@vileness999

It's an interesting topic. I think one of the nuances that I don't quite grasp as an English-speaker is when someone leaves out an honorific in Japanese. I suppose I can intellectually contemplate that it can signal speaking informally implying personal closeness, or equal status, or presumption, but I don't feel it viscerally. At times I barely notice.

@zwabbit

Thanks. I think I got thrown off by Sebastian calling him Sir Lecoq. "He's been knighted" slid into "He's a knight" in my mind without me noticing.

The story was written before we knew as much about the Sovereignty, and travel and trade between dutchies, but I think it holds up pretty well. It still makes me smile.

It makes me wonder what would happen if a Sovereign noble had advanced knowledge of what Ehrenfest is up to, without telling the royal family. I guess they probably couldn't buy up plots of land with lots of trees.

@topgnu

I'm glad you're still enjoying Bookworm. My favourite part of P3V1 is the concert, but the pandabus is pretty great.

@kuali said in Bookworm Fanbook 2 Discussion!:

@alicecheshire Actually, I stated (in the bit you quoted, even) that 'high capacity' and 'many colors' tend to coincide with one another at birth. Which is, in your wording, the inherent base mana capacity.

And then we see them diverge - in the case of RMCM users, especially - as the person's (current base) mana capacity grows, and their colors (as far as we know) do not. (Even with the speculation that it is possible to gain them one way or another, the standard expectation in the nobility is that the colors you have at baptism are your colors. No-one ever goes to get retested...) If you can grow one but not the other, then the two can't be inherently linked.

If the two were actually linked, then you would see one of a few possible odd effects in the RMCM users:

They would 'spontaneously' gain colors as their mana capacity rose They would hit a capacity plateau they couldn't grow beyond without gaining more colors The children of, say, a hypothetical Philine/Damuel marriage would randomly gain colors their parents lacked to suit the 'tier' they were the effective strength of Philine and Damuel wouldn't be able to have a child above Laynoble strength no matter how strong they, themselves, were at the time (because they doesn't have enough colors to pass down).

...Admittedly, one or more of those could still turn out to be true later.

I don't think gaining colors would be spontaneous. There would probably be some kind of nebulous requirements to gain new colors, similar to how someone like Angelica can have a wind affinity but fail to get the corresponding blessing.

You would also need an explanation for how ultra-strong single-color feybeasts and feyplants (like the Lord of Winter, Riesefalke, Ruelle and Rarein) could happen at all. If the rules are different for humans than for everything else with mana, there needs to be a reason why humans get special rules.

I would say that more colors is correlated with more mana but there would be exceptions due to things like mana compression. You could have a person or feybeast with a ridiculous amount of one kind of mana but that's going to be a lot rarer than a person or feybeast with 3-4 colors who has less in any given color but more in total.

My personal theory, based on what we know of noble reproduction and mana colors, is that any baby with any detectable amount of mana picks up the color of their birth season. They have a starting mana capacity determined by the amount of mana their mother managed to give them, and a random selection of extra colors from the set their parents had (assuming either parent had extra colors for them to inherit, and they poured in enough mana to dye the child that many colors). There is a (currently little- or un- known) method for a noble to gain additional colors, which can then be passed on to their offspring, and a well known method (compression during the growth period) for gaining additional mana, which can also be passed on to their offspring.

I believe that gaining the affinity of their birth season is more or less confirmed in-story already. They haven't outright stated it but it'd be pretty difficult to resolve that not being the case with what's been said. It also makes sense that they would gain an affinity according to their birth season as well. We already know that the holy knights of the main five (or four? I'm not sure how Ewigliebe works here and the story hasn't addressed this detail yet) result in greater ambient mana of that color in the atmosphere. This is actually one of the things that has convinced me that there's, at least to a degree, a matter of mana exposure to gaining a given affinity. The more mana of a given type that you're exposed to at a young age, the more likely you are to have an affinity for that type of mana. I would guess, though, that your mana capacity at the time may play some role however. It seems like the greater your base capacity, the more likely you are to gain more affinities, at least to some degree. It's just that that doesn't seem to be the single deciding factor on it.

