幼女(ようじょ)戦記(せんき)(Little Girl’s War Chronicle), known as the ‘Saga of Tanya the Evil’ in English, is an Isekai series about a HR employee who dies and gets reincarnated as a little girl, Tanya, in an alternate magical World War 1/2. With a premise like that, it can’t possibly be bad.

I’ll note that Youjo Senki is an ongoing series. This is important, because I tend to not want to write reviews for stuff that I have not finished yet. However, as it’s ongoing, I figure I may as well.
Also, another note: I started reading the Light Novel, but didn’t finish the first volume. I found it kinda infuriating to read. This is mostly because the anti-religious themes are cranked way up in the LN, even when compared to the manga and anime. And that anti-religion angle comes off as Reddit Atheism (which is extra annoying). That’s the main reason I stopped reading it, since I didn’t like getting lectured to.

Proof of Cute Tanya.

The manga is my favorite part of Youjo Senki and, while I don’t see myself ever finishing the LN, I will continue reading this. It has beautiful artwork (although the art style keeps changing seemingly at random) and the story is told very well.
The obvious anti-religious themes of the LN are not as visible here, which means it isn’t nearly as infuriating to read as the LN. Of course, the manga is still ongoing, so I’ll mostly leave it there.

The anime is a bit of a weird adaptation, but might be more faithful to the LN than the manga is. This is mostly because Tanya’s prettiness is turned way up in the manga. In the anime…
Well, I won’t comment on that too much. Another (possible) change from the LN is that Tanya is obviously evil/sadistic in the anime. In the manga Tanya is not a sadistic person by nature. She does a lot of her ‘evil’ mostly because it’s the most efficient way of doing things (efficient in the short/long term). Tanya is a bit like me when playing Valkyria Chronicles, GFL2 or Warcraft 3: the solution to every problem is to kill everything. Once they’re dead, they can’t bother you anymore.
That’s at least the impression I get. In the anime, however, she specifically transfers two people away so they would die and then snickers about it after she learns they did.

I had almost forgotten to mention this, but it’s a pretty big deal.
Youjo Senki’s premise is that Tanya pissed off God, claiming that religiosity is a direct result of hardship. So the modern day, which has a big chunk of humanity not living in hardship, will obviously produce less faith for God. God then isekais Tanya to see if Tanya’s right or not…then Tanya dedicates her life to proving God wrong.
However, this is all built on the assumption that wealth/prosperity = faithlessness. This is also sometimes argued in the primary world…but, yeah, no.
The large-scale decline in religiosity didn’t really happen until World War 1…particularly in Europe. In America the decline can be attributed to Boomers and their support of Post-Modernism. And, well, depending on how you look at it, the Boomers were a result of prosperity, though it’s perhaps more accurate to say the Boomers were the result of catastrophically bad parenting advice based on bad understandings of psychology.
The idea that wealth/prosperity = faithlessness is largely a myth.^A) I mean, the Victorian Era is mostly remembered as ‘steampunk’, but it was also a super religious time period. In fact, Americans stuck to religion as official justification until, at least, the end of WW2…since MacArthur specifically promised to convert Japan to Christianity by pumping them full of missionaries. That was also a thing the European powers did in their colonies: promote Christianity by encouraging missionaries to move in.
I’m pointing to the Victorian Era specifically because that was a period in time where Science was viewed with a lot of prestige and people (particularly the British) were getting significantly wealthier…yet it didn’t seem to erode their spiritual beliefs at all. Even Darwin remained religious after discovering evolution.
Youjo Senki is actually, probably, depicting a fairly accurate version of the First World War (and prior), spiritually speaking.
So…uh…yeah. If God in Youjo Senki is having problems with declines in religiosity…that really is his fault.

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