Mariela has lived an isolated existence for most of her life so when monsters come stampeding out of the nearby forest in a rage, the kind of rage that won’t be quieted until every single magic user is dead, she’s prepared to hide with a magic circle that’ll put her into suspended animation until the danger is past. But with one, critical error Mariela is under for far longer than she expected and it’s now been 200 years! With no acquaintances or connections left Mariela isn’t quite sure how to go about re-building her life, but with her newly purchased slave Siegmund and the fact that she is literally the only alchemist left in this wild area it looks like something will work out.
The Manga:
Like with Woof Woof Story, I had both the original light novel and manga adaptation available to review and I chose to read both the first volume of the manga adaptation and the first volume of the light novel back to back in order to see if I preferred one over the other. Unlike Woof Woof Story, I chose to read the manga adaptation first this time, and honestly I didn’t end up really preferring one version over another.
The first light novel is unusually thick at around 350 pages. Most light novels are closer to 200, so the manga obviously doesn’t cover the same amount of ground but it still works as a good introduction to the story and I do think that some of the magical elements, such as the alchemical processes Mariela is frequently using, work better visually than being described solely with text. I also like Guru Mizoguchi’s manga art a bit better in some areas than ox’s manga art (the first volume of the light novel actually “begins” with a short manga section, something I’ve never seen before, and made it easier to compare the two) although overall I liked ox’s illustrations and cover work (for the light novel) a bit more. You can really tell the difference in the speed behind the production for less than 10 illustrations (the light novel) vs a 170 page manga volume by comparing the art of these two!
After reading the first manga volume I was curious if the light novel would give us a deeper look into some of the characters, since I know that light novels are fond of extensive, internal monologues that don’t adapt well to other mediums and usually get adapted out, but it turns out that the manga was a pretty faithful adaptation and doesn’t give you any more or less insight into the characters than the light novel did. I will confess that it did take me until I was halfway through the light novel to realize that I had been conflating two characters with each other, as while their speaking styles were different their designs were so similar that I had totally missed this detail in the manga (their character profile art in the light novel makes them look more distinctive). With the exception of one big caveat, I did enjoy this almost iyashikei fantasy story of an alchemist and how her magic works.
The Light Novel:
The big reason why I was curious about seeing more of the character’s internal thoughts was due to the fact that Mariela buys Siegmund as a slave quite early on in the story and with Siegmund’s servile actions I legitimately couldn’t tell if he wasn’t under any kind of geas in addition to his physical brand, something that more internal thoughts would clear up for me. It turns out that the light novel doesn’t offer much additional insight or focus on Siegmund (or Mariela for that matter); the chapter in the manga that covered his backstory is again a pretty faithful adaptation, but it does seem to confirm that Siegmund’s worship-like actions towards Mariela are of his own volition and this set-up is my largest issue with the story. The story, not the characters but the story itself, tries very hard to rationalize both the idea of slavery in general (with world-building explanations of how it’s so hard to convince free laborers to come to the dangerous Labyrinth City that they’ve had to resort to using slaves) and Siegmund’s attitude toward Mariela specifically (that after being an arrogant young man, being enslaved, treated like crap, and then being healed and treated gently by Mariela he’s completely changed into an upright, outstanding young man) in ways that felt much more awkward and unnatural compared to the rest of the prodigious amounts of world building elsewhere in the story. Mariela’s reasoning behind getting Siegmund makes sense and I think there were totally ways for the story to portray slavery that wouldn’t have bothered me as much (it doesn’t quite glorify slavery but I got the impression that the story doesn’t want the reader to think too hard about it either; Siegmund is also the only slave we meet and his treatment by Mariela goes beyond “unusual”).
And I hate that I need to spend so much time talking about yet another light novel with slavery in it instead of talking about what the rest of the book was — a non-isekai, so far non-romantic, fantasy with a female lead! The story sometimes goes a bit too far into detail with it’s world building, although it usually manages to pull back before it derails the main story (in a shorter volume I’d accuse the author of including all of these details merely to pad out the volume but this volume hardly needed padding). It’s not a story of grand adventure but one of quiet problems and solutions and I almost wish it was an anime since Urata Nonohara’s description of the later settings is fabulous and I’d love to see them in color.
But at the same time, this issue of slavery really rubbed me the wrong way (especially since I was completely blindsided by it) and I’ll be reading the second volume much more hesitantly than I did the first. I’m especially nervous that the story is setting up Siegmund and Mariela as a couple, although I also got the impression that the story itself was still unsure if that’s what it wanted to do so we might avoid that additional layer of “ick”. I can completely understand readers for who slavery is an immediate no-go a far as the story goes, I’ll give it one more volume to see how things shake out but it certainly lowered my enjoyment of the story as a whole.