The Ascendance of a Bookworm reminds me a lot of Inside Bill’s Brain. In a season where Dr. Stone also runs in the background, it’s pretty easy to see why that particular fantasy is fancy, where in Bookworm, the lead character struggled to get anything done given her circumstances, in the same amount of time.
The fundamental concept in world-building fiction is really a mapping of thoughts, the inputs, the modeling and the guiding principles behind how one relates to the exterior environs. In fiction, we have the luxury of moving that perspective outside of ourselves and inject unrealistic boundary conditions and shortcuts. A thought experiment is the kind of fiction in which we inject somewhat more realistic boundary conditions (and still unrealistic, or no weirder than undead cats). In JK Haru, you could tie that to prostitution and weave a powerful narrative about human condition as encoded in the language of isekai radobe. I think anything can be built by anything in fiction, and to an extent, real life. Compare that to a biopic/Netflix documentary, when we dig deep into how one person connects to the huge thing that person is doing, a similar image surfaces.
Putting aside Bill Gates’s reasons behind his quest to eradicate polio, I think of Main’s quest to become someone who has access to the tangible niceties enjoyed by bookworms in the same way. She wants to encode information as words in print, and to weave a set of words to depict a world in which Main lives in, through the fairy tales of her isekai mother. It is like building a world on the remains of another, minus the empires at war. Well, I guess there’s still Boko Haram in Africa.
Of course, this is only an interesting comparison because the Gates foundation has billions of dollars and massive resources at its disposal, compared to Main. The recap on Bookworm is that a book-loving adult woman got the usual “ran over by a truck” treatment and is reborn into a young girl in the Other, born to a middle-class rural family in what seems like late medieval Europe. Literacy is rare and the Main, the main character, has to first learn to read–well, she has to first find someone who knows how to read and make him teach her that. Books seemed very rare as well. As the story goes, Main became obsessed in creating her own book since she cannot purchase any. She then tried to obtain paper, or clay tablets, or wood tablets, or making papyrus paper, what have you.
And eradicating polio seems kind of hard compared to make paper at home in the 15th century, if you are a poor little girl. Well, maybe. Given that 1000s of species go extinct every year I don’t really know or can measure just how hard, given each’s comparative power levels, lack of a better term. And Bill is a smart, resourceful dude, definitely a 0.1%-er in terms of not just wealth, but as someone who is known as a smart business guy and a savvy technical guy. He is also a bookworm.
So maybe they’re tied? In her new world, Main might as well be its Bill.
PS. I mentioned JK Haru, because that story share a lot with Bookworm in that one aspect: A lot of the time (so far) Bookworm is focused on not just the world-building power fantasy, but the fact that knowledge portability does not always translate to power portability. In Gate or Slime, for example, the respective main characters gained tremendous power in the opening minutes of the series. In Bookworm, this seems to be entirely the opposite–and arguably Main is a better world builder than anyone in those series. It’s a great demonstration of how the isekai genre is both great (in distilling that power injustice to separate it from present-day reality) and terrible (in reinforcing that injustice). On that note, I kind of guh’d at Chouyoyu (Because how are these people any good? If this is “smart” for Japan then that country is in trouble) and I tried Noukin and couldn’t get into it. I’m okay on Isekai Cheat but behind. Am I missing anything worth checking out?
PPS. I can use an isekai fantasy where someone just runs a NGO.
Leave a Reply