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ming-sik · 3 months

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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.

#ascendance of a bookworm #credit to @yurgenschmidt for the hartmut sticker i use it so frequently #tbc i havent read the webnovel its possible im jumping the gun and the devouring returns #but from where the ln is at it really seems like its been dropped . which im mad about >:(#also ik that 'subversion'/'deconstruction' are so overused theyve gained a negative connotation #but like that very obviously is what aob is doing at a lot of points and it USUALLY really sticks the landing

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