Anime & Manga Youjo Senki (Saga of Tanya the Evil) Discussion and Ideas

[Wasprider]

Youjo Senki -- Young Woman's War Record, known in the US as Saga of Tanya the Evil.

This is light novel series written by Carlo Zen and published in Japan. There is now an English translation of the first 6 novels available. There is also an anime, an anime movie, a manga, and an initial web novel that started the whole thing.

It is set in an AU where World War 1 did not kick off till 1924. The countries involved go by slightly different names.

The main character (the young woman) is named Tanya Degurechaff, and she is a solider in the Imperial military.

If you haven't read it or watched it, there are a lot of things that can be spoiled, and I'll avoid that in the opening post. I would heartily recommend it for fans of military fiction, rational fiction (who don't take it too seriously), and irony.

Chapter 41 of the manga is now available on many of the manga reader sites out there.

As far as fanfic goes, there's only one I care to recommend: A Young Woman's Political Record (SB thread).

 

[Wasprider]

If you haven't seen or read the series, spoilers follow in this post. After that, expect spoilers.

Spoiler: Plot and Story Spoilers

The main character is Tanya, she is the reincarnation of a 30-some odd year old salaryman from Japan.

The salaryman has problems understanding and connecting with people and has fallen back on the Chicago School of Economics as a way to model behavior and conducts his interactions with other people on that basis. The background montage (in the manga) shows him as getting third place in the national tennis rankings for his age, and having good test scores, but he feels he can't compete against the true geniuses. He winds up with a position in HR, and winds up firing an employee.

Later, he is pushed in front of a train by the employee he fired. God intervenes, and complains about the bother of reincarnation and lack of faith by the current generations of men. The salaryman snaps back at G(g?)od and says it's his system, it should have been built to be easy to administrate. And besides, modern life has become so easy and comfortable, that people don't feel they need God. God does not take it well.

God responds with asking whether hardship and misery makes people more faithful. The salaryman mouths off again, and gets an offer to be reincarnated into a world of hardship and misery so that he can find faith.

So he is reincarnated as Tanya, an orphan residing in a poor orphanage outside of Berun in the Empire (the analogue of pre WW1 Imperial Germany). There is a lot of turmoil, and lots of nationalism, and from his experience the world is headed to war. As it turns out there is magic in this new world, and he (she from here on out) is a surprising powerful mage. And the top end mages can fly.

Mages are subject to the draft, and so, since he sees WW1 coming, he volunteers as an officer candidate at the ripe old age of 9. Because officers, if they succeed, can get a safe desk job in the rear, and get a government guaranteed pension.

On her first field assignment in Norden (part southern Sweden that was originally part of Denmark, but here Denmark is part of the Empire), where she's training as an artillery observer, Legadonia (Sweden, Norway, and Finland blobbed into a single entity) makes a major border incursion.

Now she's doing actual artillery observation, at which point, the Legadonians send in a squadron of their mages to perform the equivalent of a fighter sweep. Drastically outnumbered, poorly trained, and under order to hold the line till reinforcements come, she manages to kill two of her opponents, gets seriously injured, and falls to the ground. She went in for a kamikaze attack and blew up her mage orb with the reasoning that she would be able to leave the battlefield and claim there was nothing else she could have done, so that she would not be in defiance of the orders to hold the line.

This is above and beyond the call of duty for anyone, and she gets duly honored, where she was hoping for an honorable discharge with pension.

The rest of the story follows. She keeps aiming for the ground and missing.

 

[Doomsought]

One very unique thing about Tanya is a character is that she is a sociopath, or rather how her sociopathy is treated. Rather than treating it as an excuse to maker her evil, her lack of natural empathy is used as a communication disability that leads to comedic misunderstandings.

This also leads to her obsession with signal theory: signal theory is the study of the subconscious communication that she isn't able to read naturally. The comedic misunderstandings mostly involve her trying to read people using signal theory and making incorrect conclusions.

All of her comedic misunderstanding can be summarized by the quote "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." Tanya has a very advanced theoretical understanding of human psychology, but lacks the practical skills to make the correct assessments based on the theory. I think Tanya's past life actually started out as a psychology major and then switched to an economics one.

 

[Cyan Saiyajin]

I like the fact that Tanya is still very much a human evil and thereby somewhat relatable as a person. A show called Tanya the Evil which is about a psychopathic person working for a very germanic like army would sound like the setup for an super edgy character and story filled with edge for the sake of edge. But the show isn't actually all that dark. At least not on a personal in your face kind of way.

 

[Bacle]

I haven't read the LNs or manga, but I did see the anime, and I must say I love it.

It's like if you took Blackadder Goes to War, Band of Brothers, and Nanoha then tossed them in a blender.

 

[Doomsought]

It's like if you took Blackadder Goes to War, Band of Brothers, and Nanoha then tossed them in a blender.

Wow, most people wouldn't think of that combination, but its a perfect description of the series. I'm also going to be stuck thinking of Captain Balckadder whenever I see Tanya.

 

[Bacle]

Wow, most people wouldn't think of that combination, but its a perfect description of the series. I'm also going to be stuck thinking of Captain Balckadder whenever I see Tanya.

Lucky Visha's slightly more useful than Baldrick.

 

[BF110C4]

I would go with Ciaphas Cain instead of Blackadder simply because while both get the classic british comic misunderstanding right both Ciaphas and Tanya are certified badass soldiers once the misunderstanding becomes an actual threat to life and limb. Plus other than the higiene problems I kinda get the same competence aura from Visha than I got from Jurgen, even if in balance the later is still more competent in and out of the battlefield that my favorite aerial mage.