Despite it being less mature and falling into the trope of the standard masculine protag that goes to magic school and is kinda the chosen one, already at the time she was putting a lot of tropes on their heads and deconstructing a lot, but it only gets better!

Like yea I didn't mind the tropey nature of the protag by the end because the story isn't what you expect. He fucks up in a major way and has to heal himself to fix things, his internal feelings are very well described. From what I remember I didn't like the position/writing of women in the first one but the second one is literally centered around women and I found it incredible