Even though the LN might be ending, the mangas are still ongoing and anime aren't always adapted to only sell the original source media.

LN and manga readers are almost never satisfied with anime adaptations, so shooting for their satisfaction is a lost cause. So, I hope the don't aim for that and just try to adapt enough of the story so their aren'y too many obvious loose ends or obvious gaps. Also, obvious to LN and manga readers aren't what I mean.

I've seen even anime only viewers express quite similar concerns to LN readers about this season, so it's not just dissatisfied LN readers...

I have no problem with the anime making changes if they improve something. But this season made several changes that actively made the story and the atmosphere worse.

For example something simple like Damuel's clothing. They were attacked in the street and rushed back to the temple to get Ferdinand's help... and somehow in the middle of all this Damuel found the time and tought it was a good idea to change clothes? That makes no sense what-so-ever in the story itself, regardless of how it was in the LN.

Or why put the happy music over something and have everyone smile happily through a scene which by all means is supposed to be a tear-full goodbye and even ends with Myne crying?

Why is her family walking away from her, potentially seeing their beloved daughter for the last time of their lives for all they know without a single glance back?

Those are not failures of adaptation, but failures of story-telling that would be mistakes even when done in original works.

Again, nitpicking. Your two examples are pretty trivial. I more wondered why the guard let a foreign noble through the gates against the rules with no particular explanation.

The biggest problem is that this is a non-shounen so only gets one cour to tell a story that a shounen would get 2-cours to tell. It is obvious S3 (and probably S1 & S2) could easily have been 20+ episodes, but just got less that 13 per season because they are non-shounen and even worse, featured a female lead.

The only non-shounen with a female lead to get fair treatment in the recent past is Fruits Basket and Chihayafuru.

I wonder why do you keep bringing up having a female lead being a problem. Do you have a statistical report that proves that non-shounen shows featuring a female lead have a significantly higher percentage to be made badly? Only 3 shows with female leads got decent treatment? I could easily pull a bunch of them from the back of my mind:

• My Next Life As A Villainess does fine.

• Bofuri is decent.

• Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is heartwarming and visually appealing.

• Vivy is visually impressive and poignant.

• A Place Further Than The Universe is amazing.

• Shirobako is a classic.

• Violet Evergarden is perhaps the most beautiful piece of art during the last decade.

I could go on and on, and there are still a crap ton of slice of life and idol series out there that fits the bill. Female leads might be fewer than male leads, but after watching hundreds of series, I don't see how the gender of the lead is related to the quality of the work.

It's true that big shounen titles tend to get more resources, but that doesn't mean LN adaptations have to be mediocre or bad. There are amazing LN adaptations like 86, Mushoku Tensei, Re:Zero and so on. Of course it's a unrealistic to expect that kind of quality for every adaptations, but we're not even putting the standards there. We're comparing Bookworm S3 to its own previous seasons made by the same studio, but the shortfalls are still painfully obvious.

Make no mistake, I'm not saying Bookworm S3 is an abomination that shouldn't exist. I would give a B+ to S1 and S2 and B- to S3. It still has many scenes adapted decently, but there's no doubt that a slew of problems not seen in previous seasons are present. Do you mean we should just suck it up as long as it isn't disasters like Date A Live III or A Certain Magical Index III? If there's where your standard lies, so be it. I'm not going to judge you for that.

I'd like to toss Mahoutsukai no Yome (Ancient Magus Bride) into the mix of well-treated female led anime, though I don't know if it's adapted from a light novel or manga off the top of my head.

It started with a sort of prequel OVA series, then got a full two cour season and then it got another OVA series that's being released right now and it has phenomenal production values. It looks beautiful, the soundtrack is fantastic and the atmosphere, story-telling and character development are also really well done.

There's also Houseki no Kuni (Land of the Lustrous), which single-handedly proofed that full 3D anime can look gorgeous too (on top of all the other good stuff) and enabled the studio to go on to make Beastars, which I have not seen myself, but I've only ever seen really glowing reviews of.

So yeah... if you never seen Mahoutsukai no Yome and Houseki no Kuni, go watch them. It's worth your time.

How many of those anime that you named have gotten 3 seasons?

@NoNickNeeded Ah, I did watch Land of the Lustrous. Should we call gemstones female? Even the feminine Diamond is referred to as Nii-san lol. Yep, the 3D is gorgeous enough to shut most CGI haters up. It fully accentuates the glittering quality of gems, and the fight scenes are buttery smooth. The plot is somewhat intriguing as well.

I haven't watched Magus' Bride, but I've seen the PV and heard about it before. The imagery are beautiful and the reviews seem rather positive. It's made by Wit after all. Gotta put it on my watch list too.

@Fandyllic If you want such examples, go ahead and count the number of seasons Love Live and Precure have right now, I'm not going to. Or if you prefer more mainstream ones:

• Violet Evergarden adapted the entire LN series with 1 season + 2 movies, while maintaining the exceptional quality.

• Non Non Biyori has 3 seasons + 1 canon movie + 3 OVAs.

• Is the Order a Rabbit? has 4 seasons + 1 OVA.

