I'm a librarian who loves anime, manga, and reading a wide variety of genres.
The second book is one of my comfort reads, but the world this series is set in is comforting in its own way. Not because it's an inherently good world - there are a lot of things about it that are terrible. But it's a world where rulers, if they fail to do what they can to properly protect their people, eventually end up paying a price. Good rulers can theoretically live forever (if I remember right, the longest lived one in the series made it about 800 years). Bad rulers, not so much.