How a History Enthusiast Deconstructed the Kingdom (Realist Hero Let's Read)

[GreatWyrmGold]

Back in January, I had some Barnes & Noble gift cards to spend. While wandering aimlessly around, looking for something interesting, I came across a light novel with a rather interesting title: "How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom." That caught by attention, but the summary caught my interest:

When Kazuya Souma is unexpectedly transported to another world, he knows the people expect a hero. But Souma's idea of heroism is more practical than most, he wants to rebuild the flagging economy of the new land he's found himself in! Betrothed to the princess and abruptly planted on the throne, this realist hero must gather talented people to help him get the country back on its feet—not through war, or adventure, but with administrative reform.

Click to shrink...

So I bought it (along with a variety of other books), took it home, and started reading...and within the first chapter, some economic nonsense caught my eye. I thought over the problem presented, turned it over in my head a bunch, and came to the conclusion that the author just didn't seem to have a real grasp on how economics work. Which is core to the entire reason I bought the book. I stopped reading in disgust.

In the months since, I've thought about writing this kind of thread for a while—you know, finding some use for the twelve bucks I spent on the book. But I kept not doing it.
About two months ago, Realist Hero got an anime adaptation. Funimation's algorithm determined that it would be in line with my taste in anime (an understandable mistake, considering that I literally bought the first book), and started showing me little banner ads for it when I went to watch other anime. And apparently a couple months of that was what it took to make me dust off my copy and actually write about it.


I don't plan to just roast Realist Hero for every little plot hole or weird creative choice or whatever; I want to actually analyze the text. I'm going to be focusing primarily on the plausibility of the kingdom depicted in Realist Hero, in particular how its economic and administrative structures line up with comparable historical societies, and whether the divergences make sense given known fantastical elements of the story. In most light novels this would be insanely nitpicky—feel free to bully me if I ever apply this kind of logic to Konosuba or something—but Realist Hero's own summary emphasizes the economy and administration of the kingdom. If your premise is about how the country runs, it had better run in a way that makes sense!

While I've been critical of what little I read of the book, I plan to try and work with the text here. Instead of just pointing out how something clashes with real-world economic systems, I'll try to interpret economic systems that might fit the text from what information we're given, like if Realist Hero was a historical text I'd gotten ahold of. To temper expectations, it won't be a proper close-reading—partly because I plan to post my thoughts on each chapter as I read it rather than creating a cross-referenced summary after completing the book a couple times, partly because I just don't want to put that much effort into it. It should be more like a grad student who forgot he had a close-reading assignment until a week before it was due and tried to read and write at the same time, except with less alcohol consumption. (Or one of those YouTube video essays which tries to summarize and analyze a movie at the same time, but without the video. Hopefully one of the good ones, and not Nostalgia Critic or CinemaSins or something.)


One thing I'd like to note: I'm not a historian, by any definition. I like reading about history, especially history that de-emphasizes wars and kings in favor of the sorts of economic and administrative structures that this book allegedly focuses on, but I don't have any formal training. Some of the people I read do, though, notably Bret Devereaux, a history professor who also writes a weekly blog on various history-related subjects, from ancient industry to medieval logistics, whose close-reading of Dune was a partial inspiration for my. (If you have other history blogs to recommend, especially ones that focus on non-Western history, I'd love to hear them! "Get good blog recommendations from like-minded history enthusiasts" is a secret secondary motive for this thread.)

---

With all that out of the way, let's start reading the book.
I'd like to start by noting that I remember basically nothing about this story except the general premise, the aforementioned farm thing, and selling a bunch of royal artifacts. I'm not going into this fully blind, but I do need to refresh most of the relevant details.


Before I get to the prologue, I'd like to point out one thing about the cover. A blonde woman, who turns out to be the princess, takes up roughly the center half of the cover art, with a bland light-novel-protagonist-looking dude behind her, maybe half the size and mostly obscured. Looking at the cover, I initially assumed the woman was the protagonist, which might have contributed in me getting as far as the back-cover blurb. (In my experience, female-lead isekai tend to be a lot better than male-lead isekai.) The cover page has a more balanced composition, the princess a bit smaller (and further to the side) and the hero a bit larger, which reveals details like the scrolls the hero is carrying and the fact that the princess is pointing a sword somewhere (and also a southpaw). In my hilariously amateur opinion, the cover page seems like a better cover for the book than the actual cover—though it still puts more emphasis on the love interest than the hero.
This isn't important, it's just weird.


