The fact that Who Made Me a Princess is a double-isekai story has largely been left by the wayside for several volumes. It's easy to forget that this is Athanasia's third try at life: her second as the princess, following one in modern South Korea, where she read about her life in the novel The Lovely Princess. Whether you find that a feature or a bug of the series is largely up to individual readers, but I think it's an element of the story that works well for its denouement. It's important that Athy had time to acclimate herself to this life without thinking about her past(s). She needed to find stability in both herself and her relationships to be successful this time around. If she'd been constantly looking backwards, she wouldn't have managed to build her roles as daughter, princess, and friend, and those are all key to the happy ending achieved in volume nine.

It's understanding that which ultimately saves Jeannette as well. As I mentioned in the review of volumes six through eight, the common trope of Jeannette as heroine becoming “bad” to Athy's “good” role is subverted here, and that continues in these volumes. Jeannette, as we learned earlier, isn't even technically a “human;” she's a black magic construct assumed to be Claude's illegitimate daughter. But once the mysterious man staying with the duke is revealed to be Claude's deposed (and not-so-dead) brother Anastasios, he claims Jeannette as his daughter, indicating that he's the one who created her. For Jeannette, who is unaware of her status as a nonhuman, this upends her hopes and dreams. She's always believed that she and Athy were sisters, and while “cousins” doesn't negate that, it does stand to pit them against each other. But the material point is that Jeannette herself is no more evil than Athanasia: both of them have been forced into roles that simply mimic the tropes of villainess isekai fiction. Since Jeannette is unfamiliar with the genre, it's up to Athy to subvert narrative expectations, which is a key facet of her character growth.

All of this traces back to most of the characters living within the expectations laid out for them. Athanasia believes herself to be in a novel of a specific genre. Claude and Anastasios are trapped in the idea that royal siblings must be bitter rivals. Lucas is bound by his status and life within his tower. All of them must figure out a way to break free of these roles to truly exist as their own people, and that's what the bulk of these final three volumes is working with. Although it's most obvious with Athy, Claude, and his brother, they feel like the most compelling examples. Flashbacks show us Claude's childhood and Anastasios' sudden personality shift, bringing in a burst of hope when he falls in love with Diana, and how losing her and killing his brother brought him down. Claude, when we first met him (and as Athy knows him from The Lovely Princess), isn't so much evil as depressed, and while Athanasia helps him to overcome that, ultimately it has to be something that he does from within. If Claude hadn't decided to save himself, Athy couldn't have saved him. That's not a power anyone has.

This idea is demonstrated across several characters' storylines. Jeannette is physically saved because of Athy's actions, but her emotional rescue comes from her deciding to trust Athanasia rather than to listen to her father's poisonous words. Anastasios chooses to allow himself to love his daughter instead of wallowing in anger. And Athy decides to live her life instead of trying to make it “right” or “better.” All of them are aided by outside forces, but their choices come from within. That's a powerful message that helps the series to stand out in its crowded genre.

These books aren't perfect, of course. Ezekiel never quite gets the development that the other characters do, and the entire plotline with Eternities feels oddly truncated, which undercuts some of Claude's storyline. Since that's a key component of how Anastasios managed to come back from death, it's a serious issue, and it makes me wonder if it's simply something that got more space in Plutus' original novels and didn't make a smooth transition to Spoon's manhwa. Spoon does mention in their afterword that there were more and more changes made as the adaptation went on, so hopefully someone will see fit to license and translate the novels as well, so that we can see the differences and get a more complete version of the story.

Who Made Me a Princess ends on a satisfying note, however. It's not a final one; Athy's love life isn't at all resolved, for one. But the storybook-style epilogue confirms what readers have hoped for since the beginning: that here, living her own life, Athanasia truly becomes the Lovely Princess. It's her story, and at long last she can see that.