Ascendance Of A Bookworm / Tropes T to Z

Tropes for Ascendance of a Bookworm
Tropes A to G (Foreshadowing) | Tropes H to M | Tropes N to S | Tropes T to Z

• Talking Is a Free Action: Averted in various instances.
  • In Part 3 Volume 5, Rozemyne is attacked by an unknown assailant. When she tries to pray for Schutzaria's protection, the assailant kicks her in the stomach before she can finish chanting. In Part 4 Volume 7, it takes her two tries to use that same prayer because she gets interrupted the first time.
  • Effa's side chapter in Part 4 Volume 5 reveals she had to compete with equally ambitious cowokers to take part in the contest to secure Rozemyne's exclusivity, as only the best cloth from each workshop was going to make it to the eyes of nobles. Effa managed to secure the best piece of blank cloth already in the workshop because she went to grab it while all other interested coworkers were still reacting to the news of the contest being held and trying to find out more.
• 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.
• Taking You with Me: A couple of people furious at the way Ferdinand was treated by his Wicked Stepmother express that they would have liked to kill her themselves, even if it meant dying in the process.
• The Talk: Notably, Rozemyne never gets the talk. Neither Florencia nor Elvira tell Rozemyne how noble babies are made. Thus, Hirschur is baffled when Rozemyne apparently doesn't know the main purpose of the potion that dyes someone in the color of another. When Rozemyne keeps asking Hirschur questions, Hirschur asks Rozemyne to go to her mothers and have them explain it to her, at which point Rozemyne realizes that it's about sex education. And thus she finally understands why she got weird looks from the people around her, when she said she had already taken the potion before (with Ferdinand) and that she knows the experience of pouring mana into someone else (again with Ferdinand, but also with Hannelore). This gets Wilfried, her fiancé, flustered, because everyone initially assumes he's already having sex with Rozemyne.
• 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.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: It's tradition for the noble who serves another food to personally taste-test dishes for poison first (or let a servant do it). The paranoia is justified, as there are several cases in the story where someone's food ended up being poisoned.
  • Eglantine's entire family was poisoned. The poison likely had a delayed effect, as they died after Eglantine wished her family good night.
  • As the reader later learns, Eckhart and his wife, Heidemarie, were poisoned too. Eckhart likely survived because of his connection to Ferdinand and because he wasn't weakened by pregnancy unlike his wife Heidemarie, who died along with their unborn child.
• 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, who are first cousins. 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. It only gets more convoluted as the story progresses, as she landed directly in the archnoble strata, which has so few people that one is outbreeding if they are marrying a first cousin who is their cousin via only one parent. And then members of Rozemyne's generation start finding marriage partners. Also, it turns out that on the "birth" family side, there is a single person who is both her paternal great-grandfather and her maternal great-great-grandfather.
  • Inbreeding is common enough within the nobility for many noble houses to share blood ties. 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.
• Teacher/Student Romance: Supplemental material reveals that an archduke candidate from Dunkelfelger once seduced her archduke candidate teacher while still being a student at the Royal Academy with a Wallpin Of Love. Said person being Magdalena, King Trauerqual's third wife.
• Tears of Joy: After two years of trial and error, Myne cries when she finally makes her first book in Part 2 Volume 2.
• 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.
  • At the end of Part 2, Sylvester's archduke persona drops once he is alone with Ferdinand and Karstedt. Exhausted, he says he wishes to never "put any of [his] family on trial again". He has to do that in Part 3 Volume 5 after Wilfried admits that he entered the ivory tower where Veronica is imprisoned without Sylvester's permission.
  • A self-aware example in Part 3 Volume 1. A criminal noble refuses to talk, so Karstedt mentions in the prologue that someone will have to use the memory-reading magic tool later to interrogate the noble. He pities the poor soul who has similar colors to that archnoble and will have to synchronize minds with that guy, though Karstedt sure hopes it won't be him. Later when Karstedt returns to his home while Elvira is picking an outfit for Rozemyne, Rozemyne notices that Karstedt for some reason looks really tired.
  • In Part 4 Volume 1, Ferdinand mentions that Rozemyne shouldn't be able to interact much with Second Prince Anastasius, since it's his final year, so there's nothing to fear from getting involved with the royal family. Rozemyne immediately makes a bad impression on Anastasius by insulting him on their first greeting and getting Eglantine's attention. She then plays a major part in getting Anastasius and Eglantine together by composing a song for Anastasius that he dedicates to Eglantine, ordering a hairpin for Eglantine for their graduation ceremony, and advising Anastasius to practice his dancing and to be more honest with his feelings for Eglantine. Needless to say, Rozemyne's guardians are left speechless.
