#Yurgenschmidt

[aubdrewanchel]

Forget about Harry Potter. I want to know what course would you take in Royal Academy (assuming u can choose)

(Pool at the end)

Scholars

- procrastinators (unless it's something they find interesting)

- probably has adhd and/or autism

- burn out kids

- will stay up till 3am to research a random topic

- daydreams a lot

- love coffee/energy drinks

- has atleast 2-3 hyperfixation all the time

Knight

- the hyperactive kids

- favourite subject is PE (no shit)

- will brag about their fav sport

- loves watching sports on tv

- VERY competitive

- probably hate math

- carefree spirit

- probably have a healthy lifestyle(?)

Attendant

- the perfectionists

- very anxious

- has millions of backup plans

- adapts easily

- overthinkers

- I feel like they like tea a lot

- very polite

(- the parent of the friend group)

- "actors without a stage"

Archdukes

- the overachievers

- has to have perfect scores and attendance

- the "heroes"

- highly ambitious and competitive

- will sacrifice anything for their plans to work out

- people pleasers(?)

- the best at controlling their emotions

- of course (natural) leaders and/or want to be in power

[yurgenschmidt]

[likesdoodling]

Was thinking about random stuff, like crossovers and drawing ideas, and small adorable anime protagonists-

And I remembered a concept I'd had about a spy family plus ascendance of a bookworm crossover-

:D

[drcatco]

The only regrettable thing about Ascendance of a Bookworm is that there will never be any shots of the characters in swimsuits or enjoying a day at the beach.

[ming-sik]

as a devoted hater of isekai where the premise is "oh no i got isekaied as the most unfortunatest character ever but Actually my unfortunate situation is secretly the most bestest divine power and now i'm a minor deity" and a triple hater of characters whose disabilities get magically cured i have REALLY mixed feelings on the devouring bc despite appreciating the mooooostly really good deconstruction, aob stumbles at the resolution for me.

bc lets face it, that IS what the devouring is. rozemyne starts as a terminally ill peasant living without access to medical care, but from when her terminal illness is revealed to be her excess of mana the story does in fact follow the path of lvl 1 commoner → lvl 99 avatar of a goddess, and that kind of sucks because it means that aob doesn't end up doing what it seems like no isekai has the will to do and just make a protagonist that never attains godlike power and has to create a fulfilling life in this unfamiliar and harsh world despite never ever ever ever even getting to meet the crown prince, which cuts off an interesting story i wish got told more often.

However, aob is very clearly doing a deconstruction of this plot structure and her relationship with her power is extremely complicated. i do kind of wish rozemyne was kept at the level of "archduke candidate" instead of the godlike power she ends up having because rozemyne's ability to slam the 'put enough mana in the machine to Win' i think prevents some instances where she would otherwise be forced to struggle with the gap between what she wants to do and what she's physically able to do, but deciding to recreate the premise closely in order to subvert it is a fine narrative choice.

especially because rozemyne's power IS balanced and caveated by the fact that the devouring & its resulting mana clumps are a pretty severe disability. the fact that she is denied any education on it to the point of being seconds away from dying from an unknown illness for most of part 1 and even when she understands the devouring and eventually her mana clumps she has to reckon constantly with her physical limits, and the fact that she can't just pour 1 million magiwatts into any given issue to make it go away because she will die. despite rozemyne's power, her disability makes it so that she narratively has to deal with a pretty neat subversion of the 'commoner elevated to noble trope' that really takes advantage of the fact that commoners in that world are so completely locked off from magic that becoming a noble doesn't just result in mild culture shock judged by the Prissy Rich Villainness but is a fleshed-out, complex tool of systemic oppression that causes real obstacles for our heroine even as she spirals ever deeper into becoming a noble. it also serves as a really elegant allegory for systemic ableism and the way that minor issues for a rich girl can be life-threatening if you don't have access to quality medical care.

