「ヴィルマと子供用聖典」 (Viruma to kodomo-you seiten)
“Wilma and Holy Scriptures for Kids”
This episode focused on two things. Wilma’s trauma and the creation of Myne’s first book.
Wilma’s fear of men got to the point where she instinctively pushed away one of the beloved orphans she enjoyed looking after. At first, she kept her distance and buried her head into producing illustrations for Myne’s book, almost as if she was keeping the orphans safe and punishing herself. Eventually, after reassurances from Myne and Rosina – Wilma is able to face her fears for the sake of the orphans. I was proud to see Wilma taking resolute steps to overcome her trauma. The overall idea and concept for this arc were compelling. However, it did seem a bit rushed. I was expecting more baby steps, as opposed to one massive leap. I remain unconvinced that a girl who’s gone through an extremely traumatic experience would decide to get over it at a moment’s notice, thanks to reassuring words from a 10 year old. But I guess that everyone is different
As for the book, it took 22 episodes and years of effort on Myne’s part. But she finally created her first book! Using soot ink and wood printing mechanisms, as well as the paper that can be created from trombe, she finally makes her dream a reality. And let’s hope this will be the first of many books to come. I will be fascinated to see how Myne’s endeavours will morph the society of Ehrenfrest forever – in terms of raising literacy rates and imparting influences from Earth culture.
Anyway, that’s about everything I wanted to discuss. As always, thanks for reading my post and catch you all next week!
End Card
Preview suggests that the next episode will bring us back to full circle to the sneak preview we were given in episode 1 of season 1. Lets’ hope that the isekai’d aren’t considered to be devils by the church and our poor Myne finally meets a bad end.
If this becomes another “Religious people” are devils anime, I’ll drop it.
It’s a shame the younger generation aren’t taught the actual history of why evil women (and evil men) were punished as “Witches”; what “Spells” referred to, what “Potions” have to do with modern day Witches and why the earlier days of infanticide by Witches spurred the church to invent the Foundling Wheel. There were indeed (and still are) “Devil worshippers” and perversions of Faith – many of which are celebrated today in a way that would have rightly horrified decent people (and led to rebellion) just a few decades ago, to say nothing of people in the Middle Ages.
One thing is certain; I look at these “Modern” developments as the worst kind of Evil, a threat to the soul of my child – a thankfully common revulsion among parents. No doubt, our forbears who didn’t have our conveniences and needed even more stringent and Honorable codes of conduct to survive and prosper, felt the same.
The author chose a very appropriate allegory in making Main’s first book “The Scripture”;
Gutenberg revolutionized printing with his mechanical press…
And the Bible was the first book it printed;
The “Gutenberg’s Bible” was his crowning achievement. Its quality, spacing, and consistency was leaps and bounds beyond anything that came before, even putting aside the speed at which it churned out pages without degradation or compromise in that quality. Of course, as the closing skit of this episode alludes to, one of the keys to this technological leap are the metal components, each of such tight tolerances that any inconsistency or variation will immediately be seen in the final product within one or two printed pages – to say nothing of tens of thousands of pages.
This is especially true for the metal blocks with individual latin characters, blanks, punctuation, etc, slotted to fit “perfectly” to produce pages as flawless as any modern word-processor’s printing. You needed tens of thousands (!) of these perfectly molded metal fittings (molded in “dies” which required the world’s foremost metallurgical expertise in alloys*) to produce any of the trillions of possible combinations found on any possible page.
In short, it is the engineering process and tooling* that builds the Gutenberg press (“the machines that build the machine”) which is the foundational miracle produced by the host society. The Gutenberg Press itself (and the Bible it printed) is the downstream fruit of those processes and tooling.
I like the way the author and anime conveyed the problem. A picture book with detailed designs can’t be printed satisfactorily, let alone immaculately, with her current technology. So the design style was simplified with wider margins and abstraction, an accommodating stop-gap to a realistic problem. And if her current methods can’t create a moderately detailed picture, it’s impossible to create something as detailed as a page with thousands of type-faced characters.
Thus, a new solution is needed.
We’ll be interested to see how the Author gets Main to solve this Problem, which in real life is multi-faceted and touches all parts of the society that produces it. Because in a sense, all this technology is fundamentally based on the ability to harness the material sciences and ultimately “Fire” – of which the “Stone, Bronze, and Iron” Age system is an outgrowth. The Greeks were ahead of their time when they dubbed Prometheus a god of Knowledge and Civilization.
Of course – with this being an “enchanted” world – the author can solve all these problems with PFM (Pure F**king Magic). Problems that Gutenberg faced with paper, ink, and finance are all essentially solved in Main’s case via “Magic” anyway. Her financial backer, Benno, wouldn’t give her the time of day unless she magically came from another world and had all this modern-day knowledge.
The Gutenberg Bible is famous around the world to this day, and you can view tributes to it everywhere, from stained glass windows, to paintings, to sculptures and murals, etc inspired by its Art**, right up to the original and complete Gutenberg Bible itself in the Library of Congress in DC….
…and ofc, in Japanese anime too.
*these developments have been traced to Holland
**Historic Bibles and Manuscripts are stunning era-defining works of Art.