BillyClark

I heard somewhere that one excellent way to get enemies to surrender is to turn the flamethrower pilot light off and just douse the enemy in the fuel, instead.

I am of the unpopular opinion that the spelling of English character names should always be as close to the Japanese pronunciation as English can get, even when they are English loanwords or foreign names. I still remember people insulting me and telling me how stupid I was when, right after she was first introduced, I claimed that Sasuke’s daughter in the Boruto manga should be called “Sarada” and not “Salad”.

I don’t even think Eustachius is a great way to spell the name, despite definitely being the spelling that the Japanese came from. We just don’t pronounce that name like the Japanese pronounce it. Kazuki-sensei has admitted that Damuel was originally a typo of Samuel. Why not just call him “Eustocks”, “Yustocks”, or something similar? The only important thing in a translated name is the pronunciation.

Well, watching the old episodes of this anime on crunchy roll, some of the subtitles from earlier seasons are almost unforgivable.

IIRC, Myne’s name was originally subtitled as “Mine”, which made it unnecessarily confusing. But my biggest beef is that, instead of the “high priest” and the “high bishop”, the subtitles, I think all the way until the previous season, used “high priest” and “head priest”. I got those confused so easily, but “shinkanchou” and “shindenchou” sound very different from each other, to me at least.

Last week, I felt disappointment that the subject matter of Wilfried possibly becoming disinherited wasn’t portrayed with the gravity and urgency that it required. I wanted it to have as much impact as the episode about the harspiel concert.

This week, however, I think they managed to put out a pretty good episode again. The only hitches I felt were the awkwardly shoehorned-in flashbacks to Rozemyne’s medical examination.

Also, maybe it is more obvious in Japanese, but I wonder if the English audience reading the captions really understood that time when Rozemyne was talking to Fran in the Pandabus that she was doing an imitation of Ferdinand. I had been really looking forward to that scene, but it was less funny than I hoped for.

I’ve been reading the manga in Japanese, and that scene almost made me regret using captions for the anime, even though my listening isn’t that great yet. Maybe the next time I watch the anime from the beginning, I’ll try it without captions.

That’s a great point. When Myne was attacked by the trombe as a blue shrine maiden, Damuel was almost executed simply because he didn’t signal for help when a higher ranked noble attacked Myne. So Damuel’s inaction due to his incompetence just with regard to following Ferdinand’s order was enough to be executed. Of course, he was a laynoble, so far less important.

I expect that even though Wilfried’s attendants are archnobles, this is a far more serious crime. But maybe on the balance, because they’re archnobles, they think they might not be executed because their mana is needed?

This next paragraph may have spoilers. It’s all stuff that’s already happened in the anime, but maybe wasn’t explained fully in the anime, I can’t remember, so I’ll mark it as spoilers. For example, did Florencia specifically say in this episode who was raising Wilfried before? I can’t remember. I do think most of it is stuff that you could assume from the anime, even if it wasn’t explained.

This episode lacked the punch I was expecting. I think partially because they’re forced to rush through the story, and partially just some bad storytelling choices.

We’re told a couple of things about Veronica, but not in a way that sinks in. If they don’t show us clearly how Veronica is different from other nobles, and specifically in how she treats different people differently, the story is going to lose a lot of its emotional bite. She was cruel to Ferdinand, and we only get like one sentence about that so far.

We don’t really understand what it means if Wilfried fails at his winter debut, as we’ve never seen a winter debut, and I don’t think we’re even specifically told how much time he has. We don’t understand the extent of Wilfried’s running away at a basic level. It must be extreme if he’s not even learned his letters, but if you tell the audience that he’s been receiving private tutoring for a long time and he’s still at exactly zero, it’s just so absurd that there’s no way for us to comprehend.

We’re told that Wilfried’s attendants aren’t raising him properly, but we’re not really shown it. The only time we’ve been shown Wilfried running away was a long time ago in the episode about Rozemyne’s baptism, and it’s not clear that this is what Wilfried does all day, every day.

Instead, we’re given a sort of heartwarming scene at the end where Wilfried and his attendant… was that Oswald?… nod at each other like everything is better. No, everything has not been fixed. Wilfried’s attendants are utter failures at their primary job.

By the end of the episode, you know that this is a critical event for the future of the duchy, an event where the fate of the next archduke is in the balance. I mean, what happens if a complete failure becomes archduke? What happens if Wilfried is disinherited? Would he be sent to the temple as a blue priest? I had hoped this episode would have a similar amount of impact as the harspiel concert episode.

One reason this anime is interesting is that it doesn’t have a completely precise genre.

Like, obviously it’s the isekai otome game genre, but beyond that, it’s closest to a mystery. The mystery being that the MC, Cecil is trying to figure out what Bertia knows. But at the same time, Bertia is a main character herself, and we in the audience sort of know what sort of things she must know, generally, if not specifically. So, is it more of a how-done-it like Columbo?

But either way, it still seems unusual for a mystery, and we saw that in this episode. They completely explained the mystery, and unless they have an unusual season of 11 episodes, there are two more episodes left. That’s quite a lot of time to spend after the mystery has been explained.

