Souma didn’t have much to attach him to life on Earth, what with his last living relative passing away the other day, so he’s not in a terrific hurry to get back after being summoned to another world. After finding out the circumstances of his summoning however, that a small nation unable to pay war subsidies to its bigger neighbor took the “if you can’t pay, then enact the hero summoning ritual passed down in your kingdom and give us the hero” option (which they didn’t expect to work), he is in a hurry to find enough money to pay off those war subsidies and buy the Elfrieden Kingdom some more time!
Luckily for Souma, he was a Socio-Economics college major back on Earth (and with an interest in world history) so he’s able to wrangle some money up from sources the King and Prime Minister had never considered. Not only that, but since the Elfrieden Kingdom’s technological advancement has been rather scattershot (after all, why would you need to study lift and internal combustion engines if you want to fly when you already have dragons and wyverns to do it for you? Etc.) there are a lot of different areas that Souma can bring new techniques and ideas to. And so, after just a few days of this, the King of Elfrieden abdicates the throne to him! Souma (who is still quite glad he didn’t get sent to the front line since his only “heroic” magical ability is telekinesis) is now even more determined to pull the Elfrieden Kingdom out of debt and improve life for all. He can’t do it all by himself however so the first task is to gather some allies and so, “If you have a gift, I will put it to use!”
This is a series that people will find either terribly boring or will jive with and I don’t think there will be much in-between. It feels a bit like Spice and Wolf in its approach to liberally explaining all of the concepts that Souma is introducing to his new world but what this series really reminds me of is the MAOYU: Archenemy and Hero “Become mine, Hero” “I refuse!” (a manga that you can read almost all of in English on Bookwalker, and is much superior to the anime adaptation, but has clearly suffered some sort of strange licensing fate in English). Both are stories of magical worlds having to adapt in a hurry, creating new governing and trade systems while facing an invasion from the world of demons, but of the two I think How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom has a broader audience appeal and that’s because largely because of the main character, Kazuya Souma.
It seems like a small detail but the fact that everyone knows that Souma came from another world makes a big difference in how his reforms come off. Souma doesn’t have to come up with every idea, like Mao in MAOYU, or even pretend to be like Myne in Ascendence of a Bookworm or Ryoma in By the Grace of the Gods, he just needs to stand on the shoulders of giants and know how to explain the concepts that he’s introducing. It certainly makes sense that, in a world of magic, society and knowledge have advanced differently than they did in our own. So of course the concept of “forest management” and “needing to thin forests so that the underbrush doesn’t choke out all life” would be foreign in a place where individual trees regularly live to be a thousand years old! I suppose it is a bit of a stretch for Souma to be so widely knowledgeable about so many ideas (although having a college student be obsessed with Machiavelli’s The Prince was pretty true to life) but I was largely able to look past that detail and not let it bother me.
The only thing that did bother me in this first volume was the sense of tension that doesn’t quite stick; Souma (and the rest of the cast) are working nonstop to stave off an oncoming famine (from drastically changing the country’s food supply and import/export situation) and in some ways it was hard to buy into the idea that so much work would be needed for that future disaster. I almost wanted a more concrete conflict that would better match the tension Souma and his advisors are under, and the last bit of this volume seems to promise a more war-like conflict in the next volume. I’m definitely sticking around for more of How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom regardless, either in light novel form or by watching the upcoming anime!