A few of you mentioned in the comments that you enjoy reading about the process and inspirations behind the story. Normally I'd slip these thoughts into the author's notes at the end of an arc, but since that space was needed for the break announcement, I decided to share it here instead. It feels like the right moment for a little wrap-up—almost like an end of season 1 commentary special. (Though there's still the rest of the dessert arc, of course!)

Since I'm here, I'll touch on a wide swath of things, some that reaches back to the first two volumes. If somehow you've clicked on this note without reading the story, please note there will be spoilers.

Re-imagining Archetypes

This is actually a major conceit for the whole of TRAS, so it's a good starting point. To wit, I'd say the world of TRAS is what you get when you combine a very shounen-isekai premise with the trappings of an otomesekai setting. For anyone who doesn't know what I mean by that, this image should help:

In that vein, four characters stand out as clear archetypes: Renea/Sophie (Fake/Saintess), Sigurd (Duke of the North), and Bea (Childcare Protag).

Renea and Sophie are probably the standout example of taking a common trope and digging deep into the idea. At this point, the idea of 'subverting expectations' has become something of a meme, but in practice, that's what reimagining an archetype tends to do.

The Saintess is a stock character in anime/anime-adjacent fantasy, but whenever they're the focus of the story, there's pretty much always a "fake Saintess" alongside her. What usually happens is a game of switcheroo: the fake Saintess is actually the real one, and the real one is the fake. The real fake Saintess's powers were just being stolen by the fake real one!

The "legitimacy" plotline isn't a coincidence, it's a consequence. When you build a plot around an archetype whose defining characteristics are holiness, purity, and faith, the natural emergent antagonist is a debased character who fakes those traits. Even more than a fake hero or a fake royal, a fake Saintess is the perfect inversion and antithesis. (To give a quick counterexample, a purer antithesis of a hero would be someone who is the real hero and yet is still a coward.) Renea and Sophie are an exploration of this idea of faith vs. fake. Put simply, they're a pair of sisters where one of them has all the holy power, and the other has all the faith. The "prince and the pauper" dynamic is then explored through the 'ole mystery switcheroo.

Sigurd... you honestly only need to look at the starter pack above lol. He's a straightforward take on the archetype, merely with the hope of adding nuance to his behavior by exploring the yokes of duty that make him who he is. In a certain sense, the goal with Sigurd was to actually just convey the emotions that are supposed to be there. "Dukes of the North" have become as much of a meme at this point as otomesekai heroines. (Though really a lot of this applies to the whole mold of tyrannical male leads). Arrogant, yet unimpeachable, this archetype tends to be right by might, often slaying vassals—or at least threatening it—simply to assert the importance of their House.

It's a case of letting the frosting become more important than the cake, I think. Feudal drama is spicy, and it's satisfying when a main character puts petty, malicious, or even outright evil characters in their place. But at a certain point it becomes indulgent. The put-downs become the central focus, and in the case of these northern dukes, their noble causes—often relegated to the background—end up being little more than pretexts for acting with impunity. It's noblesse oblige. But the bad kind. Sigurd's sort of just an attempt to get back to basics. His flaws find cause, though not pardon, in Varant's dire circumstances. Extinguishing the Blanc lineage is meant to feel like a morally complex decision, if not an outright moral failing in the way he carried it out. The Blanc children he does spare, he treats with decency—yet it can't be denied that he was at the cusp of executing them. All these things, I think, create the moral tension that should lie at the heart of this archetype.

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In many ways, what's true of Sigurd is true of the eum-Creid family itself: at the end of the day, he's just a man doing his best, who'd been thrown into brutal circumstances from a tender age.

Which creates a great segue for Bea, the little girl who tries her best to live good.

First off, I don't think there was any chapter I was more excited to drop than the Bea reveal. I just felt there would be something electric about reversing the order of reader discovery: rather than starting with the young child yearning for her father, who she doesn't know is a duke or tyrant, what if we start with the duke? In these stories, the child is typically illegitimate, or a secret, or has been stolen away somehow. In principle, that means the father was living their life normally, either unaware of their child or doing their best to not be a part of their lives. What if we showed that first?

The result, I think, is "reviving" the archetype. When you know the tyrant daddy before you know the kid, then the dad has a chance to be more than just a relational character who exists to orbit the child. Plus, you get that great soap opera moment that I hope caught readers off-guard. I wanted to get a full caps "WHAT?" from you guys, haha.

To talk more about Bea herself:

If I had to pick a singular influence for Bea, it was probably this manhwa (which has a novel it was based on): The Status Window to the Soul. Another one that comes to mind is Lady Baby, actually. It's the intersection of childcare with future-facing cheat. The thrust of these kinds of stories typically is that a family is set for ruin, and the child knows it, and they have to use the limited child tools at their disposal to save their family. That tends to involve saving parents from carriage accidents, or knowing some mage who's going to invent a tool and become rich.

I would say Bea is more of a fresh take than she is a subversion. While Sophie/Renea were specifically meant to use genre expectations to throw the reader off, Bea is a straightforward rendition of the archetype with my own personal twist. Fragmented past life recollection is actually pretty rare in isekai, and most children tend to just be adults in child bodies. For lack of a better way to say it, I think that leaves a lot of fun on the table honestly.

Besides the fact that naming a stuffed pig Bent Ham is one of my favorite jokes in the novel, Bea's philosophical friends were a great way to thread the needle. A lot of Bea's behavior was drawn from case studies of children with elaborate imaginary friends. I was actually astonished how well it worked, implying her inner world entirely through her side of her stuffed animal conversations. But maybe the reason it resonates is because almost everyone has, at some point, met an especially imaginative child.

Functionally, the murmurs of Bea's past life give weight to her decisions. Futuresight gives her incredible agency. But the fact that she works so hard to think things through gives a sense of moral fiber that's hard to achieve with young, innocent-by-default characters.

From another perspective, Bea is an exploration of the question: what if a reincarnator brought over a "different" sort of knowledge than usual? In isekai writ-large, knowledge is typically just another instrument of domination. Philosophy is, in a certain sense, the inverse: a gentle form of knowledge that doesn't seek to transform the world so much as to find the proper way to live in it. Bea, maybe the most of all the reincarnators, is truly a member of her world, and is as much a product of Ciel's loving upbringing as the echoes of her past life.

Hence, "doing your best to live good," besides being a great encapsulation of virtue ethics (it's not a coincidence that Aristurtle's her first and favorite friend and teacher), is very much the central idea of Bea herself. She's meant to be a prodigy of a different sort—a reincarnator who simply has tried more than anyone else to be a good person.

Some Closing Thoughts

This post has ended up being longer than I expected, and it's taken a bit more time to write too. You'll have to forgive me if the Bea breakdown feels a bit less coherent. There's just so much to her concept, so many dovetailing pieces, that keeping it brief was difficult and the flow of ideas was tricky. I have a much harder time with nonfiction than fiction, and I wish I had more time to clean this up.

There'll be a second part, because I didn't quite get to the commentary I wanted to. I don't intend to make this a series or anything, and in the future this is the type of content that will make it into the newsletter.

I hope you guys enjoyed this breakdown, though! A lot of the ideas in this post set the stage well for part 2, which is a writeup on the Blancs, Amière, and the arc at large. Have a great day, guys!

AceGreen

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