Another Rambling post about Ascendance of a Bookworm:
(with minor digs at Harry Potter)
When I was younger I used to browse Tv Tropes and I really enjoyed looking at them describe things I noticed in media but didnât have a name for. On a rare occasion, I would find a trope that I had no real reference for and one of those was âblue-orange moralityâ.
The concept of having a morality system completely divorced from our own that we canât really judge it. Now itâs not like I have never seen like a series or text attempt to create a character or species that has different standards of morality but the issue I always had was, that the supposed âdifferent moral standardsâ were always included as a contrast to a more recognisable real world standard - which meant it was framed from a real world standard anyways.
It is always seemed like one of two scenarios:
Alien/Monster/Non-human: âHere is our horrifically barbaric practice that has no functional purpose to our society and entirely superstitious!â
Human/Humanoid 1: âThatâs badâ
Human/Humanoid 2: âOh thatâs just their cultureâ
And its like no⊠the narrative framing still shows that is weird and barbaric and not at all a foreign concept which is itâs own morality system so divorced from our own. If we have to be advised not to judge it on our own standards, it can be judged by our standards.
Stories being set in a distant past/medieval times where there are different moral standards is not true blue-orange morality. They are just the worse models of current moral standards. We are not divorced from those at all. They are just uncomfortable to think about. Like, yes it is fucked for dudes to claim to be kings and murder thousands to maintain their power⊠but people werenât super cool with massmurder back then either - it was just an inevitability due to the social economical problems. Itâs like being a billionaire with hundreds of sweatshops now. Even with people who are cool with the system - we all know that shit isnât our âmoral standardâ - itâs our uncomfortable reality. Pushing the setting back or forward a 1000 years doesnât really change anything. Our countriesâ leaders still go off to kill and exploit people to maintain power, they just donât get crowns for it anymore.
And I donât care if you chose to do this with fictional races and places, that is just set dressing. They still resemble human society as we know it.
So I just never really saw a series that really grabbed me as authentically blue-orange⊠just typically shades of grey.
But then I read AOAB⊠and I really saw the potential of blue-orange morality. And it was done well.
Now it might seem logical to treat Bookworm as a Scenario B.
After all, itâs literally nobles presiding over commonfolk and elizabethan era political drama⊠but heres the thing⊠the framing of Scenario B is based on understanding that some characters still fit our present mold of a good person:
attractive (no literally)
religious in the right way
And these characters are the ones we root for. The characters we arenât rooting have qualities we do not desire
over zealous or cult-like
Like in a Scenario B you canât show the main characters enslave children in a sweatshop and allow grown adult attendants put their hands on them - and still be the good guy. You canât plan the purging of an entire faction and hold their children hostage under penalty of death - and be THE GOOD GUY . Canât overtly tax a city to the bones and deny them the best possible harvest because the previous mayor annoyed YOU â AND EVER HOPE TO BE THE GOOD GUY.
Well you can in ascendance of a bookworm tho.
And the readers will agree with you.
And itâs NOT because readers can overly moralise the actions of main characters.
And itâs because unlike a Scenarios A and B which are just OUR WORLD where we are all AWARE that we donât really need kings or billionaires and antiquated traditions that rely on human suffering for the world to work. AOAB is different
The world of AOAB is not our own. Nobles have more rights because the world explicitly requires their mana to function. Nobles are human plus. They are what rich people in the regular world pretend to be.
Remove the army, the wealth, the status of a king and he is commoner. AOAB Nobles are literally magic batteries that build cities, make harvests happen, keep the population safe from deadly magical creatures âŠlike the yearly giant blizzard monster that wonât literally wonât let spring come unless you have an army of trained magical knights slay it. Without Nobles the world literally be a giant sandpit.
So right of the bat, the nobility are integral to society. You simply donât live your life raised as a necessary part of the world functioning and not have a social structure that reflects that. Its our world turned on itâs head. All the commoners could die and all that means is the nobles have to do more work. Instead of rich needing the poor, the commoners need the nobles. Otherwise they rarely even interact. The commoners and nobles are almost different species.
And not like itâs particularly unfair on the commoners. Not having mana simply bars you from a lot of activities, duties and experiences. Hell, not having a lot of mana as someone born into a noble family arguably sucks more than being a commoner. Nobility is earned, not given. Being born into a noble family that doesnât have the means to regulate your mana means you wonât even make it to age where you are considered a separate entity from your parents in that society. If you have enough mana to make it to the Royal Academy without getting sent to the temple and the ability to pass or even excel at the Royal Academy - congrats you are now an asset to your duchy and that includes the commoners inside it. Just make sure you donât blunder and cause your own execution.