  • During ones of the discussions about name-swearing in Part 4 Volume 5, Brunhilde's guess of the number of name-sworn people (implicitly) in Ehrenfest as whole is that it can probably counted on the fingers of one hand. It turns out both Veronica and Georgine demand names, so the number is actually so big that the duchy can't afford to have all of them die.
  • During the tea party with music professors in Rozemyne's second year at the Royal Academy, one of the professors is seen hoping the succession of the current king will go on without much trouble with the only potential source of it that was being taken seriously having been taken care of the previous year. Another potential source of trouble gets brought and promptly dismissed during that very same tea party.
  • In Part 4 Volume 6, Rozemyne coincidentally meets Prince Hildebrand, who is to avoid the students as much as possible (as he is not enrolled in the Academy yet), in the library. She tells Hildebrand that she will go to the library every day from now on, as she finished all her classes already. Rozemyne's logic behind telling him this is that someone who wants to remain hidden would not go to the library again. The opposite is the case. Since Hildebrand has a crush on Rozemyne, he wants to go to the library every day to see her.
  • In Part 4 Volume 7, to not be mistaken for being from Dunkelfelger, Ferdinand wears a new Ehrenfest cape instead of his blue Dunkelfelger cape at the Interduchy Tournament. He notes that he doesn't feel as safe because the cape isn't weaved with protective magic embroidery, but it should still be fine. When the king's speech is interrupted by a terrorist attack, Ferdinand's back gets injured because his cape did not offer him any protection.
• Textile Work Is Feminine: Textile work is generally the kind of work left to women. For both commoners and nobles.
  • 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.
  • Noblewomen are also expected to embroider clothes, though they only do this for their significant other and their children usually. In the first half of Part 4, Rozemyne asks her female retainers to help her embroider Schwartz and Weiss' new protective clothes.
• 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 tells Myne's parents at the end of Part 1, 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.
  • Played straight in Part 5 Volume 2: Rozemyne's guardians tell her to avoid the Royal Academy library as much as possible to not draw unwanted suspicion, which is why Rozemyne refuses Hannelore and First Prince Sigiswald's request to translate the ancient texts they have found. Anastasius then orders Rozemyne to come help them, which she happily accepts, to the dismay of her retainers that accompany her.
• This Is a Work of Fiction: 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."
• 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.
  • In Part 5 Volume 7, Rozemyne enters the Garden of Beginning, where she is forcibly aged up by Erwarmen and Anwachs the God of Nurture. After doing so, Erwarmen gives her the Book of Mestionora (which also takes a long time) and then makes her leave the garden. When Rozemyne returns, several weeks have passed and it's almost spring. She has missed almost her entire fourth year at the Royal Academy.
• 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.
• Too Important to Remember You: This gets played with in Part 4 Volume 9. An inverted Disguised Hostage Gambit in which hostile Devouring soldiers disguise themselves as kidnapped gray priests and fake getting taken hostage fails because Damuel knows the face of every single orphan from the temple. Because of this, he immediately sees through the fact that the "hotages" are wearing gray priest robes and notices that they are actually complete stangers. The nobles controlling the Devouring soldiers are assumed to have ordered them to use that trick because they didn't expect Rozemyne or any of her noble retainers to be able to tell one gray priest from another.
• 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.
• Too Proud for Lowly Work: Rozemyne decides that Royal Academy students who want to learn her mana compression method must pay for the class with money they have earned themselves after an archnoble makes the mistake of disparaging the kind of work his Impoverished Patrician classmates need to do be able to afford it.
• 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.
• A Tragedy of Impulsiveness:
  • In Part 3, the entire Hasse plotline and Ingo temporarily getting in a very awkward gray area when it comes to his status as Rozemyne's exclusive carpenter happen because Rozemyne's noble guardians decide that right after drawing the blueprint over lunch is a good time to start building the monastery. Failure to put the locals in the loop beforehand keeps said locals from realizing that their eventual attack on the building is a treason against the archducal family grade crime. Ingo not being notified of the work before the carpentry guild starts distributing it among all workshops in the capital, meanwhile, gives the carpentry guild the idea that Rozemyne silently dropped Ingo as an exclusive, all while Ingo is still being treated as Rozemyne's exclusive by people outside of the carpentry guild who know she actually didn't.
