Talk:Kuuderika/@comment-2607:FEA8:55E0:6E7:D9A3:CE5C:812:F1D0-20180404024731/@comment-45.56.46.26-20180822214111

If Maruyama didn't build a sense of investment in her character, her death wouldn't be felt as keenly.

Everything that was done to make people sadder about her dying was exactly to the point.

A red herring would have been if Maruyama left it uncertain whether or not she actually died, as happened with Calca. I think that was also brilliant, in it's own way. Red herrings aren't bad if they work to serve the narrative rather than being easily dismissed, after all. And all the uncertainty about whether Calca actually died was so great that I personally work to keep it alive when I can (one cannot always, such as when someone asks "what does it mean when Maruyama tweets that Calca is very extra-serious definitely dead?").

But leading you to care about Arche and be invested in her character and hoping she could be saved was not a red herring, it was the entire point.

Maruyama tried giving her a "fate worse than death" in the Web Novel because the readers voted for her to survive. Artistically, it was simply a failure. It was nothing but bad porn (bad in that it wasn't supposed to be porn and thus wasn't readily 'usable' as such). He went ahead and killed her in the LN because it is the more serious work, and her character deserves to be taken seriously.