But Then The Jureve Walks In. "literally don't even worry about that," aob says, "theres a magic juice which just cures any disease, and the only challenge is creating that juice and using that juice". but no, no you tell me, the jureve is balanced narratively by the timeskip and the difficulty of getting it! rozemyne loses years of her life, that's not nothing! but while it's not NOTHING it also just. doesn't have enough far-reaching consequences that i don't feel like it's an invocation of the "dw abt your disability theres a magic cure for it" rather than a true subversion. imo a true subversion would require that there either 1) straight up not be a cure and rozemyne has to live the rest of her life at 150cm with 3 HP, 2) only be an imperfect cure which maybe allows rozemyne to reach adult size but keeps her health frail enough that using her full magic potential has serious consequences or vice versa if they want to also subvert the '300 yr old child' trope by acknowledging how much it would suck to be eternally trapped in a body with no fine motor control that people instinctively don't take seriously, or 3) only be a cure that is either temporary or otherwise not a one-and-done deal because now that she's big and healthy she just has no long-lasting consequences from her severely disabled childhood, which seems like a narrative branch that was pruned way too hard and way too early to feel like a satisfying subversion instead of just playing the trope straight with a couple extra steps. indeed, option 2b is what the jureve initially seems like...... until your man gives rozemyne some steroids and she's tall now too. so there's just no conflict whatsoever between rozemyne's power and her ability to utilize it, which makes it much, much harder to balance her power in a way that lets her have interesting conflict around magic where she can't just press X to win.

also this problem doesnt exist in a vacuum, and a related complaint is one mostly unexplored comment from when ferdinand is talking to rozemyne about dirk's devouring, and he says that dirk was born with more mana than myne, but her compression method meant that her mana ballooned much bigger than what it would have if she was raised as a noble. bc like god Damn is that interesting! my ideal plot twist would be that the cinderella theme returns because there's a random laynoble whose magic tool got taken away as a teenager who ended up independently discovering a similarly desperate mana compression method, but they're knowledgeable about magic enough to hide it as physical weakness and then become a ticking time bomb who can be exploited by antagonists as a rozemyne with nobody to help her, the ultra-devouring soldier. the contracted devouring in general are such a potent and viscerally horrifying worldbuilding element that i really wish they weren't effectively treated as npc baddies, bc like-- that could've been rozemyne! only her support network and sheer luck separates her from them. part of the problem with rozemyne being cured of the devouring means that she loses even the vestiges of her personal connection to imo the most interesting take on fantasy disability i've ever seen, which is a real shame! especially from a series that's generally so concerned with Not having npc baddies, like explaining that bandits don't attack the church because they're farmers most of the time who rely on the harvest or the fact that all the minor noble antagonists have coherent motivations from bindewald to grausam, even if you aren't at all intended to sympathize with them.

pictured below: me explaining what the devouring couldve been to you

spoilers for vol5p9:

her recent PTSD around feystones... honestly feels like it exists mainly because if rozemyne is able-bodied and therefore powerful enough to just dye a duchy's foundation in minutes... she has an auto-win button for any situation that can be resolved by Having More Mana, which is most combat and a decent amount of politics because aob takes place in a society which runs on mana. i'm saying this as someone who felt like fran's PTSD was really well-done, despite it being the protagonist's problem rozemyne's is so explicitly and exclusively focused on feystones that it ceases feeling like a character trait that serves a narrative purpose and starts feeling like something that was crowbarred in because the trait meant to serve that narrative purpose got phased out before the realization that the story had rozemyne's power be balanced for a reason. is this me being unfair to miya kazuki when it's entirely possible that this was as planned out as everything else in aob and i have no idea what she thinks of this plot development or why she chose it? yeah probably especially when this is based on an incomplete prepub, which is why i say 'feels like' so much. i just read it and thought it fell really flat esp in comparison to earlier depictions of trauma triggers.

[transdimensional-void]

.

[nyd-needs-cuddles]

your honor they're gay

somebody help I haven't even written their fic yet

[tired-reader-writer]

Is it just me or is the Ascendance of a Bookworm fandom on Discord kinda rotten

[aireterra]

Anyone have some quotes from AoaB??

[nefertittythegreat]

Ok, but the reason Ferdinand loves Myne so much is because she was the first person to love him unconditionally. Now I'm not saying Ferdinand wasn't loved, clearly Sylvester loves his brother dearly, but because of how Yurgenschmidt works no one was in a position to love Ferdinand just as is. Something else in their lives had to take precedence over him, but for Myne, Ferdinand was a priority. She put him first, and no one in his life has. For the first time, someone cared about him openly without fear of repercussions, and needless to say, that fact resonated with him.

[monster-gender]

Putting aside everything else about me that would make it impossible for me to actually live in Yurgenschmidt, I think the funniest thing about imagining myself as Rozemyne is getting to the high beast creation part and realizing that I can't do proper magic because I'm an aphant.

