English Dub Review: Ascendance of a Bookworm “New Retainers”

Overview:

Main realizes she needs more weapons: mannerisms.

Our Take:

This time we are introduced to a new retainer, Rosina. She is suggested by the high priest for her musical ability, something that Main is required to know. While Main isn’t nobility-born, she does have an incredibly high amount of mana, which makes her desirable by the nobles once she reaches womanhood. A high amount of mana in Main herself means a lot of mana for her children, after all. In order to give herself agency and to prevent herself from being a pawn, she has to learn to navigate nobility. Being too headstrong would likely make problems down the line.

Rosina’s issue is her lack of moving on; she used to have a former master that focused very heavily on the arts, and therefore favorited Rosina due to her musical abilities. While the priestess in question returned to her place in noble society, Rosina was left behind and didn’t take up work with another master. She is therefore left with the memories of her previous treatment, and upon being made to work with Main, expected similar results. Her favoritism meant that she was relegated to music only, and didn’t do any of the household chores. Of course, that won’t work very well in Main’s place.

Main’s philosophy is work hard, and be rewarded accordingly. While Rosina very clearly has talent, she is uninterested in the more menial tasks, like the ones that Gil and Deliah are relegated to. To do hard labor would injure her hands, and to be fair this isn’t entirely incorrect. Since her main talent is her musical ability, it would make sense to avoid any sort of potential harm to that. If she lost that ability, her value as a retainer would go down. The only problem remains that she is unwilling to compromise at all.

Fresh from her dealing with Lutz’s problems is Main, who decides to listen to both sides. She has clearly come quite far in such a short period of time, able to not only listen objectively, but deliver an ultimatum when needed. She has progressed significantly, and is well on her way to be a solid priestess.

The ending is quite the cliffhanger, where the focus comes back to Vilma, where it’s revealed that she had been harassed by a blue-robed priest in the past. The incident left her traumatized, and so Main will have to navigate that. We know the church is far from perfect, but to go into a harassment scandal will be a heavy topic. Curious to see how that will be navigated…