Youjo Senki, Ascendance of a Bookworm and Stanley Milgram

 (talking about the Japanese Light Novels Youjo Senki and Ascendance of a Bookworm)

A pretty big theme with the Youjo Senki novel is the takeaway of experiments like the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment, basically equating to "how people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play" and "human beings are susceptible to obeying authority". They are fairly relevant when it comes to wartime mindsets and military bureaucracy & red tape, which are very big parts of the novel. The first volume spends some time spelling that out for you as a sort of exclamation that susceptibility to obeying authority is the most major overarching theme of the series. The volume also spends quite a bit of time establishing that the main character is a neoliberal, a massive conformist to corporate culture. Neoliberalism is a somewhat interesting political alignment for a character in the setting of alternate world WWI-era Germany, since while by itself neoliberalism does not equate to fascism, it certainly can lead to it. The main character's knowledge of modern warfare seems completely inhuman to these naive world war virgins, which leads to the main character, a corporate cog just trying to do their job as efficiently as possible with the role they are given, being seen as, as said, inhuman.

It's somewhat similar to the main character Myne in Bookworm being treated as a saint for just having average modern earth morals in a world where being killed for slight mistakes is normal in some situations. Tanya, the main character of Youjo Senki, is similarly treated as a freak for taking the modern warfare she knows is coming as granted. It's something less attentive readers might take as the series outright telling you these characters are good or bad people, while in fact it's a lot more gray than previously thought (so yeah, good on whoever decided on that localization for youjo senki). A somewhat interesting dichotomy could be drawn between the two series, Myne being a childish person who refuses to budge on enjoying life, and Tanya, a cog in the machine adult conforming to her environment to get ahead. Oh yeah, the reason why I got the inspiration to write this thing is because I realized the Milgram experiment is named after Stanley Milgram, and it reminds me very strongly of the main point of Stanley Parable the video game, where you are encouraged to obey the authority of the narrator. Whether you are a Tanya or a Myne will lead to different outcomes. What a nice wrapping to tie up this wall with.