Review of Ascendance of a Bookworm Season 2

Ascendance of a Bookworm is now a well-known anime with a relative unanimity around its quality. I review the S1+S2 here. (english is not my primary language) I have been quite disappointed by these two seasons... The anime is the story of a 20-year-old librarian who is reincarnated in a 5-year-old girl body after her death, in a new fantasy/medieval world. All the anime spin around the fact that this new world has not yet invented the printing and so books are rare and expensive. The anime have a lot of problems in its writing and I will discuss about them, but before, let's talk about theart and the OST.
The art of Ascendance of a Bookworm is a bit "cheap", with a bad animation on certain scenes and a drawing a bit strange, particularly on faces.
The OST of this anime is not good at all. We have not a single one recognisable theme and OP/ED are not good. This last point is a very bad point for me : in this type of anime I like to be transported by a strong OST.

The story and the universe of the anime is, from my point of view, not well written. The loop of the anime is simple : the girl knows technologies and things that don't exist in this new world, she recreates it and this is a success which permits the girl to progress in the social structure of this world in order to achieve her final goal : creating a lot of books.

The main problem with this loop is that the universe is constructed to permit this, and this is not done delicately ...

All the world of this anime is improbable and not well executed. The absence of some tech is not credible for the level of civilisation of the world, and the success of the girl invention is too quick to be credible.

The writing has also a lot of inconstancies : one scene the heroine, after having created a book with soot ink, smell the book and say « huuuummm, the good odour of the ink », referring to the nostalgia of books smell in our world. But hey, you just print a book with soot remember, it should smell soot, not modern ink ...
It's a small detail, but all the anime is written like that, and after 27 episodes it is very visible.

Another problem is the reactions of adults to the heroin experimentations and inventions : everybody give her full trust, way too easily. She is a five-year-old girl, her inventions should, sometimes, bring some suspicion. It is never the case in the anime.

The last bad point of the anime is the nature of relations between the heroin and the other characters, specifically in the season 2. In the season 2, the anime takes a strange turn : it becomes an anime on commercial relation between people and on servant/master relationship. And this is strangely executed. The heroin will always construct her relationship with her acquaintance in a mercantile like way : contracts, or material rewards/punishments .

For example, at some point in the anime it happens that the heroine picked up the management of an orphanage with a lot of starving children, and to remotivate orphans she will cancel the charity organisation (everybody had the same meal in the orphanage) to go to a commercial organisation : those who work better will have a better meal.
It's a bit choking, for me, to see that. It's like, in kindergarten or middle school you change the meal relatively to the notes of the student in class. It's a bit revulsing. And the fact that here it's starving children didn't help with my feeling about that.

Another part of the anime is about the relation master/servant. The heroine has some servant and will act in the same way : material rewards and punishment to construct her relation with them. It's very cold and the feeling of the « superior noble enlightened heroines » who manage her herd of servants with a good little candy and pat on the back to motivate them to be good servant is a bit too much for me in this anime.

All the S2 is like that : cold relationship based only on mercantile considerations.

So well, I didn't like the direction of the anime in the S2.

The combo of inconstancies, strange orientation of scenarios and relationship between characters in the S2 and poor art and inexistent OST make, for me, the anime not very good.
It's still watchable, so for me it's a 6/10 for the S2 and a little 7/10 for the S1.