackmail him with to keep him quiet. Her material? Telling Sylvester or Ferdinand that she blessed Damuel at the end of Part 2, which increased his mana growth. Damuel would forever get teased by Sylvester if he learned that a laynoble got such a magnificent blessing and he didn't. It doesn't end up being used because Damuel just stays behind and closes his eyes, so he can declare ignorance if he was ever interrogated.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: In Part 2, Volume 2, the Knight's Order calls High Priest Ferdinand and Myne for help to defeat a grown trombe and restore the land. Karstedt assigns two new knights, Shikza and Damuel, to protect Myne. However, Shikza soon attacks Myne and Damuel cannot try to protect her because Shikza outranks him. Myne's wound creates another trombe, but she is saved by Ferdinand. Ferdinand admonishes Shikza and Damuel for dishonoring themselves, and the archduke sentences Shikza to death, while Damuel is degraded back to an apprentice and is ordered to guard Myne henceforth.
• Book-Ends: The last episode of Season 2 of the anime has Ferdinand preparing to read Myne's mind with a magic tool, which was also the first scene of the first episode of the series.
• Breach of Promise of Marriage: Damuel gets a double blow after failing to protect Myne. One of the indirect consequences includes his fiancée breaking their engagement after he had spent all his savings on her. When he hopes to get some of that money back because she was the one to end it, the response of his ex-future in-laws is basically "you're the one who messed up, you're not getting a single small copper back".
• Burying a Substitute: Myne's funeral replaces the body with posessions of the desceased because she's not actually dead. The fact that the buried possessions are her commoner clothes is fitting to the real situation, however.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Tends to happen when the people of this world are confronted with Myne's futuristic concepts. Her shampoo gets branded as "rinsham" (a portmanteau of "rinse" and "shampoo"), and everyone refers to libraries as "book rooms." Even the "potatoffel," a plant that seems identical to a potato, sounds like a mix between "potato" and its German equivalent "Kartoffel".
• Call-Back:
  • At the end of Part 2, after the archduke has sentenced High Bishop Bezewanst to die, all of his attendants are to be executed with him. When Delia regretfully bids Myne goodbye, Myne remembers that in Part 2, Volume 1 she promised to help and save Delia the next time she is in trouble. Myne then asks Sylvester to reconsider Delia's punishment and ends up saving Delia's life.
  • In Part 3, Volume 4, Rozemyne and Ferdinand need to figure out what to do with the Doorstop Baby orphan, Dirk, who has his submission contract with Count Bindewald canceled. Since Rozemyne wants to keep Dirk at the orphanage for a longer time, and making him sign with Rozemyne would force him out, Ferdinand suggests to do the same thing that Sylvester did with Myne and give a pre-signed contract to Dirk's guardians, which they should only activate if Dirk is in danger.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • In Part 1, Volume 3 Myne volunteers to enter the temple as a shrine maiden and even offers one large gold as compensation to get access to the temple's book room. Anyone who hears this, commoner and noble alike, thinks this is ridiculous.
  • At the end of Part 1, Otto tells Gunther how amazing Myne is, and how her products are so unbelievable that Otto eventually will have to quit being a soldier to help the Gilberta Company. While Gunther appreciates the praise, he values labor and materialistic things more, so from his point of view, Effa and Tuuli deserve more praise for the hairpins and rinse shampoo respectively. He therefore doesn't think Myne is that incredible, until Otto tells him that Myne rakes in and manages huge amounts of money with her ideas, just like Tuuli told him before, but which he dismissed because it sounded too ridiculous.
  • No one believes Rozemyne's achievements or how hard she is working in general. The products she invented, how she saved and educated the orphanage, how much work she has every day, it all seems too ridiculous for a child that was just baptized. Even Sylvester initially believes she doesn't do much work and it's actually Ferdinand who takes care of most things and then lets Rozemyne take credit for it. He's shocked when Rozemyne tells him that Ferdinand is overworked and he can't possibly handle her work on top of all that.
• Cerebus Retcon: Gunther coddling and seemingly overprotecting his daughters is very heartwarming and funny, but gets harsher once the reader learns that Tuuli and Myne aren't his first children, they are his third and fourth one, and he lost two more after Myne before Kamil was born. Mortality for newborns from low commoner families is high, and Myne has been a weak girl from the beginning.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In Part 1, Volume 1, Myne finds a book at a merchant's stall. In Justus' side story in Part 3, Volume 2, Justus and Eckhart are doing research on Myne and the former comes across the same book. He ends up buying it roughly 2 years after Myne first saw the book and delivers it to Ferdinand. invokedWord of God says that the book belonged to the family of Heidemarie, Eckhart's deceased wife.
  • At the end of Part 2, Volume 3, Sylvester leaves Myne a necklace with a black stone, as thanks for giving him a tour in the temple and the commoner forest outside of the town. He tells her it's a protection charm and that she should touch it with her blood if her life is in danger. It's a magic tool that makes Myne a part of Sylvester's family. By using it at the end of Part 2, Myne was adopted by Sylvester.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Rozemyne meets the noble children of Ehrenfest at her first winter socializing in Part 3, Volume 3. Many of the named children like Hartmut, Traugott, or Laurentius, but also the unnamed ones like Giebe Groschel's daughter with the crimson hair (Brunhilde), become relevant in Part 4 when Rozemyne enters the Royal Academy.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • In Part 2, Volume 1, Myne enters the temple and her room without an attendant. She sees High Priest Ferdinand waiting in her room, who scolds her for walking around without an attendant who would open her door. Myne feels he's overreacting and the lecture goes on for a while, at which point Myne gets bored.
    Myne: High Priest, I have learned how to open a door.
    Ferdinand: This was not about opening a door. Were you even listening? I am telling you how to act like a proper lady.
    Myne: (thinking) Ooooohh.
  • In Part 3, Volume 3, Rozemyne learns that as the archduke's adopted daughter, she must take the archduke candidate course at the Royal Academy, instead of her desired scholar course, which is required to become a librarian. Ferdinand informs her that she can just take multiple courses, like he did. Rozemyne then gets depressed since she is just a normal girl and not a superhuman like him. Ferdinand tells her that she should just give it up then, since a normal person can't possibly become a librarian, and Rozemyne takes his bait, but not the way Ferdinand expected.
    Rozemyne: I will never give up, no matter what. Forget all that about me being a normal girl. I'm going to become the weirdest, strangest girl who ever lived!
    Ferdinand: Hold it. You are already bizarre beyond words. That is the wrong direction to focus your motivation.
• Coming-of-Age Story: This is the story of how Myne spreads literacy and books throughout the world to eventually become a librarian. However, it is also the story of how Urano Motosu, who was still much of a Womanchild despite already being in her twenties, slowly matures and takes over responsibility.
• Consequence Combo:
  • The offer the archduke of Ehrenfest made to Shikza's family after his Bodyguard Betrayal towards Myne has this element to it. They could either get executed alongside him or have the patriarch of the family sign a contract in which the promise to never interact with Myne ever again, pay a large fine and have Shikza recorded as having died honorably doing his duty as a knight.
  • Myne's noble identity Rozemyne is the result of a similar situation. Her choices were getting adopted by the archduke of Ehrenfest with all the perks that it entails or getting executed alongside her family and attendants. In the latter case, the archduke of Ehrenfest would have been the one to order the execution. Several people who went from serving her as Myne to serving her as Rozemyne are in similar bind: they get a boost in social status and the privileges that come with it, but it's a Resignations Not Accepted job.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In Part 1, Volume 1, a side chapter introduces shumils. They are very weak feybeasts with blue fur who squeal "pooey". One of Ralph's friends, Fey, directly compares Myne to a shumil. In Part 2, Volume 3, the blue priest Sylvester accompanies Myne to her first Spring Prayer, and the first thing he does when he meets Myne is poking her cheek and demanding from her to chirp "pooey". He later states that Myne reminds him of his pet shumil that he had in the past.
  • When Myne meets High Priest Ferdinand for the first time in Part 1, Volume 3, she guesses that he is around Benno's age (late twenties to early thirties). In the prologue of Part 2, Volume 1, it's mentioned that Ferdinand is frequently mistaken to be 25 or 30 years old, when he is actually 20.
  • In Part 2, Volume 1, Myne tells Delia to deliver a message to the High Priest, as Myne will get in trouble otherwise. Hearing this, Delia promises to deliver the message. When Myne returns a few days later, she is greeted by Delia smugly saying that Myne must have gotten in trouble. Delia indeed did not deliver the message.
  • In Part 2, Volume 1, Myne notes that she likes her food a bit saltier than most people. In Part 3, Volume 5, Hugo ends up losing his cooking duel with Leise because the food he made was too savory. He based the dish on Rozemyne's personal preferences.
  • In Part 2, Volume 1, after Lutz runs away from home, Gil comes to Myne's home to walk her to the temple. However, she can't leave because she is still stuck with a fever. Gil then kneels, takes her hand and presses his forehead against the hand. He then prays for her soon recovery. At the start of Part 4, Sylvester does a similar gesture to express his heartfelt gratitude to Rozemyne for saving his children.
  • Elvira and Eckhart are first seen in Part 2, Volume 3, when Ferdinand visits Karstedt to discuss Myne. Karstedt notes that his wife and eldest son seem to like Ferdinand much more than him. In Part 3, when Rozemyne and other characters like Cornelius narrate the story, they make the same observation.
  • In Part 2, Volume 3 Supernatural Sensitivity is explained. Damuel, who is a laynoble, is weak enough to sense the relatively weak Devouring soldiers. In Part 3, Volume 4, Brigitte, a mednoble, starts sensing Damuel's mana, which is a sign that his capacity is growing.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • In Part 2, Myne, Lutz and Benno visit one of Benno's go-to carpenters to make their diptychs and karuta cards, where they find Lutz's older brother Sieg working as an apprentice. Neither brother was aware their employers knew each other up to that point.
  • A side chapter in Part 2, Volume 2 reveals that the apprentice chef Ella was in a desperate situation where she eventually would have had to become a bar waitress/prostitute once she came of age. The only way to escape her uncle was by either getting enough money to open her own store or by becoming a noble's chef. She coincidentally was sent on an errand at the Eatery Guild on a day where Benno was present, whose job offer was basically a godsend for her. Incidentally, no one at the Eatery Guild but Hugo wanted to take Benno's offer, due to the temple's bad reputation, so Benno was lucky to find Ella.
  • Johann at one point needs a patron to sponsor his apprenticeship graduation task, but the urgency couldn't have happened at a better time for Myne, who needed a skilled smith to make her type letters.
• Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: Rozemyne's cover story is partly reliant of this, as the noblewoman who is supposed to have given birth to her is dead. That same woman's still-alive husband, meanwhile, is one of the people actively and knowingly participating in the cover-up.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: In Part 2, after the debacle attempting to punish Myne by confining her to the repentance chamber, Ferdinand is informed that a much more effective punishment is to deny Myne access to the library.
• Cooldown Hug:
  • Myne can calm her raging emotions (and mana) if she embraces or is embraced by another person. She regularly receives hugs from Tuuli and Lutz and later Ferdinand.
  • At the end of Part 2, Volume 2, after Ferdinand is clearly affected by the wave of emotions he just experienced, Myne gives him a hug.
• Crapsaccharine World: A downplayed example fueled mostly by perspective. The Slice of Life of a peasant six-year-old often plays as simple and idyllic as any childhood, but as Myne reaches out to accomplish her goals, she runs into darker elements of the world around her.
• Crime of Self-Defense: The setting's society is stratified enough that when one person attacks another, law will always favor the person with higher status. Unsuprisingly, the higher in status one is, the better they are at Playing the Victim Card.
• Cruel Mercy:
  • Subverted. At the end of Part 2, Myne tries to spare Delia for being associated with High Bishop Bezewanst, who is set to be executed. Sylvester only accepts life imprisonment in the orphanage after he sees Delia's shocked reaction to this, deeming it a fitting and cruel punishment. Delia though is actually thankful because despite being sent to the place that she never wanted to see again, she can watch over her adoptive brother Dirk and raise him.
  • In Part 3, Volume 3, Sylvester asks Rozemyne how she intends to punish the people of Hasse if she has no intention to raze the town to the ground and kill them all for attacking the archduke's family. She responds that she would raise their taxes for the next 10 years. Sylvester finds this especially cruel, as he thinks it would be better to just kill them immediately instead of letting them slowly starve.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The religion in the world worships a pantheon of multiple gods ^note  two creator gods, five inheritors of the planet and multiple subordinate minor gods under jurisdiction of the main five . The Church is led by blue priests, who are of noble origin and have mana. They fill objects with mana for a bountiful harvest and ensure prosperity for the people.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • In Part 2, Volume 2, Myne is first attacked by her own bodyguard, then a trombe is created when her blood comes into contact with the ground, causing a giant trombe to appear and entrap her in its branches. High Priest Ferdinand notices the trombe and quickly appears to saves her.