So if murder, classism, deception and greed arenât necessarily immoral in AOAB, what is?
The only real way to be a labeled a bad person in AOAB noble society is to endanger your duchy and cause widespread problems. Which only means the real way to be immoral in AOAB is to be incompetent or to FAIL.
You might initially think The Veronica-Georgine faction are the antagonists because they try to murder a barely baptised child but the guardian trio literally admitted they had plans to kill her too. They are ones committing the most one sided mass murders in the series. Ferdinand being able to outmanoeuvre and manipulate his enemies in the ring of politics is considered a SEXY TRAIT.
So whatâs the difference between the Florencia faction and the Veronica-Georgine faction? Easy. The V-G faction is DESTABILISING AN ENTIRE DUCHY WITH SHORTSIGHTED NOBLE BULLSHIT. And just escalates into the entire nation being in jeopardy⊠because the Ahrensbachian Archducal family keeps producing nobles that are profoundly worthless with no sense of noble duty. They are defective.
In the next paragraph, Iâm just going to state something this legion of defective nobles did and the names of who did it/involved.
They donât respect the authority or wisdom of nobles of higher rank so they disobey orders (Bezewanst, Veronica). They force already new brides on married nobles that ruin established marriages for no benefit besides sating their schoolyard fantasies on a whim (Gabriele). Their spitefulness and cruelty to one of the biggest archnoble families in the duchy has made the Ehnferestian faction politics a disaster (Veronica) and were forced to create an entire section of mednobles not even loyal to Ehnferest because archnobles rightfully disliked them (Shikikoza and Gloria). Theyâre such suck ups it endangered their own duchyâs stability to the point where their only options is an intermediate archducal candidate that was poorly raised by all metrics (Gieselfried). Ahrensbach archducal children are regularly raised to be puppeteered by the parents instead of independent thinkers (Detlinde). Which is a real fucking problem for duchies when you keep trying (and typically succeeding) in making these children the Aubs of duchies (Georgine).
Ultimately it comes down to the fact they believe in their ideological RIGHT as nobles over their ideological DUTY to prioritise their duchies running smoothly. And that leads them to overestimate their APTITUDE as nobles.
Which is REALLY telling when a little powerhouse is redefining what it means to be an accomplished noble and entire political career is to the benefit of Ehnferest. Which is why the Ehnferest archducal family and Florencia faction who prioritise the stability and growth of the own goddam duchy instead of their own personal grudges are the good guys.
Bad guys are bad because they are bad what they are supposed to be doing and the good guys are good because they focused on what they should be.
Thereâs even a moral gray zone which is âtrying your best but not being enoughâ and the prime example of that is the current the royal family. The country is only in this sorry state because one prince allowed his ineptitude and thirst for power to spiral and cause the nation lose the most important tool, and now it has a king that was only ever raised as a vassal is struggling (impressively) to keep a nation that should have dried up to keep running⊠A shame his intel gathering is dogshit so he keeps making mistakes and even overlook things that could have solved the problem.
So the dynamic of magic and morality is baked in the worldbuilding and itâs doesnât feel dumb that nobles have all this power but somehow DONâT really interfere the non magical inhabitants in the world on a grand scale. These features, not flaws.
It is so much better than making a magical world where wizards hide their shit IN non magical places but donât interact with non magical humans and have poverty and slaves that do house chores despite HAVING MAGIC that handles that shit. And also celebrate non magical peopleâs holidays despite thinking non magical people are beneath them because despite the book apparently being about fascism being bad - it doesnât address any of the core issues of it and even has extra issues layered on top!
AOAB doesnât operate on regular morality so itâs not mind numbingly incongruent when bad things happen in the universe because the magic people choose to let it happen despite thinking itâs bad. Even tho nobles do not care about the commonfolk it would stupid if they hid magic from the non magical folk and even dumber if entire spinoffs were based in fighting to keep it secret. Having a series where the protagonists realise that a faction in their world is a problem and getting RID OF THEM? Imagine getting rid of people who are the problem instead of fighting them in a WAR and reading checking the epilogue and that faction caused the fascism is STILL THERE and children are scared to end up there?? WHY DOES SLYTHERIN STILL EXISTâ
I havenât had the pleasure of reading past the translated pre-pub myself, but from what I do know is the Ahrensbachian penchant for stupidity and shortsightedness in the pursuit of positions of power they couldnât hope to manage effectively⊠while destabilising as much of the nation as possible continues and I canât wait to read it.
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