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

• Adorkable: While generally calm and collected in the midst of the party's usual absurdities, Mavis has her moments when she breaks this to adorable effect, such as Mile using her for a Fastball Special against a wyvern, or in the anime, excitedly chopping an entire tree into neat sections like meatloaf to test the fancy new sword Mile has forged for her.
• Fan Nickname: "Average Isekai" - more often applies to the anime.
• Les Yay: Adele thinks that Morena's "a super-cute princess!" when she sees her. She's recognizing the latter as a trope, but that doesn't stop her from sounding just a little subtexty.
• So Okay, It's Average: The Production Posse who made the anime have a slew of high-energy slapstick shows under their belts, including Mitsudomoe, YuruYuri, Himouto! Umaru-chan, and Gabriel DropOut. The show's Japanese trailer even banked heavily on the staff's pedigree. But compared to those, the Average Isekai anime is fittingly a bit more... average. There's very little energy in the cinematography, and it has none of director Masahiko Ohta's trademark frenetic camera dollies, like the first episodes of Mitsudomoe or Himouto Umaru-Chan. Judging by the fact the ED—in contrast to their previous work for Doga Kobo—is literally just slow pans over concept art, it seems the studio didn't lavish a whole lot of money on the production.
• Uncertain Audience: The anime adaptation runs into this problem. The original novel series, despite having a group of young female protagonists, is a standard isekai that can get very dark at times. Meanwhile, the anime tried to play up the Four-Girl Ensemble nature of the main cast to draw in slice-of-life fans, but that failed to appeal to them as the dark elements that were kept from the original books caused Mood Whiplash and they found the show much too dark to be a good Moe anime. Meanwhile, fans of the original series were not amused at the amount of content that got cut from the adaptation^note most infamously, the entire first light novel, and fans of isekai weren't happy with the Mood Whiplash either, finding it to resemble an Indecisive Parody more than an actual entry in the genre.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Pauline. While her greed is meant to be her character quirk just like Mavis's suicidal bravery and Mile's wish to be normal, some find her actions, including attempting to ruin a merchant for lowballing the party and trying to sell bandits into slavery to make some extra money, to be legitimately unscrupulous. She's even worse in the light novels, where the only reason she doesn't kill Crimson Vow's enemies is because it wouldn't make them suffer enough and is shown to enjoy torture.
• Values Dissonance:
  • As befitting the nature of the world and the real-life cultural practices it was based off of, there is plenty of completely serious, played-straight talk of treating children (girls especially) as bargaining chips to be married off for their and their family's financial futures, and possibly also social status. When Adele first teaches the Wonder Trio about magic, they are overjoyed that their spells give them so much more value in the marriage market, and they don't need to fear being forced to become the mistress of a rich old man or merchant.
  • Whenever the Crimson Vow can capture bandits and hostile forces alive, there is frequently talk of selling them into Indentured Servitude alongside the subjugation reward. Pauline especially is happy about all the extra income this provides, to make the transportation hassles worth it. The people who end up with this sort of punishment are mostly portrayed as Asshole Victims; why banditry is so common in the first place (inequality? frequent exiles? lords who can't be bothered to mobilize an army just yet?) isn't really discussed.