The text opens with Kazuya at a memorial service for his grandmother, and his grandfather is providing some profound-sounding philosophical thoughts. This sort of thing generally indicates that said thoughts are important to the story—that they comment on the story's core theme, and present a thesis that will be challenged or supported by the rest of the novel. The philosophical thought in question: "People have families so they won't die alone."
That's a perfectly fine thesis—reductive, but most theses are when you boil them down to one sentence. It reminds me of Yuji Itadori's grandfather, and everything about their relationship was absolute gold. But this strikes me as an odd thesis and theme for what's supposedly a novel focused on economic and administrative crises, rather than a shonen action/friendship romp. I look forward to seeing how it comes up in later chapters. Maybe it'll motivate him to start a family early or something?

Unlike Grandpa Itadori, Grandpa Souma is giving Kazuya advice on how to make the same good choices he did. But like Grandpa Itadori, he dies (though much faster than Grandpa Itadori), leaving Kazuya with no living blood relatives and no (mentioned) friends to feel bad when he vanishes into another world. Which isn't a problem, it just feels unnaturally clean. I guess it makes some sense, though; if Kazuya had left Grandpa Souma behind, he'd die alone. And of course, if Kazuya had any life, he'd presumably want to get back to that life, which might disrupt the plot.

All of that is pretty common for isekai, of course, but that doesn't mean I like it. Kazuya doesn't have a backstory beyond how few living people care about him; worse, what we see of Kazuya's past doesn't give us a sense of what he's like as a person. Yuji's scenes with Grandpa Itadori didn't just establish themes and propose a thesis, they characterized Yuji (and Grandpa Itadori) via their interactions. Here, we learn that Grandpa Souma cares about family, and that he thinks Kazuya "tends to think about things rationally" (and shouldn't when it comes to family). This makes Kazuya a pretty generic light novel blank-slate protagonist, which is also common for isekai, and which I also don't like.

But I'm not even two pages in, so maybe I'm jumping the gun there. It just feels so weird to have a scene of the isekai'd hero's prior life that does so little to establish anything about it or him.


The next segment (after Kazuya gets isekai'd) does kind of give Kazuya some characterization, though it's hard to tell how much of it is intentional and how much is a side effect of the narrator's authorial voice. Like, there's a detailed first-person description of the throne room, but Kazuya also tells himself to stop panicking when it feels like he's calmly analyzing the situation? I can't tell if Kazuya's supposed to be hyper-self-critical or if the author just didn't want a panicky internal monologue to distract from the throne room's description. The king says he looks calm, so the calm internal monologue is probably intentional, but the "I shouldn't panic" line is kind of weird then? Argh, this is the sort of detail I was going to try not to get caught up on!

Kazuya displays his immense rationality by noting a bunch of details, and then asserting something that seems to be true, without explaining how he got from A to Q. So, basically like BBC Sherlock. It would be one thing if he at least said "Nice-looking white-haired kings giving quests to heroes are always good guys" to explain why he thinks the king is good-natured and beloved by his subjects, but he doesn't. (He does use genre savvy to divine other details before the king can explain them, so that kind of logic wouldn't be out of place.) I hope he explains his economic policies better than that.

We get some exposition about the world, which sounds extremely generic. There's a land named Landia, which is inhabited by a bunch of fantasy races and divided into many countries. (The term "country" is consistently used, rather than "state," "nation," or even "kingdom"; whether this is a coincidental translation or an indication that anachronistic nation-states aren't a thing in this world, or perhaps that some of the countries aren't states, is not clear.) Some countries are dominated by one race, some are cosmopolitan, none are described beyond the fact that they "took many forms" and compete violently in what the pseudo-intellectual in me wants to identify as interstate anarchy. (The term Northern Countries is capitalized at one point, suggesting that this is some kind of recognized interstate bloc like the Nordic Countries rather than just "countries in the north," but this isn't actually explained or explored.)

Then one day, the Demon World "appears," apparently having decided that a hegemonic international system would be preferable. The other inhabitants of the world don't seem to know what to make of the demons and monsters, to the point that they don't even know for sure that there's a demon king (Kazuya's genre awareness excepted). The demons now control a third of the suoercontinent, an area called the Demon Lord's Domain, and the rest of the continent sets up a defensive alliance in response. The war has ground to a stalemate, possibly because the front lines of the war are broad enough that the demonic forces are spread too thin.