  • In Part 4 Volume 6, the danger from the ternisbefallen, a feybeast with an Energy Absorption trait, would not have escalated if Traugott had analyzed the situation or listened to Matthias. Instead, he went for an all-out attack without having his sword blessed by the God of Darkness, which leads to the feybeast growing larger and more ferocious.
  • As Rozemyne learns in Part 5 Volume 2, the royal family is absolutely clueless about the hidden library, which may lead to more hints about reobtaining Grutrissheit. This could have been avoided if the royal family hadn't executed the archnoble librarians at the Royal Academy just because they were related to the losers of the civil war. A side chapter from Solange's view also reveals that she in vain tried to inform the royal family for several years.
• Tragically Misguided Favor: The natives of the Dunkelfelger duchy are a recurring cause for this trope:
  • In the backstory, Ferdinand's Royal Academy friend from Dunkelfelger, Heisshitze, tried to get him married into the duchy to save him from his Wicked Stepmother. Heisshitze didn't think of asking the would-bride if she was on board with the idea before he suggested the idea to her father. As a result, she went on to make a move toward becoming the third wife of the man she loved, the current king.
  • Lestilaut, the oldest archduke candidate from Dunkelfelger attending the Royal Academy at the same time as Rozemyne, manages to do this towards two different people when it comes to Schwartz and Weiss, the two magical automatons Rozemyne accidentally reactivated, becoming their master in the process. His personal reason for trying to take them from her is that his younger sister randomly expressed interest in them. His public reason is that the automatons technically belong to royalty, making it easy to frame taking them from Rozemyne as taking back stolen royal property. He ropes other duchies in his plan without consulting his younger sister or the royals. When the prince attending the academy does get involved, it turns out that the royals can't spare the mana necessary to supply the automatons anyway, so they have no problem having another supplier for them as long as they are properly taken care of.
  • In late Part 4, Heisshitze wants to make up for not having been able to help Ferdinand back when they were at the Royal Academy by roping Dunkelfelger and another greater duchy into supporting Ferdinand getting married into Ahrensbach. This time, Ferdinand is the one with whom he forgets to double check. By that point, several elements Heisshitze is unaware of have made Ferdinand's life in Ehrenfest significantly better and the change supported by Heisshitze a downgrade, making the whole situation an Unwanted Rescue.
  • In early Part 5, a Dunkelfelger noble who got engaged to someone from Ehrenfest to be able serve Rozemyne decides to move to Ehrenfest early on a whim after hearing that the sooner she does so, the better for Rozemyne. Rozemyne is a Triple Shifter and anyone who works for her tends to become one by osmosis, including the aforementioned Dunkelfelger noble's betrothed. Between that and the preparation that is expected for just about any aspect of noble life, the sudden early move creates at least as many problems as it solves. During that specific incident, Rozemyne wonders out loud if Dunkelfelger has a law mandating any act of kindness to be bothersome in some way.
• 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 Delicate and Sickly, even this much is a major undertaking.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • At the end of Part 1, Myne gets very angry at the High Bishop, who openly threatens Myne's parents and wants them arrested and executed. She unleashes an oppressive Killing Intent aura while speaking with an eerily calm voice.
  • In Part 5 Volume 7, Ferdinand is worried sick that Rozemyne apparently is "bedridden" and has not sent any gifts or letters to him or Leticia for weeks. After the Interduchy Tournament, Ferdinand decides to enter the Garden of Beginning to get the other 70% of Grutrissheit he didn't take last time, but notices that he cannot enter. He realizes where Rozemyne has been the whole time. Eckhart gets scared of how cold and furious Ferdinand sounds and internally wants to know just what his little sister has done to make Ferdinand so angry.
• 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.
  • Also at the end of Part 2, 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.
  • In Part 4 Volume 9, the blue priest Egmont is tricked into signing a submission contract. He thought he signed a magic contract that promises to make him High Bishop once Rozemyne was eliminated. He was also given a submission ring with which his new master, Viscount Gerlach, could detonate him at any time, but Ferdinand cuts off Egmont's arm before it can happen.
  • In Part 5 Volume 2, Lestilaut makes Wilfried sign a contract that concludes the terms for the bride-stealing ditter. Wilfried is later accused of breaking his word by Dunkelfelger, as he refuses to take Hannelore as his second wife after Ehrenfest won the ditter match. However, he never thought he signed a contract in the first place because Lestilaut used Ehrenfest's plant paper and official contracts are signed on parchment.
• 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.
• Underestimating Badassery:
  • A constant theme in the series is that High Priest Ferdinand keeps miscalculating Myne's mana capacities.
