BillyClark

I was thinking the anime is giving enough detail to vaguely understand the world, but that it didn’t feel like good world building.

It’s disappointing to hear that an anime-only experience feels lost. If they don’t do a good enough job, they might not have a next season. It would be like stopping the story right after the introduction.

This episode was too rushed.

I don’t greatly disagree with some of the overall plot decisions they made, such as combining two different Damuel scenes into one. And some of the specifics about how they gathered the egg.

But they changed the way Ferdinand fought the lizard creatures, which is actually a relatively important but minor plot point from Rozemyne’s perspective. I think this was done this way because the episode was cramming too much stuff in, and so they didn’t have time to show the correct scene. But the important thing is that, after this episode, Rozemyne now has slightly different knowledge compared to the LN. I’m guessing they’re planning to just let this go.

And they ignored a lot of the religious stuff, like how they had to go collect the egg on a certain day, or what Liedenshaft’s wrath would be. Rozemyne at this point is supposed to be pondering the difference between the religious view and what might be called a scientific view.

They did get a lot of the emotional stuff between Damuel and Brigitte pretty correct.

I think they did a kind of a shit job with the Effons and the Effon hunt. They’re supposed to be headbanging trees that initially seem to be singing death metal or something, but when you approach them, it turns out it’s just horrible screaming.

Also, the part where Rozemyne attacked the Nanseb showed her swinging her mana knife way too hard. She’s putting her mana into it, so it just goes through like a hot knife through butter, and she knows it. With that blade and her enormous mana in it, she won’t have trouble cutting almost anything. What’s shown in the anime looks far too dangerous for the sorts of things that she’s allowed to do.

Well, Elymas was unbelievably stupid again this time, but at least it was in the most cliched heroic way.

You know, there’s a reason why, in every RPG style anime and game, that they have a rule that nobody has to save a party that made a huge mistake and got in way over its head. Even IRL, people don’t generally sacrifice themselves if they can tell that others got in trouble because of their own stupid mistake.

We’ll probably learn that those two adventurers are important people, somehow, because that’s the most cliched thing that can happen, but realistically, you know, a smart person in that situation would figure that the best solution is to run out and let the already doomed team “delay” the boss.

The thing I don’t get is, if they’re computer animating, why do they still have to have so many shots where they’re just standing completely still and talking, even in situations where it would be so much better to be moving?

“Oh no, the ‘Dreamlord’ (pronounced ‘Master’ in Japanese) is about to very slowly stroll up in only a few minutes. Those two incredibly injured, limping adventurers on the verge of death only outran its minion by a whole lot. The best thing to do is to just sit here and talk about how much it will kill us, rather than running straight away.”

I thought the illustrations from the knight stories would basically be Ferdinand with different hair for plausible deniability, but those illustrations are just straight-up Ferdinand. With Haldenzel looking like it’s about to become a city dedicated to printing pictures of Ferdinand, his control over illustrations of himself might just be out of his hands, regardless.

This season, I’ve complained about the animation so much that I figured I’d give them a sort of a back-handed compliment. The chairs are still too big for Rozemyne to sit in by herself, as they are supposed to be, so I think that anytime she’s in public, she is supposed to have to have an attendant lift her into a chair. But I think you’d only want to animate that if you have an unlimited budget, and it would also have the possibility of changing the pace of the story.

So, the obvious answer is simply don’t ever animate her sitting down or getting up unless you’re prepared to pay that animation penalty. But in this episode, they showed Rozemyne interacting with chairs a few times, and she sort of sits normally, but has to lift herself up with her hands on the seat of the chair. I don’t think Rozemyne would ever do that at this point in the story, but at least she’s not inelegantly crawling up onto the seat like they animated her doing in the episode where she first created her highbeast.

She should have an attendant lift her up, but they way they animated it, it will probably just slip past most people’s attention. So, a more reasonable tradeoff than I’d have expected from these animators.

This next thing I’m mentioning was the same as the LN, but it just boggles my mind that there is any world where a woman could go through all the effort to break off her engagement, and then her former fiance can propose to her again and almost force her to accept it within the normal rules of their society. Like, I could see it if he had blackmail material or something like that, but it looks like everything was out in the open in this case. If he had that much sway, then it seems like he could have stopped her from breaking their previous engagement and saved all the trouble.

This was explained in the LN as him intentionally trying to put her into a bad situation where she’ll inevitably harm Illgner with her reaction, forcing her to accept, but I really don’t buy it. If the guy you broke up with were to approach you, it seems like you should be able to say whatever is noble-speak for “fuck off,” without even needing to listen to him.