  • At the end of Part 2, Myne and Tuuli are kidnapped on their way home by Count Bindewald's forces. Myne is quickly freed by Gunther, and she and Gunther then save Tuuli. When Myne flees to the temple, she is ambushed by Bindewald himself and Bezewanst. Ferdinand (and Sylvester) save Myne.
  • At the end of Part 3, Charlotte is abducted, but Rozemyne's guard knights, Angelica and Cornelius, save Charlotte. This leaves Rozemyne unattended, who is then kidnapped and poisoned by an unknown assailant. Rozemyne's grandfather, Bonifatius, catches up to the kidnappers and stops them, and Ferdinand again comes to Rozemyne's rescue and saves her life by giving her an antidote and putting her in the jureve to heal her wounds.
• Darwinist Desire: Due to the child's mana usually coming from the mother, Ferdinand states that when Myne comes of age, it is very likely a large number of noble male suitors will be after her due to her very large amount of mana reserves.
• A Day in the Limelight: The light novel and manga have extra chapters that are narrated from different character's perspective. In the anime, the OVA focus on characters other than Myne.
• Deadly Euphemism: "Climbing up the towering stairway" is a noble's way to say someone died. This is first mentioned in Part 2, Volume 4 by Fran when he realizes that High Priest Ferdinand had his head attendant Arno killed. It's mentioned again in Part 3, Volume 1, when a side chapter from Cornelius's point of view brings up Karstedt's deceased third wife, Rozemary. The explanation comes in Part 3, Volume 2, when Rozemyne has to write in a letter that Bezewanst was executed. The mayor of Hasse, to whom she writes, doesn't understand the meaning and thinks Bezewanst was promoted.
• Deep Sleep: At the end of Part 3, Rozemyne is informed that taking the jureve will put her in a sleep that may last up to a season. However, as she takes severe damage after being poisoned at Charlotte's baptism, she sleeps for nearly two years.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: A constant source of conflict is Myne's morals and regard for life clashing with the values of noble society. Myne absolutely abhors how nobles view commoner lives as expendable. As Ferdinand is aware of Myne's circumstances, he is more accommodating towards her, but he still intends to teach her that she is often too soft on everyone.
• Demonic Possession: Lutz eventually figures out that Myne cannot possibly know all the things she does and demands she leave the original Myne's body. To his surprise, she agrees, but suggests they go home first...because if she lets the fever take her, all that'll be left is a corpse, not a living little peasant girl that had already died of a fever. After some discussion, he realizes she didn't want to be here in the first place and she's the only Myne he really knows, so he decides it's none of his business and that she should speak to her family.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Myne attempts to list the High Priest's positive qualities, but gets stuck on the last one because it involves... well, you can probably guess.
  He risked his life to stop my rampage, he's a skilled leader managing the administration of the temple himself, he read the bible to me, he let me enter the book room, he let me enter the book room, and he let me enter the book room!
• Denied Food as Punishment: A common practice in the temple, where access to food works on a trickle-down system from blue-robed priests to their grey-robed attendants. Myne turns out to have been doing this to Gil by complete accident due to skipping lunch to have more time to read the temple's books before returning home. Fran and Delia were being properly fed by the temple higher-ups to whom they report information about Myne.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Considering the disaster that ensued simply from the back of Myne's hand accidentally getting cut open by his blade, one wonders how much Shikza was thinking when he intended to gouge out Myne's eyes out of pure spite. He also didn't think of a good excuse to explain his actions to Ferdinand and Karstedt who ordered him to protect Myne.
  • In Part 3, Volume 5, Charlotte's kidnapper throws her away to escape. Angelica jumps to catch her, but when asked what she intends to do about the landing, she admits that she didn't think that far ahead and promptly cries for help herself.
  • In the aftermath of the incident in the same volume, Charlotte's kidnapper, Viscount Joisontak, explains his "flawless" plan to gain Rozemyne's favor by kidnapping either her or one of her siblings to save them and then appear like a hero. Everyone comments on how flawed his plan was, because he never would have been able to contact Rozemyne or her retainers without appearing suspicious in the first place, since he is on the black list of nobles that Rozemyne justifiably shouldn't meet.
• Don't Split Us Up: After Myne reforms the temple's orphanage, plans are made to export its model to other towns. In the first town that gets an expansion of the temple orphanage, local orphans are offered the choice between moving to the new orphanage or staying in the current set-up for them. The four who accept to move from the get-go are two pairs of siblings in which one half was about to be sold off by their caretaker.
• Don't Tell Mama: In Part 1, Volume 2, Myne collapses after overexerting herself, giving Mark the shock of his life. She wakes up in Corinna's home, where she asks her to not tell her family she collapsed while Lutz wasn't with her. Corinna flat-out refuses, because Myne deserves that scolding.
• Doorstop Baby: In Part 2, Volume 4, a baby is found at the entrance of the temple. Myne gives the baby to Delia to take care of and names him Dirk.
• Double In-Law Marriage: The Ehrenfest and Frenbeltag archducal couples are in such a marriage. Ehrenfest's archduke's wife is the younger sister of Frenbeltag's archduke, whose wife is the older sister of Ehrenfest's archduke. Ehrenfest being led by the younger siblings all while having been less damaged than Frenbeltag by a recent civil war results in its leaders having trouble saying "no" to requests for help from Frenbeltag.
• Do Well, but Not Perfect: Myne sells the formula she uses to make shampoo, which at one point contains the necessary step of filtering oil through a ragged cloth. When the buyer tries to use her recipe to make oil, she tells him that the cloth he's using is too high quality and won't work for making shampoo. She has to tell them an alternate recipe for shampoo instead, which does end up higher quality than the first stuff she sold them.
• Do You Want to Haggle?: The main skill of any Merchant. Thanks to Benno's training, Myne has gotten quite skilled at it, even getting a great deal out of Benno for exclusive rights to her hairpins.
• The Dung Ages:
  • The Urano version of Myne to her horror learns how awful the lower city smells, especially in the southern part of the lower city, as there is no sewer system and people just throw out the contents of their chamber pots out the window. The further south one goes, the less people care about hygiene. One of the first things the Urano version of Myne tries to do is improving the hygiene in her house, which made her family and neighbors think she's a Neat Freak. However, Myne's insistence to keep their house clean may have contributed to her health improving and to her baby brother, Kamil, surviving.
  • Averted for the temple and the Noble's Quarter. These parts are very clean, which is why all nobles start feeling nauseous when they enter the lower city.
• Emotion Suppression: Nobles are taught from the start that they must never reveal their true feelings and stay stoic. This also has practical reasons, as mana begins to leak if they get agitated. Myne clearly struggles with this, as she is very open about her feelings and she is a Bad Liar on top of that.
• Every Man Has His Price: In Part 1, Volume 2, Benno asks Myne to make more of her hairpins. When Myne and Lutz ask their families for help, they initially want to refuse, but quickly change their mind when Myne pulls out her money and shows them how much she is willing to pay for each part.
• Exact Words:
  • Sylvester's words while telling Myne how the Protective Charm he gives her works are "If you're in a bad spot, press your blood against the dark gem part and I'll come save you." While Sylvester is a little too far away to respond as promptly as he first made it sound like he would when she ends up using it, it later turns out that the charm has another effect that takes place as soon as Myne activates it: it legally makes her the daughter of Sylvester's real identity, Ehrenfest's archduke, which means that whoever is causing her trouble can no longer be protected by their higher status and she no longer risks getting herself and her allies executed for self-defense.
  • Ferdinand had forbidden Rozemyne from selling prints of him. He didn't forbid her from simply gifting them or loaning the artist drawing them to somebody else. Or that somebody else may open their own print shop and sell the prints.
• Exotic Extended Marriage: This has yet to be shown among commoners, but nobles are known to take both extra spouses and concubines. Karstedt had three wives at some point, one of them having died a few years prior to Myne meeting him. When shown Sylvester's home, Myne is explicitly told that there's a wing meant for his eventual second and third wives.
• Facepalm: Myne frequently causes those around her to perform this.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: The story has a faked case involving the polygynous marriages common among nobles. Rozemyne is passed off as the daughter of her father and one of his wives, but her real mother is another of her father's wives. In reality, she's the daughter of neither of the two women.
• Fantastic Flora:
  • The first indication that Myne was reincarnated in a fantasy setting is the paru tree, a strange tree made of ice that grows coconut-type fruit that can only be harvested in the early hours of the morning during winter. Once the sun gets too high, the tree flings its fruit an incredible distance and melts.
  • Another is the taue, a fruit that swells with water during the summer, and is used by the people of the town as water balloons for a wedding festival. But if a person with Mana touches the fruit, it suddenly transforms into a Trombe, an invasive, mana-hungry, fire-resistant woody plant that grows extremely fast (as in, after the seed cracks, it immediately lays roots and grows almost a couple of feet in as many seconds). Lutz calls his brother and cousin to immediately cut it apart before it can keep growing, as its rapid growth sucks up all the nutrients in an area and, if it grows into a tree, ruins the soil in a large area for other plants afterwards and takes entire teams of knights to take down (it also seems to shoot off its seeds like the Paru). Said wood is also noted to be unable to burn. However, it turns out its bark is actually one of the best materials for Myne's paper.
  • Even cooking ingredients aren't exempt. A radish can scream or a mushroom dance.
• Feminine Women Can Cook: Along with sewing, low commoners rank cooking as one of the most useful and attractive skills to have for a woman, which makes them especially attractive.
  Effa: Creating clothes for your family is important both practically and to show off to the neighbors. You can't be a true beauty if you’re not good at sewing and cooking.
  Myne: (thinking) Aaah... I'm definitely not gonna grow up into a beauty, then. And I mean, I can understand all that being important for a good wife, but what do cooking and sewing have to do with being beautiful?
• Fictional Age of Majority:
  • Children have their baptism around their seventh birthday. During that ceremony, children enter their local temple for the first time and are officially made citizens of the city in which they were born. All children officially start their vocational training after their baptism. Getting orphaned or running away from home after one's baptism is also just slightly less painful than before it, as employers are expected to have housing space available for employees and apprentices with no other place to live. Working pre-baptism children are akin to child labor in modern times in that they're technically illegal by temple rules, tolerated if they're children helping with their parents' business, and paid less than a seven-year-old just getting started. It's also mentioned that children aren't considered human beings by the temple before their baptism. All of the above is problematic for Myne because she's still as small as a 5-year-old long after her 7th birthday has passed, causing people who first meet her or only know her by sight to not realize that she has already been baptized.
  • Age ten has some degree of importance as well, as it's the age at which noble children enter the Royal Academy, at which the proper length of female skirts moves from knees to shins, and when the first contract of lower city apprentices usually runs out.
  • Adulthood ceremonies happen around fifteen years after one's birth. It's justifiably earlier than in other places on Earth because a year in the Bookworm world is 420 days long. If one wants to skip the "number of days actually lived through" math, a fifteen-year-old in the Bookworm world would be about seventeen years and three months old on Earth ^note Five years in the setting have about as many days as five years plus nine months on Earth.
    • The new rights acquired after the ceremony include no longer needing parental approval do to things, getting married and starting a formal concubinage. However, it's implied to not be any sort of age of consent; when Ferdinand hears rumors that the adult Benno and the seven-year-old Myne are in a sexual relationship, he mentions that that's not uncommon.
    • Fifteen is also the age at which people are expected to settle in their permanent workplace (vocational training starts at age seven) and graduate from the equivalent of a temporary employee to the equivalent of a full-time one if it hasn't happened earlier. Some trades require the person to have proven that they can bring money into their new workplace by completing a special order for a customer by the time they reach adulthood.
    • Noble children that come of age are allowed to keep their wands if they have graduated from the Royal Academy and are given permission to leave the Noble's Quarter. Angelica for instance cannot accompany Rozemyne to the temple or leave Ehrenfest with her mistress because she hasn't come of age until Part 4.
• Fictional Currency: The world uses a Gold–Silver–Copper Standard, further subdivided by coin size. However, currency is also measured in "lions," and a quirk of the system is that there isn't a 1-lion coin (a small copper is 10 lions).
