I was looking at the site to try to see when the last time someone had posted was and I found this thread. As a special bonus present I will post on sm.org for the first time in probably years!
I am a huge fan of Romeo and own all of the volumes of the Jintai novels (some of them multiple times) so I'll just stick my head in here and offer some commentary from the perspective of someone who read the novels long before the anime even aired.
* "The Fairies' Time Management" actually was the first time Assistant showed up in the novels, I believe, but I still think the anime made a smart decision placing it later in the series after we'd been getting to know him for several episodes.
Yes, he doesn't show up until v2c2 of the novels. I personally think it's a bit off-putting to see a mute character with no real explanation at the start of the anime like that, but to each his own, I suppose.
It's over :ohdear:
I curious as to what parts from the novels didn't make it to the animation.
Quite a bit. Of 11 chapters published at the time of the anime airing, 7 made it into the show. A week or so after the anime began airing, volume 7 was released, bringing us to 13 chapters total. In other words around half the series at this point. It should also be noted that the plot starts being introduced in the latter half of volume 7, so... hope for a second season, I guess? There's enough material left to do one once the series is finished assuming they do the out of order chapter thing again.
The only part of the anime cut significantly was the story with Voyager and Pioneer; in the novels, this takes up an entire volume all by itself, so it really should have gotten 3 or 4 episodes instead of the 2 it received. Every other chapter adapted was only half of a book.
Speaking as a die-hard fan of the books, I honestly was not really pleased with the anime. Nakahara's voice acting is wonderful and the comedic parts are portrayed pretty much as well as they're going to be, but I feel they really dropped the ball with v3c1 (episodes 5/6) and v5c1 (11/12), neither of which came close to having the emotional impact they do in the novels. Volume 3 is mostly a problem of trying to pack it all into 40 minutes or so; if they had taken more time with it and fleshed out the setting more I think it would have worked much better. Volume 5, on the other hand, can never be adapted to any medium that isn't text-driven. Romeo's beautiful writing expresses things on a deep, personal level that no anime will ever be able to. Really, the entirety of the anime really takes on quite a different atmosphere as a whole and I think the absence of Romeo's text is more or less at blame for this.
That said, nearly all of the (wonderful) dialogue is retained from the novels and the underlying ideas that went into Jintai are far more intelligent than any of the other tripe being pumped out in the anime industry nowadays, so I can understand why it found so much popularity despite my personal (fanboy) complaints about it. Even if it's an inferior experience to the novels, I'm pleased to see Romeo's brilliance being brought to a wider audience. It's just a shame that none of his writing has been translated properly, so I can't in good faith recommend any of it to someone who enjoyed Jintai but only speaks English. Them's the breaks, I suppose.
...Also, though it's not terribly important due to the nature of the series in general, the anime has quite lacking production values, something especially apparent in the last two episodes. I doubt the AURA movie will really end up much better, so I guess it's good that there's not much action in that either.
Anyway, Jintai is a really amazing series of books written by a genius so I'm glad to see it getting some recognition. I didn't like the anime as much in comparison, but the fact that I plan on buying all of the blu-rays should tell you that I don't exactly hate it either.
By the way, if anyone was curious, the chronological order of the episodes is: 10 7 8 5 6 1 2 9 11 12 3 4
And if you liked Jintai, you should check out the AURA movie (based on another LN by Romeo) when it comes out.
Here's the subbed PV, along with a brief summary by yours truly.