I know what you’re thinking, they screwed up Stenluke and old BillyClark is going to come here and shit all over the episode. Well, too bad. Although they departed from the LN, and pretty drastically, I’m just considering this to be the Stenluke version from the anime. For the narrative purposes, I don’t see why it won’t work.

And I know what you’re thinking, they previously said that Rozemyne has more mana than the archduke, so she is going to be a mismatch for Wilfried, who hasn’t even gone to the Royal Academy yet. It’s still years away for him. They made it look like Wilfried was directly giving mana, and he’d probably be putting his life at risk to do that with Rozemyne. Well, you’re right about that complaint, but in the previous episode, they did make him use a feystone, even if they completely messed it up. So, at least I can pretend like he was using the mana from a feystone. That feystone fuck up was from the previous episode. It was so bad that I honestly think they need to redo that entire scene from that episode. But this one, you can just pretend that the feystone was hidden under Wilfried’s hand or whatever.

No, I’m sorry but whatever was wrong with this episode is completely overshadowed by the scenes of Rozemyne reading in bed.

Plus, we got to see Bonifatius confusing the shit out of Rozemyne. We got to see Tuuli getting ready to go to the Gilberta company, and we’re reminded of how important she feels her promise to Myne was. You can really feel Tuuli’s motivation. We got to see Otto finally introduced to Rozemyne as well as the birth of the Plantin company. We got to see Ferdinand pinch Rozemyne’s cheek and Benno scolding Rozemyne.

Probably my biggest complaint about this episode is that they didn’t emphasize how important that one-of-a-kind book that Rozemyne made was to her. I believe that was actually the first book she tried to write on the clay tablets, and it’s only now finally finished. My second biggest complaint is probably that they crammed too much into one episode.

Although I tend to complain about all the details they get wrong, I think the heart of the story is rooted in the very realistic motivations and emotions of all the characters. The details can be problematic because they distract from the story when you mess them up.

That’s fine, though, if she leaves after understanding her worth.

You were just saying that they were going to make 20m on the first day, so even if he has her for one day, and gives her her fair worth, which let’s say is 20%, then he’d have the 16m after one day, and she’d have 4m, as well as an understanding of her value. He’d have set up himself to achieve his goal much faster.

And if she understands her fair value, as well as his value, she’s not going to leave his team, anyway. 20% of his team is going to be worth more than, let’s say 50% of other teams, and let’s not forget, that’s only if she can actually convince the other teams that she’s worth that much.

She said in this episode that she couldn’t live on 20%, and if she goes with a different team and demands a lion’s share, that team is going to have to make those same calculations on whether they’ll get enough to live.

And one more obvious thing, Elymas is going to get the absolute best build. He would have already had it had he been allowed to stay in his family house. He understands everything about the build and can fully explain it, but nobody is willing to listen.

She’d have the same problem. She’s already had the same problem. That team she was with ignored her contribution and assumed they got the lucky drop only because of themselves.

What you’re describing is really the way a small child understands things. “I need food and I have a $20 bill, so if you have a bag of peanuts, then I just have to give you the $20 and I can eat.” They don’t actually understand the deal they’re making. The $20 that the child has is worth far more than the bag of peanuts.

Him giving her 80% is a terrible deal for him. Him giving her 50% is a pretty bad deal for him. He’s worth far more than her. We know this because the premise is that he’s going for the #1 most broken build in the game.

That woman at the shop already agreed to hold onto the skill book for him. He doesn’t need a teammate this urgently, even if she has chosen a broken skill.

An adult, or even an older teenager, unlike a child, should be capable of empathy, and should try to consider things from the other person’s perspective.

He didn’t need to go get her all hot-blooded. She wasn’t going to leave all that money on the ground. Going in with full intensity is only going to scare her. He could just wait for her friends to dump her, or for her to beg her way back in, and then offer her some calm help when she comes back for the money.

And not only is 80% objectively too much, it’s the sort of thing that would frighten a person further. Most other people would think that they’re getting scammed.

An adult might not consider all of those things, but they’d at least know that it would be stupid to try to recruit a person in a way that scares the shit out of her and should make her think you’re trying to scam her or abuse her.

I’m conflicted about this anime, because I like the basic idea of an MC who has deep knowledge about the RPG system a world uses.

I like the setup for this anime that the other characters are thinking things through and trying their best, but it would be impossible to find a broken skill somewhere down a skill tree that was otherwise terrible. Because, like they’ve shown, if you mess up your skills, your life as an adventurer may simply be over.

People playing that as a video game would be able to try every build, but nobody in that real world would risk screwing up their entire life to figure out what’s the best.