• Follow in My Footsteps: The children are generally expected to follow the same career paths as their parents or take a job that is very similar, as most baptized children become apprentices by being introduced to workshops via their parents.
  • Effa is a dyer and can also sew very well, and Tuuli's dream is to become a seamstress. Since Gunther is a soldier, Myne's neighbors don't raise an eyebrow when they see her commuting between her home and the gate, as they think she's eventually going to find work there.
  • Lutz's father and brothers all have craftsman-related jobs (specifically carpentry and construction) and apprenticeships. Lutz's father expects his son to do the same, which is why Lutz initially is mocked and disabused by his family for wanting to become a merchant.
  • Nobles are more flexible regarding their paths, but some families specialize in one profession. Karstedt for instance followed the same path as his father and became the commander of the Knight's order, and all of his sons have become knights, too. Angelica's family traditionally consists of noble attendants, which makes her an exception, as she has taken the knight course at the Royal Academy.
• Forced to Watch: Justified in Part 3. Ferdinand forces Rozemyne to watch how the mayor of Hasse and his faction are executed. The entire story of Hasse is meant to be a learning experience as a noble for her.
• Foreshadowing: Enough of it to get its own page.
• Framing Device: The anime's first scene is the High Priest going back and examining Myne's memories. Presumably, this continues until the scene appears again at the end of the second season.
• Freudian Trio: Ferdinand, Sylvester and Karstedt tend to become this when they are in the same room:
  • Sylvester, the Manchild who gets away with it because of the low number of people who are allowed to even try keeping him in check, is the Id.
  • Ferdinand, the Stern Teacher to whom other people's feelings are frequently an afterthought to getting desired results, is the Superego.
  • Karstedt, who meets the fairly low bar of being both more mature than Sylvester and more relaxed than Ferdinand, is the Ego.
• Gag Echo: In the anime, after Myne gets the idea of making a picture book for a baby she knows to be coming, there is a montage of Lutz, Benno and Ferdinand all having the same bemused reaction to the notion of a picture book. Myne's reaction to Ferdinand's is the feeling she's hearing an echo.
• Game Changer: Myne could accurately be described as a game changer engine due to her past life memories. Between being dragged into various arts and crafts hobbies by her mom, her education, and prodigious reading of various fields of study making her a polymath, she is primed for reinventing the various technologies necessary to achieve her goals.
  • When discussing her first picture book with Ferdinand he is floored that she has already produced 30 copies. Myne summarizes the process of stencil printing to him and the explanation leaves him so stunned he freezes up like a crashed computer until Myne snaps him out of it.
  • After receiving the metal letter types she commissioned Myne explodes in a joyous frenzy and outright declares that this is the moment history will be changed forever. A demonstration of what they are for and how they work causes most of the witnesses, Benno, the smith foreman, and Myne's bodyguard, to immediately grasp the gravity of the situation and agree with her claim. A later demonstration to Ferdinand yields similar results and he echoes, "This will change history... Yes, I understand that now."
• Gem Heart: Feystones are the hearts of feybeasts crystallized upon their death. This can also happen to humans who have mana. A magical medical exam done in preparation for Rozemyne's new life reveals that her brushes with death as Myne were close enough to create several hard clumps of mana in her chest.
• Genius Burnout: After her mother shows surprise at the fact that she figured out her new world's numbering system over a single market run, Myne wonders if this trope will happen to her.

"... Oh wait, am I going down the child prodigy path here? At age ten I'll be God's gift to mankind and at age fifteen I'll be a genius, but once I hit twenty I'll just be a normal person."

• Gentle Touch vs. Firm Hand: At the end of Part 3, a gray shrine maiden is sent back to the orphanage because she got pregnant. However, since the previous High Bishop removed every gray shrine maiden who may have known how to handle childbirth, Lutz, Tuuli, and Benno are consulted and asked to help. When Benno suggests moving the pregnant woman to the nearby town of Hasse, Wilma refuses to come with them due to her trauma. A stressed-out Benno then starts verbally abusing her, leaving Wilma a blubbering mess. Fran reacts in a more sympathetic way (since he can relate), and tells her in a gentle but firm way that she indeed was protected by Rozemyne the whole time and that she needs to overcome her weaknesses like everyone else did. Wilma then goes to Hasse, and Rozemyne can see that she is doing better after she awakes.
• Giving Radio to the Romans: Myne eventually starts moving up in status as she starts reinventing things, though she only makes them in passing because she needed them for something else. However, it's very difficult to even make things like paper, which keeps her invention making at a slow pace as she struggles with the trial and error necessary to make things.
• Giving Up on Logic: Myne's knowledge of inventions like her hairpins, rinse shampoo or plant paper, as well as her unusual intelligence, cleanliness and manners make people question where she learned all that when she is the daughter of a low-class soldier and dyer. Benno and Mark eventually just give up trying to make sense of it and when Otto asks Gunther where Myne got her knowledge, he suspects that the gods must have blessed Myne. Funnily, Otto actually thinks that makes a lot of sense.
• Glad He's on Our Side: Each time Myne sees how ruthless Ferdinand is against his enemies, she's very grateful that he's one of her allies.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: In Part 3, Volume 3, Ferdinand plays the bad cop, who intends to eradicate the entire city of Hasse for treason, while Rozemyne builds up her saint image by insisting to only punish the ones responsible.
• Gossipy Hens: The neighborhood around Myne's family is a tight-knit community, and the wives love sharing stories about their families and rumors.
• Heir Club for Men:
  • Gender-inverted with the successors of the Gilberta Company. It is tradition for the women to inherit the store, while their husbands act as frontmen. Benno only temporarily acts as the company's successor and has waited for Corinna to marry and produce an heir.
  • Downplayed agnatic-cognatic form for archduke candidates. Women are serious candidates, but they have to outclass their male rivals sizably. This is lampshaded in a bonus chapter in Part 3, Volume 3, when Lamprecht points out that there is a gender barrier that a female archduke candidate needs to overcome (which Georgine couldn't against Sylvester), which is why Wilfried has an advantage over his younger sister, Charlotte. However, Rozemyne is so much more brilliant and has a bigger mana capacity than Wilfried that his retainers worry that she will easily steal his position as heir.
• He Knows Too Much:
  • In Part 2, Volume 4, the archduke of Ehrenfest makes Myne and her family sign a magic contract that forbids them from interacting like family. A more ruthless man would have just had her family killed, but he still allows Myne's family to meet with Rozemyne on business matters.
  • At the end of Part 3, Damuel has to take back his marriage proposal to Brigitte when she asks him whether he would go to Illgner with her once they were married. Damuel knows too well that knowing Rozemyne's commoner background makes it impossible for him to leave her side alive. Ferdinand outright notes in his thoughts that Damuel would have died in an "accident" if Rozemyne had given him her blessings to go to Illgner.
• Here We Go Again!: Pretty much the reaction of anyone close to Myne when she does something outrageous without realizing it.
• How Is That Even Possible?: Everyone's reaction around Myne when they see just how much mana she has.
• Humble Pie:
  • Wilfried's "High Bishop for one day" day in Part 3, Volume 2 ends up being one. Neither the attendants nor Ferdinand are willing to spoil him, and due to his illiteracy and laziness, he and Lamprecht end up being humiliated. The cherry on the top is when he returns home, when he hears his father seriously considering to disinherit his son. Wilfried vows to change and with Rozemyne's help improves drastically in only a few months.
  • Happens to Charlotte at the end of Part 3. Charlotte was told that she was more skilled than her brother, Wilfried, and since she is only one year apart from him and Rozemyne, she wants to take Rozemyne's place while her sister is absent. She quickly learns that she is still too inexperienced and Rozemyne's skills are far beyond her capabilities. Even Wilfried fares much better than her in the playroom and when they replenish the foundation, so she starts copying Wilfried and tries to not overestimate her abilities.
• Hypocritical Humor: Among the people Myne meets, there are people who are just as weird as her by her new world's standards. Cue her First-Person Smartass calling those characters weirdos, a word that plenty of characters have used while talking about her. Things get especially interesting when she has a conversation with one of her fellow weirdos and gets a reminder that they are among the people who think she's weird:
  Rozemyne: ...Wait just a second. You, the biggest weirdo I know, are treating me like a weirdo?
• I Have No Son!: Part 3, Volume 4 reveals that Count Groschel does not acknowledge Bezewanst, a convicted criminal who was sent to the temple shortly after birth, as a member of his family, which is why the latter has no grave.
• Improbable Antidote: Myne stumbles on a cheap treatment for the Devouring by accident: taue fruits. Just handling one is enough to drain some of her excess mana off. Of course, the fruit then sprouts and becomes a dangerous trombe plant, so it's not a treatment that can be used casually.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Invoked; after Myne washes Otto's wife's hair, Otto suddenly wants to have a "private moment" with her and asks if Myne has any reason she needs to leave immediately.
• In It for Life:
  • Unlike lehange contracts, which last three years, leherl contracts last eight years and come with greater benefits. The employer promises better pay and provides the apprentice with food and a place to live. They also receive further training. After their contract runs out, the apprentice is guaranteed to stay employed and get work, and may even potentially take over the store or workshop one day. However, the apprentice in turn is bound to the store or workshop for the rest of their life. They cannot open their own store, nor can they join another store. Ingo, for instance, always wanted to open his own store, which is why he always signed lehange contracts and moved from workshop to workshop until he earned his beruf certification and was allowed to open his own workshop. In Part 3, Volume 4 this becomes an important matter for Tuuli, as she wants to stay close to Rozemyne, but since the Gilberta Company will always remain in Ehrenfest, and there is no guarantee that Rozemyne will too, Tuuli hesitates to sign on as a leherl.
  • At the end of Part 2, Delia has to stay in the orphanage for the rest of her life, as punishment for her involvement with the High Bishop and him attacking Myne. The alternative was the death penalty, and by staying in the orphanage, Delia at least gets to raise her adoptive brother, Dirk.
• In Medias Res: The anime begins with a flash-forward to the scene of the Apprentice Shrine Maiden arc in which the High Priest uses magic to check Myne's memories, at which point the story chronologically begins.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • In Part 1, Volume 3, Myne learns that the female members of the temple are called "shrine maidens". Only the male members are called "priests".
  • A meta example: The translator insistently calls the rooms where the books are stored "book rooms". He intentionally avoids calling them "libraries", as the number of books is nothing compared to a library on Earth or the library in the Royal Academy that Rozemyne visits in Part 4.
• Instant Messenger Pigeon: Nobles use feystones or magic parchment, which then turn into ordonannz (German word for "order" or "command"), white birds that will fly to the intended receiver and then either play a recorded message or turn into the written letter.
• Internal Reveal: Each book has a prologue, an epilogue and various side chapters told from the point of view of characters who aren't Myne. This can result in a significant lag between the moment a reader is made aware of something and the moment Myne is.
• Irony:
  • Cosmic. When introduced in Part 2, Volume 1, Johann's master mentions to Benno that Johann is looking for a patron. When Benno glances towards Myne, the master dismisses the suggestion because "she's too much of a twerp" and that the patron needs to be an adult and have enough money to support someone. One guess as to who becomes his patron within a year.
  • In a more situational case, one of the duties of archdukes is to take part in a ceremony in which they gift capes and brooches to new Royal Academy students and encourage them to study hard. Ehrenfest's archduke is well-known to be Brilliant, but Lazy among those who work for him.
• It Seemed Trivial: A combination of such events culminates in the introduction of one of the antagonists of Part 3. After landing the job of a deceased previous antagonist, Rozemyne finds a bunch of old letters in her predecessor's office, including some that she assumes to be a secret Long-Distance Relationship correspondence. Out of a misguided sense of respecting the privacy of both sides, she doesn't include the assumed love letters when she hands over her predecessor's correspondence to Ferdinand so he can sort through it. Later, she gets a letter from her predecessor's assumed lover and announces the death on a provided answer sheet that promptly turns into a sent ordonnanz. After that, she double-checks with Ferdinand to make sure there is no gag order on her predecessor's death while not saying anything that would make Ferdinand realize that the assumed lover isn't just a random acquaintance of the deceased who can be told of the death with no issue. It later turns out that Rozemyne's predecessor had a cherished female relative who was sent to another duchy for an Arranged Marriage; Rozemyne's adult allies simply never got around to telling her of the woman's existence or the fact that they needed to be careful about the circumstances in which she learned about the death.
