Ascendance of a Bookworm (Anime)

I doubt there will be any romance (yet alone resolving of romance) this season. (Does anyone know if further seasons are planned?) Six episodes in, and she's just a poor girl from a poor family. At this rate, she isn't going to be 20+ and married by episode 13. We can expect her to be 7+, baptised and probably apprenticed to the priest before the end of this series.

However, I'm still putting my bet on Lutz/Mein as the eventual Official Couple.

Second season announcements are an en of season thing if its not split four and we're barely halfway through this one

From the pace of the story, I'd be very surprised if they aren't planning to make it multiple series. However, I suppose there is always a possibility that future series will get cancelled if the audience isn't good. Is cancellation of unfinished series a thing in anime the way it is in US live action TV?

Its less cancelling and more the production team's whims. There are hundreds of series that stop mid plot with no signs of ever being adapted again e.g. No game no life, spice and wolf

Correct. Anime productions are 90% funded by a production committee, who reserve a set broadcast time. In old days there were no hard limits, hence why in the 80s and 90s you saw shows that ran for a whole year without pause.

The baker's dozen of 12-13 episodes however just about rounds off a three-month "season" (a cour), and many companies have found it much cheaper to do it like this. Not to say that companies don't do it anymore, but its usually reserved for long-running shounen series, not your average light novel adaptation is more a 12-episode commercial for their books, so...

Benno looks like Kotomine went and bleached his hair after becoming a priest didn't work out for him. I think they left out his analysis of the first meeting, which is a shame.

Man, I still can't get over how weird the character's mouths look. They're so wide and disproportionately large sometimes and then they open up in this weird crooked way that shows their teeth as these big solid white plates.

Also, gasp, first mention of the Devouring. This part of the story actually makes me think that Benno was being either a moron or an asshole. I mean, yes, the tools for treating the Devouring are not readily available to commoners given how hard to get and therefore expensive they are, but he should know that the church has those tools easily available. Yes, the church isn't a great place to go, but he didn't even mention really mention it to her.

Edited by Arha on Nov 8th 2019 at 12:15:30 PM

Ok I read the work page so I kinda spoiled myself about the Devouring, but I havr a question. If it is caused by mana in a commoner, giving them magical abilities, wouldn't teaching them how to use magic properly solve it? Also if it has to do with magic why wouldn't the church/nobility/whatever keep an eye on signs of magical potential?

Because magic is a sign of nobility so commoners assume they can't do it. Then they get sick and die as medieval children are prone to do and no one is any the wiser. As for why nobles and so on don't look for commoner mages, they usually don't need to. Magic doesn't seem to be that important in and of itself.

Oh ok thanks. That explains it actually, I somehow thought magic implied power and if commoners aren't supposed to have it, those who do would want to keep an eye out if it did.

Thoughts after episode 7 (no spoilers if you've seen ep 7, I haven't read the light novels):

The more mana you have, the sooner the Devouring kills you. Few commoners with mana survive until baptism. If Main has mana (very likely) and does not get the mana-draining treatment Benno spoke of until meeting the high priest, and doesn't meet the high priest until baptism, then she has comparatively little mana relative to other commoners with mana, so may end up as a mage, but as a low powered one. On the other hand, her isekainess may interact with this in some way.

I think Main should confess her isekai origin to Lutz. They should trust each other.

I'm warming to the idea of Main and Lutz as Platonic Life-Partners rather than Official Couple.

With my rather small knowledge of paper making, for a first attempt at making paper, I think using worn-out old clothes as raw material would be better than timber. It should take less processing and at the least would be a good proof of concept. In the long term wood based paper will have much lower cost of materials, but even cloth based paper will be much cheaper than parchment.

Wikipedia's page on paper says "Before the industrialisation of paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags."

Do you want a response to that or are you just speculating?

In general, I mean. I never know when people actually want responses to questions like that.

Edited by Arha on Nov 13th 2019 at 12:54:42 PM

I presume you're referring to the bit I spoilered. I'm speculating. I don't want spoilers. I'd welcome other peoples speculation.

As far as paper goes, Myne may not know how to make paper out of cloth. She has a very wide range of shallow knowledge. Like her knowledge of papyrus was "I think it was made out of woven grass or something, right?" Which is why she called her attempt to reproduce it pseudo papyrus. And possibly why it failed to be useful.

Basically, she's a nerd, but the story doesn't pretend that she's an engineer or a scientist. There's a lot she doesn't know.

Edited by Arha on Nov 14th 2019 at 4:29:58 AM

That's... surprisingly apt, especially for an isekai-tensei story like this. It's not an issue other protagonists encounter, as they're either too OP to care, or just so happen to have the smarts to make up for it.

Myne is just a nerd's nerd, and most of what she knows is really just second-hand knowledge, but little practical knowledge thats actually USEFUL in her current situation. Also, she's a little girl, which has its own set of issues.

What is isekai-tensei?