An anime setup like this one really makes me want to watch until the end so I can see how broken he becomes and how he shows up all the people who doubted him. And it wouldn’t be the same to simply watch the last episode of the season.

But I have come to detest anime where the MC is a complete dumbass, and Elymas seems to be the stupidest person on that planet. Why would he offer her 80% when he needs to make money and she thinks she’s worthless? Maybe her build is broken, but he’s going for the most broken build and he also has broken knowledge. If she actually knew the Elymas’s isekai situation, she’d be ecstatic for a 20% cut. Not only would she become rich, but Elymas could guide her to choose the best skills going forward. So why would he offer her 80, and even before confirming her build? I think a smart person could have easily convinced her to go for 20, which would probably be in the neighborhood of fair, and if he’d feel guilty about it, anything up to an even share.

It’s also weird that Elymas is so smart when it’s about the RPG aspects of the game, and the rest of the time, he doesn’t seem like he’d be smart enough to put his armor on correctly.

I also think that over-exaggerated reactions in an anime are typically there to appeal to like 10 year olds. It’s fine to have them in there occasionally, but Elymas is having them several times per episode.

I find myself hitting the skip forward button all the time. Stupid overreaction? skip. Pointless flashback? skip. Long CGI pan? skip. At a certain point, I’m not even watching it.

I’m not sure why he overreacts to the price of the skill books. He had just seen that healing potions were more expensive than expected, and that skill books were only available on the black market. And then, they turn out to be only double the price from the game. Then, he shows obvious reactions to the skill book he wants which lets the shop keeper charge him whatever she wants.

She said it was rare and that only an oddball would want it, which is like saying that it will never sell. There’s tons of room for negotiation.

Imagine a world where he wasn’t a complete moron, and he saw the book, and then calmly asked her about it. He could negotiate the price down instead of up.

I got so far through this episode that I almost had hope that it would finish without any large complaints.

The mana replenishment room registration feystones can just be added like that from outside the mana replenishment room? That makes no sense. Any noble could sneak in if it was like that.

And then, almost immediately after that, they had what I consider a major error, perhaps the biggest error of the season. Something that makes no sense at all the way it was presented. What was the deal with that feystone that Sylvester gave Wilfried inside the mana replenishment hall? I think to the average viewer, it’s incomprehensible.

Sylvester gave Wilfried an empty feystone and told him to fill it. Which Wilfried doesn’t do. Then, Wilfried holds the feystone under his hands while doing the replenishment. THIS MAKES NO SENSE. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?????

But what it’s supposed to be is that the feystone was already filled with mana, and that Wilfried was using his mana to push the foreign mana out of the feystone into the magic circle, instead of using his own mana to do the replenishment. So, the feystone also should have been animated shining with a color like it was already full of mana, but instead it was shown to be empty, which makes no sense.

The anime made it look like Wilfried was filling that feystone with his mana as well as doing the replenishment, which would be absolute nonsense.

I tried listening to the Japanese, and unless I am mistaken, it actually said the same thing as the English subtitles. Man, my Japanese listening could use some work. I wish they had Japanese subtitles.

I’m not overly concerned if the anime simply diverges from the LN a bit, but it at least needs to make sense by itself. One of the things I like the best about Bookworm is that its world building is done so well. Almost everything makes sense. I don’t want several main characters to be participating in complete nonsense and acting as if it makes sense. It totally ruins the vibe.

Well, I thought this episode hit most of the marks that I wanted it to, apart from again many lacking animations. We got to hear Rozemyne’s song. We got to see Rozemyne and Brigitte swallowed by the talfrosch and then spit out. We got to see the rairein harvest.

Although the animations did my boy Ferdinand wrong. From the way it was animated, it seemed like he should have stopped the talfrosch before it attacked Rozemyne, but he was just incompetent. And of course, in this episode, we got this epic like 10 second shot of Rozemyne’s hand not moving. It lasted so long that I thought Crunchyroll had crashed. There were a whole lot of lackluster animations this episode.

There was one other disappointment, which is not different in factual content from the source, just presented differently.

But in the LN, you never learn anything about Ferdinand’s experience on the night of Flutrane until after he catches Rozemyne from falling, when he is telling her about what happened from the men’s perspective. You first get this magical experience where the women all simply wake up at the Bath of the Goddesses, and then only after it’s all over, you learn about how they were abducted and the men were all desperately trying to save them the whole time. It adds an ironic aspect that was not at all present in this episode, and I think the book’s style was simply superior.