• The Jail Bait Wait:
  • The noble to whom Freida is to become The Mistress isn't expecting her to move in with him until she has her adulthood coming of age ceremony. It's fifteen years old and also the age at which people can start getting married.
  • Rozemyne's "biological" brother Lamprecht has this going on on top of the risk that the girl's family might not approve of the marriage. He's sixteen when properly introduced and the age gap between him and the girl he loves is big enough for her to not have come of age yet.
• Japanese Politeness: Myne initially still exhibits unique Japanese etiquette like bowing down to superiors and elderly people, though she quickly realizes that this is a very uncommon practice. Nonetheless, at the end of Part 2, she deeply bows to her family after finalizing her adoption into Sylvester's family and saying her goodbyes. While Sylvester doesn't recognize the gesture, he knows it must have been a sign of respect and gratitude.
• Killing Intent: People with enough mana can start releasing it like an aura that suppresses everyone around them and can choke people out. Mana users also do this subconsciously if their emotions run rampant. This usage of mana is known as Crushing, and it is first demonstrated by Myne after Fey and his friends trample on Myne's clay tablets. At the end of Part 1, when the High Bishop begins harassing Myne's family, she gets fed up and releases her mana that terrifies everyone there in a fit of Unstoppable Rage. The High Priest manages to calm her down before she accidentally kills someone.
• Lap Pillow:
  • Myne is given one at the beginning of Part 2 by Benno, after she collapses at the end of his meeting with High Priest Ferdinand.
  • Discussed in Part 3. There is an incident upon which Rozemyne notices her attendant Fran is overtired, asks him to rest and makes him choose between two available options. She more or less threatens to have him sleep on the piece of furniture on which she's currently sitting and use her lap as a pillow if he refuses those options.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: When a blue priest ransacks the temple's book room to harass Myne, Myne spends some time being furious. Then she realizes that whoever will be cleaning up the mess will be able to choose where to put things back and decides it's a good time to introduce a classification system.
• Liminal Time: The style of clothing changes with one's age. Girls who turn 10 have to wear skirts that reach their shins when before they were allowed to reach their knees. When they reach adulthood at 15, all women have to bind their hair in some way and their skirts are supposed to be as long as they can be. For practical reasons, women from lower classes follow the second rule much less strictly than by those from higher classes.
• Literally Shattered Lives: In Part 3, this is how Ferdinand executes the mayor of Hasse and his collaborators. He casts a spell with which their medals are dissolved, causing the victims to turn into stone and then shatter, leaving nothing behind.
• Little Professor Dialogue: A common criticism of the story is characters like Lutz and Tuuli are only about six or seven at the start of the story, but often used much more advanced vocabulary than you'd expect for their age, which isn't helped by their high mental maturity and complex thoughts. Some of this can be explained by children being forced to mature more quickly in medieval times (such as being apprenticed to learn a trade or helping in the family business while still young), but not all. With Myne however, the fact that she does this in universe is intentional, and indeed becomes a plot point.
• Living Is More Than Surviving: Myne would literally rather die than live in circumstances that entail losing her liberty and/or separating her from her family.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: Not to an insane degree, but enough to avert The Main Characters Do Everything. Over time, Myne's activities expand into more and more fields, with each one requiring a couple new characters to oversee/develop/teach it.
• Locked Away in a Monastery:
  • Nobles that are born with too low mana levels are typically sent to the temple, where they still can help society by offering their mana to the duchy as blue robes.
  • In general, it's viewed as shameful to anyone with noble descent to go to the temple. Angelica for instance is the subject of jealousy because her fellow female knights assume they would only have to guard Rozemyne in the Noble's Quarter, when in truth Angelica only hasn't gone to the temple yet because she isn't of age. Damuel's Reassigned to Antarctica punishment involved guarding Myne in the temple for a year, which kind of ruined his already low reputation. On the other hand, since Damuel is privy to Rozemyne's commoner past and Rozemyne got attached to him, he became an obvious choice as one of her guard knights. Guarding the adopted daughter of the archduke, who is appointed as High Bishop, in the temple is an honor and raises his reputation again.
• Logical Latecomer: Whoever joined Myne's circle the most recently will frequently have a least one scene of witnessing the group's strangeness as a newcomer before becoming part of it themself. Those who have quirks of their own before joining aren't necessarily immune.
• Long-Distance Relationship:
  • Lamprecht is in such a relationship with a girl from another duchy that he met at the Royal Academy. However, since she hasn't come of age yet, he is still waiting before he can marry her.
  • Hugo is kind of in one with his girlfriend Kirke at the start of Part 3, while he is away in the Noble's Quarter to work as a chef at the archduke's castle. When he returned to the lower city, he saw his girlfriend started dating a neighbor though, which is why he quits the Italian restaurant and decides to permanently become a noble's chef.
• Loophole Abuse: This is frequently used by merchants or nobles when they make people sign contracts. Since most commoners are not literate and don't understand noble euphemisms, they are prone to fall for this.
  • Benno first demonstrates this to Myne in Part 1, Volume 2, when he shows her boards that teach her about the principles of contracts. Myne then notices Benno did not give Lutz or her the money to buy the new paper-making tools and calls Benno out for trying to break their contract and tricking her. Benno tells her that he tested her memory and that he wanted to teach her to always make copies of contracts. He only would have broken the contract if he had refused to pay, not if Myne had paid the workshops first and then forgot to ask Benno for the money back.
  • After Ferdinand forbids Rozemyne from selling prints of him, she continues providing illustrations of him to people via means that don't technically qualify for what she was explicitly told not to do. Since Ferdinand only forbade Rozemyne to print illustrations of him, Rozemyne subtly tells Elvira that she can print anything she wants with her own workshop.
• Lord Country: Duchies and provinces are named after the ruling noble family. Thus, the Ehrenfest duchy and its capital are named after the archducal house Ehrenfest.
• Loved I Not Honor More: At the end of Part 3, during the Starbind Festival Damuel tells Brigitte that he cannot marry into the Illgner household, because he would have to give up being Rozemyne's guard knight, which everyone interprets as him choosing honor over love by staying loyal to his mistress. While his loyalty to Rozemyne is one reason, he simply cannot be dismissed so easily, because he is one of Rozemyne's biggest Secret Keepers.
• Love You and Everybody: Myne says she loves Mr. Otto. She meant it as a platonic-if-intense friendship, but her father thought that Myne was in love with him.
• Low Fantasy: Played with and ultimately Subverted. Magic is such an unimportant part of commoners' everyday lives that outside of the occasional Fantastic Flora, it takes a long time for Myne to even realize that it exists. It doesn't actually affect people's lives most of the time and is generally only used for important things like religious rituals. This may be just a matter of perspective, as the nobles seem to hoard the secrets of magic for themselves, so the use of magic seems to rise the higher up the social ladder you are. This is more the case for people in the city rather than the country, as some of the biggest rituals magic is used for are performed on the fields during planting and harvest.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Bonifatius has Super Strength due to Magic Enhancement. People hit with his punches frequently explode in a shower of gore.
• Magically Binding Contract: Magic contracts exist that need to be signed with blood or mana. They may range over a city, a duchy, or even the whole country, depending on its importance. Adoption and submission contracts with nobles are also magically binding. Once they are signed, they burn up. Violating the contract leads to dire consequences, sometimes even death.
  • Merchants typically only get access to city-wide contracts from their archduke, but although magic contracts are horribly expensive, they are the only effective way for commoners to protect themselves against nobles. Myne signs several contracts with the Gilberta Company, assigning them various financial and trade rights to her innovations, and carrying similar guarantees for her. This is as much to her advantage as the company's, since as long as she is under contract, she can't be "stolen" by nobility or other highly placed people, which would otherwise be a real danger for her and her "creations".
  • At the end of Part 2, Myne unknowingly signs an adoption contract with Sylvester before Count Bindewald tries to make her sign a submission contract like he did with the orphan baby Dirk. After Bindewald is defeated, Sylvester summons Myne's family and makes them sign a contract that forbids them from treating the newly-adopted and renamed Rozemyne like family.
  • In Part 3, Volume 5, Rozemyne forces every noble who wishes to learn her mana compression method to sign a country-wide contract that forbids them from harming Rozemyne or teaching other people the compression method.
• Magitek: Registered merchants carry a magic-powered debit card.
• The Magocracy: While it isn't generally known to the public, virtually all nobles are mages, with the primary duties of the nobility being to build, charge and utilize magical devices (those without sufficient magic to do so are cast aside). While there are common-born mages, having enough magic to be useful can be deadly to children if they can't discharge their power somehow, and the only commonly known way to do so is through the magical tools used by the nobility. Which means that most common-born mages die before anyone realizes that they have magic, and the rest end up pledging themselves to a noble house in exchange for access to the tools they need to survive.
• Make an Example of Them: In Part 3, Ferdinand and Sylvester allow Rozemyne to spare the citizens of Hasse who bear no ill will and manage to pass through Schutzaria's wind gate. However, he executes those who cannot pass in front of everyone's eyes to show them what will happen if they ever defy the nobility again.
• Mama Bear: Ella's mother fully supported her decision to work in the temple as a chef, despite Ella's uncle's protests, as she didn't want her daughter to end up like her and become a bar waitress (i.e. acting as a prostitute by night).
• Mechanical Horse: The highbeasts used by nobles are essentially magic-powered moving statues shaped like winged horses or other ridable animals.
• Medieval Universal Literacy: Averted. The story has a realistic level of literacy and Myne is reincarnated as one of the large majority of poor and illiterate people in the population. Add in that books are created one at a time by trained craftsmen plus both paper and ink being expensive, makes books rare and expensive. One book costs roughly what Myne's father would earn in 40 to 50 years. Myne does however retain her memories of reading and writing in Japanese.
• Metaphorically True: At the end of Part 2, Volume 4, Myne's family tell their neighbors that Myne is gone and that the nobles took her. This is technically not a lie, as Myne was adopted by Aub Ehrenfest. Myne, the commoner, is dead, and the person that was Myne is now Lady Rozemyne, daughter of Karstedt and adopted daughter of the archducal house Ehrenfest.
• Microts: The temple's bells will ring throughout the city after a certain amount of time has passed, based on the sunlight. The bells ring roughly every 2-3 hours, which is how people arrange the time for meetings.
• Misplaced Retribution: It is common practice for nobles to not just punish a person if they are guilty of a crime, but their entire family and anyone associated with them as well.
  • At the end of Part 2, after Sylvester sentences High Bishop Bezewanst to die, all of his associates are to be executed as well.
  • In Part 3, citizens of Hasse attack the newly built monastery, which is a direct attack on the archduke's family, as Rozemyne is Sylvester's adopted daughter. Ferdinand wants Rozemyne to destroy the entire town and kill its people, but changes his mind to let Rozemyne experiment on Hasse and have her learn how to become more manipulative.
• Missed Him by That Much: The anime bonus episode that adapts Justus and Eckhart's investigation of Myne in the lower city (a fact only revealed to Rozemyne in Part 3, Volume 2 in the novels) adds this element to the story. Much like in the original, Eckhart is being The Load due to the lower city's stench literally making him sick while Justus does most of the work. In the anime version however, Justus comes very close to seeing Myne twice. The first time is outside of Benno's shop, which she had left seconds before. Later, near the end of his search, he walks right past her without noticing, because she's carrying a huge loaf of bread in front of her face.
• Morph Weapon: The schtappe (actually Stab, the German word for "wand" or "staff") is the magic wand nobles use which can turn into any weapon like a knife, a spear, a sword or even a giant scythe.
• Mundane Luxury:
  • After being stuck in a home without a single piece of writing in it for days, Myne is overjoyed merely from seeing what is essentially a price tag. The lack of things to write on also makes posession of a stone slate a big upgrade.
  • For Urano, shampoo was a basic fact of life; for the people of the new world, it's completely unknown. The lack of shampoo drives Myne to make a homemade version, and the others whose hair she washes go nuts for it.
• Mundane Utility: Trombe, a malicious magical plant that grows impossibly fast and tries to ensnare humans, turns out to be ideal for making paper, if you survive the process of killing it (a freshly-sprouting trombe can be cut apart by children with knives if they're fast, while a full-grown tree takes magic-wielding knights to put down). Benno doesn't take it well when Myne tells him about this secret ingredient.

Tropes N-Z

• Named After Somebody Famous:
  • Rozemyne grants people who have greatly contributed to spreading books and printing the title "Gutenberg", after Johannes Gutenberg, who brought modern movable-type printing to Europe.