Just imagining getting to the "now visualize a sphere" part of the instructions, being like "Oh yeah this is actually impossible for me" then getting put down like a dog just makes me laugh.

Btw for anyone that's gonna say like "Oh but it's magic so it could work" etc etc, please just think about how hilarious it would be. Exhibit A:

[aspecofdust]

I wonder how trans people are treated in Yurgenschmidt's noble society sometimes. The core identity of being a noble is having a lot of mana, so there's a bit of me that hopes and prays that they wouldn't care as long as they kept doing their job. Maybe Flutrane would help the trans mortals who prayed to her, embracing change and healing. Though on the other hand, Noble society is so ruthlessly conservative and status-based that I fear for those who don't have the protection of someone with actual power. Worst case scenario, the Temple is always an option I guess...

[mallowdraws]

Ferdinand made sure to tell Rozemyne right away that the first rule of noble society in Yurgenschmidt is to keep your Twitter account private

[ship-of-skitties]

ferdinand being called the lord of evil is hilarious. he's basically the most pathetic yet competent guy in yurgenschmidt and he's known for being a tad unethical in sport rather than being a genius researcher

[ming-sik]

I really did want to avoid changing names in BAON but I'm just not strong enough to put up with them as someone who's familiar enough with German that all the dictionary names sound really fucking stupid AND more importantly when a bunch of the cheap shot names have ACTUAL names that would've worked better. Idk why Kazuki fought the translator on changing the Japanese names since the jokes don't translate and are therefore ruined, but I'm definitely more annoyed that nobody insisted she change Bezewanst or Bosgeiz for at least the LNs. JK Rowling ass names, ma'am I must insist you rename "Ugly Belly" and "Stingygreedland" no matter how much you despise fat people and foreigners

[stardustizuku]

Forgive me for transposing my tags on my reblog to the ask box but I totally agree with your post about Myne's age and her perception of her “peers”! And then THE VERY SAME PEOPLE turn around and say “ohhhh Sylvester is so terrible for not parenting her not treating her like a child!!!” Like. Dude. PICK A LANE.

I think it's insanely interesting how she views people in relation to herself because it's not so simple as “oh she sees her peers as children because she's mentally an adult” when it's just. Not true?? I don't think we get concrete proof that she does. She sees Eglantine for example as older despite Myne+Urano combo age being most definitely elder.

FerMyne is a very good ship but I think people (especially on Discord, my fucking god) shut down other ships in an instant using this as a bludgeon.

Anyways I hope you don't mind me sending this ask, I've been following along your posts about AoB's trope/genre subversions and the breakdown of Yurgenschmidt's hypocrisies. You're so big-brained for it, whenever I see a particularly rancid take from somewhere else I come back to your posts to cleanse my brain.

Im glad you feel comfortable enough to share that!

Rozemyne is an interesting character bcs, If you’ve noticed, she rarely states who she loves and likes until it’s absolutely necessary for her to do it.

Even with her family, she starts showing affection but it isn’t until she has a near death experience that she becomes very vocal about how much she loves them. With Ferdinand, it isn’t until he’s set to leave for Ahrensbach that she vocally states how much he means to her. Even with Lestilaut, she states that his sudden proposal was opening a can of worms she didn’t want to open.

While she doesn’t lie when she has noted someone is important to her, she takes a while to admit it.

Also, her way of defining “love” has very little romantic connotations, and oftentimes just falls in an ambiguous “family”.

Saying that age is the only reason why she wouldn’t consider someone as romantic interest, is greatly reducing her character. There’s like at least five things that would come first than age - hell Ferdinand checks all the boxes and she STILL doesn’t see him in a romantic light (as of now at least)

Also, and this more important to me, is fucking rude.

People are allowed to ship whatever they want, regardless of what canon says. So pulling the “but they said x in canon!” is like spoiling the fun for everyone for the sake of a rigid moral compass that blocks you from even exploring the characters in interesting ways.

Fandom is about having fun, exploring rships and encouraging others to have a say in what they think of characters!

If you have a genuine insight into characters, sure! Share it, expand on it. But using the tired and useless “she said x therefore she won’t see them as romantic therefore shut it all down” is just, stifling. It screams horrible fandom etiquette

That said, I’m very happy that you like my essays! I try to put my thoughts in order and sometimes I take days to write them, so it means a lot to me.