Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Why Ascendance of a Bookworm Refreshes the Isekai Genre
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yuna49
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Certainly the most surprising show of 2019. I didn't intend to watch it at first given the descriptions available, but after the first few episodes I was hooked. I do have issues with how mature Lutz is, but otherwise Bookworm makes sense within the parameters of its storyline. Well worth watching.
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borobor
Posts: 18 |
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Agreed, I was a little underwhelmed by the first episode and the lukewarm reviews at the start, but it got stronger and stronger as it went on. I'm really glad it got a second season.
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SteelBlaidd
Posts: 25 |
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Wait for it. Remember they gots to get down the road at Main's pace and she can't go to fast. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Broadly speaking, that is what we're getting. It's just that there's a bunch of prerequisites and it takese time to gain the means for it all if you're an average person (ie, poor) in such a society. Also, to pick a couple of nits, Gutenberg didn't invent books. Books in various forms, including the bound format we think of, already existed. What he invented was the printing press (and related technologies such as movable type) which allowed the inexpensive mass production of books.
Well, people do pick different and seemingly odd places to draw the line. Plus for some it's not so much what is presented, but how it's presented. Here this kind of society is being presented in a negative light. If the series was presenting it as being some kind of ideal or generally positive, absolutely I'd be irate about it. Probably less irate than I am when slavery is presented in a positive or neutral light, but slavery is worse than "just" an unequal society. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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Presentation is everything with touchy subjects like these. I don't think there's a whole lot of "slavery is good actually" anime out there, outside of hentai at least, but there's quite a lot of "slavery is bad, but it's fine when this guy becomes a slaveowner, because he only wants to free this one female slave and coincidentally get in her pants." (And, yes, before someone brings it up, there was a gender-swapped case, which isn't any better.) Besides being kinda the pinnacle of a power-imbalance relationship, it fits into a larger pattern of making systemic bad stuff seem more tolerable by showing how people can do good within the system, without having to change it to prevent the need for heroism in the first place. It's like those "10-year-old pays off poor students' lunch debt by selling lemonade" stories; nice of them to do that, sure, but poor students shouldn't have to cope with "lunch debt." (For those outside the US, yes, that sort of thing really happens, and the news always acts like it's heartwarming. I only made up the lemonade part.) On a related note, I don't know what in Bookworm qualifies as "hypercapitalism." That's what we've got in real life. What they've got is just old-fashioned feudalism... with magic credit cards. Even that isn't portrayed as a good thing; Myne has to frantically try to make enough money to buy items to treat a chronic illness, and at the end of this season we learned that the extremely wealthy church could have been taking care of her--and her friend, who basically sold herself to a sugar daddy--with their apparently ample supply of those items, if they weren't more interested in exploiting orphans and ultimately trying to kidnap Myne for her mana. I've lost count of the number of anti-capitalist real-world metaphors in all of that. |
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Hiroki not Takuya
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^^Hmmm I wasn't sure if there was an actual term for the extreme greed mantra the show has merchants and nobles espousing and thought hypercapitalism fit but you and maximilianjenus seem to think feudalism fits so I'll have to research that. Also thanks to you and Sakagami Tomoyo as I wouldn't have thought people are that sensitive to framing subtitles, at least I'm not. That could explain why there is such a divide in reactions because otherwise it seems there is inconsistent rationale for tolerance...
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Functionally, there's not really any difference between "slavery is good" and "slavery is bad, except when it's used right". (Not that having a slave because you want to shag her is using it right by any stretch of the imagination, even if you free her.)
I suspect that Hiroki not Takuya's line of thinking is that the societal inequality is worse than what we have, and what we have is capitalism, therefore they have hypercapitalism. Of course what they have is feudalism, and I think Hiroki not Takuya is seeing but not recognising in so many words that the trajectory that capitalism currently has us on leads to a kind of neo-feudalism. |
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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I hate the fact that people consider isekai a type of genre and have lumped all of them together unfairly, comparing them against one another. If you ask me, at this point in time, isekai has become nothing more than an aspect of the premise or backstory of the character that may most likely serve little to no purpose in the actual story. Like, many, if not most, isekai shows can be simply rewritten to remove the isekai part to turn them into shows with a pure fantasy setting. Without the isekai commonality, comparing say Youjo Senki with KonoSuba would be as fruitless a conversation as comparing say Shingeki no Kyojin with Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu. Depending on your tastes and preferences, you might be more biased towards a comedy over a drama or vice versa. Not to mention, lumping all isekai together might make some shy away from series because of their bad experience with another isekai. Essentially, what I'm getting at is that I believe that there are far more interesting, nuanced and meaningful conversations to be had than "which is the best isekai" or "all isekai suck". |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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It really is, though. Much like, say, musical is a genre of film and play. Literally everything you say about isekai aplies to musicals just the same. People unfairly lump them together, there's intersection with practically every other genre under the sun, examples everywhere on the comedy/drama spectrum. It's easy to name examples that have nothing to do with each other beyond being musicals (Cats and The Blues Brothers, to give an example off the top of my head). Remove the singing and dancing and they all still work as stories. And yes, there are more interesting, nuanced and meaningful conversations to be had than "what's the best musical" and "all musicals sucks". But no-one claims "musical" isn't a genre. I also find it a bit funny that you say comparing Youjo Senki and KonoSuba is fruitless when a literal crossover betwen the two (plus Overlord and Re:Zero) does just that. |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1401 |
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While I don't know that I would call isekai its own genre (I think the term itself a little too specific and insular to be as broad as something like "horror" or "action comedy" etc) I think it's totally fair to gestalt isekai as it currently exists - the central narrative conceit in a prolific trend of late night anime that's been going on for a few years now. And specifically I think there's value in isolating that particular trend from, say, the 90's trend of female-led/shoujo based isekai anime.
