English Dub Review: Ascendance of a Bookworm”Needs”

Overview:

Continuing off bettering her relationship with her retainers, Main betters her relationship with Gil.

Our Take: 

Like the episode before, it’s realized that a lot of the miscommunication is due to the fact that Main doesn’t know a lot about the church, since she leapt headlong into becoming a priestess without really thinking about it. In this case, she doesn’t really know about how the retainers work, and so she doesn’t realize that she has to provide for them as well. Fran is still in the high priest’s quarters and Deliah is with the high bishop, but Gil doesn’t have a place to stay anymore. Now that he has a master, he can’t lodge with the other gray robes, so he’s completely isolated. Even more so, a gray robe’s master is supposed to be the person supplying them meals, so Gil has gone hungry. Even though he has a bad attitude, he is still right in the sense that Main doesn’t know any better.

However, that changes when Main realizes how to use him. Although he looks down on her for being a brat, he will work for compensation. When Main challenges him with the idea of working for wages instead of working because of her own orders, Gil agrees. It’s also implied that he had never been given any trust before, and had a bad attitude because of it. However, Main’s knack of getting people to do things, specifically through business, that means that she is able to influence people via her logic and not her status.

It turns out that Gil does respond well to that, especially when Main gives him the opportunity to prove himself. Him going into town with her makes him realize that there’s a lot that she knows and he doesn’t, which humbles him quite a lot. As soon as Main praises him, he warms up to her. It shows that with responsibility and the opportunity to prove oneself, as well as with hard work being rewarded, even abrasive people can become willing to pull their share. It really is about learning to work with different kinds of people.

When Deliah gets kicked out of the high bishop’s quarters for not being a good enough spy, she comes to Main for help. When Main offers a helping hand, Deliah accepts, which at the very least puts all of Main’s retainers on relatively good terms with her. Although the ending implies that there is much more that Main doesn’t know, at least she seems to have this under control.