Afterword
HELLO, EVERYONE. Long time no write. Honobonoru500 here. Thanks for picking up a copy of The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick up Trash, Volume 11. Thanks to you all, this series has sold a total of over 1.1 million copies! I seriously cannot thank you enough. Also, by the time Volume 11 goes on sale, the anime version of The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash should be airing. I hope lots of people are enjoying it. So…are they? Are they enjoying traveling with Ivy? I’d love it if you could find time to give Ivy and Sora some love as they struggle their way along.
In Volume 11, I wrote more about Marya’s condition after she escaped the church. I struggled a little with what state she should be in. Should I really have all her problems be solved, even though she’d spent most of her life in confinement? Or should I have the demons from her past continue to haunt her? Personally, I would have felt fine having all her problems be over once she escaped, but I needed to further explore what sort of group the church was. And since this was a great opportunity to do that, I wound up making Marya’s mental and physical state much worse than I ever thought I would, which I feel really bad about. However, Marya’s damaged state allowed me to show what kind of group the church is.
I also got to write about the church in more detail in the side story “Assassins.” I’ve been wanting to stick this assassin duo into this story for a while, partly to show just how evil the church is. At first, I didn’t plan on having them interact with Druid. But when I realized they had to interact with somebody, Druid made the most sense. Then, once I imagined how their paths might cross, I wound up with a rather interesting story. You can enjoy their story to the fullest in the original short that I wrote for this book called “The Two Assassins.” It chronicles their past and present along with Druid’s, and I hope I brought out how they all changed.
Thank you to everyone at TO Books for your help with Volume 11. My editor K-sama, thank you for always putting up with me. We managed to get Volume 11 published, thanks to you all.
Lastly, I would like to thank everyone who read this book with all my heart. I hope you’ll give Volume 12 a read, too. The manga version of The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick Up Trash is also selling well. May we meet again in this “Isekai’ed into a world…where proper waste disposal rules!” light novel and manga series.
—Honobonoru500
February, 2024