Lol, just shooting randomly and Ryuu likes that.
With the manga adding its own bits, and the anime getting a different ending for volume 1. I honestly don't know where the story is heading for the manga.
Anime was good, but ending bits were funny to see (not funny themselves). They were following the novels till like episode 8/9 then went "we won't finish volume 1 by 12, fuck it. All original from here."
Thanks for the TL
the Anime, and Manga, have the same problem in that if the author is making edits, they apparently want Alicia to be sympathetic, which is absolutely impossible with Book 4, while also ignoring that Eleanora's elemental affinity also is Light.
they were mostly truncating scenes, they welded "Mommy Yumellia's Dungeoneering 101" with "Yumellia gets a sword" (which tbf, Fair. those chapters are directly adjacent) and completely ruined the ending so they cant have S2 even though what actually makes VL99 good is not the book 1 material which is, and lets be perfectly fair here, a funny but trash straight take on the Villainess Otome genre.
like, my personal interpretation of this story from reading the LNs is that Yumellia and Edgelord/Chuunigirl are NOT the same person even though Yumellia thinks she is Edgelord. They share memories, in that Edgelord is manipulating Yumellia for her own entertainment, but there are moments where Yumellia isnt the abuse-victim jock she normally is and instead acts as a modern normal person in a given situation, while her thoughts are almost entirely defined by arbitrary nonsequitors that are intentionally intended to derail Yumellia, but when the main plot of book 4 starts for Yumellia, those nonsequitors stop, entirely. Almost as though Edgelord is pulling a Tsundere Villainess and watching Yumellia from a couch and doing running commentary, with Edgelord getting her second moment of Hands-On weve seen from the series with Piercy.
The anime ends with Volume 1, and there's at least 4 more volumes of stuff to go through. Alicia's anime personality would only clash with one or two plot threads. The author has mentioned that they like the anime's take on Alicia so I don't think "ruined" or "[doing] better justice of the source material" is accurate.
Regardless, it was a lot of fun seeing Patrick's PoV this chapter with a lot of good panels. Thanks for the translation!
Book 2, 4, and 5 all integrally need the prince "disgraced", and the other 2 love interests imprisoned along with Alicia. Book 3 has to deal with why Edgelord is living in Yumellia's head. Alicia could be nicer to Not-Yumellia, but her dislike of Yumellia has to be founded in some principle that doesnt conflict with a trait she shares with Eleanora, something both the manga and anime do.
That would be WN Alicia, not LN Alicia. LN Alicia doesnt randomly become a villainess, Yumellia traumatizes her to a degree bordering on mindrape because of being too used to the Dolkness Deathpits and not explaining the dangers properly. She also DOES ask Yumellia for help with magic going into the Martial Arts Tournament. Shes not a good character, but you certainly get whats happening in the book. the Anime introduces some bullshit handwavium explanation instead.
Alot of that has to do with a consistent problem with the writing itself. Yumellia is the only character who gets a ton of PoV work in the story, and the Narrator is also the archvillain of the story so why would she have any intention of giving an unbiased perspective. Edgelord thrives on sowing disinformation and miscommunication.
keeping the racism and giving Alicia more of a personality is fine, the rewrites damage the plot going forward though because the prince needs to be out of the picture.
Volumes 2 and 3 were hard to get through, but it got good again in volume 4 in my opinion. What happened in volume 4? Yumiella spent most of the novel out of contact with Patrick, and her intelligence returned.
In volume 5, Yumiella even makes a comment in her internal monologue at one point that "I've been hearing people in certain circles claiming my intelligence and maturity were dropping" which had never been said previously in the story, so I suspect it was a direct shout out to the fans who were complaining about that.
Yumellia behaves like she has, as you would expect from her upbringing, as having ADHD and PTSD with maybe some OCD on top of it. shes clearly coming apart from lack of any focus and its progressively getting worse as she has idle time during books 2 and 3. I havent read book 5 yet so i dont know how it continues there.
