Kusuriya no Hitorigoto is by all means and purposes a female oriented power fantasy. Yes this is exactly how I started my review last time and thats because this series is really not better than the first season hell Maomao at this point is no longer the underdog she was supposed to be at the start she has more support than ever and is as capable as ever. What has improved since last season? Well I dont have to see Maomao intimidating stupid ladiesinwaiting but I guess thats about where my compliments come to an end as it follows the same formula of having a mystery and Maomao solving it with some parts building a bigger picture to resolve at the end of the season. Maomao and Jinshis romance is as bad as it has ever been but you now get him acting like a toxic shoujo male lead like Jinshi gently laying down Maomao and pulling her leg up while asking her if she wanted to find out if he had a dick and honestly they completely lack chemistry since the first season and they dont seem to be moving their relationship as its so onesided that it hurts but I guess the moments where he is the most forceful will be the closer they get to have any kind of thing remotely similar to romantic tension in the foreseeable future. Of course Maomao is still a Mary Sue you can scream to me that she isnt but what people dont realize about this term is that it works on a spectrum. Sure there are some characters that might fit better all the criteria but Maomao covers most of them pretty easily she just lacks fighting abilities to kick people around and you will always see a discourse about this. It still looks like that without Maomao the integrity of the palace would fall in any moment her underdog aspect of being a lowly servant has been pretty much put into irrelevance ever since Jinshi bought her we were told last season about her father Lakan a very high ranking member of the military who would literally wage a war if something were to happen to her she has been working under Gyokuyou one of the emperors main consorts as her attendant so basically no ladyinwaiting ever pesters her again the fact that Maomao and the series still act like she could catch fire any time is nothing short of stupid and dishonest. The closest argument you could get from this season was that Maomao was kidnapped which I put in quotation marks because nothing ever happened to her she was taken to a festival then put inside a house where she didnt suffer anything beyond doing some medicine for immortality she could read she could eat she could rest the two worst things that happened to her there were that she was hit with a fan which is even less than the metal bat from the previous season and she was put inside a closed room with insects and snakes but she is very quirky so she just ate them which means that at no point in time she was in any danger. Nothing about this arc made me think that Maomao wasnt a Mary Sue and just as I put it at the start one of the thing she lacks to be a Mary Sue to a T is having any kind of fighting abilities. At the end the only episodes that may be worth a damn are completely ruined by their copout solutions: the kids that dramatically died last episode by drinking some shit? They arent dead and drank the medicine that can kill a person and later bring them back to life of course this was quite obvious if you remember that said medicine exists but it doesnt make it any less stupid. Suirei? She doesnt have any punishment whatsoever for what she did this and last season she quite literally plotted to kill the emperors younger brother and is quite literally associated to the clan that tried to do a rebellion and instead its her comically evil stepmother who takes the fall for everything she did because she was abusing her its so unrealistic that she didnt get executed and instead is living with the kids alongside AhDuo. Shisui? She has this stupid emotional dance with music and everything while she gets shot multiple times and then falls from a high place of course that is a fakeout and at the end she is perfectly fine. For the last year I have been pestered about this series being mature smart and realistic which is quite obviously untrue these events are quite literally on the level of intelligence of battle shonen which are kids shows events like emotional deaths followed by death fakeouts is overused in those you can see them in Bleach Naruto or One Piece and they are already stupid there despite the fact that they are quite literally for kids so they dont try to be smart this series pretends to be smart while at the same time pulling this kind of stuff which is honestly embarrassing I wish this was me twisting the events or anything but this is quite literally what happens in the series this author has no backbone at all. It has been a pain watching this series it didnt help that I was sick to the point of being bedridden without wanting to watch anime for an entire month so I had to catch up with many things instead of just taking it more slowly and Kusuriya was easily the thing I wanted to see the least between the list of anime I hadnt dropped at that point you dont have to worry about me anymore as Im not excited in any way to even see the continuation of this series. Thank you for reading.