Caste Relationships in Bookworm: Nobles, Commoners & Orphans

In Bookworm Part 2 Volume 3 or so Myne and Ferdinand have a conversation about rogue bandits on roads. Myne expects bandits to exist because of either trope savviness or some historical knowledge, not sure which. Ferdinand flatly explains that commoners would never attack nobles, and that the few bandits that might spring up are amateur farm workers with pitchforks who resort to robbery out of desperation. So no romanticism here. If a criminal organization relating to banditry ever popped up, it would take one incident until the Knight’s Order, consisting of what are basically the military officers of the duchy, all of which are magic-wielding nobles, to go and wipe them all out immediately. Such is the unsurpassable wall between nobles and commoners in the world of Bookworm.

Commoners in this world are dependent on nobles to properly farm crops due to the earth needing a frequent helping of mana. Though obviously both would starve if nobody did crop work, as nobles have different jobs and make up a much smaller portion of the population. Commoners do marketing and production, nobles do the military, government and politics. Especially in the capital of Ehrenfest, where most of the nobles are concentrated, and where the only Temple of the duchy is positioned, the nobles’ presence is oppressive. In the tightly-packed lower city that comes into contact with nobles from the upper nobles district frequently, they are feared because of frequent rumors of commoners being punished for their mistakes. The fear is beaten into everyone from a young age. Ehrenfest is an exception though, because in other parts of the duchy, the relationships between nobles and commoners might be much closer, due to the land-owning nobles being positioned in backwater areas where interaction, and then understanding, between the two classes comes as a matter of course. The situation in the capital is special precisely because nobles and commoners are separated to the degree that they cannot understand or empathize with each other properly.

To sum it up, nobles are necessary, they have all the power, and most of them have a completely different outlook on life than commoners. So, the Temple. It’s a place in between the lower city, which has all the commoners, and the noble district. It’s the place where nobles who couldn’t become nobles go, and it usually leads to them becoming a walking bundle of complexes, resentful and such. It’s actually the place where the goblets which are used for giving farm lands the mana they require are filled. These noble-rejects certainly won’t get any servants from their family, as the Temple is frowned upon by noble society and a large portion of noble servants are nobles themselves, so making use of the orphanage seems like a matter of course. A bit of worldbuilding for Bookworm; you can only have children with people with a similar mana capacity as you! You connect the dots. There is a pretty specific reason why the orphanage is in the state it is when Myne first sees it.

In farming towns the ownership of orphans generally goes to the mayor. It’s basically slavery, but you’re guaranteed your own farm plot by the time you become of age. The mayor might sell an orphan to a noble as a servant et cetera, if they’re competent or good-looking enough. But in the capital of Ehrenfest, there is no mayor, or farmlands. With the less well-off families food can be hard to come by, so children are made to go to the nearby forest to scavenge for food. “Those who do not work don’t deserve to eat” is a phrase conceived out of necessity. If a child is unwanted or just can’t be looked after they get sent to the orphanage in the temple, because the only other option is for the kid to die.

About that mana capacity child-making thing, nobles are generally sent to the temple if they have, bad genes, basically. As has been established, mana is extremely important for a noble, and if the child is an embarrassment in that regard, they might be cast out and sent off. So, do I have to spell it out. Between the odd pregnancy and child ‘gifted’ to the Temple, there is a semi-consistent flow of children to the orphanage. Officially, in noble society, a person, be it the child of the archduke or a commoner orphan, is not treated as a human before they get baptized at age 7. So unbaptized children in the orphanage get the lowest priority when it comes to offerings, which are basically leftover food from the nobles working in the Temple. The order in which people get food is noble>noble’s attendants (commoners with jobs)>baptized orphans>unbaptized orphans. It’s a similar situation to the lower city, except the amount of food you get isn’t related to how much you work. If there is a shortage of nobles, and therefore food, the unbaptized children will just starve, because they have the lowest priority. In comes Myne, with her lower city common sense of  “why not just go to the forest to scavenge” and “if you work hard you deserve to eat”. Myne obviously has her own motives here, she’s basically using the kids as an easy work force, but from the starving orphans’ perspective she’s a saint. The common knowledge of lower city life combined with the calculativeness and ambition of a merchant springs forward the massively improving situation for the orphanage.

Bookworm is a generally light-hearted series when it comes to presentation but it takes just a little bit of deeper inspection to realize how fucked up it can be, and the seemingly unambiguously lovable main character has a pretty selfish and calculating side to her. The presentation of the anime matches the novel’s almost perfectly, and that’s how you get this wonderful feel of matter-of-fact moral ambiguity. No tone-shifts, no twisted reveals, just life in a very fragmented and different society. In conclusion, basically nothing about Bookworm is superficial or tropey, and most moral criticisms of the series are misguided because it never tries to present itself as a story where good wins over bad. I wrote this thing inspired by some paraphrased third-party criticisms from a discord chat. Couldn't let it stand. Bookworm is perfect, after all.