The anime adaptation of Ascendance of a Bookworm has returned for a fourth season almost four years to the day after the April 2022 beginning of season 3. The fantasy isekai anime is now being handled by Attack on Titan and The Ancient Magus' Bride studio Wit rather than Ajiado, the studio behind Izetta: The Last Witch and Kakushigoto. It is, bar none, my favorite isekai anime, and it's looking better than ever.
Ascendance of a Bookworm stars a young peasant girl named Myne. Internally, the girl is Motosu Urano, an early-20s Japanese college student who died in an earthquake and was reincarnated in a fantasy world of magic, feudalism, and, horrifyingly, next to no books. Unable to accept a world without books, Myne uses the knowledge of her past life and help from some lower-city muscle to develop printing methods and promote literacy in her new, medieval world while struggling with the chronic health problems of her new body.
This is one of the only isekai series that does something meaningful with the central conceit of the genre – awakening in a new world – and actually pays off its own ideas. The severity of Myne's struggles has always set Bookworm apart. The isekai genre is filled with frictionless, feel-good power fantasies designed to turn normal Japanese boys into peerless heroes in lit RPG worlds set up for their success. Bookworm is anti-power fantasy. The entire story is about Myne resisting the chains the world would put on her and making the best of bad situations. Unlike nearly every isekai protagonist, she very rarely gets her way; when she does, it's with clear effort and sacrifice.
Beyond her health and restrained passions, Myne grapples with her new socio-economic status, the foreign and primitive standards of the world around her (especially that world's view of women and girls), rampant corruption among the nobility, and the loneliness that comes with her knowledge and maturity. Every time Myne wins some new comfort, new dangers and responsibilities are, without fail, close behind.
The season 4 opening animation – now scrubbed of the ugly AI-generated art which Wit Studio has apologized for – plunges Bookworm into what it's best at: political drama tied up in the sim-like development of industries and kingdoms, spearheaded by folks caught in Myne's gravitational pull.
If you've enjoyed anime like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime (as I have), which is also getting its fourth season this spring, but want to see things play out at a smaller, slower scale with a protagonist facing actual stakes, you can't do any better. Isekai trappings aside, it's just a good drama, set in a more low-fantasy world than what we usually see in anime. (There's magic, yes, but decidedly not for everyone.)
In the four-year gap since season 3, the series of novels by Miya Kazuki that the Bookworm anime is based on concluded with volume 33. As someone who savored the source books right up to the end, it's nice to see Bookworm receive the kind of animation that many other fantasy anime have enjoyed.
The first two episodes of season 4, which you can watch on Crunchyroll, carry the same energy as the three prior seasons but bring noticeably greater flourish and detail. Actions and emotions are sharper, and movements and magics are lush and complex, embellishing an ever-growing cast of characters.
To my immense relief, the new Bookworm looks fantastic, and better still, it hasn't abandoned the divergent art styles and visual metaphors that the anime was known for. Ascendance of a Bookworm is one of the shows that I point to when people understandably say that the isekai boom has been a strict negative for anime, and I am once again hungry for every new episode.