Replying to myself, but it occurs to me that the citizenship medals are not sorted well at all. If only they had a person with the expertise of, say, a librarian, to get them into a reasonable order.

The citizenship medal registration box is too damn big!

I don’t think this can possibly be a spoiler, because it has nothing to do with the plot, but since it’s info from the LN, I’ll mark it as a spoiler, anyways.

I admit, I don’t remember with minute detail how the scene went with Angelica and her parents, but….

So, this response includes explanations from the LNs. I don’t expect that this stuff will be explained in the anime, so I guess I don’t consider it a spoiler.

The schnesturm was supposed to be much more injured than that, and maybe even sort of pinned in place. Meanwhile, although they didn’t explain why specifically, my guess is either it’s a property of the spear or that Ferdinand is aiming her hand, but Ferdinand acted like Liedenshaft’s spear couldn’t miss in that situation. The fight in the anime was indeed unimpressive.

And as for Angelica, the situation is even worse for her. If she failed, she wouldn’t just lose her job, she’d be stripped of her nobility and be forced to work as a servant for the rest of her life. If you’ll remember, nobles are people who graduated from the academy. With Angelica’s personality, she’d probably end up the same as a devouring commoner under a submission contract.

It’s late and so maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see the part of the article that compares the abandon rate of slopcode with the overall abandon rate. Not saying that the premise is wrong or anything, but you can’t tell how bad something is unless you can compare it with the norm.

Perhaps if you challenged Bybon son of Phola to prove his claim, he could claim that “this” refers to the chisel he used to carve the message.

If you were given Superman’s powers, would you do the same thing as he does in the comics?

I try to imagine myself doing that, and I can’t imagine it would be anything but depressing. Oh, now that bad person over there wants to kill that other bad person. Probably if you went and completely stopped the fighting in the Middle East, people would just call you antisemitic. And then the moment you left, they’d all start killing each other again.

I suspect that, rather than trying to save or rule people, I’d just become an apathetic egomaniac. There’s no point to ruling humans. Just like humans aren’t obsessed with ruling ants. I’d probably just see them as the best available source of entertainment, and I’d only intervene if something interferes with the entertainment industry.

Although I complain, I don’t hate this season. Most of my irritation is limited to a few scenes per episode. If I had a trillion dollars, I’d pay to have the entire series re-animated, though.

I had previously tried to figure out how many episodes were in this season, and all it said was that it hadn’t been announced. This episode made it obvious that there are more than 12 because it seems like an episode where they just shoved various plot-related leftovers, and it would be weird if they did that in episode 11 of 12. AniDB has release dates for episodes up to 16 for this season, but I don’t know whether that means there are only 16 episodes.

It seemed like they really wanted to exposition dump in this episode, and they made a lot of strange changes from the source material, many of which don’t make sense, and where doing them the right way would have been no harder. I’ll mention a couple of things that are not, in any way, spoilers.

Like, we’re supposed to believe that there was a huge locked cabinet in the book room, and Rozemyne wasn’t interested in it until she found a key that she didn’t know what it did? No, she obviously knew from the beginning that there were locked shelves, and that the High Bishop had the key. Well, technically, her attendants have the key. When she needs a key, she asks her attendants to bring it to her. I don’t remember exactly when in the story she read them, but any delay before she got to the locked shelves was simply because she hadn’t gotten to that part of the book room yet.

And we’re supposed to believe that Ingo got in the High Bishop’s face like that? I think in that same scene, Ingo said he paid for etiquette lessons just to be able to meet the High Bishop. Rozemyne had a guard knight in the room. There was some leeway given because they were in her hidden room, but Ingo now believes her to be a noble. After his lessons, he should at least know that if he physically approached her like that, he’d probably be executed on the spot. The lessons weren’t an excuse for Benno to make money like they said in that scene. They were to keep Ingo from making mistakes that would lead to severe punishment or execution.

And although it looked less offensive than what Ingo did, Zack would never run up to Rozemyne after the meeting like that. Zack running up to her was far worse than what Ingo did. That wasn’t in her hidden room. Zack is a commoner. He’s not her attendant. He’s not even an orphan. That was outside the temple where there is no leeway to treat Rozemyne as anything but a noble and the High Bishop. All commoners know that any mistakes dealing with the nobility will likely lead to their execution, and maybe the execution of their family. In this same episode, they made sure to tell Ingo that he could speak without as much fear because he was in her hidden room. And now a couple of scenes later, they have Zack do this outside the temple.

How was this animated like this? If the animators just read the script for this very episode, they shouldn’t have made these mistakes. Why did they spend all of that time in the earlier seasons showing how much commoners cower before nobles?

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.