If you read Korean-style isekai, chances are you've stumbled across a title like this before:

And if you're not familiar with the genre you'd likely think that villainous actually means villainous. But just like villainess rarely means villainess, and heroine almost never means heroine, what started as a subversion has become the staple. There's a whole post that could be made about what I'll tentatively call faux-subversion, and it's a best left for another time. For now, it serves our purpose to draw a simple distinction.

If you're reading anything with a vaguely otomesekai setting and a family is called villainous, they're probably not. They're often mafia-coded: violent, shady, and yet driven by hierarchy and a sense of criminal honor. Violence as decorum so to speak. Sometimes they're even more benign, and their "villainy" amounts to a borderline goofy infatuation with the macabre paired with an eccentric fashion sense. If you take a step back and squint...

You get the idea.

Eulogy for a "Villainous Family"

It's worth elaborating on a theme I touched on in my last writeup. We talked about false Saintesses and the inversion of holiness, then about Sigurd, and how his flaws stem from the duties of his station. In this type of setting, families explicitly framed as holy are more often than not abusers in disguise. The eum-Creids are, conceptually, an attempt to introduce nuance. They're flawed, and even quite dysfunctional. But they are ultimately striving toward good.

The Blancs do away with that nuance. They are just that bad. They're the family that's so pathetic they never even rose to the stature of being villainous. They were too small-minded, short-sighted, and self-destructive to manage much of anything at all. By trope, they're the abusive family of the female lead—the kind that usually gets killed in chapter one—and true to form they're background lore by the time Ailn ever arrives in Varant, ghosts long before the story starts.

There's a slippery idea I spent about an hour trying to articulate, and the tack I eventually came up with is a bit of an odd one. So, here we go: if you trace the etymology of the word pathetic, then you eventually go back to the word pathos which means suffering. When something is pathetic, its misery spills over. It's so sad, it evokes pity like a whimpering puppy—theoretically at least. Practically speaking, we don't always feel sorry for the things we attach the word pathetic to. Its meaning has drifted simply because it's such a negative, intense word, and colloquially pathetic sits closer to "repugnant" than "pitiable."

Bring those two senses of the word back together, and you get the Blancs. They're the vain nobodies who never had dignity nor agency; they never had a chance. The holiness inherent to their bloodline only serves as a bright light illuminating their ruin. The pride they posture at isn't simply in tatters; it's a farce so ugly the entire empire is laughing. Gerhardt's line, I think, sums it up best:

The night Sigurd marched into this throne room and cut down Gerhardt's kin, not a single noble died. Only pigs had been slaughtered.

Amière is a mausoleum and a requiem to the pathetic. And the city's shape and geology, I think, functions like a Rosetta Stone for the whole arc.

It's a cradle.

Musical Inspirations and What's in a Name

Now's a good time to interject with the music I listened to while shaping Amière. In short, Pink Floyd. The song Echoes was a huge inspiration for the arc. Comfortably Numb was a major influence on how I wrote Gerhardt's shadow form. And if you want to see what most shaped the simple aesthetics of Amière, with all its rot and spoil, you can watch this scene from the movie version of The Wall.

One of the chapter titles is actually an overt reference to the song Wish You Were Here.

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell? Blue skies from pain? Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell?

"Blue Skies from Pain" is also a play on Ciel's name, which means sky. Though I won't go into a full analysis of the song, I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to be gleaned listening to it while considering the relationship of Ciel and her mother Marcella.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

A Neverland of Sorts

The overarching aim of Amière was to express a world unto itself, that grew up wrong. The Blancs aren't a simple inverse of the eum-Creids. They're children who never grew up, who were never taught any better. All the imagery in Amière is built around that. Rotting teeth, faces throwing tantrums. It's like a messed up Neverland, with its very own Peter Pan.

Puck's name is, of course, a nod to A Midsummer Night's Dream, a Shakespeare play where he also goes by the moniker Robin Goodfellow. To be honest, though, the Shakespeare references form a fairly superficial part of Puck's character—more of an aesthetic wrapper than anything, which helps reinforce his archetype as a forest trickster who finds lost children.

