![]() Having the point of view character being someone else, and having them experience every tactile sensation, every bodily response, and every emotional beat, was a direction that immediately allows the reader to understand and empathize in a way that both captures the experience, while also telling them how the POV character responds. Seeing the complete scope of the depth of Myne’s emotions, and just how quickly, intensely, and almost involuntarily, just how every single feeling Myne feels, she feels to her core it was something I didn’t think was possible or necessary, but completely sold me on all of her actions up to this point. ![]() It provided me with something I had soon thought I didn’t need, but was extremely grateful for. The Epilogue chapter where the aforementioned memories are revisited by Myne and experienced by High Priest Ferdinand is something that I never really needed–having overlooked those past critiques as the story grows more intriguing and continues to admirably flesh out its world and characters. I could empathize profusely with her, marvel at the wealth of her knowledge, but I was constantly harboring frustration at how little she thought things through–at the lack of foresight for simple things that could have been avoided, or what could be seen as careless mistakes that someone with her knowledge and experience as someone who lived another life and remembered it, shouldn’t have made. I was incredibly frustrated with Myne as a human being. I remember still, how I originally felt about the very first volume of this series. This was not the first time within this same volume that I felt a pang in my chest as the words on the page grabbed me by the feelings and knocked me senseless on my commute to/from work, but it was definitely the strongest. That is why seeing him forced to empathize and through Myne’s memories experience the same tumultuous, relentless, and overwhelmingly powerful range of emotions that she did, made for such moving prose. We’ve known from the get-go that Ferdinand is not in particular a malevolent or ill-meaning force within the Church, and that if anything, he is Myne’s greatest ally, on a level equal to Benno. The actual use of the magical item to peer into Myne’s memories, after she had been essentially drugged by the High Priest no less, was a worrying development, in terms of unexpectedly heavy handed developments. ![]() ![]() Now, seeing the inclusion of the circlet, and how Ferdinand uses it in context of the story itself, I can see where the anime’s staff were going, in terms of appealing perhaps to novel readers who knew in advance the events that happened in Part 2. The framing device used in episode 1 of the anime adaptation was a very strange choice, as a viewer who had only read Part 1 of the novel series (Volumes 1-3). Spoilers ahead for folks who have yet to read this volume or have only watched the anime. There is a level of emotional catharsis drawn from multiple events in the story that up to this point we’ve only gotten maybe glimpses of beneath the surface. Ascendance of a Bookworm Part 2: Apprentice Shrine Maiden Volume 2 has to have been the most satisfying entry I’ve read of this series thus far.
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