Kazuya has found himself in Elfrieden, an average-sounding kingdom on the opposite end of the continent from the demon problems. It's described as very egalitarian, with no discrimination, universal citizenship, and "aside from 'king,' [citizens] could take any job they desired" (page 14, in case I want to check this bit later). That makes it sounds a bit like the modern UK, except without institutional clutter or lingering prejudices. And also possibly without a parliament or other democratic bodies. There's a Prime Minister, but no mention of if the position is elected or not. (We do know that he's only half-human, though. And the other half is elf, the most humanlike of the listed fantasy races...let's put a pin in that no-racism thing.)

Elfrieden's location means it only faces a few demon attacks. (The fact that it receives any despite being most of a supercontinent from the front lines is interesting.) However, the nation has plenty of problems, including an empty treasury, a food shortage, and refugees "drifting" into Elfrieden. International relations with a Gran Chaos Empire are strained, though surprisingly not because of their deeply sinister name. The GCE are the largest (non-demon) country in Landia, the ones with the longest border with the Demon Domain, and the ones who directed the first invasion against them. They "request" that other countries—especially ones far from the war—send them was subsidies, but it's made clear that the power the GCE possesses makes them offers you can't refuse. (I wonder if the relative power of the GCE is a new thing, or if they were quasi-hegemonic before the demons came?)

The GCE is flexible, however; they offered Elfrieden the choice to either pay more tribute than they can afford, or perform some special hero-summoning ritual which seems to be unique to Elfrieden. The narrator (and presumably in-story expositor) wonder whether they want the hero to fight, whether they wanted the failure to provide a hero to serve as a casus belli, or if they want to DISSECT AND STUDY the hero. Okay, the GCE are definitely the secondary antagonists. Anyways, the kingdom performed the hero-summoning ritual and were surprised when it worked, for no reason the text mentions. They're debating whether to turn over Kazuya immediately to stave off the Empire's wrath (but risk giving up their only advantage/bargainng chip), or whether to hold onto him for negotiations (but risk the Empire's wrath).


At that point, the book goes from describing expository information to describing Kazuya spending days gathering further information, asking follow-up questions, and discussing policy. I'm fine that the narrator doesn't describe all the information we get, but I wish we had a few more details. Just general stuff—is the country a republic? An absolute monarchy? A Chinese-style bureaucratic monarchy? Something unique to this fantasy world? By what mechanisms is wealth distributed, and how equitable is this distribution? Are there significant non-state institutions, like merchant's guilds or allied tribes or religious organizations, and how do they interact with the monarchy? Is Elfrieden divided up into administrative regions of some sort, and how are they administered? Anyways, after the three days of meetings, the king is apparently so impressed that he abdicates his throne to Kazuya and declares that Kazuya and Princess Liscia are engaged. This is...

First off, since the royal house's surname is Elfrieden, it's pretty clear that the realm is somehow tied to his specific dynasty. Abdicating the throne to someone not of that dynasty sounds like a recipe for instability, which this country really doesn't need. And you can't really argue that Kazuya is marrying into the family—the king formally abdicates (one sentence) before even announcing the engagement! It would be one thing if he abdicated to his daughter (with instructions that he should listen to her fiancée), or if he said he'd be abdicating to Kazuya as soon as he was Kazuya Elfrieden, but...he doesn't.

Maybe the country's name is just a way of saying "The land held by the Elfrieden family," like how people say "the Ottomans" to refer to the empire held by the Ottoman dynasty, but the family isn't actually symbolically important to the state's legitimacy or identity? And maybe the culture has some Mandate-of-Heaven-ish concept, which justifies handing the kingdom from an unfit ruler to a fit one from an unrelated dynasty? There are ways to make this abdication make sense, but I need to pull ideas from unrelated states on opposite ends of Asia to come up with a remotely plausibly explanation. And to be blunt, I don't think "The royal bloodline is so important that we name the country after them" is very compatible with "Eh, anyone can hold the royal title, it's fine".

Anyways, since this title will presumably give Kazuya freedom to freely implement his policies, we can assume Elfrieden (Souya?) is an absolute monarchy, or at least close to it.

---

This seems like a good time to bring up something that should have been obvious from the premise—the colonialist implications.

