True! I was subconsciously counting that one since they are her immediate servants and reflect her authority, but that’s not how I worded it.

Good point about Frieda and her benefactor. I don’t remember, was he ever named?

I had the same thought after I wrote that and looked him up on the wiki: Lord Henrik. What’s even easier to forget? He is Damuel’s older brother. I remembered that Freida had a cameo when characters received blessings at the end of Part 2, but completely forgot Damuel was in the same building for it! asdfasdfgdfsg

It just goes to show you just how far Freida’s circumstances get swept under the rug. She’s the consort of Damuel’s brother, and we’re rarely ever given opportunities for it to register.

(Edit: Going by the wiki Henrik was born 12-13 years before Myne, and Freida was born 1 year before Myne. Freida was 6 when she met Myne and already promised to be the concubine of a low ranking laynoble who was 17-18. Yurgenschmidt eugenics continue to provide for the creepiest things that happen in the series.)

I am internally fighting with me because […]

You’ve pretty much encapsulated the dilemma. Most of us want the characters to be individually happy, but it feels off. We can visualize perspectives for Ferdinand and Myne that would help rationalize it, but we don’t have them. It needed more time.

You also made a good point there about characters needing some antagonistic traits.

People new to writing or RPing tend to unconsciously make characters without these traits by default, because why would you make your precious characters “flawed” on purpose?

At best, you end up with a flat and uninteresting character. At worst, you end up with one of two archetypes that should sound very familiar to fellow light novel readers:

• white knight protags who are always right and can do no wrong (and then everyone clapped)
• toxic and edgy protags who are assholes by default but are always justified in the author’s canon (i.e. walking back the antagonism)

I think it’s unfortunate that the friendship between Myne and Frieda (granddaughter of Merchant’s Guild guildmaster) didn’t pan out. I wonder what happened to her.

I suspect it was cut for the squick factor of her being, effectively, a child consort. The deeper Frieda’s involvement in the story, the more it would need to bring her benefactor to the front and center. Even after the timeskip, let’s be honest, none of the readers are going to like this guy because of how their relationship began.

Kazuki-san’s writing style tends to acknowledge the darker aspects of her world without fetishizing them the way her industry peers do, and I suspect she wrote herself into a bit of a corner with Frieda. She was intended to educate us about Devouring and how the commoner and middle classes are trapped between powerlessness and exploitation in matters adjacent to magic. Could something have been done to “save” her? Certainly, though she was not written as someone who was particularly looking to be saved. Was it narratively worth the chapter focus considering where the story was going and who Myne would be associating with? Probably not.

This makes a good segue into…

One of my least favorite points in the entire story was when the whole Rozemyne x Ferdinand thing started to crystalize. The thought alone made me feel icky. Myne was mentally always an adult and with her induced growth her body mirrored her mental age, but to Ferdinand, she is the little girl he was the guardian of.

This was one that many people were going to be uncomfortable with no matter what, and bringing Frieda’s circumstances back to the forefront would have risked entrenching the perception of unaddressed child exploitation even further. The only thing I can really offer in Ferdinand’s “defense” is that he was exposed to her older identity and appearance when he explored her memories, which could have anchored him into not seeing her as a child at all. (between that and her never acting like a “normal” person at all, let alone a normal child)

Myself, I’m kind of indifferent to it. He’s a compelling character and deserved a good ending, but the relationship needed a little more time on the cooker to smooth out the edges. A PoV flashback regarding how he saw and felt about her from the moment he explored her memories onward would have been beneficial, and I strongly feel that his reunion with her in the mana replenishment chamber was written with the intention of being revisited in a sidestory PoV that never manifested.