English Dub Review: Ascendance of a Bookworm “Orphanage Reforms”


Overview (Spoilers Below)

Out of curiosity, Myne asks Gil to guide her to the orphanage area of the temple so she can see it for herself. However, they arrive at a locked underground bunker to see many orphaned kids malnourished, hygienically challenged, and possibly not in the best mental state which isn’t even the worst part…

Myne learns that the temple dismissed the previous priestess/caretaker of the orphanage, forcing the children to exist aimlessly and starving, surviving off the leftovers Gil provides them which kinda irks me as it comes across as extremely atrocious. Seriously! What kind of church really thought locking orphans up and feeding them like animals was a humane & efficient way to deal with a situation like this? I know this takes place in a medieval fantasy setting but such barbarism was unacceptable even to most churches and it’s never explained why the Priestess/Caretaker was even dismissed in the first place or why there was no “Plan B” solution for the kids if they had to do it at all?

Though I will give massive points to Myne for always managing to do the right thing when the situation calls for it. As later that day, Myne and Fran meet with Lutz and discuss the problem, only for Lutz to come up with the idea for Myne to use that will help everyone involved while also helping Myne maintain her dream of a paper/book-making while saving the Orphans lives. However, given that Myne isn’t known to be the diplomatic type, she learns the hard way what not to do in the face of royalty…



Our Take

This was a decent episode despite moving at a brisk pace in places. And much like Rising of the Shield Hero, it takes a non-traditional approach to the Isekai genre but succeeds in a different way with very little violence by carefully inserting a touch of Dr. Stone’s practicality and logic into a compelling narrative as exemplified with Myne’s humane solution towards a particular problem such as this.

I gotta say, shit got too real and dark with the state of those poor kids in a show that rarely has any sort of shocking imagery, but it effectively gets the point across the severity of their situation. In a lot of other shows, the protagonist would’ve impulsively thrown open the basement door, magically had enough money to give them all food and clothes, and everything would be sunshine & rainbows, but Bookworm actually takes into account all the infrastructure, hierarchy and long-term consequences that just giving them random donations & hand-outs wouldn’t completely help them in the long run. To quote Dave Chappelle: “modern problems require modern solutions” but I guess here the mantra works well with a “Medieval problem”.