By Carlo Zen and Shinobu Shinotsuki. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Emily Balistrieri.

The subtitle of this volume is translated as “Hell Follows Hell”, or more colloquially, one mistake leads to more. Tanya learns that here in a book that shows off how imperfect all the sides are. Tanya herself, due to her rabid anti-communist mindset (and the salaryman inside her, who I honestly tend to forget about most of the time) is slow to realize that the not-Russians fighting them are actually fighting for their homes and native land… not for communism. This is huge because it changes the entire way they have to fight the enemy. She also runs into Mary Sue for the first time, and while there’s clearly a much larger fight still to come, it’s a difficult battle that depletes her elite unit of a quarter of its entire force. (That said, rest assured all the characters whose names we can remember survive.) And of course Britain and Russia are having their own issues with lack of manpower, lack of supplies, lack of materials… we’ve reached the attrition stage of the war.

The cover art has Tanya standing at the gravesite of the soldiers who fell in that battle, and it reminds us that just because the title is “Tanya the Evil”, and Tanya frequently does morally reprehensible things, does not means she is 100% black of heart. She cares about her subordinates, mourns them, and has long passed the Tanya of the first book who was merely looking for “meat shields”. Likewise, General Zettour, at the end of the book, as he attempts to coerce/cajole the separatist parts of the Federation to join them, thinks that as a good person, he’s appalled, but as a soldier fighting for the Empire, he’s willing to be evil. A person who commits mass murders but feels really bad about the whole thing is still a mass murderer. And, on the other side of the coin, we have Mary, who is bright and shiny and filled with thoughts of revenge and I suspect is so naive that she will be led by the nose whenever she runs into someone manipulative.

Other things to note: as I feared, Loriya is still around, and still a pedophile. It’s not played for laughs as much, but still disturbing. Speaking of which, the soldiers joke at one point about Tanya marrying Visha for her coffee-making skills, and Tanya briefly ponders whether, as a male mind inside the body of a young girl, he would qualify as gay or not, but then promptly decides to not think about it. Which is fine, I won’t either. Tanya is twelve. In fact, the fact that Tanya is twelve comes up an awful lot here: after four volumes of mostly having everyone ignore the fact that she’s so young, we get a bunch of scenes to reinforce it: she can’t interrogate the Federation prisoners as they won’t take her seriously, she can’t get into the celebratory party at the Officer’s Mess as she can’t drink, etc. It’s a nice reminder that the basic premise of this entire series is meant to be, deliberately, very screwed up. War makes people send a child to battle.

I’ve heard that Tanya light novel fans and Tanya anime fans disagree quite a bit, and I suspect this book definitely falls on the reader side, being interesting more for the discussion of warfare than for the short, yet well-written battles. There’s also a lot of great wartime sarcastic banter between the soldiers here, which I enjoyed. For those who don’t mind long, lecturing tomes, this is still very good.

By Carlo Zen and Shinobu Shinotsuki. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Emily Balistrieri.

I’ve talked before about how Tanya the Evil is at many times written like you’re reading a history book. It’s actually a bit weirder than that, as you’re reading several competing history books, each with its own agenda. This is made obvious in the sections involving the Federation, aka not-USSR, whose style of Communism under “Josef” is mocked mercilessly, even to the point of having one section written as a children’s history book. The Federation in general comes in for a bashing this volume, partly because, well, Communism under Stalin, please look at real history, but also because Tanya is virulently, rabidly anti-Communist and says so most of the time. The book starts with her taking her team to “put a scare” into the Federation capital. She proceeds to overdo it. One of the more interesting bits is when she tells Visha, who escaped the Federation as a child, not to hold back her hatre3d and to go all out. Visha, who honestly doesn’t recall much of her childhood and isn’t really driven by hatred, is rather nonplussed.