Essentially, the 'link' between (starting) mana capacity and (starting) mana colors is that both are (for the most part) capped by the amount of mana the mother donates during gestation. Except in cases (like RMCM laynobles, or Ruelle trees) where the 'parent(s)' lack enough colors to pass down, in which case you'd get something with a lot of mana, but few colors (like the jureve ingredients, or baby Samuel-with-an-S-note-spelling).

I would hazard a guess that having more mana and fewer affinities might actually be something that has potentially already happened in-story. We don't know what Rozemary's affinities are, we also don't know what Bezewanst's were as an example in the opposite direction. If we had that information, it could help clarify things quite a bit.

@alicecheshire said in Bookworm Fanbook 2 Discussion!:

And you can also explain variance within the same class of noble (if we're talking about having identical elements, for example) by a combination of differences in their compression methods and elemental affinity likely not being a simple binary on/off switch but more of an analog value. So instead of affinity being a simple 0/1, it could instead be 0.0-1.0 with any value in between those two being valid and having an affinity above a certain value would be considered having an affinity for that element. Admittedly, this last part is actually speculation on my part but it seems to line up with what we've seen in the story.

No, that part you're completely correct on. Rozemyne has all 7 colors, but her overall color is pale yellow/gold. Her wind and/or light are stronger than her other colors. That's all the evidence we need to confirm that there are multiple strengths that count as having a color.

I'd actually go as far as claiming that Bookworm's magic system is complex in what feels like a fairly realistic way. It seems like it's actually quite complex and many factors go into every facet of it. Probably why it's so fun to speculate about how it works, lol.

@jpwong Check out the Alternate Reading Order thread. While I haven't listed just the POV chapters anywhere, I have listed all of them in the reading order, sorted into their place in the story, with listed sources.

@vileness999 Feel free to set that one up yourself; The only restrictions on making polls are that they have to be the first post in a new topic and you can only put 10 options in...

@georgemto Thanks, I will certainly watch it unless something bigger eats me before I get around to it, but now I have no time for anime :(. Started a new very rewarding job which makes me happy but had to cut down on reading and no time to watch anything. Given the choice between reading and watching, I always prefer the book. In the long log of what I've watched, the comments like "the anime is better than the LN" can be counted on the toes of the three-toed sloth with some to spare.

As a side note, a few weeks into every season I go over what's new and record it on my to-watch list once the full season is out.

Now that I think about it, given that she was making good money with Benno before she went to the temple, it's a kind of a baffling development that she didn't go back to the stand and buy the book.

@zehd said in Ferdinand's mother:

Here's an alternate theory: his MOTHER was the child of that prolific royalty (or a different royal person), and the "not know who the mother was" is related to not knowing who his mother's parents are.

Eh.
We'd need to know what generation the Wandering Princess fell into, and have it be such that it was plausible timewise for her to be Ferdinand's grandmother.

It'd be good to know which generation anyway, so if anyone has a clue, please share it with us!

@sithence
Since you posted this so close to the publication date, checking against the published version to see if it made it in under the wire might be a good idea.
If it didn't, then submitting an email concerning it to the JNC support email address would be a good idea; the pre-pub corrections topics only get a for sure monitoring while still in pre-pub...

@xfbph said in Will Myne Be Able to Reconnect with Her Lower City Family and Friends?:

@kalani said in Will Myne Be Able to Reconnect with Her Lower City Family and Friends?:

I don't know if she will ever call them family but I can definitely see a future where they all are employed as her personal seamstress, guard, dyer, etc

This seems more and more likely as I think about it, although it's not clear how she can get Gunther in.

Her personal hairpin maker and Renaissance dyer both need a guard, so a commoner guard/escort for commoner craftswomen? That might or might not allow Gunther to be in proximity to Rozemyne, and physical deterioration/retirement might get to him before the ladies can retire themselves (definitely in Tuuli’s case).

Now I see how the story is organized in compartmentalized parts with their own setting and conflicts in an ever expanding world and cast of characters. I quite like it how P2V1 is mostly busy building up and preparing for the action to start. It is that tingling feeling when the rollercoaster is being pulled slowly up. All action is still a bit tame but there are hints that even if Myne us not going to munch on planets and vaporize gods, she packs major powers. Which she will totally waste in her single-minded pursuit of fluffbooks. I am just waiting to see what happens to the first person who tries to lay a hand on any of "her's" orphans.

