Talk:Arche Eeb Rile Furt/@comment-31820190-20180614160716/@comment-36676058-20180822145318

"That you feel bad for Arche over the hundreds of thousands of nameless mooks is perfectly normal. It's not about morality. It's about investment. She has a face, a name, a story. Of course you'll feel bad for her more."

This!

Arche and her sisters are given story focus - enough to make us care about them. Who is at fault for Arche's death and us feeling bad about it? It's not Ainz, nor Arche, nor Shalltear, nor any other fictional character. It's the author's fault.

Originally, in the Web Novel, Arche had a significant role to play. And, so, her character was written with a detailed background and she needed a strong reason to live - her young sisters that rely on her and adore her. But the LN was rewritten so her purpose in the story became almost nonexistant, except as yet another (mostly) innocent caught in the meatgrinder of a harsh and uncaring world.

The author should have rewritten the material for the LN to greatly diminished the story's focus on Arche and, especially, her sisters. (Alternatively, she could have been written to survive with a different role created for her.) But Arche's story had already been written in the WN and I can understand the desire to reuse material - even if it was the wrong choice in this case.

Such focus on a character that almost immediately falls victim to a tragic and mostly meaningless death is not only pointless, it essentially becomes a red herring. Why wouldn't we feel betrayed by the author after that? If she was intended to die like that from the start, she should have been little more than a throwaway background character. We could have been given a mere glimpse of Arche to establish that she was an innocent. And she should've merely mentioned her young sisters in passing (if at all).

Indeed, there was no need at all to use Arche as yet another innocent victim. The story had plenty of those without her.

Further, I can't imagine a good reason for the story to mention that Arche's young sisters were sold into slavery and died of exhaustion - unless that purpose is to have us cry and make the story even more dark and distopian than it already is. Forget the "kicking the puppy" trope. It's like torturing an already dying puppy. Instead, that detail could have been left out and their fate could have been left to our imagination.

I would also argue that Arche's rare talent of "All-Seeing Eyes" as well as her being a former student of Fluder (with the potential to one day be as great as him) are red herrings. These facts - along with having young siblings that depended on her - would naturally lead to the expectation that this character had more of a future or at least more significance to the story than her very brief role and a tragic fate.

How would Arche surviving make it unavoidable that the story would be fundamentally changed? How would that "ruin" things?