It can be difficult at times to remember that Tanya is not the heroine, merely the protagonist. We’re meant to be a bit horrified by her. Quite a bit. The trouble is that most of the book is in her semi-1st person monologue, so sympathy naturally falls with her, especially when the war is not going her war, which is constantly. There’s a glorious bit when she’s on trial for some of her actions when they realize that this little girl is, in fact… acting like a petulant child. Even when she finally gets her wish of a transfer to a non-combat position, it doesn’t even last two weeks. But we’re not really meant to like ANYONE in this “war is hell” series. Not the Empire’s generals. Not the government, who are invisible but making poor decisions behind them. Not the Federation, who I would call a parody of Stalin’s Russia were it not already hard to parody. And not even the Commonwealth or the Unified States, who we see training up their own crack mage unit, complete with blonde Kansas girl Mary Sue, who unfortunately runs into Tanya in her first combat and realizes that Tanya was the one who killed her father. She doesn’t take it well.

These books continue to be bricks, far longer than almost all light novels that aren’t DanMachi. A lot of that is tactics and military discussion, and I say it again: don’t read this unless you’re fascinated by such things, because it will drive you mad. One other downside: we’re introduced in this book to “Josef” and his number two, who is named Loria. Loria is based on Lavrentiy Beria, who was a sexual predator, and it’s this aspect that Carlo Zen mines for “humor” (and also horror, to be fair), as he spots the 12-year-old Tanya (she must be twelve by now, right?) stomping all over Moscow burning everything in sight and decides that he needs to make her his. It’s as disturbing as it sounds, and it gets a color illustration that makes it much worse. Sadly, I expect to see more of him. As well as Mary Sue, who’s a talented newbie this time around but is now driven by hatred and fury, so I expect her next run-in with Tanya will be very different.

Tanya fans who only watched the anime will be happy to know this is where the new stuff begins (well, technically the end of the last book). It’s still a very interesting series to read, but remember that the author is actually a left-wing socialist. Tanya is not here to be admired. No one is, really.

By Carlo Zen and Shinobu Shinotsuki. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Emily Balistrieri.

As has been noted before, Tanya the Evil’s world is essentially an odd mashup of World War I Europe, with appropriate touchstones. That said, it’s perfectly content to mess with the timeline in order to move things along, and the third volume does this incredibly quickly, moving from World War I to World War II in the space of about three months. The victor may have changed, but the players are much the same, though we do get a few new – and more obviously inspired by real life history – characters. The “Duke of Marlborough” is Winston Churchill, complete with color illustration in case we didn’t get it (not to mention the subtitle of the book), and Tanya’s new commander in the African – sorry, Southern Colonies is “von Romel”, which is almost TOO on the nose. And of course there’s Tanya and her crew, who manage to almost single-handedly win the war only to see peace remain elusive. In fact, Tanya’s desperate plea to let her unit stop the Republic from getting away is probably the highlight of the entire book.

We begin with a giant slaughter, as is usually the case in these novels that make no bones about war being hell – at least for Tanya’s opponents. She and the 203rd are literally shot at the enemy on giant rockets, and they proceed to lay waste to most of the republic’s main forces as well as their HQ. It is amusing to see Tanya’s constant cynical, worried POV as the group essentially walks in and walks right back out almost unharmed. There are times when she is unaware of how good she is. So all that remains is to sign a peace treaty and negotiate the end of the war… something not done by the military, alas. The cease fire allows the Republic to regroup and the Commonwealth to stop pretending they don’t care, and thus everything is for naught. As for Tanya, she regards being sent south as a punishment for her freak out at the generals, but when we see them scheming it, it’s more that they just don’t have any real resources, so need to use the 203rd to have any chance of doing anything. The Empire is running out of money and resources.

And we may be getting a new player into the game. The Unified States have been mostly neutral here, but they also have Mary Sue, the daughter of Anson Sue, who Tanya fought and killed back in the previous book. Mary is unaware of this, but she is extremely patriotic and also has a buttload of magical talent, so is ready to fight and die for her country. In terms of the series, she promises to be something of a rival to Tanya, which is good as lately there has been the sense that nothing can stop Tanya once she gets going. It will be nice to see her have a bit of a challenge. Mary Sue seems sweet, but given that we already have the ‘sweet girl’ card in this deck with Visha, I suspect that won’t last long. The illustrations also make her look a bit possessed, to be honest.

Tanya the Evil is still wordy as all get out, and I’d honestly only recommend it if you’ve read military biographies and histories before. But if you want to know what happens after the anime ended, this is the volume to start with, as the anime wraps up about 3/4 through this book. I’m still waiting to see how all this turns out.