That scene at the end between Lutz and his family stirred a lot of thoughts. As someone who has a natural tendency to keep things to myself I both know the trouble this can create, but also how a loving family and a bit of old agewisdom overcomes it after all.

@anonymous0070 I think it was more than a few days - she lived with Elvira for roughly half a season (from the archduke conference to her baptism just before the starbind ceremony). That's late spring to mid summer, I believe.

It just feels like a short time because it was mainly stuff like etiquette lessons, and Rozemyne mostly glossed over it.

@strangeattractor My favorite tactic when discussing something I've been spoiled on (whether by reading spoilers or by being ahead of the discussion due to another medium) is to rely on the "Mathematician's Answer" to any "will X happen or will Y happen" questions, as seen in my posts in the Misfit of Demon King Academy topic. You know, like asking "How did he do that?" and answering "Very carefully" or asking "Is Dedede actually evil or just brainwashed?" and answering "Yes!" A completely factual, 100% true statement that is nonetheless devoid of any information.

@anonymous0070 That quote is key in telling us that Myne's future is, in any event, a revered one, as her close subordinates/helpers are marked and lauded by future historians. Beyond that I don't see much else it confirms, much like the next title, yeah. I'd edit your post to remove the spoiler implication though.

I started with the anime but that's just because I was unaware of the light novel at the time.

I've trained myself with various other stories to not compare the book version to the movie version or the TV version, and I'd like to think I was able to apply the same dissonance when I picked up the light novel.

With that in mind, my first exposure to the LN was a MT, so that probably also affected me, as I got the plot-important stuff but smaller character details were lost.

When I started with a proper translation, though, I immediately picked up on Myne being a bit of a brat. But instead of turning me away from the books, rather, it cemented the idea that Myne was not, in fact, a reincarny but instead simply had access to otherworldly knowledge. The idea that I was reading through the eyes of a really smart and knowledgeable toddler fixed the "brat" idea, and also helped me pick up on smaller details that Myne points out but that might not in fact be accurate, especially when we got to contrast some of her story with others' in the POV chapters. I really appreciated the author's use of these "blink and you'll miss it" inconsistencies or oddities that helped to portray Myne as an unreliable narrator.

In my opinion, the best way to onboard new readers is to remove references to the Isekai genre, or perhaps to call it Isekai-Adjacent. I have no wish to get into whether or not this is a story of a reincarny; the author said no, and that's how she wrote the character and story. Perhaps any one person's idea of reincarnation is, in fact, how it works in Bookworm, just not with Myne specifically. I think interpreting her as a genius child with special knowledge of how much better things could be alleviates the bitter taste that would otherwise be on the tongues of some of those who understand her to be an adult.

In addition, it might be helpful to come up with our own teaser blurb that hangs a lamp on Myne's behavior.

@derpster Actually, Freida pointed out in P1 that a devouring child being sickly pre-draining is normal - she was as well - and the abnormal part is Myne still being sick post-draining.

Thing is, there are four events we know of that could have caused mana hardening:

The devouring attack at the start of the story The devouring attack after Effa burned the Mokkan The devouring attack at the end of P1V2 The poisoning in P3V5

Now, that last one is after Ferdinand's examination of Rozemyne, so while it probably did make the clumps worse, one (or more) of the other three have to have caused them in the first place.

And since all three of them are pre-draining... There has been no point in Myne/Rozemyne's life when she was not either a)suffering from untreated devouring or b)full of semi-crystallised mana (and for P1V1 and P1V2, she might have been suffering from both). So we can't really say that Myne's body is just inherently sickly - no-one's ever seen what she's like without mana issues holding her back.

Don't forget that Season 3 starts Monday 11th April :)

One other possibility as to why she might take the knights course is coordination (although this could also be learnt in Ehrenfest).

As when fighting the big black dog (I can't be bothered trying to spell it), including her in a fight as a ranged/special weapon fighter greatly increases the possible tactics and fire power of the group. Staying at the back also keeps the archduke candidate protected.
HOWEVER, this only works if she has trained to fight in a coordinated manner. Just like she had prompted the changes in the Ehrenfest knights, she could also be pushed into the knights course for Ehrenfest's sake. Although the course would probably be highly modified.

Personally, I don't think she will be doing the knights course.