Realistically, a platform where you can delete your own questions so that they disappear for everyone isn’t the best platform for technical support communities. But a platform where you can’t delete your own posts is not the best platform for for a lot of other things, like privacy.

Two use cases without overlap seems like a good argument that there should be two different platforms.

For me, this isn’t a small thing. It’s a fundamental mistake that betrays a nearly complete lack of understanding about the character being animated. It’d be like if you were making a cartoon about The Flash, and the animators had him flying somewhere like Superman.

What is the point of this part of Rozemyne’s life? What is she doing? She is learning to be not just a noble, but the Arch Bishop and the daughter of the Archduke. She is doing this seriously because if she fails, it’s quite likely that her family and all of her commoner friends in the lower city will be executed along with her.

If you just have a two sentence summary of Rozemyne’s motivation like that, then this would never have been animated like that. It goes against her core character at this point in the story.

There are allowances that need to be made for animation. Like, in their society, nobles basically always either smile or have an otherwise calm expression, and never show other emotions on their faces, but that would probably not look good as an animation.

This is purely a complaint about something that was animated in this episode, but I just found it shocking, being familiar with the story.

Right after Rozemyne has her sleepless night about Hasse, (at 14:10 on Crunchyroll), she gets into her highbeast by crawling onto the seat, then kneeling on the seat, and then turning and putting her feet down into the pedal area.

One of the first things she learned about noble etiquette as a blue priestess was to never to climb onto a seat, and I’m pretty sure that was shown in the anime, too. So, Rozemyne would never do this at this point in the story, especially not in front of Ferdinand.

Fine, but even weirder, I don’t think anybody would do this. I’ve never seen anybody get into a car like this… maybe a small child, but that’s because they’re getting into an adult-sized car. This highbeast was made specifically for Rozemyne.

What a weird animation choice. If the seat was in the way, they could just make the seat move similarly to the door, which would be an easier animation, anyways.

Pretty much my biggest complaint about the entire story is the idea that the king wouldn’t use the royal reserves of medicine to heal the wife of his vassal and close friend just because people might object.

Everyone acts like this makes logical sense, but I don’t think anyone either in-universe or in the audience would actually agree.

Of course he would use the royal reserve medicine. And maybe some people would be upset, but their dissatisfaction would be nothing compared to the mess that a dissatisfied vassal would create. If there was just enough for the royal family, that might be one thing, but from their language, it doesn’t seem like that is the reason.

Of course, you can easily forgive the anime because it didn’t actually happen… but it was “supposed” to happen. So the game that Bertia and Heronia played had some astonishingly shitty writing.

One thing I forgot when talking about this episode earlier is the cliffhanger from the last episode where Wilfried is dragging Rozemyne’s bloody unconscious body across the floor. And this episode they just carry on like it didn’t happen.

I suspect that would be jarring if you were binge watching the episodes. There is more context in the LNs. Maybe they plan to do a flashback the next time Rozemyne meets Wilfried? I’m hoping at least.

So, I read the manga for this series yesterday, and I actually think the anime is better than the manga so far. I’m usually a fan of any anime with the word “Villainess” in the title, but conversely, I usually dislike the “clueless” sort of animes where the MC doesn’t realize what’s going on.

I guess I think of Bertia as the MC, even though Cecil is supposed to be the MC.

I’m not sure why the anime seems better than the manga. Maybe because I am watching it knowing how it ends. Maybe because Bertia doesn’t seem quite as clueless as in the manga. Maybe it’s because the mangaka frequently used a really stupid happy face for Bertia that I disliked.

I was surprised they spend so much time making sure that we knew Ferdinand killed Arno. Arno was previously bullying Fran, and Arno was the reason why Ferdinand didn’t respond to the attack in the temple more quickly. So, it’s sort of important to know that Ferdinand can be this ruthless to commoners, and how little grey priests’ lives are worth, but if they just mentioned that he was replaced with Zahm, I still think it would still play out similarly to the audience.

When I first watched the anime that had come out so far, I didn’t originally classify it as top-tier. Only after reading the LNs did I get really excited about it. Going back and watching the anime again, I was surprised at how good they were at choosing the parts to animate without changing the story very much.

One thing they changed compared to the anime is that Myne is somewhat more weak and sickly in the books. So, it’s more natural if she collapses with Cornelius and then with Wilfried. By the way, I think those two scenes are months apart.

Also, in this episode, it sort of looks like she fainted with Cornelius because she was walking too much, but in the book, it’s clear that she mostly got overexcited about the book room. They kind of showed this in the episode by showing how happy her face was after she collapsed and was in bed, presumably dreaming about the book room.

So, we know from the previous season that Eckhart investigated Myne with Justus before she entered the temple. So he knows all about her past as a commoner, but she doesn’t recognize him. Knowing this, it’s interesting how he talks to her as her older brother. He specifically says he accepts her because of her relationship with Ferdinand.

As a fan of the LNs, if I could choose one anime to have it become popular so that it is guaranteed to finish the entire main story, it would be Ascendance of a Bookworm.

So, I’m hoping this season does it. So far, so good.

Of course, it’s also hard for me to tell how this episode would play to a person who doesn’t already know the entire story. But some scenes in this episode hit harder for me, I think.

They even gave dialogue to Hartmut.