YMMV / The Mystic Archives of Dantalian

• Awesome Music: The opening for the anime is a great example.
• Complete Monster: Paula Dickinson, from the anime's "Book of Soul Exchange", stood out for her truly horrible crimes. An obsessive fan of "Crown of the Dog Days", she stalked the author Leni Lentz and assaulted and harassed many of his friends and family. When she found out the ending to Leni's final book in the trilogy, out of rage and spite she took Leni and her lover hostage and tried to force him to redo the ending. When Leni remade it, Paula wasn't satisfied, killing him and then subjecting him and his lover to a cycle of life and death through her Mystic Tome, which involves reviving and brutally killing them over and over again in front of each other. When Huey and Dalian start to uncover her crimes through Leni's message of help, Paula decides to take the two prisoner and brutally tortures the couple again to "discipline" them.
• Fandom Rivalry: One sparked between this series and Gosick after the former's anime started airing two weeks after the last episode of the latter. Comparisons were made about which series was more enjoyable (as both light novels and anime adaptations) and which main heroine was better between Victorique and Dalian.
• Friendly Fandoms: That said, some fans enjoy both for filling in the "goth loli mystery" niche.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Some of the Phantom Books are actual literary works.
  • In Episode 12, the Phantom Book that was written by a famous but unspecified assassin morphs into the gun that John Wilkes Booth used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
• Les Yay: In the first part of Episode 8, Dalian fawns over a teddy bear and Camilla negotiates with a collector in order to obtain it, giving him a Mystical Tome in exchange. Camilla explains to Huey that she doesn't mind losing the power to get anything she wants because she now has what she always wanted, and looks fondly at Dalian, happy with her new teddy bear.
• Tear Jerker: The end of Episode 12, but in a good way. Also doubles as a Heartwarming Moment.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some fans of Dalian's outfit in the light novel were not happy with her different look in the anime.

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