    • In Part 1, he assumes that Myne has some mana (roughly laynoble level), which is why he wants her to join the temple. He is shocked when he sees that Myne can Crush the High Bishop and later asks her how she has managed to survive so far.
    • After Myne's inauguration as an apprentice blue shrine maiden at the start of Part 2, Ferdinand tries to measure Myne's mana and makes her donate mana to Schutzaria's shield. Seeing that the feystones on the shield absorb her mana, she excitedly starts decompressing her mana, but quickly pulls her hand back and compresses her mana again in fear of breaking the shield. Ferdinand sees that she filled seven feystones and begins with Myne's noble education. It's implied that his original plan was for Myne to become Eckhart's concubine, which means that he guessed Myne must have been on a high mednoble or archnoble level in terms of mana. At the end of Part 2 Volume 2, after using Flutrane's staff to restore the lands that were destroyed by a trombe, all while having been told to show people watching just how much mana she has, he realizes that Myne isn't just on a level with archnobles, at only seven years of age, she has more mana than Ehrenfest's archduke, which forces him to change his plans for Myne.
    • At the end of Part 3, Rozemyne is put in a jureve to heal her body. In that time, Ferdinand has to regularly use feystones to absorb the mana in the jureve bath that is leaking out of her body. Only then does he realize that Rozemyne has compressed far more mana than he thought. Even in her sleep, Rozemyne has provided enough mana for the Dedication Ritual and Spring Prayer to proceed without any issue. For nearly two years.
  • With the man who is both Myne's main magic-savvy caretaker and an intellectual prodigy underestimating her mana level several times over, it's little wonder that she keeps running into other people who make that same mistake.
    • It's implied that Shikza thought he could gouge her eyes out consequence-free because he had no idea that her mana was high enough for her bodily fluids to cause another trombe to grow just from getting on the ground.
    • In the climax of Part 2, an attempt to subdue Myne that is reliant on her not having more than a certain quantity of mana fails because the person behind it had prepared for much less mana than what she actually has.
• Unkempt Beauty: Played with. The women in Myne's family have naturally good looks, but that can only get you so far 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.
• Unwanted Rescue:
  • In Part 4 Volume 8, Aub Ahrensbach's wish to betroth Ferdinand to his daughter Detlinde is supported by several other duchies like Drewanchel and Dunkelfelger. Especially Dunkelfelger thought they are helping Ferdinand, as ten years earlier they remember that Ferdinand felt so miserable about his life in a backwater duchy like Ehrenfest (back when Veronica was still in power and made his life a living hell) that he almost was married to Magdalena, an archduke candidate from Dunkelfelger, just to escape Ehrenfest. And after Ferdinand graduated, he immediately was forced to join the dreaded temple where he still resides. They are not aware that one, Ehrenfest and Ahrensbach have an ongoing conflict (add to that that Detlinde looks almost exactly like Ferdinand's hated Wicked Stepmother), and two, Ferdinand's life isn't miserable anymore. His stepmother is locked away, he is part of the archducal family again, and the temple has become a place where he can relax. Ferdinand doesn't actually want to leave Ehrenfest.
  • In Part 5 Volume 2, Lestilaut tricks Wilfried and Rozemyne into accepting a bride-stealing ditter, with Rozemyne and Hannelore as the brides to be stolen. In Lestilaut's opinion, Rozemyne's talents are wasted in Ehrenfest, and since she has no desire to become aub and would rather be another aub's first wife, he suggests to marry him instead and become Dunkelfelger's archduchess. The whole idea of a bride-stealing ditter is to save a woman who wants to leave. Rozemyne doesn't want to leave Ehrenfest at all.
• Uptown Girl:
  • Myne's version of Cinderella is kind of this. In her version, Cinderella is a rich commoner instead of a noble, who gets to marry a prince, although the rich background was added to give Cinderella a higher status. The prince isn't actually poor, and it's not the reason they marry, so it isn't Nobility Marries Money.
  • Subverted. The relationship between Rozemyne's guard knights, Damuel and Brigitte, shows how difficult it actually is to overcome status differences to marry. Love and sufficient mana is not enough.
• 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.
• Useless Bystander Parent: It's sadly common for a nobleman to not do much to intervene when one of his wives harasses the children of another wife or a concubine, which usually takes the form of him remaining neutral or even apathetic towards his children's predicament. This includes cases where the children's mother is unable to offer any sort of protection to them, be it because she has passed away or the other woman outranks her. Such behavior has been shown with Ferdinand's and Philine's respective fathers. Situations like that of Sister Christine where her father did as much as he could to protect her from his first wife's harassment seem much rarer.