  • In a similar way, she named Benno's new print and publishing company after Christophe Plantin, a famous book printer and publisher.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: One of the nobles introduced at the end of Part 3, Volume 4 is named "Grausam", which is German for cruel. What he and the rest of Veronica's faction plan to do with Sylvester's family and Rozemyne is truly befitting of that name.
• The Needs of the Many: In Part 3, Rozemyne is faced with a problem where she can either stay passive or actively cause someone's downfall to save lives. Hasse is set for execution after they rebelled against the archduke. Ferdinand orders her to cause the mayor's downfall, but this goes against Rozemyne's values and makes her sick. After a talk with Benno, Mark, and Lutz, she realizes that Ferdinand is soft on Hasse, whose citizens attacked a building of the archduke, and gives her the choice to save the town from being eradicated. By fulfilling the task she is given by Ferdinand, she can at least save some lives by only bringing down the mayor and his faction.
• Nepotism:
  • Defied when children turn 7, the age at which they are supposed to get their first apprentice contracts. Their parents or other relatives usually introduce them to a friend who will take them in instead of their parent's own workplace. For instance, Tuuli's first seamstress contract was with a place whose employees Effa knew from being a dyer, while her second one is with the Gilberta Company, to which she was introduced via Myne.
  • Played straight with High Bishop Bezewanst. He got his high position largely because of his very influential older sister.
• Neutrality Backlash: The Ehrenfest duchy didn't take a side during the nobility's civil war. On one hand, it is in a better position in the duchy rankings than it was before the war due to the duchies who lost it being in worse positions than they used to be. On the the other, Ehrenfest has little to no influence on other duchies and only ally it has is one that was made through a political marriage.
• Never Learned to Read: "Wilfried's day as High Bishop" in Part 3, Volume 2 is this. Rihyarda and Rozemyne in the castle, and everyone in the temple learn that he is illiterate, which makes him worse than every single orphan but Dirk (a baby). When Rozemyne, Rihyarda, and Ferdinand report this to his parents, they accept that they raised him improperly and go with Rozemyne's stricter education plan.
• Never Lend to a Friend: Discussed in Part 2, Volume 2, when Myne prepares to buy clothes for her winter preparations at the temple. Myne runs short on money, which forces her to sell more books to Benno than she wanted to. Lutz offers to lend her money, but Myne refuses, remarking that this can ruin friendships. Lutz goes around this and instead pays for her clothes, stating that while it's not good for friends to lend money, giving gifts shouldn't be a problem.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • At the end of Part 2, Delia takes it upon herself to find someone who would adopt Dirk. She brings him to the High Bishop, who sells Dirk out to Count Bindewald, who forces Dirk into a slave contract, as Dirk has the Devouring. If Delia had waited until Myne had been adopted as a noble, she could have been able to take care of Dirk.
  • The entire mess with the town of Hasse in Part 3 happens due to some unfortunate decisions Rozemyne makes based on a few misunderstandings. First, she asks for a workshop and orphanage, similar to the already established workshop in the Ehrenfest Capital temple. Second, she takes in orphans that were about to be sold, in the belief that this would save the orphans from mistreatment and relieve the townspeople of a financial burden. However, the orphans were already promised to other nobles and they are considered the shared property of the town, which she just stole from them. The mayor thought he would have former High Bishop Bezewanst's backing, which incited him to retrieve the orphans that were taken from him. By sending a few of his citizens to attack the monastery, he committed high treason. While Rozemyne manages to prevent the entire annihilation of Hasse and its people, she has to isolate and execute the mayor's faction, and the town must pay more taxes for the next decade with no help from priests to revitalize the land for next spring.
  • At the start of Part 4, Ferdinand laments the fact that he didn't get much further with his investigations regarding Viscount Gerlach's involvement in Rozemyne's kidnapping. The reason for that though is that Ferdinand was too busy with paperwork, since Bonifatius had Damuel and Eckhart going through some Training from Hell, while the archduke summoned Ferdinand to the castle more often (without Rozemyne being there to keep the archduke from doing just that) to delegate work to him again. On top of taking over Rozemyne's duties, it was all too much for Ferdinand to investigate.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: The Gilberta Company trio of Mark, Benno, and Lutz act this way towards Myne. Mark is always friendly, Benno is loud and keeps scolding her, and Lutz may sometimes scold Myne, too, but he is always there to give her a hug.
• No Body Left Behind:
  • At the end of Part 2, Ferdinand's Beam-O-War with Count Bindewald obliterates all Devouring soldiers and the High Bishop's attendants that weren't hiding behind Myne's shield of wind. Ferdinand then tells Myne that this is how one gets rid of any evidence and witnesses.
  • In Part 3, Ferdinand casts a spell on the Hasse traitors, which turns them into stone, then shatters the bodies, leaving nothing but dust behind.
• No Longer with Us: Inverted. After High Bishop Bezewanst dies, there is an attempt on Rozemyne's part to inform one of the deceased's commoner allies of the fact. The first message she sends uses the standard noble Deadly Euphemism, "Climbing up the towering stairway". When the commoner ally responds by trying to contact the deceased with an actual letter, Rozemyne correctly guesses the euphemism wasn't properly understood and mistaken for the news that the deceased got a promotion.
• Not Blood Siblings: There are a few scenes in which Rozemyne suspects that her adoptive father is planning to have her marry her adoptive brother. Some of her adoptive brother's retainers are shown to be assuming this is the reason for which she was adopted.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Part 2:
    • Multiple times in a row during the trombe extermination mission in Volume 2. First, Shikza and Damuel realize they screwed up when a second trombe appears. Second, Karstedt realizes that the guards he assigned to Myne endangered her life and neglected their duty, and that Ferdinand is furious. Third, Shikza realizes Ferdinand does not accept his non-excuse for hurting Myne and that he just blatantly admitted he committed insubordination.
    • In Volume 3, Benno visits the Myne Workshop, as Myne wants to introduce him to a few visiting blue priests. He sees Sylvester and gets so scared that he immediately gives away he knows Sylvester's real identity is Aub Ehrenfest.
    • In Volume 4, Bezewanst and Bindewald realize they are in deep trouble when Ferdinand pulls out his wand to fight Bindewald. Bindewald was not aware Ferdinand was not a lowly blue priest, but a graduate of the Royal Academy. He also breaks out in a cold sweat when he learns the identity of Sylvester, who moments later arrived, even more so when Sylvester reveals that Bindewald attacked Myne after she already made an adoption contract with Sylvester, which means he directly attacked a member of the archducal family.
  • Part 3:
    • At the end of Volume 1, Rozemyne realizes she is going to get hell from Ferdinand for printing and selling illustrations of him without his permission.
    • An off-screen moment in Volume 2, when Fran unambiguously tells the mayor of Hasse that after infuriating Ferdinand for protesting against him and Rozemyne, the temple will not send any priests for Spring Prayer to revitalize the land with mana.
    • In Volume 5, Wilfried's retainers turn pale and panic when they realize that he visited and talked to his grandmother, Lady Veronica. They all know doing so without Sylvester's permission is treason, and retainers are punished along with their masters.
    • At the end of Volume 5, Viscount Illgner recounts how Brigitte becoming Rozemyne's guards lessened the abuse his region had to suffer and how expanding the printing industry in Illgner first will bring much prosperity to the economy. He therefore turns pale when he hears that Brigitte told Elvira that she intends to go back to Illgner after she and Damuel marry. Even Viscount Illgner realizes that Brigitte isn't doing what is expected of a knight and that Elvira subjected Brigitte to a Secret Test of Character which she failed. To not be viewed as an enemy and to keep receiving Rozemyne's support, he has no choice but to accept Elvira's offer to find a suitable husband for Brigitte.
• The Oldest Profession: Bar waitresses also work as prostitutes.
• Orphanage of Fear: The temple's orphanage before Myne takes it in hand. Its sustainability depends on there being a certain number of blue priests in the temple to dribble down food and money for its upkeep. Circumstances over which the temple had little-to-no control resulted in the population of blue priests dipping below that number, resulting in the orphans getting less food. The pre-baptism children, who are fed after all other orphans and aren't considered human beings by the blue priests before they are old enough, are literally starving to death. Things are so bad that turning it into a workshop, that by modern-day standards is using child labor, is a step up because the money made is actually going towards providing better care for the orphans.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: One of the means by which Rozemyne gets around Ferdinand forbidding her from selling printed illustrations of him consists of making the illustrations of some of her printed stories Comic-Book Fantasy Casting versions of him. She takes advantage of the first set of such stories to introduce a common disclaimer from Earth:
  "This work is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental."
• Overly Long Name: Nobles need to have names that are a bit longer than commoner names, which is why Myne is asked to choose a new name for her new identity as an archnoble. Nobles also all have family names that state their relation to the families they were born, adopted or married into. As an example, Rozemyne's full name is "Rozemyne Tochter Linkberg Adopti Ehrenfest", which means "Rozemyne, daughter of House Linkberg, adopted into House Ehrenfest".
• Panacea: Part 3's main plot revolves around gathering materials for a jureve potion, which is one of the strongest rejuvenation potions in existence. It can restore even a person on the brink of death, which is why Rozemyne needs one to fix the hardened mana that formed inside her body while the original Myne was overwhelmed by the Devouring.
• Pauper Patches: Poor commoners such as Myne's family and the non-baptized orphans from the temple orphanage have patches on their clothes. This also applies to any background or bit character of sufficiently low status.
• Pent-Up Power Peril: This is the how the Devouring kills its hosts. Someone afflicted with this condition (like Myne) generates more mana than he or she can release on his or her own. Once said mana overloads, it causes the sufferer to die. The severe symptoms include constant fevers, lethargy, hypersensitivity to harsh weather, and an ominously yellow aura with glowing rainbow irises in times of stress and despair. In fact, children with this illness are not expected to live beyond seven years old, at least in commoner households. Another sufferer, Freida, explains to Myne that it is possible to control the overloads so that they don't become lethal. However, this is largely unsustainable since the magical items needed to siphon the excess mana are rare, prohibitively expensive, and those available for sale to commoners tend to be damaged or defective ones that each works only once before breaking into little more than crumbs and powder.
• Perspective Flip: As side chapters are written from other characters' point of view, their inner thoughts and reasoning is laid bare, giving the reader a new understanding of them.
  • A chapter from Corinna's point of view shows that she is not as nice as she pretends to be and looks down on people with poorer status like Myne. She is still a coldhearted merchant at heart.
  • A side chapter narrated by Mark gives the reader an early notion that he is far more ruthless than his gentleman-like behavior would make one think, and that his loyalty to Benno is so deep that he may resort to extreme measures if his master is harmed.
  • According to the chapter written from guildmaster Gustav's point of view, he was genuinely trying to help Benno's family business through tough times with his marriage offers, but poor forethought and timing with the first two resulted in the subsequent ones being mistaken for harassment by Benno. His tendency to be an obstacle to Benno's ventures are him keeping him from biting more than he can chew, which he risks doing by selling Myne's products and trying to monopolize him. His ploy to get Myne to join his store was out of genuine care for her her, as it would have made it easier for Myne to secure a contract with a noble that would give her a reliable supply of the magic items she needs to keep the Devouring from killing her.
• Pet the Dog: Freida and her grandfather, the guildmaster, are portrayed as being untrustworthy at best. However, Freida genuinely considers Myne a good friend and gives her one of the magic tools she herself needs, putting her own life at possible risk. While this is also partially motivated by self-interest, even that self-interest carries a note of "It's for her own good anyway if she feels indebted to us emotionally or literally since she'll need treatment only we can help provide."
• Platonic Co-Parenting: Rozemyne considers her nobility guardianship situation to be this. Ferdinand is still mentoring her on quite a few things, while both her "biological" parents and her adoptive parents are taking part in her upbringing.
• Please Kill Me If It Satisfies You: When Lutz figures out in Part 1 that "Myne" is actually another person entirely, he angrily tells her to get out of Myne's body. She calmly responds with a "Sure, but wait until we get home first or you'll have to explain why you have a corpse on your hands." He hadn't realized that the original Myne had already died, that the new Myne didn't want to be here at all, and that she could die at any moment if her will to live decreased even a little.
• Please Spare Him, My Liege!:
  • Shikza's mother indirectly pleads for her son to be spared by asking High Bishop Bezewanst and Lady Veronica, who have connections to Archduke Ehrenfest. While Bezewanst does ask to lighten Shikza's punishment, the archduke ignores the pleas and makes Shikza's family pay for Myne's replacement robes if they don't want to be punished along with Shikza.