The only reasons I hesitate to call Kazuya a "white savior" is that A. he's not white (he's Japanese, duh) and B. only one character in the book's artwork has a different skintone. (In this racially-integrated fantasy kingdom, everyone is white.) But TV Tropes notes that the Mighty Whitey trope is used liberally, and suggests defining it as " a 'modern' character achieving mastery over 'ancient' or 'backward' characters, not necessary with respect to race per se." Obviously, Kazuya fits this definition; he's literally an ordinary (if "rational") modern dude, in a society which resembles ancient/backwards absolute monarchies. And as is clear from what I remember of the first chapter, the country is in dire need of a "sensible" modern perspective, since the locals need him to implement "simple" solutions to their problems.

To summarize, we have someone from an advanced society coming to a primitive society to solve all their problems, which he can do easily because of what his advanced culture considers common knowledge. That is exactly what European colonizers claimed they were doing when they exploited native populations and exterminated their cultures. It's not as bad as, say, Avatar (the blue alien one, not the airbender one), but it's still not good.

It's possible to tell this kind of story without those implications. The simplest way is to have the protagonist's superb insight come from something other than their superior culture; to pick an isekai-friendly option, if Kazuya recognized Elfrieden's situation from the not-Fire-Emblem game he was a huge fan of and used spoilers to plan around major events. You can make it clear that the protagonist's point of view, while different from the locals' (and providing valuable insight), is horribly insufficient for handling the situation at hand. You can have "primitive" characters pick up ideas the hero is putting down and do things he couldn't have imagined (which Realist Hero might do, but it doesn't seem likely).

Or you can just not have your hero come from a different culture. Basically nothing about the story changes if Kazuya is a rational-minded farmhand summoned from the boonies, needing education about broader national issues but able to process it well due to being "rational". Which is an exceedingly-poorly-defined term, especially since we never see Kazuya use his rationality. We see his conclusions, we sometimes see the premises he had at hand, but we never see what connects the two. And theoretically we could see them later, but we need to see them now. The start of the story is crucial for setting everything—the tone, the pace, the themes, the structure. If we're going to see Kazuya rationalizing his way through the kingdom's problems, we need to see a basic version of that process the first time he rationalizes out a deduction—ideally a harmless one, like the king's nature or what's going on in the kingdom, but figuring out what the GCE wanted with a hero would work too.

We never see what Kazuya's "rationality" entails, so it feels like all of his greatness comes from the fact that he's a clever modern guy. But even if we had a better idea of what made Kazuya tick, one of his first actions as king should raise the same red flags.


But this isn't supposed to be a basic book review. This is supposed to be me analyzing a text and figuring out what's going on in its society. And, um...well, so far, the author hasn't given us much. Landia isn't so much a cohesive setting as a bunch of fantasy tropes dumped onto a map. Some countries are racist assholes, some are tolerant, and there's no sense why these viewpoints exist or how countries holding them interact. The world is a sea of individual countries, with the occasional big fish mentioned, but without any sign of the influence a truly hegemonic state like ancient China or the Roman Empire had. There's no sense of any kind of regional groups or significant cultural differences between regions, beyond Northern Countries being capitalized. The countries all fought each other, then the demons came and the Northern Countries fell, now the countries are all working together.

The situation inside Elfrieden is similarly vague. No powerful families aside from the royal family are mentioned, suggesting that there's no legally-distinct aristocracy and that any unofficial aristocracy (e.g. unusually rich families, the families of high-ranking government officials, an old royl family that commands some people's respect) isn't significant enough for the king to worry about. There's a king, but every other position is open to anyone, whatever their origin...but we don't see how it's determined who has to work in the mines and who gets to be Prime Minister. Speaking of which, there's a Prime Minister as well as a king, but it's not clear what the relation between them is, or how responsibilities and powers are divided between them...which wouldn't be important, except that our hero is appointed king and has to use the powers of his office to solve economic and administrative problems. But we know nothing about the king, the economy, or the administration.

The most striking thing about the information we've been given is the absences. We don't see any sign of the institutional clutter you'd expect from a real-world nation with more than a couple decades of tradition behind it—and quite bluntly, you aren't holding a sizable nation together unless you can draw on traditions going back longer than that. (Obviously, the book couldn't give detailed explanations of everything it gives a simple description of in the same space of time, but focusing on a shallow flyby of the most generic-looking parts of your setting is a questionable way to set the tone.) As far as we can tell, the world is like a simple strategy game—there are centralized states, which can effectively be treated as individuals due to the absolute control their leadership exerts.

