Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 3: Adopted Daughter of an Archduke ‒ Episode 11

It does not take long for this episode of Ascendance of a Bookworm to pay off last week's promises of Ferdinand-formented escalation. He arrives and immediately starts slinging around magic accompanied by some extremely attractive animated flourishes. There's a bit where a huge magic energy wave gets split around the characters that so succeeds at selling the scale and degree of what's being dealt with. It truly feels like Rosemyne reached a climax after she pushed herself to this in the previous episode.

It's only a little deflating when the result is that the mana stone being corrupted by the Feybeast means they can't use it, and Rosemyne can't just infuse another one from the tree, so they're set back an entire year on this development. As I already detailed, a lot of this action was about Rosemyne learning to shoulder greater responsibility and effort on behalf of others working around her. But also, delaying a critical component of one of her main motivations—curing her Devouring—because of a big beastie interference turns it into an almost-literal shaggy dog story.

It absolutely comes off like a consequence of the perfunctory pacing of the Bookworm anime, because this abrupt finish to the material-gathering action has to immediately give way to business as usual for the rest of the episode. All the momentum and urgency evaporate under the pretense that Rosemyne and pals can simply try again next year, and then she's back to going over old documents and enacting incremental printing press production progress. Typical for the show, but over the past couple of weeks, the audience has gotten a taste of engaging escalation from the series. Shifting the gears like this is going to feel jarring.

It doesn't help that these follow-up segments only "go somewhere" in the most technical way typical of day-to-day Bookworm storytelling. There's an intriguing aside early on where Rosemyne trips over a cache of "rare books" that are actually those hollow secret-storage compartments that college students stash their weed in, except these are concealing old letters and evidence of connections and corruption by Rosemyne's high bishop predecessor. And these revelations don't especially do anything in the moment, save for prompting details from Ferdinand about Sylvester's mother because it turns out she was party to the dealings by said bad bishop, and he had to take punitive action against her accordingly.

Late into this family-focused season, this revelatory detail throws some wrenches into Rosemyne's emotional appreciation for the institution of family. She'd already heard how unfairly hard Ferdinand's adoptive mom could be on him. Now she has to reckon with Sylvester's hard decisions made as an archduke that can alienate those relationships. It's an important complexity she'll have to accept more and more as she grows, and it speaks to why the previous plotline about bringing Sylvester's own son, Wilfried, to be raised with his mother and family is even more important to this unit. An odd cascade of storylines in an episode that didn't start in that arena to get there, but appreciable nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the writing simply checking back in on Wilfried in that moment as a follow-up betrays how blithe Bookworm can be with the rest of this episode's elements. "He's doing fine" is the barest of updates given. And I know I said I don't particularly care for Wilfried, but I still recognize the value in touching on his station a little more when the theming of the entire subplot being addressed in this moment clearly relates to him. The rest of the episode ostensibly deals with Rosemyne following up with characters like Ingo and other allies in the printing press manufacturing. It's funny to see some good old "character introducing isekai people to new-world concepts" shenanigans as Rosemyne blows people's minds with the principles of leverage. And it touches on the influence Rosemyne's advancements have on the business and reputations of the craftspeople involved, which is nice to see tangibly. But it's such an incremental tangibility that it doesn't feel so momentous that it should overtake the episode's focus from the magical monster mash that Rosemyne's actual life hinges on.

That's all to say that I still enjoy Ascendance of a Bookworm and want to enjoy it even more. But the arrangement of adaptation in these past couple of episodes has made the cracks in the pacing thereof more and more visible. Obviously, it's a consequence of adapting books that have a ton of moving parts this deep into the story, which itself seems to be caught in an interstitial phase. But previous sensibilities have shown it has tighter ways of pulling it all off, regardless. I'm just asking for a bit more of a detectable arc to the pacing, and the hard turn from the cliffhanger conclusion to Rosemyne taking a bunch of meetings that could've been emails is not it.

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Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 3: Adopted Daughter of an Archduke is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is back to hit the books. You can see him posting about anime, transforming robots, and other quality reading material over on his BlueSky.