It’s at that moment that Main more-or-less resolves to topple the class system if it means she can get back to reading - even if means she has to learn a whole new language and also invent paper first.
Main’s health is so fragile that any exertion leaves her vulnerable to collapse, and she’s also the daughter of peasants, which means no access to the books that serve as luxury items for the church and nobility of the medieval world. Bookish Urano, who spent her entire life reading, wakes up to find she now inhabits the body of a small child named Main (or Myne, in the novel’s translation). Bookworm stands beside Chihayafuru (which had to wait almost a decade for its third season) and Fruits Basket (one of the most beloved shoujo manga of all time) as one of the few multi-cour non-action anime with a female lead.īookworm ’s lead is reborn in another world, but it’s not exactly a power fantasy. In the modern anime industry it’s common for shows to receive a single “cour,” or a season of roughly 12 episodes, unless they’re part of a beloved franchise or otherwise come from a proven money-making source material. The last prominent example of this before the genre waned in popularity was 2001’s Spirited Away, but the past year has seen a slow resurgence in female-focused isekai.Īscendance of a Bookworm is of note partially because it has been given so much space to spin out its slow, deliberate story. Fushigi Yugi, written by x-gender artist Yuu Watase at age 22, made fears about rape culture, responsibility, and the struggle to maintain platonic friendships against heteronormative expectations into a grand epic The Vision of Escaflowne made its heroine’s anxieties literal, while The Twelve Kingdoms charts its characters’ struggles with marginalization and overcoming abuse. In these stories, the other world was a place to face abstracted versions of the trials of teenage life.
A few years later, the genre was almost exclusively made up of stories about milquetoast dudes who get reborn into fantasy worlds where they automatically have superpowers and everyone (read: hot chicks) finally appreciate them, with the grossest examples sprinkling in slavery apologia on top just to make sure the hot girls are properly subservient.īut back in the 1990s, there were a wealth of isekai stories that served as coming-of-age stories for adolescent girls. The genre gained its official name with the boom/revival arguably kicked off by the Sword Art Online anime in 2014, which set the stage for a years-long stretch of isekai that were increasingly framed as male fantasies. The definition is broad, fluid, and constantly being argued over, but in general it involves a protagonist being transported to another world and trapped there, whereupon adventure ensues. The isekai (“another world”) genre is a staple of anime.
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