More than anything, Puck is Peter Pan. He's the original novel version, which differs from the Disney's interpretation in some important ways. The Disney Peter Pan is more like a teen on the cusp of adulthood, someone just about to grow out of adolescence yet who never quite becomes. If I had to put an age to him, I'd say he was fifteen. But in the novel, Peter Pan actually appears ten. He's not just the shortest of the Lost Boys. He's even shorter than Wendy! He's so gallant and ferocious because he stays a child. He's the master of Neverland because he's the most childish being there is.

'ARR! Cut my bonds at once! At once, y'hear! Or I'll plunge me hook into you!'

This line, where Puck mimics Ailn's voice to mess with Camille, is actually word-for-word what Peter Pan says (imitating Captain Hook's voice) to mess with the captain's crewmen. In the ebook version of volume 3, I'd definitely like to lean more into Puck's prankster nature!

The Peter Pan parallel goes further. While Bea, Ciel, and Marcella's personalities don't exactly correspond, the three of them considered together are a soft analogue for Jane, Wendy, and Wendy's mother, Mrs. Darling. There's a curious little detail on the very first page, that Mrs. Darling has a "kiss on [her mouth], that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner." Soon after, referring to Wendy's father, "He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and he gave up trying for the kiss."

Reading through the book the first time, it's a baffling passage that makes you pause and reread it several times. It's a mystery, made all the more confusing by the obliqueness and grammar of the metaphor. It's never said outright, but by the end of the book the reader can piece together the meaning: Mrs. Darling's inner box and that kiss on the corner of her mouth belong to Peter Pan. That sometime long ago, Mrs. Darling had gone to Neverland, and when Peter found Wendy he'd actually been looking for her mother. Then, later still, when Peter comes looking for Wendy he finds Jane instead.

To call the novel's Peter Pan Oedipal wouldn't be quite right, I think, because there's nothing subtextual about his longing for a mother. He outright tells Wendy that he sees her as a mother, despite Wendy's wish for him to see her romantically.

Somehow, it's sad and tender, and just a little bit unsettling all at once.

"Where's the good gone, girl?"

Typically, I try to tiptoe around overt discussions about symbolism, since those kinds of connections are most striking when the reader discovers them on their own. In fact, you might have noticed this note is pretty sparse in commentary on Gerhardt. That's largely because most of what there is to discuss about him deals with symbolism rather than allusion.

In this case, a certain motif quietly defines the arc and is easy to miss because it's largely played as a joke. Noticing it adds enough to the arc that I felt it was worth mentioning.

It's sugar. From nearly the start of Bea's quest, as she her tummy rumbles and she wants knights' cake, to her giving a maid the evil eye, to wanting to brush her teeth when she sees the rotting tooth sculpture in Amière.

I'm gonna focus on its complementary motif, though: teeth. It's paired consistently enough that it's basically the same motif. And it illustrates the point I want to make better.

"Because… because living good is like brushing your teeth…"

When Bea is summing up Aristurtle's philosophy, she's making a statement for the arc. She's a direct contrast with her grandmother, Marcella.

…Like a tooth with cavities left to fester, though, the flaws in her personality dug deep until it all turned to rot.

And of course, Ciel's own experiences, though the metaphor is just a bit more removed:

Of course, Ciel didn't have anything as lavish as honey or linen. She spat the paste onto the rag, then a few times onto the ground for good measure. Some of the bitter taste still clung to her teeth.

The plainness of the motif, I think, is what makes it effective: goodness as a habit, as ordinary as taking care of your teeth.

Which leads us back to our idea of that which is both "repugnant" and "pitiable."

I doubt readers will ever feel sad for Marcella quite the way that I do (not that I think they should!) One can't even make the defense for her that "she never stood a chance" because her daughter proved otherwise. The world didn't just conspire against Ciel to extinguish her goodness. Marcella herself did. Marcella lost her goodness, and couldn't stand the idea that Ciel, despite all the pain she bore, could protect her own.

By the analogue of Mrs. Darling, Wendy, and Jane, Marcella would be the first. That comparison to Mrs. Darling—and the unachievable kiss on the rightmost corner of her mouth, and that inner box no one ever got to see—was one of the arc's deepest emotional seeds. Marcella is probably the least sympathetic villain I've written for TRAS; and of all the villains in the arc, she also had the least screentime. So it might come off as strange when I say that she's the heart of the arc for me, in a sense. I've sat here for a while, trying to write an explanation. But I think a certain song—one that partially inspired her, and which always comes to mind whenever I think of Marcella—does a much better job.

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