• 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.
  • Nobles can use a water spell called waschen ^note German for "to wash" to clean their tools or clothes, as is demonstrated in Part 3. In Part 4, Ferdinand performs a city-wide cleansing of the lower city at Rozemyne's suggestion, after Sylvester already slightly restructured the city.
• Variant Chess: In Part 2 Volume 3, Myne wants to introduce board games like reversi and chess to Ferdinand and Karstedt. While they are fascinated by reversi, Karstedt notes that chess seems to be similar to the noble board game "gewinnen" ^note German word for "to win". It uses mana and can be utilized as a playful way to teach aspiring knights military tactics.
• Vicious Vac: Played for Laughs in Part 4 Volume 6. Lieseleta owns a vacuum cleaner magic tool, which she uses in Hirschur's Trash of the Titans research room, since the room is too dirty to properly welcome Rozemyne.
• Violence Is Disturbing: While there are times when violence is portrayed in a glorious way (such as against feybeasts or in the ditter games), when things are serious, they are often portrayed as disturbing. Myne abhors blood and the loss of life.
  • In Part 1 Volume 1, Myne accompanies her family to a town on pig killing day. As the day of the name indicates, she sees her father and other people drag a pig out, kill and eviscerate it. The sight makes her faint.
  • In Part 2 Volume 2, Myne's own guard knight pulls a Bodyguard Betrayal on her. He hurts her with his knife which causes a trombe to emerge and wrap Myne in its branches.
  • In Part 2 Volume 4, Myne and Tuuli are getting kidnapped by Devouring soldiers. Gunther and Damuel kill them and Myne flees to the temple. There she is attacked by High Bishop Bezewanst, Count Bindewald and more Devouring soldiers. Damuel and Fran get heavily injured and the former loses consciousness, Gunther's arm gets burned while shielding Myne from a deadly attack, and Ferdinand later pulverizes anyone who is not protected by magic to dust.
  • In Part 3 Volume 3, the mayor of Hasse and his faction are executed by Ferdinand. They turn to stone and their screams are so cruel (while Rozemyne is Forced to Watch) that Rozemyne feels sick and immediately wants to sleep. She can sleep soundly because she wraps herself in Gunther's cloak.
  • In Part 3 Volume 5, Rozemyne and Charlotte get kidnapped. Rozemyne is kicked in her stomach by an unknown assailant after her highbeast was dragged down from the air, then is forced to drink a potion that paralyzes her body. Meanwhile, Bonifatius fights off the Devouring soldiers who blow up to bits after he punched them or after their master simply needed a distraction.
  • In Part 4 Volume 7, the Interduchy Tournament is interrupted by terrorists who unleash dangerous feybeasts and attack the royal family. They are cut down, but Ferdinand shields Charlotte and Rozemyne from the view and spares them the bloody scene.
  • In Part 4 Volume 9, Rozemyne and Ferdinand break into Brother Egmont's room, where they notice that he is wearing a submission ring. Before Egmont's master can blow up Egmont, Ferdinand swiftly cuts off Egmont's arm. Before he cut it off, Rozemyne was spared from seeing it.
  • Also in Part 4 Volume 9, after reading Egmont's memories, Ferdinand and Rozemyne go to Viscount Dahldolf's estate in the Noble's Quarter. Before they can interrogate Viscountess Dahldolf, she blows herself up along with her attendants to not let them read her memory. Rozemyne notes that the "bloody carnival" she once wanted was much gorier than she expected and the sight of blood almost makes her want to vomit.
  • In Part 5 Volume 7, Leticia is compelled to poison Ferdinand and almost kills him. When she leaves the mana supply room, Leonzio uses the same poison on Leticia's retainers, instantly killing almost all of them. Leticia suffers a trauma from this.
  • In Part 5 Volume 8, Rozemyne and Hannelore participate in the Battle of Gerlach. While trying to break through the enemy's line and get to the defending Ehrenfest knights, she is shielded by Dunkelfelger knights, but she can still see the cut limbs, blood, and feystones flying everywhere. Especially the sight of people she just healed instantly getting killed by Grausam and turning to feystones leads to longlasting PTSD (she can't look at feystones anymore) from which she only temporarily recovers because she suffers from partial amnesia. Hannelore suffers similar nightmares, though talking and mourning the dead with Rozemyne helps her.
• 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 gray 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.
• Wall Pin of Love: There is a tradition in Dunkelfelger, where a woman can demand a marriage proposal from a man she can physically overwhelm.
