What piqued my interest in Ep. 2 is Lara thought of “car” for the horse-drawn carriage she rode in with the prince she liked 200 years ago (This was supported by a clear flashback) and how she was bewildered by what being in a modern car actually entailed. The word, “car”, has been used since 1300 and referred to any carriages, wheeled carts, wagons, and other wheeled vehicles long before the automobile’s invention. Refer to this Reddit post that has sources for the relevant info: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/qona8j/car_isnt_short_for_carriage_its_a_longstanding/ This basically shows that Grace’s auto-translating magic allowing Lara to communicate with others and navigate this world is limited to translation only and doesn’t impart to one knowledge of things one doesn’t know, which explained why Lara was frantic about being in a car she didn’t recognize as something she knew. The long and short of it is that I believe Lara will end up with Mari at the end of this series.
Folks who believe the show’s yuribaiting missed some unsubtle references to Christianity with Lara searching for “true love” but now a ring important to that goal, is her priority, and wedding and promise rings are meant to show one’s bond with another. She in Ep. 2 ends up in a household with a church next to it belonging to the family there, and Mari’s the good samaritan who rescued a girl in dire straits from roaming around with 0 knowledge of the world. The kanji for Mari can mean “true home”, meaning Lara will likely have found her place at the story’s end with her.
More on this is Lara is in Russian the diminutive form of Laris(s)a, meaning “citadel”, and the Salvation Army uses military terms for its churches, sometimes referring to them as “citadels”, meaning the name Lara may have been on the nose in having her end up with a family w/ a church.
The romaji for Lara’s rara, and “ra” in Japanese can refer to “la”, the sixth note of a major scale, and Lara’s the sixth of a group of sisters, showing much deliberation in how her name was used for this story.
Rowan’s derived from the Irish name, Ruadhán, which means “red-haired”, and is extremely fitting for the Rowan in the show.
The katakana for Grace is グレース (gu-ree-su) with there not being an exact kanji combo for that name. “Gureru” means to stray from the right path, and “su” can mean “nest”, so Grace perhaps was meant to be a mashup of straying from the right path of her home, hinting how she became a witch.
The first anime I watched that really made me dive into the etymology and meanings of names/words is Re:Zero kara hajimeru isekai seikatsu with Episode 22, A Flash Of Sloth, really getting it on my radar in a big way with the number of ways it could apply to events of that episode. When I saw Lara think of a horse-drawn carriage when she thought of a car, I knew there’s a lot more to this series than what’s on the surface.