#with say a hypothetical new bacteria that grew in the container we use for our new veggie wash

[salmalin]

"Never does a thing to stop it."

LOL she does. She literally does.

There's five arcs dedicated to it. But if that isn't obvious enough for you, how about you get reborn as a five year old disabled girl, become a politician's intern at seven years old, and dismantle our industrial prison complex, which forces people to work and charges them for the pleasure?

Big ask, right? It's almost like life—and this series—is more complicated than a surface-level power fantasy.

There are at least five arcs involving Myne using what little influence she has to provide them with the tools to feed themselves, the skills to protect themselves, and directly giving them the right to consent to work and sex. This involved preventing priests—people with much more power and influence than her—from taking literal children from the orphanage to be—for lack of a better word—fuck toys. Myne takes people who have no ability to survive in the world and makes sure they will be able to live comfortably long after she is gone. including informing them of and enforcing their right to consent.

What's more, saying "slavery is bad" is easy to do. But to go into detail about why is harder. And the series decides to do the hard thing and goes into explicit detail about why slavery is bad on a fundamental level, as well as its place in society. In detail. Repeatedly. I literally cannot believe you missed this. It's one thing to say "ooh, slavery is bad, we should end it," and it's another entirely to explore in detail the extensive damage done to the people in the system. It also explores that sudden extreme change has severe consequences on large quantities of people, and suddenly freeing dozens of people who have been starving for years, have no ability to provide food for themselves, have no concept of how the real world works, and have been raised in a culture free of violence that is literally incompatible with any place outside their small realm of control is not exactly a good idea. Why? Because ignorance is the default, and enforced ignorance is a bitch.

Bookworm doesn't just have chattel slavery.

Bookworm has slavery in a cult. A cult that controls, on a mass scale, what people can do, where they can go, and what they're allowed to know.

If the people in the church were released all at once when she gains control of the temple, they would very likely die of starvation in a few days. This is literally canon. This is how their society is built. And it's how our society is built, too, when you think of it. If you throw a child in a basement, never teaching them to read, do math, or even do basic cooking, feeding them chicken nuggets their whole life, and then release them into capitalism at eighteen, there is no social safety net to catch them. They will not know about homeless shelters. They will not know how to buy food. They will likely die on the street, lost, confused, and scared. This is why we have mandatory education systems, which is the exact thing this series is a love letter to. Education is an equalizer. It is necessary not just to protect ourselves, but literally just to function.

The only thing that protects Myne from the world she's in when she first arrived was her family, who provided her with context and a chance to understand the world around her.

The grey priests do not have families.

Myne is told over and over not to fuck with the status quo. But she knows knowledge is power, so the first thing she does is arm these people however she can under the radar. Because if other pay too much attention, she will no longer be able to help them. Even Ferdinand, canonically, wants to help them, but is unable to follow through so he doesn't do it. He brings who he can under his protection, but the whole point of his character is that he's running away. He has no hope for the future, no hope for his safety, so he hides.

But Myne isn't like him. She can see a future. She knows things can be different. She knows things can change.

She she tries to make that change. And Myne nearly bankrupts herself. She goes nearly broke several times, canonically, giving them what they need so they can survive without her. From a business, to learning skills, to giving them the power to make demands regarding their own living situation. She also gives them money for their work.

Her giving whatever power she can to enslaved people is so important to the story that it is literally the inciting incident that gets her slapped with the label of "saint" and affects everything that happens after. These events are massive, and it's more than a little silly to say "slavery exists and she didn't abolish it, so the series is bad." Bruh, it took her like five novels to make one book. I have no idea why you think a five year old disabled girl who barely understands printing can dismantle a country-wide system of forced labor involving a cult when she can barely walk for ten minutes. But if this is so easy, you should go out and end forced labor in the prison industrial complex. It's not like it's linked to the police and how people are arrested, and the people who fight this system end up dead or anything. It's not like this has been going on for hundreds of years and you're just one person who isn't part of the group in charge of it. How hard could it be?

I'm sorry, but you may want to stay away from Bookworm meta if you have fundamentally no idea what happens in the series, how the world works, or even what's happening right in front of you.

I'd just like to take a moment to appreciate that in Ascendance of a Bookworm (spoilers obv), Myne does not descend upon Ehrenfest and the country at large with the intent of changing it. At first she wants to change things, and she tries. However, she quickly finds that she needs to do so while following the rules of the world around her. Even as the story goes on, as she rises in the ranks of the world, she does so in the context of that world. Yes, she brings technologies from Earth, but they are all modified to suit needs not being met in that world, and to suit the people there. Even more, even with the printing Industry, she quickly learns that there's no way to bring Earth stories to this new world because they're so incompatible, socially.

But what's most impressive is that, as time goes on, the focus stops being about bringing Earth technologies into their world. Instead, she spends a lot more time focusing on reviving the culture already present. She learns a dead language, translates it, and proceeds to make that knowledge more readily available than it's been in generations. Not to mention... *Points to everything in part 5.*

Myne enters the world isolated and alone, desperate for her own culture. She wants to beat Earth into everything she sees. She ends it by bringing the parts of the world dying around her back to life, for the betterment of everyone around her.