The start of a harem?
Continuing from last week, Shinichi manages to escape punishment from Petralka (Eldant’s Supreme Ruler) by Motoba’s help saying that a woman is not considered as “adult” before they reach 20 in their world. To top it off, Shinichi manages to become Petralka by answering back to noble knight Garius’ harsh comment about him.
At night, Shinichi find Miusel secretly learn to write Japanese letters. Looking at Miusel’s great interest to learn, Shinichi helps her to learn Japanese language. This brings Shinichi to realize one thing. His job is to bring Japanese otaku culture to Eldant. How can he possibly do that when both world has totally different languages? His “translation ring” basically grants him the ability of telepathy between person to person. So it won’t help people of Eldant to understand anime or manga.
Since Shinichi can’t get Internet connection in Eldant, he arranged to get a lot of hard drives with anime, tons of manga and posters to be “imported” to his work room in Eldant. When all the goods have arrived, Petralka comes to visit him and told him to read a manga for her. Somehow, Shinichi ends up reading the manga for Petralka and Miusel. And Petralka soon feel jealous because Miusel can read the characters in manga a little bit and get Shinichi’s attention. Sounds like the beginning of a harem to me. A very dangerous harem, I would say. Since one of them is the ruler of a country.
It seems that this anime brings something deeper than just bringing otaku culture. The real problem here seems to be the great difference of values between Japan and Eldant. In Eldant, social status greatly matters and people are treated based on their status. It’s common for masters to beat up their servants. Sounds like human’s dark age of slavery. On top of it, Shinichi learns that most of Eldant’s citizens can’t even read their own languages. Only few rich people can afford books. Kids are trained everyday to fight, then join the army. Their break time is used to help taking care of crops and other tasks. They don’t even know the concept of “having fun” or “entertainment”.
By end of this episode, Shinichi tries to bring up the issue of value differences to Petralka, and seems to be a bit interested to learn about Japan. So she asks him to teach him Japanese language. Arguably this might be Petralka’s effort not to lose from Miusel.
