And done. Mushoku Tensei Vol 26 finished. Damn. What a ride. It's a really good fantasy novel series. Things wrapped up about how I wanted them to, in the end. But getting there took all kinds of twists and turns. Which I'm thankful for. It's no fun reading a book for the first time when you can see the ending from a mile away. The author definitely stuck the landing with a good ending.
Though it was odd. He somehow managed to have more finales than Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. There are five major "final battles" and a dozen or more reoccurring characters who needed wrapping up...and the author managed to miss a few of them in the prose and answered a few lingering questions in the form of encyclopedia entries and in-fiction historical research about the characters.
As I said before, I can see why people would be turned off by the main character's perversions. It was definitely a shock and not something I was expecting. Setting that aside, the series is directed at a specific audience of young male shut-ins. It speaks directly to that audience. And after the first 5-6 volumes starts to subtly shift into exactly the kind of story the wider society would want exactly that audience to listen to...wrapped in action-adventure, power fantasy, humor, drama, and, at times, slice of life.
It's filled to overflowing with constant messages of get out, try, don't quit, make friends, friends make you better, on and on and on. I'd go so far as to say it's an overt attempt to socialize anti-social otaku. We see about half the life of the main character, from birth to death. And it's nothing if not a repeated glorification of how friends and family make people better.
The highest is ~81,000 the lowest is ~49,000 and the average is ~65,000. All told the series is slightly longer than the five published books of Game of Thrones. Both series sit around 1.7 million words.
For comparison, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings combined has ~550,000 words. So both Game of Thrones and Mushoku Tensei are more than three times as long as Lord of the Rings.