  • At the end of Part 2, Myne has to plead with Sylvester to spare Delia. She can convince Sylvester by making Delia stay in the orphanage for the rest of her life, which Sylvester accepts as a satisfactory alternative.
• Politeness Judo:
  • Myne doesn't initially notice it, but Corinna can get a lot of information for free by acting polite and friendly. She at least notices this when Corinna attempts to steal Myne's hairpin technique by asking Tuuli (who admires Corinna) nicely instead of going to Myne or her mother.
  • Nobles always use euphemisms and polite speech when speaking officially, which Ferdinand attempts to teach Rozemyne as well, as she has a tendency to be too direct. This is how he presses the scholar-official Kantna for information regarding Hasse in Part 3, Volume 2.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Part 1:
    • Mark's first experience with Myne's collapsing without notice was due to Myne overexerting herself. Prior to that visit, Lutz asked Myne if she was able to get to Benno's. Myne thought the question was about if she knew the way. Lutz asked because of Myne's health.
    • Lutz's mother, Karla, assumes that Lutz wanting to become a merchant is Myne's fault, and Lutz is just getting dragged along by Myne. Once she learns that Lutz is serious about his job choice and that Myne originally didn't have anything to do with his dream, she decides to support him.
    • The reason that Myne ends up involved in temple matters is that the people who know the cause of her Devouring never properly explained it to her until after she mentioned suffering from it to members of the temple. Benno should have realised that there was a good chance of her collapsing during the baptism ritual and that if that happened there was a good chance her Devouring would have come up. However, it was not actually the Devouring that caused her to collapse, and she did not mention the Devouring until later. It was a massive oversight on Benno's part to not see the potential danger of not warning her about mentioning the Devouring in the temple.
  • Part 2:
    • At the start of Part 2, Myne's head attendant doesn't do his job very well at first, because he sees his new assignment as some kind of punishment from the High Priest. It's actually the complete opposite. The High Priest trusts Fran more than any of his other attendants. Once Fran realizes this, he puts his all in serving and educating Myne.
    • At the end of Volume 1, Lutz ends up briefly running away from his family because he feels they aren't respecting his dream of becoming a merchant, are being too controlling and only thinking of themselves, especially his father. It's not until High Priest Ferdinand steps in that he realizes that not only was his father thinking of him the whole time, but was even right about some of his concerns. He's just a gruff man who doesn't talk much about how he feels or what he's thinking unless forced. After that, the two finally get down to talking and figuring out a way to make things work.
    • At the end of Volume 4, Delia takes her adoptive brother, Dirk, to High Bishop Bezewanst, who notices that Dirk suffers from the Devouring. He then gives Dirk to Bindewald, who makes Dirk his slave via a submissive magic contract. Myne knew Dirk had the Devouring, but didn't tell Delia, because she was advised by Ferdinand that if word got out, some noble would have immediately made Dirk his slave. Instead, she lies to Delia and tells her that Ferdinand looked for, but couldn't find a family to adopt Dirk.
  • Part 3:
    • Rozemyne's request for a workshop and orphanage in the style of the temple is approved by Sylvester, who orders Ferdinand to construct the chapel and monastery. Ferdinand, who usually acts as Sylvester and Rozemyne's Cloudcuckoolander's Minder, didn't interfere because he thought Rozemyne was plotting this from the start, and her goal was to satisfy him and Sylvester with a good meal to gain their approval. He didn't realize she still didn't know enough about noble society, and that she never wanted to put the town of Hasse in such a dangerous position where the unknowing citizens committed high treason by attacking a white building that was owned by nobles.
    • In Volume 3, Rozemyne's exclusive carpenter, Ingo, gets into trouble because Rozemyne didn't come to him when she had to mobilize every workshop to finish the monastery in Hasse before the Harvest Festival. What Ingo doesn't know is that this only happened because the archduke threw everyone off by building the monastery with magic and then set an almost impossible deadline that required Benno and Gustav to immediately contact the Carpenter's Guild and hire every workshop they could get. Ingo tries to contact Rozemyne, but since she is in a too high position for her to come to the lower city and Ingo isn't trained enough to talk to her, he can't voice his concerns, forcing Benno to mediate between them.
    • In Volume 4, Wilfried doesn't listen to his retainers when they explain a noble way to say farewell to him. As such, he doesn't understand that his parents really don't want to see Georgine again for the time being. His blunder gives Georgine an excuse to return to Ehrenfest.
    • In Volume 5, Brigitte and Damuel realize that they had different plans after marrying each other. Brigitte wanted to return to Illgner and support her province, while Damuel thought that Brigitte would move to the Noble's Quarter with him, as he would remain as Rozemyne's guard knight. Not only does this conflict with Brigitte's wish to return home, she would be reduced to a laynoble. Damuel marrying into Illgner's household isn't an option, either, as Damuel is one of Rozemyne's greatest Secret Keepers, so Damuel has to withdraw his marriage proposal and Elvira finds a mednoble scholar for Brigitte, who is interested in Illgner's paper-making industry.
  • Part 4:
    • Rozemyne is told by Cornelius in Part 3 that her grandfather, Bonifatius, actually really adores her, and as thanks for saving her life at the end of Part 3, she gifts him a letter in the shape of a heart. Since Bonifatius has trouble expressing his happiness, Rozemyne assumes he doesn't actually like the gift, when he is actually overjoyed.
• Pose of Supplication:
  • Especially at the beginning when the Urano version of Myne isn't used to the manners of her new world yet, she does a dogeza whenever she's begging or apologizing. She genuflects the first time when she sees her first book and begs the owner to let her touch it. She stops doing it after Part 1, except when in Part 2 Karstedt orders Count Bindewald to kneel in front of Archduke Ehrenfest. Myne is so scared, she accidentally forgets how to kneel in her world.
  • The full prayer to the gods involves two poses. The first one looks similar to the Glico pose Myne remembers back in her days as Urano. Then the praying person bends over to genuflect.
• Power Crystal: Feystones are the Gem Heart from feybeasts and their uses include storing mana.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: The more the story advances, the more Myne finds herself in situations in which she's actually the villain.
  • The embryonic stage of the trope happens when she reforms the orphanage. While her reform gives the orphans jobs and allows them to get more food overall, the system is changed into one where, at least on paper, the orphans have to work for their meals. Myne's issue with the previous system was that the only orphans that were fed decently were those made attendants, while all the others were given insufficient food. The narrative still presents the reform as a good thing.
  • When Rozemyne tries to export her new orphanage model elsewhere, she forces the town's mayor to hand over orphans he was about to sell. It takes her a conversation with Benno to realize that the town's mayor was counting on the money from the sale for the town's budget, and that from his point of view, she just plain stole municipal property and got him in hot water with his would-be buyer. Rozemyne responds to the situation by making sure the transaction gets properly cancelled and giving the mayor money for the orphans she took, but other than that she still needs to execute that very same mayor sooner or later as punishment for having townspeople attack her orphanage in his initial effort to get the orphans back.
• Psychic Link: The archduke possesses a magic tool that allows a person to search the innermost memories of another if they share the same or similar color of mana. It is usually used on criminals to get a foolproof testimony, but Ferdinand is given the device at the end of Part 2 to ascertain who Myne truly is and what her intentions are. Due to the link they also share emotions, and Myne's emotions deeply affect Ferdinand to the point that he begins to cry when Urano is overwhelmed by her feelings to see her mother again.
• The Power of Legacy: This is actually built into the deal to keep Shikza's family from being a bother to Myne at a later time. Their alternative to getting punished as well was his father signing a contract promising to never interact with Myne in any way ever again and paying a large sum of money. A perk of that option was keeping Shikza's wrongdoings towards Myne out of official records and putting something more positive in their place.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: A tactic that Myne often employs to get her father to do something. It usually works. Funnily, Rozemyne is also weak to this when Charlotte asks her to perform her baptism.
• Rape Leads to Insanity:
  • What happens with Jenni, one of High Bishop Bezewanst's attendants. Being raped nearly every day coupled with the knowledge that her former fellow attendants, Wilma and Rosina, have it much better, drives her to madness, as she willingly takes part in trying to enslave Myne.
  • Averted with Fran and Wilma. The former recovers due to being treated with respect and love by his new masters, Ferdinand and Myne, while Wilma eventually works on overcoming her trauma after Rozemyne can no longer protect her and Benno and Fran tell her to get over what happened and take responsibility as the orphanage overseer.
• Really Royalty Reveal:
  • The end of Part 2, Volume 4 reveals that Sylvester and Ferdinand are actually nobles, specifically the archduke of Ehrenfest and his half-brother respectively. There are several hints in the previous volumes that make it obvious, such as Sylvester and Ferdinand's proficiency in magic, as blue priests are usually children of nobles, who do not have enough mana to be recognized as nobles. Damuel and Benno are also really scared of Sylvester, as if they knew who he is. The Knight's Order, including an archnoble like Karstedt, also bowed down to Ferdinand and referred to him as a "lord", which means that Ferdinand was even higher in authority than the commander of the order.
  • Starting with Part 3, Rozemyne is made out to be this. The fake story is that Karstedt feared for her safety and let her be raised in the temple with Ferdinand acting as her guardian. That she is a commoner who was merely given blue robes was a misunderstanding spread by High Bishop Bezewanst, who incidentally was highly corrupt and was thus subsequently executed. Myne was just a nickname to keep her identity hidden, and they thought the time was right when she was old enough to be baptized. While Rozemyne bemoans that no one would believe such a ridiculous story, Ferdinand notes that this is very believable because there is precedent, as Sister Christine had a very similar backstory.
• Religion Is Magic: When casting a spell, the caster always calls on one of the gods in the world.
• Reveal Shot: The light novel left it ambiguous, but when the author was asked who the blue priest was that performed Myne's baptism in Part 1, she said that all would be revealed in the manga. The face of the priest who treated Myne gently is hidden until it's revealed that it was Ferdinand. The manga dedicates an entire page for these two when they meet for the first time. The anime uses a similar trick by having only the lower part of the blue priest's face visible when he calls for the next child in line, though his voice can work as Five-Second Foreshadowing for anyone who recognizes it from the first episode.
• Rewatch Bonus: Many story elements are introduced via Cryptic Background Reference and sometimes mentioned repeatedly before being actually shown to Myne or observed by the occasional alternative point-of-view character. Re-reading early scenes with knowledge from later in the story on hand can reveal a few hints not seen during the first reading.
  • Ehrenfest's archduke gets several mentions before his proper introduction, always in the context of his high-responsibility position. The man's "out of the public eye" personality turns out to not exactly be the sort one would associate with a leadership figure, to the point that Myne has a "Really?" moment when she finds out.
  • A first-time reader won't think much of the fact that Ferdinand's highbeast is a lion, since he's far from being the only character to use something other than a horse. It later turns out that only members of the archduke's family are allowed to give their highbeasts a lion form.
  • Watching the heavily implied Childhood Friends Ferdinand, Karstedt and Sylvester interact with each other is amusing in its own right, but it only gets better after finding out that all three of them are related to each other and Sylvester is the archduke of Ehrenfest, which means that both Myne and the reader have been watching family bickering between three very high-status men all this time.
  • One of the means by which Damuel's Impoverished Patrician situation is established is via mentioning he had to borrow money from his older brother's mistress' family to be able to pay a hefty fine. The mistress turns out to be Myne's friend Freida, a young girl from a wealthy commoner family who is already known to be destined to become an unnamed noble's mistress once she reaches adulthood.
  • Arno's actions throughout Part 2 are best appreciated after reading his Perspective Flip chapter, which reveals several seemingly unfortunate mistakes to have been made very much on purpose.
  • One of Ferdinand's suggestions to Myne to make the Cinderella story more palatable to the setting's nobles is to make the Uptown Girl situation into a romance between and archnoble and a mednoble. Rozemyne's coverup noble biological parents are an archnoble and mednoble pair that Ferdinand knows, which explains where he got the idea in the first place.
• Rite of Passage:
  • There are two significant rites for commoners that happen when someone turns 7 and 15 respectively. Commoners are acknowledged as citizens and registrated by temple members at their baptism by stamping their blood on medals. Their coming of age ceremony also happens at the temple.