  • As shown in the Year 1 Side Story Collection, this is what Clarissa does with Hartmut. She brings him down to the floor with a surprise attack and holds him at knifepoint. Shortly after Clarissa gives him a Forceful Kiss and sends her mana to him through her lips to see how compatible they are. She then asks Hartmut to propose to her (so she could serve Rozemyne), which he eventually does after she proves her usefulness to Rozemyne. By the way, she didn't try it on Cornelius because one, he wasn't interested (he already has a girlfriend), and two, he is probably stronger than her.
  • This is what Magdalena did with the fifth prince who later became zent.
  • In the spinoff after the end of the original series, Hannelore tries to get Wilfried to propose to her multiple times by using the Dunkelfelger method.
• War Is Hell:
  • Eglantine wasn't even baptized when she witnessed her family and servants dying in front of her. She barely survived. This is why she wants to avoid conflict as much as possible and does not wish to incite another war.
  • In Part 5 Volume 9, in the night after the victory banquet, Rozemyne suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. While she didn't see everything, the war scenes during the defense of Gerlach, with cut limbs and blood flying everywhere, and friend and foe alike turning into feystones, causes her nightmares and she can't sleep. Just seeing a feystone makes Rozemyne nervous and sweat profusely. Judithe informs her that this happens often with knights who go through war, and especially younger people struggle with this. Judithe has heard that after a battle, some knights "go watch flowers", so she asks Rozemyne to go with her to the greenhouse and have a tea party (no one had the heart to tell Judithe that "watching flowers" refers to Sex for Solace or Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex). They ask Hannelore to come along, as she also suffers from PTSD, and since both are archduke candidates, they have no one else to talk to.
• Water Guns and Balloons:
  • Taue fruits tend to be be so water-gorged when summer arrives that they basically work as natural water balloons. They are popular to throw at newlyweds in the lower city, as all marriages are held during the same yearly summer festival.
  • In Part 4 Volume 6, Rozemyne accidentally invents a water gun form for her schtappe. Instead of water, she can shoot mana with it, and the weapon becomes deadly when she imagines a rain of arrows like the one Ferdinand used back in Part 2 Volume 2.
• Weather Manipulation:
  • In Part 4 Volume 4, during Rozemyne's visit to Haldenzel for Spring Prayer, she witnesses a ritual where the men pray to the gods for spring to arrive. Based on what she read in the bible, she suggests letting the women do the ritual, too, and when she, Elvira and the other Haldenzel noblewomen perform the ritual, a large magic circle appears that absorbs their mana. On the next day, the snow that was still lying around has melted and it seems like it's summer in Haldenzel.
  • In Part 5 Volume 8, Rozemyne reverses the magic circle for bringing an early summer and instead temporarily brings an early winter to Ahrensbach, so that her retainers are able to use Ewigeliebe's sword and stop the Lanzenave ships that are trying to escape.
• 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:
  • The end of Part 1 Volume 3 has the development that allows the story to continue past Part 1 and the first season of the anime. At a point where she's resigned to die once the few months bought by one of Freida's backup magic tools run out, Myne attends her baptism and enters the temple for the occasion. Once there, a series of incidents makes her discover that the place has both books and magic tools. The temple currently has a shortage of both money and people to provide the magic tools with mana, both of which are things Myne can help with and use as leverage to enter the temple on the same terms as a child of the nobility.
  • Part 2 Volume 4 and the end of Season 3 have the High Bishop making his move on Myne, forcing Ferdinand and Ehrenfest's archduke to accelerate their plans, meaning Myne has to be adopted into nobility immediately and separated from her commoner 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, which makes her wake up old enough to attend the Royal Academy.
  • The one that ends Part 4 is such a shift in the status quo that it goes all the way from Volume 7 to Volume 9:
    • Volume 7: Rozemyne turns out to meet some requirements to be Yurgenschmidt's Zent that are not met by the current king. She finds this out via Ferdinand, who seems to meet the very same requirements and tells her to ignore the whole thing. Not that much later, the king gets attacked by terrorists who consider him an illegitimate king because of the requirements he's publicly known to not meet. Just the next day, Rozemyne's potential to be Zent allows her to notice that a stage in the Royal Academy is involved in the requirements. Then it turns out that the royal family doesn't know of the secret archive that it's rumored to have, despite documents from the Royal Academy library indicating there being a kernel of truth. The Sovereignty's Kight Commander is next shown to have unclear reasons to think that Ferdinand might know something about the supposed royals-only archive.