Old Myne was arts-and-crafty as well as being a book nerd. We've seen this most directly in her ability to crochet, and to make shampoo. It is also implied in one still image of Turi looking astonished at how Myne has decorated some candles she's making. So she does have practical knowledge - but perhaps not in the areas she'd really like to have it, making paper and printing presses.

Speculation: At some later point, she'll go through multiple attempts to implement various printing technologies: screen printing, lithography, wood block, moveable type.

Change of topic: We've now seen written-on tablets several times, but there has been no exploration of the technology. The lunch invite comes on one, and the order forms are written on them. I take it that these are reusable - they look too substantial to be worth making for single use, for the minor uses to which they are put. I'm guessing they are wood with some treatment (wax coating?) to allow writing and erasing.

Is there any way of including still images in these forum posts?

In episode 4 (7 minutes in), we get to see the full alphabet (35 letters). In episode 7, we get to see Lutz, Main and Benno's names written. Comparing these, we see that the alphabet is AB??E???I??LMNO????TU????Z??????? So the pattern for the first 26 letters is pretty obvious. When I have some more time, I'll see if I can read the contract.

A 35 character writing system could easily have been a syllabary (one character per syllable), especially coming from a Japanese source, however were it so, Lutz, Main and Benno's names would have been written in 2-3 characters instead of 4-5.

I've tried to read the contract on the assumption that the alphabet shown in episode 4 starts with A...Z, and I've called the remaining 9 characters 123456789. Bear in mind that these presumably stand for accented vowels or dipthongs or similar. Also bear in mind that if the animators wrote a sensible contract and then transliterated into this alphabet, the original language may not have been English, although I'd expect it to be something European.

I think someone just threw a bunch of letters on the page except putting character names in every so often. Many of the letters in the contract are not recognizable as letters in the sample alphabet. This may be the animators being super thorough and subtle - in our world letters like a, g, k can look pretty different in different typeface or handwriting, so maybe this is what is going on here.

Here is my transliteration of the contract. Capital letters are one I am pretty confident about, lowercase letters are ones which might plausibly be that letter but in different handwriting, ? for where I have no idea. It also sometimes isn't clear where word breaks are.

Kh I Dbr Ie? rJIsh?7 MAIN 1?Gy?CV?OM? QD?4fu?bX??? BENNO DAG GO?Du 9?JD 3 J?NX Te u 3?NDR 6??D Orr XN ?NQ?OR? N?O?VN IOV 5?J?R Vb I ?TY

STAT D?KK??r Dy? ??NVO 6 MAIN ?NO?2 LUTZ C?R? DA? 4CbD LUTZ 2b?? ?OO D?QQJ ??Vb?O 7DG?8 JD 6 ?I? ALLNG? 5D??bDGD ?? 8DCX? ??D??G 4DCJ??V??? ?N5?T

Also, that is very few words to convey a contract of this complexity.

Edited by Kotomikun on Nov 19th 2019 at 6:32:24 AM

Tensei means reincarnation.

Thanks, that makes sense. I've noticed three common methods of isekai: reincarnation (frequently courtesy of truck-kun), summoning or portal, and virtual reality (frequently with death in game causes death in reality.)

One of the things I like about A of a B is that it actually thinks about what it would be like to experience the reincarnation.

What role does religion play in this society? We know there is a temple, and that a high priest will play a role in Main's life in a while. However, the only role we've seen religion play in the lives of people of Main's social class is the once in a lifetime babtism.

Incidentally, I've given in to temptation and started reading the light novels, so I am now ahead of the anime.

My next comment is from post-current-anime-episode, but is non-spoiler. The money system is 1 big gold = 10 small gold = 100 big silver = 1,000 small silver = 10,000 big copper = 100,000 medium copper = 1,000,000 small copper = 10,000,000 'lions'. (It seems that, like yen, a lion is a small enough unit of currency that it doesn't get its own coin.) In particular, 1 large copper = 100 small copper. It seems unlikely that they have coins with a weight ratio of 100:1. This implies they have some sort of fiat currency, rather than coins having value simply by their metal content. I wonder if there is some anti-counterfeiting magic? From what I've seen so far, this world seems to use its magic to enforce its economics.

We also find out that a new apprentice earns about 2 large copper per week. If we (questionably) call that $200 in our world currency, we get: small copper = $1, medium copper = $10, large copper = $100, small silver = $1000, large silver = $10,000, small gold = $100,000, large gold = $1,000,000.

HA! Someone else noticed that the money makes no sense.

Actually I am just assuming you think that, but it doesn't. The value for the coins gets to be crazy and really inconsistent at both ends.

Edited by Arha on Nov 18th 2019 at 1:25:49 PM

Finally watching the episode. OG Myne knew the word for collateral but not book?

As I've read a bit further now (no important spoilers coming) we find that Main's dad earns a bit over one small gold per year. $50,000 is reasonable as a working class annual wage, so I'm halving my above conversion rate.

"Myne knew the word for collateral but not book?"

When I was a student, I knew someone studying Slavic languages. She was learning a new one, and complained about the industrial bias in the lessons. "I know how to say 'blast furnace', but not 'tree'."