  • Noble children are similarly baptized and recognized by noble society when they turn 7. The parents then invite a blue priest to their estate and give their child a feystone ring. The priest will registrate the child's mana and bless it, and the child will bless the priest in return. There is also a special ceremony for children who turn 10 during winter socializing, as this is the age when noble children enroll in the Royal Academy until they come of age and graduate, at which point they will be fully accepted into noble society as nobles.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • After Myne collapses at the end of Part 1, Volume 2, she is saved by a magic tool Gustav and Freida give her. However, Freida makes it clear that Myne only has one year at best to live, which leaves Myne only with two options: Either die from the Devouring or leave her family and sign a contract with a noble who can provide her with the tools she needs. After thinking it over, Myne decides to stay with her family, even if that means that she is going to die soon. She ends up Taking a Third Option by joining the temple, which allows her to stay with her family and get the tools to release her mana safely without submitting to a noble.
  • The apprentice chef Ella seemingly faces one, but it's subverted. Once she comes of age, she would have to work as a waitress at her uncle's bar (and waitresses also work as cheap prostitutes). During a visit at the Eatery Guild she sees Benno looking for chefs who would eventually work in his restaurant, but they have to train at the temple, which is notorious for treating its commoner workers like slaves (including for sex). She quickly learns that neither Benno nor the blue shrine maiden she would serve have any need for sexual services, and since Ella always wanted to become a noble's chef, she takes Benno up on his offer and becomes Hugo's assistant.
  • A minor case with Myne's attendant Rosina: Myne tells her to either study under Fran and start doing more than playing instruments or be sent back to the orphanage. After a talk with Wilma, Rosina decides to stay and learns how to do paperwork.
  • High Priest Ferdinand gives Myne a similar choice in Part 2 regarding her future: Get adopted by a noble or face execution. He even forbids her to expand the printing business until she has the backing of a noble, yet Myne refuses to leave her family. It takes an attempted kidnapping and an attack by a hostile archnoble to make Myne accept the adoption immediately.
  • In Part 3, Rozemyne is ordered by Ferdinand to execute the mayor and his faction. This is him being soft for Rozemyne's sake, as Hasse's citizens attacked a building owned by the archduke which would usually lead to the entire annihilation of the town and its people. If Rozemyne doesn't act, all of them will die. She makes the people of Hasse aware of this, and the citizens consequently isolate their mayor.
• Secret Test of Character:
  • It's implied that Sylvester accompanying Myne during the Spring Prayer in Part 2, Volume 3 was all a test. A test which she passed, as he leaves her with a necklace that would save her if she was in danger. Sylvester is in truth not a blue priest but the archduke of Ehrenfest. His teasing is him testing Myne's patience, he sees her capabilities and how well she could pass off as a noble, he gets to talk with Benno to discuss Myne's printing business plans, and he questions the gray priests and orphans about Myne's influence. After concluding that Myne is worthy, he gifts her the contract feystone that would bind her to him if used.
  • At the end of Part 3, Viscount Illgner suspects that Elvira subjected Brigitte and Damuel to one. Elvira asks Brigitte during a tea party what she wants to do about Damuel's marriage proposal and Brigitte lets slip that she intends to accept and then move back to Illgner with Damuel. As Brigitte and Damuel are guard knights of the archducal family, Brigitte's brother thinks Elvira wanted to see how dedicated Brigitte is to Rozemyne. Since she apparently didn't see the Conflicting Loyalty issue and chose her home province over her charge, Elvira deemed Brigitte a failure as Rozemyne's guard. Damuel on the other hand firmly stays by Rozemyne's side and has to take back his proposal. Elvira then finds a husband for Brigitte to relieve her of her duties and let her go back, just as she wanted to.
• Sent Into Hiding:
  • Sister Christine was a blue shrine maiden who hid in the temple, as she was the daughter of a mistress. However, her mana capacity was unusually high, which is why her father wanted her to be formally made a part of the family. After the purge, she left the temple and attended the Royal Academy, leaving all of her attendants in the temple behind.
  • At the end of Part 2, Karstedt, Ferdinand and Sylvester claim that Rozemyne was similarly hidden in the temple like Christine. However, they claim that her identity was hidden so well that the High Bishop mistakenly believed she was merely a commoner who was given blue robes. Since Bezewanst is a convicted criminal, his accusations are made to look like Malicious Slander, silencing all other blue priests who protest against Rozemyne's appointment as the new High Bishop.
• Serious Business: Do not get between Myne and her precious reading time, as her attendants find out.
• Sex Slave: Gray priests and shrine maidens are forced to obey all nobles and blue priests/shrine maidens, who are descended from nobles. Their services include "flower offerings". Usually, pregnant gray shrine maidens are sent back to the orphanage, where they give birth and then raise the children and other orphans, but during High Bishop Bezewanst's reign, unattractive maidens were sold to nobles, while pregnant maidens are "disposed of" instead because they just add more useless mouths to feed for which Bezewanst doesn't want to spend any additional money.
• Sexual Euphemism:
  • Within the temple, women (and girls, and boys as well on at least one occasion, including very young ones) serving as concubines are said to be "offering flowers".
  • The term "goddess of water" is commonly used as a term for lover.
• Shout-Out:
  • The ridiculous-looking prayer pose used by the priests is a reference to (of all things) a specific billboard advertisement◊ for Glico, a Japanese food company, which has been on display in Osaka since 1935.
  • When throwing out Trombe seeds, Myne usually calls out "I choose you!". In the novels, she describes a newly-purchased outfit as "comfy and easy to wear" (a meme-reference to Pokémon Gold and Silver, and probably a joke from the translator).
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: Once Myne and the High Priest get to know each other long enough, a lot of their private conversations devolve to this.
  High Priest: I would rather not see your face more than once a day, you know.
  Myne's internal retort: ..it's not like I'm coming here to see you either.
• The Social Darwinist: How nobility run their succession process, even more extreme in this world due to children being born with different mana capacity. Blue priests are actually children disqualified from inheritance for having too little mana.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • Lutz starts suspecting that Myne may be possessed by someone else after hearing her talk about business with Benno. He is entirely convinced once Myne accidentally says that she's made plant paper before. Before that, the Urano version of Myne only did things that he had no reason to find suspicious, such as digging for clay or cutting wood.
  • At first, Ferdinand only thought that Myne was a smart young girl. After he saw her distill the holy scriptures into a kids' version, he realized that even a brilliant seven-year-old couldn't possibly do something like that, and it was more likely that she was an educated woman from a foreign country - and yet, it was clearly established that Myne was a seven-year-old from Ehrenfest. That was part of why Ferdinand had to probe her mind, because the facts in evidence simply did not make sense.
• So Proud of You:
  • Whenever Tuuli or Myne do something well, their parents readily tell them how proud they are of their children. Tuuli is also unbelievably proud of how smart her little sister is and often brags to her friends about it, as most of them have the wrong impression of Myne.
  • Myne expresses how proud she is of Lutz when he faces Benno directly and tells him what he wants to do when he becomes a merchant. Later on, Myne, Benno, and Mark are also proud of Lutz's quick growth as an apprentice merchant.
  • Gustav's pride is his granddaughter, Freida. She is Wise Beyond Her Years and he loves to see her grow up and become a successful merchant like him.
  • Myne often tells Gil how proud she is of his work, as affection and approval is exactly what he needs.
  • In general, Myne is very proud of all of her attendants for how skilled and competent they are.
  • Lutz's parents see at the end of Part 2, Volume 1 that their son is actually already far ahead in his training as a merchant. They never knew that Lutz is literate and how he vastly behaves differently when they go to the Merchant's Guild with him, which makes them see why Benno already wanted Lutz to become his leherl. Since Deid is a man of few words and doesn't like admitting that he's wrong, he doesn't openly say it, but Karla proudly tells everyone how much her son has grown.
  • Wilfried doesn't get much attention from his parents, but he really would like them to praise him. Once Rozemyne works on his education plan, he often proudly presents to them his progress and they readily praise him.
  • During the ruelle gathering in Part 3, Volume 5, Rozemyne expresses internally how proud she is of her guard knight, Damuel. As his mana growth has given him new confidence, he performs much better against the swarm of feybeasts compared to the previous Night of Schutzaria a year before.
  • Rozemyne's adoptive siblings, Wilfried and Charlotte, often express how proud they are of their sister. Especially the latter matters to Rozemyne, as she always wanted to be a Cool Big Sis.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Female knights are expected to retire when they marry.
• Succession Crisis: Defied. As there can only be one heir to a duchy, the heir is chosen amongst the children of a duke's first wife. If they all come with similar mana levels, the more competent one is chosen as heir. This all needs to happen long before the current ruler dies, to prevent a crisis. Sylvester was the winner of the current generation, and thus became Ehrenfest's archduke. His older sister married an archduke from another duchy to avoid future conflicts. Sylvester doesn't like this tradition, though, and he's decided from the start that Wilfried is his designated heir. Unfortunately, this makes Wilfried lazy and complacent, as he does not have to put an effort into earning his privileges. He drastically changes after Ferdinand threatens to make Sylvester disinherit him and instead train one of Wilfried's younger siblings, if he turns out to be completely incompetent.
• Supernatural Elite: Only nobles have easy access to the means to handle the Pent-Up Power Peril that manifests as the Devouring to which children born with magic are prone, and a child's mana level depends mostly on their mother's. Commoners who do get mana usually die of the Devouring before age seven. This results in magic use remaining something only found in nobles. There is a way to survive for non-nobles, but it boils down to pledging to become a noble's slave in exchange for an excess mana-absorbing item. Before the arrangement gets actually made and if the noble changes their mind, the alternative is to pay a lot of money for a defective or broken mana-absorbing item that only works once, overall making the option available only for people who already have a lot of money and connections to nobles.
• Supernatural Sensitivity: Individuals with mana can sense other beings with mana. However, they usually can only sense beings with similar levels of mana. For instance in Part 2, Volume 3, since Damuel's mana levels are so low, he is good at spotting the weak Devouring soldiers, which nobles like Karstedt or Ferdinand can't.
• Superpowerful Genetics: Having powerful mages as parents greatly ehances the chances that a child will be a powerful mage themself, but is far from guaranteeing it. This is shown by the fact that blue robes from mednoble and even archnoble families exist, when laynobles are considered those the most likely to produce blue robe level mages. Meanwhile, the fact that Devouring children are technically cases of Mage Born of Muggles shows that being born to a commoner family doesn't bar one from having great magical power. This is further reinforced by the fact that two people with significantly different mana levels can't have children, meaning neither side of the family can truly be given credit for a Mage Born of Muggles or Muggle Born of Mages situation.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: One of the notes Rozemyne leaves behind before she is forced to sleep for two years mentions that she wants to gather information about the Royal Academy, the lectures and the other duchies. What she actually wanted most was to gather more stories for future books, but Damuel and Charlotte misunderstand Rozemyne's intentions and tell the Royal Academy students to gather any information they can find, which Damuel then passes on to Ferdinand. In Part 4, Rozemyne is visibly disappointed that she didn't clarify what she meant, but she decides to not tell Ferdinand this and lets him think that she got exactly what she wanted.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Someone might have been a bookworm who read countless books ranging from all different kind of subjects, but just reading about how something is done doesn't make you a master of making it. You will still need to practice before you develop the necessary skills, or use trial and error to work around the obstacles.
  • If you reincarnate somewhere completely by chance in a medieval setting, you'll probably be poor. If you're poor in a medieval setting, you're almost guaranteed to be illiterate. Hygiene was also... difficult in those times, leaving Myne horrified at how "disgusting" her family is.
  • People will start to wonder how a young girl who is usually bedridden by fever suddenly knows how to make so many things and use odd phrases. More so when she knows how to do something despite admitting she's never done it herself.
  • Many of the products we have now are only cheap commodities because of the complex infrastructure we have. To people living in medieval times, where everything has to be handcrafted on the spot, things like shampoo and hair clips are extremely high-end luxuries.
  • The clothing of commoners in medieval times generally are for utility, not for show. Myne ends up making her family stand out a lot with the decorations she made, which would have normally been seen as a frivolous thing for them. This becomes a minor plot point where the High Bishop assumes she's wealthy.
  • This universe's locals aren't immune, either. Lutz's romanticized idea of the traveling merchant life is shattered when Otto explains that it's a difficult and dangerous career, one which no one in their right mind would take up unless they were very poor and lacked citizenship (Lutz was born in this town, so even though his family is poor, he automatically becomes a citizen when he comes of age). And even if you wanted to do it anyway, the routes traders take are a closely-guarded secret.
  • When Myne gets a younger sibling, a few lines of dialog from adults make it clear that high miscarriage and infancy mortality rates are the reason her family only had two children at the time at which she was reincarnated.