    • Volume 8: Ferdinand gets engaged to Detlinde, meaning that he'll move to Ahrensbach before the year rolls around. Anything that absolutely needs to be taken care of before his departure cannot be delayed any further, including the second jureve treatment intended to make up for the fact that Rozemyne's first one didn't completely get rid of the reason for her bad health. Hartmut, the number one Rozemyne fanboy, volunteers to take over the High Priest job. The reason Ferdinand lets the whole situation happen turns out to be because he's a self-aware Hidden Backup Prince that the previous Aub Ehrenfest passed off as his bastard son for unknown reasons and the only options he had to prove he wasn't a threat to the recently-attacked current king were to accept the marriage or overthrow Sylvester.
    • Volume 9: Aub Ahrensbach turns out to be even closer to dying than originally thought, causing Ferdinand's departure to be advanced an entire season. To motivate Rozemyne to not let herself be taken away from Ehrenfest, he gives her his estate to start a library in. A purge of Georgine's adult allies happens just as Rozemyne's third Royal Academy term starts, leaving a bunch of abandonnned children and orphans of all age groups behind. Those within the "old enough to attend the academy" group may still risk execution unless they give their names to members of the archducal family.
  • Part 5:
    • Volume 7: Rozemyne obtains the Grutrissheit after the gods intervene to grow her body to suit her chronological age. In the process, she learns that the gods are desperate for a new proper Zent because the country-level foundation hasn't been supplied in a very long time. Her copy of the Grutrissheit is however incomplete because the gods got her mixed up with someone who got very partial copy several years ago, who turns out to be Ferdinand. The new knowledge makes Rozemyne aware of a glaring flaw in the security of all duchy foundations that Georgine is likely to have discovered independently and to be planning to exploit in her future attack on Ehrenfest. Just as plans to counter the flaw are being finalized, Rozemyne gets a vision of Ferdinand being left for dead by the Ahrensbach archducal family as they prepare for their attack and needs to make plans fast if she wants to save him.
    • Volume 8: Rozemyne manages to rescue Ferdinand with a plan that includes temporarily technically making herself Aub Ahrensbach to enter a room only accessible to the duchy's archducal family. During an opportunity to have a private conversation with Ferdinand, it gets spelled out that both their engagements might as well be cancelled, returning to Ehrenfest is a realistic long-term option for neither of them and neither of them wants to rule the entire country. A larger duchy might be nice however, and Ahrensbach is right here, provided Rozemyne decides to commit to its ownership.
• Wham Line:
  • In both the light novel and the anime, the first time Benno mentions his plan to adopt Lutz comes out of the left field.
  • 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.
  • The Ehrenfest archduke's announcements after the Archduke Conference from Part 4 Volume 4 are all somewhat expected things, until it turns out that Ahrensbach has been making its own moves. One of those moves forces Ehrenfest into a variation of an arrangement that was refused several volumes ago :
    Archduke: At the insistence of Ahrensbach, two more marriages have been settled. Lamprecht and Freuden will each be bringing their brides to Ehrenfest.
  • A plan to search the High Bishop's bible for information causes Rozemyne to stumble upon magical instructions on how to become Zent, a title that is consisdered practically the same thing as being the king. When she shares her discovery with Ferdinand, the reason she must not share it with anyone else establishes a far-reaching component of the plot:
    Ferdinand: The current king has not fulfilled the qualifications to be the Zent.
  • The prologue for Part 4 Volume 9, which is incidentally the Part's last volume, has a few:
    • Ferdinand spells out that he might not return from his marriage in Ahrensbach alive.
    • Florencia's internal narration, while making plans, notes that something is a bad idea because of an upcoming purge that neither Rozemyne nor recent alternate point of view characters know about.
  • During a discussion in which Rozemyne has just spelled out to Aub Ehrenfest that he'll need to take a second wife to resolve an ongoing political crisis, one of the single female nobles, who is present in the room as part of her regular job, drops the following line, right after making sure Aub Ehrenfest remembers who she is:
    Brunhilde: Will you grant me the position of your second wife, Aub Ehrenfest?
  • Part 5 Volume 6 has a few, thanks to setting the stage for the Wham Episode that is the following volumes:
    • During a series of events that causes a lot of of characters to display the true extent of their affection or loyalty towards Rozemyne, sometimes during one-on-one conversations, a couple archnobles from her close circle independently say something relating to one of the most closely guarded secrets of her noble life:
    Elvira: This will prove crucial if you wish to keep your true family safe, you know.
    Harmut: I already know that you are a former commoner, that Gunther is your father, and that you have known Benno since before joining the temple.
