Warning, spoilers (duh). I might be interpreting things differently from how some others do, but this is the only way it makes clear sense to me rather than being just plain childish.
1. Holo is going to outlive Lawrence. If she lets herself get into a full relationship with him, she will have to live with the consequences after he's gone. And also, he's a human and she isn't. Sure, Dian said that humans and "gods" have paired off, but she deals with fairy tales, and it's implied that she failed to produce children with the priest she fell in love with, until the man left her. As for Holo, she left her pack to start a new one, and now her old pack are all dead - she has no living family right now (this is much clearer if you've read volume 4, which is skipped by the anime). Holo also had nothing to keep her in Pasloe anymore, and it took her centuries to stop mourning her "friend" there and move on with her life. So of course she's afraid to try again, even with Lawrence. It's also incredibly unfair to him if she can't have a family with him, since he clearly wants a family; after all, even getting a shop is just a stepping stone to get to that goal.
2. If Lawrence gets fully caught up in Eve's scheme, which will piss off the Church, he's the one that will be left behind with a shop - in the same city with the people he just pissed off by working with Eve. He could never keep that fact hidden, and Eve fully intends to piss them off as much as possible. So for Lawrence it's suicide, either literally or in a business sense. That's why he backs off from the deal, and does so in the only way that will keep Holo from having an excuse to leave him for having done so.
3. Here's a (very brief) summary of the rest of the story. The books continue their journey to find Holo's homeland, but first they go chasing after Eve, meeting a kid along the way who joins their party. Holo's insistence for them to chase Eve gets Lawrence swept up in a weird situation, where he ultimately has to save Eve's skin (much to Holo's frustration since he can't be a hero for her like that). After that, they search for an artifact related to Holo's past, and Holo finally gets a talking-to from an older deity who cuts through her BS and helps her realize just how hard she's fallen for Lawrence. They then go chasing after a map to Holo's hometown, and Holo slowly comes to accept Lawrence's feelings as more important to her than being a deity. After that, an arc begins where Lawrence has to choose between taking her home or helping her save her homeland. He takes a third option where he finally lets go of his "be a good merchant" attitude, and instead becomes a merchant willing to do what it takes to get what he wants. Then a final arc begins where he and Holo get caught up in a gigantic economic struggle in the North, and Holo finally realizes that if she doesn't want Lawrence to keep risking his life to stay with her, she'll just have to settle down with him, fears be damned. At the end of the story, her fears prove unfounded, when they see a half-deity, and she realizes that it's possible for them to have the family that Lawrence so obviously wants (even if he will sacrifice it to live with just her). In an epilogue, the author spells out that they got their happy ending, because fans of this type of story apparently need it spelled out like they're 5 years old.
So what would season 3 be? Depends on how many seasons they would make after 3. If they follow the book it would be about them chasing Eve, meeting the kid, and presumably solving Eve's problems. If they don't, it depends on how they condense the material to get to the ending. It would probably need a couple of seasons to feel satisfying, since they would have to condense a lot of material or adapt it more skilfully while skipping a few arcs that aren't truly needed to get to the satisfying parts of the ending. |