Isekai, as a term that's come into vogue in the last few years (I distinctly remember it coming into mainstream anime parlance around 2016 with ReZero's popularity, but obviously it's been around for ages) can technically refer to any series where the main character is displaced into a different world, but more often than not it's shorthand for the modern trend of light/web novel adaptations aimed towards male otaku that almost always feature a male lead who's a game or anime otaku himself, and who inevitably ends up with a party comprised mainly or solely of attractive girls with varying levels of affection towards him. Said shows almost always are set in a vaguely medieval fantasy world, more often than not include diagetic RPG elements like Levels and Skills, and quite often will concoct some reason for the male lead to be extremely powerful or skilled in a way that makes it narratively easy for them to succeed. That shorthand is why some series that aren't technically isekai will sometimes get lumped in during casual conversation. DanMachi isn't an isekai, but it takes place in a vaguely medieval fantasy setting with diagetic leveling mechanics and has a male lead surrounded by a number of attractive women. Even if it lacks the central conceit of an Isekai, it's similar enough in form that the borders can blur in people's consideration of it. Contrast this with Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun, which is technically an Isekai story insofar as the main character is taken to an alternate world with magic and demons and such. In practice the series has way more in common with a typical school comedy, and doesn't really have the trappings associated with other isekai series. Bookworm, to me at least, is also in sort of a different genre space than its peers (in anime, at least, I have no idea if its narrative conventions are more common in the larger world of web/light novels). Main's status as a reincarnated soul from "our" world is certainly pivotal to the plot and her character, but the forms of conflict and dynamics are largely separate from what Wise Man's Grandchild or Demon Lord, Retry! or any other number of others typically engage with. Last edited by lossthief on Fri Jan 10, 2020 12:37 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Hiroki not Takuya
Posts: 2535 |
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Actar
Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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If you ask me, musicals are as much of a genre as poems. It's an art form, not a genre. Just like anime, you can like the form and you can hate the form due to its unique stylistic elements, but it's hardly restricted or specific enough to be a genre.
Crossover =/= comparison. We have Space Jam, yet you don't see people comparing professional basketball with Loony Tunes.
...which is precisely my point. The problem is that the term refers to the premise, but has become a way to define tropes that aren't necessarily related to the premise. Because some shows have that premise, it automatically gets assumed that they will share the tropes as well because it gets labeled as an isekai. That's where the confusion stems from. If you think about it carefully, the various tropes that are linked to an isekai are very much part and parcel of the shonen genre: fantasy setting, powerful main character, female harem, etc... making the term even more pointless. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18226 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Oh, sure. A case could absolutely be argued that the most common trends in current isekai series have been heavily influenced by both harem romcoms and shonen action series. That's one thing which distinguishes current isekai from those that existed in the '90s and early '00s, which were more directly influenced by the "transported to another world" tales which came out in fantasy and sci fi literature earlier in the 1900s or even earlier. They're all still isekai, though. This would hardly be the only genre that's undergone a major stylistic and topical transition over time. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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That description doesn't sound that much like the world of Bookworm. Certainly more like ours than Bookworm's.
"Feudalism" never really had a strict definition, at least not one quite succinct enough for a single sentence in a dictionary to be totally accurate. And in any case the second definition that dictionary gives is "or anything kind of like it". The world of Bookworm (at least, the nation within it that Myne lives in) certainly looks the part; monarchy, a powerful but strictly defined/controlled nobility, powerful church, some amount of rich merchants, lots of poor peasants, and not much in the way of social mobility. |
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nargun
Posts: 926 |
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The economic framework of "capitalism" is, literally, capital-ism. The "-ism", the dominant force and arranging principle, being "capital", that is to say accumulated stores of money.
You buy things and you sell things. If something can be owned, it can be bought, and the only requirements on owning a thing are that it be legal and that you can match the pricetag. That's what "capitalism" means. Now. The guildmaster bought magic tools for Freida... but he didn't buy them with money alone. The text talks about this at reasonable lengths: the guildmaster could buy them because he had money, sure, but mostly because because there were nobles who wanted for various reasons for Freida to not die. The money alone wasn't enough. Myne has the money, but that's not enough, because this isn't a capitalist society. Social status -- nobility, magic-using -- gets you more power than you can get with money, in this society; Myne needs to be a noble to survive but no amount of mere money can equal the value of that. Myne can't buy what she needs, precisely because the society isn't capitalist. Capitalism is liberating in a lot of ways! [the society may not be feudal either; we don't see a lot of the nitty-gritty of local administration, but... people are citizens of the towns directly, for example. In a feudal-properly-so-called society, people would have their loyalties to an intermediate leader who in turn was loyal to the next level up... but the noble stratum exists without direct relationship with the population rather than everyone having "their" noble, for example. You can build class distinctions by putting some specific people over other specific people and then grouping the levels, or you can do the grouping first and then putting the classes over and under each other collectively; this is actually how most daimyo domains were organised internally! ... which is why a lot of people say the bakufu wasn't really feudal.] |
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