    • Benno, while talking to Lutz a few chapters after Tuuli is established to be right around the typical lower city engagement age:
    Benno: I mean, why else would [your parents] have let a runt like you get engaged prior to coming of age?
    • The story of the foundation of Lanzenave, of all things, reveals something about a certain item:
    Leonzio: As your King Aeussewhal grew old and it came time to choose the next Zent, there were three candidates who had obtained Grutrissheits. [later] The Grutrissheit can be duplicated with one's schtappe, no?
• 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.
  • A mild case in Part 4 Volume 2. While discussing Traugott's dismissal from Rozemyne's service, Hartmut reveals that Traugott intended to quit as soon as he learned Rozemyne's mana compression method. After Traugott willingly resigns, Rozemyne calls Hartmut out for withholding information from her. She doesn't care where and how he gets the information, but she wants him to report anything he finds to her first.
  • Elvira indirectly calls out Karstedt for not protecting her enough from Veronica and her faction. During a family meeting, she lectures Lamprecht that it's a man's duty to protect his wife (which Karstedt did not do). Instead, he married Veronica's attendant and another mednoble from her faction, who he clearly liked more than Elvira, leaving the mother of his three children alone.
• Wild Card Excuse: Every time Rozemyne is doing something abnormally, people state it's because she was raised in the temple. Since most nobles never visit the temple, they have no idea that Rozemyne is simply abnormal, since she is not only commoner-born, she has memories of a different life in another world. A side story in Part 5 shows that the narrator of that chapter isn't buying that excuse at all. He has interacted with priests before, and none of them act like her.
• 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...: Freida, 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.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: One thing that Rozemyne tries to teach nobles is that the lives of the commoners aren't easily expendable. She puts several safety measures in place that ensure her Gutenberg members aren't getting abused by the nobility, and in Part 4 Volume 5 tells Brunhilde that unlike Illgner or Haldenzel, House Groschel does not interact with and protect the people of the lands they were given.
• Wizarding School: One of the functions of the Royal Academy is to teach noble children how to use magic.
• World of Technicolor Hair: The very first hint Myne gets that she has reincarnated in a fantasy world is that her mother and sister's hair is naturally green, while her own and her father's is dark blue. The first female friend she makes has bright pink hair and her internal monologue has her admit to liking to spend time around Lutz in part because his hair is a shade of blond that would have been plausible back in her previous life on Earth.
• 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.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • After Ehrenfest wins a treasure-stealing ditter match in Part 4 Volume 2, Rozemyne humbly acknowledges that the coordination and reaction to unexpected events of Dunkelfelger's knights are praiseworthy and far better than Ehrenfest's ones. Dunkelfelger on the other hand feel proud to receive praise from someone of her status and praise her brilliant tactics that led to their victory. Professor Rauffen is also very impressed as Rozemyne reminds him of Ferdinand, a ruthless Combat Pragmatist. He wants a rematch sometime later and from this day on starts viewing Ehrenfest as serious contenders again.
  • Ferdinand is one of the most respected Ehrenfest nobles in Dunkelfelger, as he has never lost a ditter match against them. His rivalry and friendship with Heisshitze is well-known.
• Yank the Dog's Chain:
  • In the beginning of the series, every time Myne seems to be making progress towards her goal, something will prevent her from achieving it. It takes too long to make papyrus, her clay tablets are destroyed by other kids or the weather, she can't heat clay tablets evenly enough, and both kinds of wood tablets she tries making are casually burned by her mother as firewood, who doesn't understand that they were important to her daughter.
  • Starting in Part 4, Rozemyne somehow is always denied more reading time in the library at the Royal Academy.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: The shrines to the gods in the Royal Academy work like this. Merely touching their closed doors while fulfilling other criteria is enough to get inside them. After this, it's possible for someone to spend a suprising amount of time inside a shrine and get back outside without anyone waiting there ever noticing that they were ever physically gone from the spot from which they touched the door.
• 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 Didn't See That: Rozemyne is in such a situation starting Part 4 Volume 7, as Ferdinand tells her to act as if she didn't see the magical instructions to become Zent in the High Bishop's bible. This includes completely ignoring the fact that she can also see a magic circle identical to the one that appears alongside the instructions on the Royal's Academy's Dedication Whirl stage during the graduation's performance of the Whirl.
• You Taught Me That: Benno asks Myne to make some of the hairpins she designed before winter starts, when they were originally meant to be work she would be doing during winter. Myne accepts, but asks to be paid extra. She then points out that Benno is the one who drilled into her head the idea that she should seize any opportunity to make more money.

---