• Yuru Camp has 2 seasons + 1 upcoming sequel movie.

• Zombieland Saga has 2 seasons + 1 upcoming sequel movie.

• A Certain Scientific Railgun has 3 seasons with 24+ episodes each.

Again I could go on and on. Just because you don't know them, doesn't mean that they don't exist. Yes, season 3 and further are relatively rare due to the law of diminishing return in financial sense, but it has nothing to do with the gender of the protagonist.

I'll say it no matter how many times you want me to: the fact that we appreciate another season of adaptation doesn't mean that we are going to let the drop in quality slide. That's different matter altogether.

@Freako Geeko

I don't count Houseki no Kuni among the female led series... the gems have no gender of any kind after all.

It is however a master-class on how to adapt something from written to animated medium. It does not make a picture-by-picture recreation, but changes things. But how it changes things and what it does not change is the key. They keep both the emotional and visual feel of the original and what they change doesn't alter the story, but is done to play to the strength of the different medium.

Every single change the anime did comapred to the manga only served to elevate the already great source material further.

That's why I mentioned Houseki no Kuni specifically, as proof that good adaptations of written media can be made, if only the production team has the necessary talent, budget and time as well as an understanding of and respect for the source material.

WIth Bookworm season 3, I can only speculate which item off that list they were lacking, but if I had to guess it's part budget and part understanding of the source material. I don't think they were lacking in respect... but there are so many little things that are just subtly wrong (and a few that aren't little or subtle at all)...

Anyway, when talking about female led series, I guess we should not forget one of the most influencial anime series of all time, more influencial than any single shounen anime ever managed to be: Sailor Moon

That series was adapted into more then 3 seasons... twice! And it made an impact on the national Japanese and international anime market that few other anime could ever dream to have. It was one of the anime that made anime break out into the international mainstream market.

On a more general note: Just getting a season 3 is quite an achievment for most anime series (including Shounen by the way), but what does this really say about Bookworm? First of all this so called third season, isn't really... The first two seasons were produced as a single product and then called season 1 and 2, when in reality it was two cours of the same production. So by comparision to other anime it'd be more accurate to say that Bookworm has gotten two seasons.

Putting that technicality aside though, that it got this current season only speaks to the quality and popularity of the first two seasons. No matter how surprising or amazing it is that there was this "third" season does not change the quality of this season inself in any way.

And if this season is markedly worse than the first two, which even the people who liked the season seem to agree on, how do you think this will affect the chances for there being a seson 4?

And what if that season 4 happens and is even worse than 3? If they keep making similar mistakes that will only diminish the already low chances for the series to ever continue further. Criticism is not automatically a bad thing. On the contrary: Well reasoned critical arguments are far more likely to improve something that yes-sayers and people who try to choke off any kind of criticism. The reason why the live-action Sonic doesn't look like a monster was because after the trailer the fans instead of being pleased that there is any Sonic movie at all, did some "petty criticism" and guess what? The producers listened ot the fans and made it better because of it!

So no, I will not stop pointing out mistakes in the anime. I do so not out of hate. I do so in part to vent my frustration yes and to let people know how much better the LN is, but I also do it in part so that future anime creators can learn from the mistakes the production team has done and do better in the future.

Because the isekai genere as a whole became stigmatized as a conveyor belt of mediocre and bad schlock precisely because so many people kept buying that crap without giving criticism, so the production teams got lazy. Why bother putting in effort if people are going to buy it and "appreciate it" either way, right?

@Freako Geeko I guess we have different standards of quality. Except for Non Non Biyori I wouldn't count any of the ones you mentioned as that good or meeting the threshold of 3 seasons, so many of the ones you mentioned don't meet that standard.

Counting magical girl series as quality is a pretty low standard.

@NoNickNeeded although I appreciated the quality from a source to anime adaptation, I found Land of the Lustrous kind of meh and overrated. I will say the fight scenes were a head trip, but so were the ones in Sarazanmai which I also thought was overrated.

Discarding an entire genre just for being of that genre seems a bit ignorant to me.

Just like there are gems like Ascendance of a Bookworm in the often rightfully maligned isekai "genre", the same holds true for Magic Girl shows.

Yes there are just soooooo many of them that it's hard to find those gems, but that doesn't mean they are all crap just for being a magical girl show in and off itself to the point where I question the practice of using "magic girl show" and "isekai" as genres.

There are just worlds of differences between happy, child-friendly magical girl shows and something like Madoka (which I like a great deal) and Magical Girl Site (which I loath). Technically even Kill la kill is a magical girl show if you think about it... but my feelings about that series are complicated so lets leave that particular topic alone.

The same goes for isekai. You got low-effort garbage like your regular self-insert, power fantasy harem show and then you got other stuff like Alice in Wonderland or The Matrix (bet you didn't think of those two when hearing isekai ^^ ), or to go back to anime The little Mermaid, The Vision of Escaflowne or Ascendance of a Bookworm that are fundamentally different from not just the gray mass, but also each other.

To me genre should be things like thriller, action, slice-of-life and such, not whether the protagonist was droped in another world or transforms to fight.