I just finished Ascendance of a Bookworm.

I felt kind of unsatisfied by the ending. Not that it doesn’t end up going in a nice direction, but that’s what it was: A direction with no endpoint. Much of the final book felt like just another book in the series with all the usual kinds of developments, conversations, etc, just maybe with a bit more recap. It would have been a fine book if it wasn’t the last one. Sure Myne has kind of gotten what she wanted, but it’s far from a done deal. We could follow the politics of how she deals with being a new aub in a previously hostile duchy. We could see how she expands printing from here. Etc. The story could basically continue as it was minus the countrywide politics plot.

As it was, it actually took me a really long time to finish this last book because I wasn’t that engaged between all the recap (which honestly the series did too much of in general) and the knowledge that none of this was really going anywhere.

Also, you’d think the epilogue where she gets to re-unite with her family would be emotional, but… idk… it just didn’t really provoke much emotion from me in the way that I felt when she was separated in the first place, or when she was remembering her life in her old world that she couldn’t return to. I think part of the problem is that the family really fully left Myne’s life, but they did kind of disappear from the reader’s perspective. They haven’t been relevant for so long that when Ferdinand asked Myne if she wanted to go back to being a commoner I didn’t doubt for a second that she would stay on her current path. It’s kind of just how stories work.

Still a bit sad that it’s over just because I don’t have anything to look forward to now. This was the first time I went to read the source material after watching an anime I liked. I haven’t felt that compelled to go check out another, or at least my trouble making decisions has prevented me from starting any others I might be interested in.

The Devil is a Part-Timer: Apart from unresolved plot lines and feeling extremely rushed I’m mostly unhappy with whom Maou ended up in the end. I’m not hating on that character like many others I’ve seen in online discussions about the ending, but she was clearly only swapped in at the end and didn’t get as much character development during the run of the series as the other ship. It felt like she only “won” in the end so that it was less predictable.

META: Super happy that Myne did her thing and created the post. If everything works she should not make repeats of any given topic in the coming weeks and I can add topics to the pool from everywhere.

So I’m a spider so what?

The ending was rushed resulting in uncharacteristic actions by the MC and other people. Then it has a chapter listing 2 sentences of what happened to each person. It would have been much better to use the chapter to expand the ending a bit.