  • This happens with the fake Family Relationship Switcheroo between two wives of the same nobleman. It essentially involves passing off a dead wife's daughter as that of a still-alive one. Only so much time goes by before the dead wife's brother starts trying to approach the daughter and calling her his niece. The switcheroo was intially done because of the political strife that would have come with the daughter's cover-up real parentage, with said strife partly stemming from the dead wife's family being Obnoxious In-Laws.
• Swapped Roles: In Part 3, Volume 2, Rozemyne swaps with her adoptive brother Wilfried for a day as a means to get him to understand his duties and pay attention to his education. A side chapter from Wilfried's view in the same volume is shown to contrast how much work Rozemyne puts in every day.
• Take a Third Option:
  • In Part 1, Myne is left with two options: Leave her family and sign with a noble who can provide her with magic tools or stay with her family and die to the Devouring. Myne ends up getting a third option by joining the temple, where she gets access to magic tools and regularly offers her mana while commuting from home.
  • In Part 3, Volume 4, Tuuli is given the choice to join the Gilberta Company either as a lehange or a leherl. Signing as a leherl comes with far more benefits, but it binds her to the store for the rest of her life, which she may not want if Rozemyne one day leaves Ehrenfest. Rozemyne is asked for her opinion on what to do and she suggests signing Tuuli as a leherl and introducing a franchising model. This way the Gilberta Company could open other Gilberta Company offshoots in other cities where Rozemyne may potentially move to, allowing Tuuli to move to that city as well, while binding herself to Corinna's store.
• Taken for Granite: There is a spell archduke candidates can use, which Ferdinand demonstrates in Part 3. This is how Hasse's traitorous citizens are executed. They are first turned into stone, then they will shatter and leave nothing but dust behind.
• Tangled Family Tree:
  • The family situation of Rozemyne, Myne's noble identity later in the story, is slightly convoluted. Long story short, she officially has both a birth family and an adoptive family within the nobility. Those two families are related to each other via their respective fathers. This means that her "birth" parents and siblings remain a household of cousins after her adoption, while her adoptive parents and siblings were all cousins to her before the adoption. She generally streamlines things by liberally addressing both sets of parents in similar ways and thinking of all their children as her siblings. Another result of the situation is that her very much alive "birth" grandfather is technically her great-uncle after the adoption.
  • Inbreeding is common enough within the nobility for many noble houses to share bloodties. For instance, the previous archduke of Ehrenfest and his wife were first cousins with strong ties to the archducal Ahrensbach house, whose current archduchess is their oldest daughter.
• Tempting Fate:
  • In Part 2, Volume 1, at the end of the Star Festival, Myne creates trombe with the taue fruits the orphans gathered. In the back of the orphanage, the trombe left a mess and moved the stone pavement, which would definitely get Myne a scolding from the High Priest, but Myne, Fran, and Lutz all agree that "there is no way a blue priest would come to the back of the orphanage, so it's fine." As it turns out, after everyone left, the High Priest took a look at the orphanage and discovered the mess.
  • In the same volume, after Myne recovers from a fever, Lutz leaves Myne at the temple, but none of her attendants are waiting at the gate to pick her up. Seeing as she doesn't know how a noble would act in such a situation, she just walks to her room alone. On her way, she thinks "...It's not like anybody will be there to get mad at me." Cue Ferdinand waiting in her room getting mad at her.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: Textile work is generally the kind of work left to women. Lutz's mother, Karla, weaves fabric, while Effa works as a dyer (but is also a skilled seamstress), and Tuuli becomes a seamstress apprentice after her baptism, with her goal to become as good as Benno's sister, Corinna, one day. Myne is told that women who can cook and sew are viewed as beautiful, as it's a very useful and attractive skill to have in a family.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • Early in Part 2, Myne needs to change outfits in the Gilberta Company, but the fact that the employee changing rooms are in the attic doesn't mix well with her low stamina. Benno's solution is to have a screen set up in his office and call a female servant to help Myne change. When Lutz comes down from his own changing room and sees Myne in her new outfit, her explanation is that "Benno helped".
  • In Part 3, Ferdinand mentions the fact that he (unwillingly) ended up watching Myne take a bath while he was visiting her Urano memories in a way that makes it sound like he and Myne took a bath together.
• That's an Order!:
  • Invitations are only invitations in name, if the person inviting another is of higher status. Myne for instance cannot refuse an invitation from Corinna or Benno, as they are higher-ranked people than Effa and Tuuli in the Tailors' Guild. The temple invitations that Myne hands out to Lutz's parents in Part 2, Volume 1 are also basically subpoenas.
  • This is basically what the High Bishop at the end of Part 1 says to Myne's parents, when he demands to hand her over. As commoners, they have no right to refuse a noble, but Gunther does so anyway and defends Myne from the High Bishop's attendants. It's only after Myne Crushes him with her mana that High Priest Ferdinand takes over, who explicitly requests for Myne to join the temple.
• They're Called "Personal Issues" for a Reason: Defied. When Myne is unable to focus on her work because of Lutz' issues with his parents, she tells Ferdinand that it's not his problem and she'll be able to work just fine. Ferdinand responds that she's not working fine, and if her problems are interfering with her work, then they are his business and he'll help resolve them so that his assistant can do her job.
• Time Skip: Two years pass between Part 3 and Part 4, after Rozemyne was forced into a jureve sleep to heal her body. She wakes up just in time to attend the Royal Academy in Part 4.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Averted. Lutz assumes that the current Myne is actually the disease that killed the original Myne and took over her body. The current Myne makes it clear that she is not.
• Top Wife: The first wives of noblemen who have at least two of them are not only expected to produce the first heirs in the sucession line. They are also the only ones allowed to take an official part in political decisions to avoid having too many cooks spoiling the soup. For instance, if a viscount has several wives, only the first one holds the title of Viscountess. If a first wife dies, the second wife, if she exists, usually takes her place.
• Too Long; Didn't Dub: Many of the traditional-Japanese-papermaking terms like "suketa" and "tororo" are left untranslated in the English novels, as there's no real equivalent to them. This also happens in-universe—whenever Myne mentions something that can't be translated to the local language, it's written in parentheses, like "could you tell them to bring some (simple all-in-one shampoo) with them," to show that from the perspective of whoever she's talking to, she basically threw some incomprehensible nonsense into the middle of a normal sentence.
• Training from Hell: To be allowed to go to the forest, Myne has to take regular walks to the city gates to build strength and stamina. As she's an Ill Girl, even this much is a major undertaking.
• Translation Convention: The people of Myne's current world are actually speaking a completely different language that Myne is unable to understand until she gets her body's original memories back. For convenience, the audience hears or reads people speak in our language. But since the original Myne couldn't read, she can't read the local language either until she's taught.
• Tricked into Signing:
  • An element of the climax of Part 2 as a whole is Delia turning out to have been tricked into making Dirk sign an enslavement contract that was presented as an adoption contract.
  • Myne herself gets tricked into signing her adoption contract with Sylvester, mostly by the fact that it doesn't look like a contract at all.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior:
  • The whole "starting apprenticeships at age seven" practice includes High-Class Call Girl type jobs. This results in the story showing no less than two different girls whose ages are still in the single digits talking about how they are going to be someone's mistress or concubine later. As someone who knows what those positions entail only because she's essentially an adult trapped in a child's body, Myne is quite disturbed by this.
  • To most people, Myne's ability to converse intelligently with adults on business matters is impressive. To Lutz, it's a sign that she's suffering from Demonic Possession.
• Unkempt Beauty: Played with. The women in Myne's family have naturally good looks, but there's really only so far that can get you when you don't even have access to things like regular bathing or indoor toilets. However, just a little shampoo gets Myne's mother looking wonderful even without any of the fancy clothing and accessories a noble would have.
• Unperson: In a way, this is what happens to traitors. In Part 3, Ferdinand demonstrates this by using the medals with which commoners are registrated at their baptism to execute the mayor of Hasse and his faction. The medals are usually given back for one's funeral, but by turning their bodies into dust and destroying the medals, it's like the person has never existed.
• Urban Segregation: Ehrenfest Capital is split into multiple segments, with the highest ranked nobles living in the north, while the lowest ranked commoners live in the south. The northern part of the city is the Noble's Quarter. The archduke's castle and archnobles are located in the far north, while laynobles live closer to the gate to the lower city and the temple in the south. High-ranked commoners in the lower city like Freida or Benno live closer to the Noble's Quarter gate, while poor commoners like Lutz and Myne live very close to the south gate of the city.
• Utility Magic: One of the temple's most important duties is using magic to enhance the harvest. Which is a problem before Myne shows up, as she and Ferdinand are the only particularly powerful mages the temple has available.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Benno actually likes arguing with Myne quite a lot since few people can keep up with him. It also seems to remind him of his deceased fiancée.
• Vow of Celibacy:
  • In an extremely technical sense, this is the case. Clergy are forbidden to marry, but not forbidden from taking concubines.
  • Between the consequences of the recent purge of the nobility and human trafficking being technically legal in the setting, both blue-robes and grey-robes can leave the temple for positions in which they are no longer expected to be celibate. Ironically, some blue-robes were disqualified from properly joining noble society after the purge due to abusing the Sex Slave loophole while in the temple.
• Weight and Switch: The riesefalke egg Rozemyne needs to collect sits on a volcano that risks erupting if too many of the living beings that absorb its Background Magic Field mana are removed. To make up for the removal of the egg, her group brings a bunch of mana-storing feystones to leave in the general area in the egg's place.
• Wham Episode:
  • Part 2, Vol. 4 — The High Bishop makes his move on Myne, forcing Ferdinand and Ehrenfest's archduke to accelerate their plans, meaning Myne has to be adopted immediately and separated from her family.
  • Part 3, Volume 5 ends with Charlotte's baptism going horribly wrong, as Sylvester's children are attacked. During the confusion, Charlotte gets abducted and Rozemyne and her guards desperately try to get Charlotte back, which ends with Rozemyne being poisoned and nearly dying. Rozemyne then has to spend two years in a Deep Sleep to recover.
• Wham Line:
  • At end of Season 2 (which is an adaptation of scene that happens mid-way through Part 2 of the books), Ferdinand asks Karstedt something that brings a so-far unexpected upgrade to Myne's prospects.
    Ferdinand: Would you consider adopting [Myne]?
  • A single line brings a new twist to a plotline that starts out as "Myne gets her first Doorstop Baby as orphanage director" if one remembers Ferdinand's description of late-stage Devouring:
    Delia: [The baby] got a fever, and his cheeks started to bubble.
  • At the very end of Part 2, Myne sums up what her life will be like as Rozemyne, her newly-minted noble identity. The archduke of Ehrenfest then tells her she's mistaken about something neither she nor the reader saw coming:
    Archduke: Not quite. You won't be an apprentice shrine maiden anymore. You'll be the High Bishop.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Lutz is quite pissed when he figures out Myne was lying from the start when she said she would just rest after walking to the forest for the first time. It meant she broke a promise to someone who was only worried about her well-being.
• Will Talk for a Price: Myne can't do much physical labor, so the main source of her income initially is selling product ideas and recipes to Benno or Freida for the right price.
• With Friends Like These...: The merchant guild's granddaughter sees herself as Myne's best friend, but that doesn't stop her from prying information out of her that can be profitable.
• Wizarding School: One of the functions of the Royal Academy is to teach noble children how to use magic.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks:
  • Shumil "mana crystals" to commoner children. They never realize they are selling off tiny feystones.
  • After Johann presents to Myne the first type letters that she ordered in Part 2, Volume 3, she jumps for joy and gets so excited that she loses consciousness. After Gil demonstrates how they can be utilized in a printing press to rapidly create books, Benno, Johann's foreman, Lutz, and Damuel realize how revolutionary this is, yet Johann is still left clueless.
  • Many blue priests and non-scholar nobles have been shown to not care much about books. Myne even won a few points with Ferdinand early on because she showed interest in books while many of the people around him couldn't care less.
  • Johann is also clueless about physical principles Rozemyne teaches him and Zack. Zack on the other hand is thrilled, seeing the potential for future inventions.
• You Didn't Ask: Happens to Johann. He really should have asked Benno what he meant when Benno said that Johann shouldn't worry about his patron ever running out of money. His patron is Myne; you either keep up with all the inventions she wants you to make or sink to the depths of despair. Benno is the one funding her, so money is not the issue; never before seen crazy inventions she wants you to make are!
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Many people in this world all have very bright hair colors. Myne and her father have blue hair, her mother and sister have green hair, and her only female friend's hair is bright pink. Myne notices this as soon as she reincarnates, implying that her original world was not like this.

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