Aside from being unrealistic, that's boring. There are only so many ways to make "Elfrieden doesn't have the resources to accomplish its goals, how will Kazuya sort things out?" interesting. And on a worldbuilding level, there's nothing unique or interesting about Realist Hero's world. Contrast Realist Hero's peer, Ascendance of a Bookworm. While not focused on the world's administrative and economic structures the way Realist Hero theoretically is, we get a solid sense of how the world works from Myne's knee-high vantage point. We learn more about what makes Myne's world unique from watching her play in the woods than we do about Kazuya's from several pages of exposition.
That's part of what draws me to Ascendance, and part of what should theoretically draw me to Realist Hero. I love worldbuilding! I wish there was some here. Or barring that, that I had some reason to think there would be more worldbuilding later.

I don't hate all the nebulousness. Heck, I love how vague people's information about the Demon Lord's Domain is! All they know is the kinds of things attacking them and how far they've advanced—their origin, internal politics, and strategic goals are all mysteries. I wish that this mystery was contrasted by a clearer sense of what things were like elsewhere, so it felt more like an intentional creative choice and less like the author just not having any details for us.


Anyways. At this point, my best guess about the administrative structure of Elfrieden is that it's an absolute monarchy, given legitimacy by something like the Mandate of Heaven which can also legitimize transfer of power to a more capable monarch. For now, I'm assuming that the Prime Minister is appointed by the king, as are other bureaucratic positions (unless they're appointed by the Prime Minister or lesser officials).
The one sticking point I have with this is the name. Elfrieden, same as the royal family. If the country is named after the ruling dynasty, there's no way the ruling dynasty isn't important to the country's identity and whatever legitimizes their rule. If the bureaucratic structures the king administers are what legitimizes the state, rather than the king's bloodline, then the country shouldn't be named after the king—it has an identity beyond him.
Oh, and it's nominally race-blind, but our evidence for this is that we're told this and that the Prime Minister is only half human. Jury shouldn't make a decision yet.

But giving a country and its royal line the same name is a straightforward hack fantasy thing. The dynasty has no history apart from the kingdom, the kingdom has no history apart from the dynasty, just give them both the same name so they're easy to remember. I don't want to assume that the author just picked the path of least resistance when it came to worldbuilding, but that's the impression the prologue gives me.
I hope the rest of the book is better about it, because I don't want to be this mean for the next 350 pages.


Miscellaneous thoughts:

• The author is aware of the generic-ness of his setting and plot; Kazuya notes that the throne room scene feels like it came out of an RPG. To an extent, I'm fine with this—the premise is "What if an isekai hero had great Diplomacy and Stewardship instead of Martial and Prowess?", so you need a recognizable isekai setting and plot backing up that sociopolitical stuff. In fact, having the Demon King thing be just a straight generic-JRPG-cliffs-notes is perfectly fine; it's a distant source of pressure on the kingdom, it doesn't need to be anything more. But the setting, especially the kingdom our hero is ruling, is more important. After all, this is supposed to be about a hero rebuilding the hero with diplomacy and stewardship.
• King Albert is consistently characterized as kind but weak—he never offers any useful ideas or information himself, quails when Kazuya raises his voice, admits that he's being driven by fear, and is described by Kazuya Sholmes as lacking "the aura of command required of a nation's ruler".
• Kazuya is...not really characterized at all. Charitably, he seems like the hero of a "rational fiction" story, except without the parts where the author explains his rationale, which...is a somewhat important part of the genre. Anyways, I described him as a generic light novel blank-slate protagonist, and nothing I've seen has really gone against that. Kazuya is "rational" and familiar with JRPG tropes, but the person expected to project himself into a GLNBS is liable to think of himself as intelligent and nerdy, so that doesn't really distinguish him from other GLNBSP.
  • Speaking of GLNBSP...Kazuto, Kazuma, Kazuya. Are there just so many isekai light novels that having so many heroes share most of their names is inevitable, or is there some meaning to the corresponding kanji?
• The Prime Minister is named Marx, which is...something to evaluate once he starts offering actual policy opinions.
• The prologue really only establishes these three characters and some economic/grand strategic threats. No other characters, no (interesting) worldbuilding, no idea what tools Kazuya has at his disposal.
• I wouldn't be so critical of this prologue for leaving stuff out if it wasn't for two things. First, I vaguely remember chapter 1 and that there isn't much more there. Two, the chapter isn't short. It's not as long as a full chapter, but it has space to do more than it does—especially if it focused on what made this setting and story unique instead of what makes the setting generic.

That's all I've got for the prologue. Next time, we'll cover chapter 1.

 

[GreatWyrmGold]

And next time is today.


Before all that analysis and recap, Kazuya Souma had been appointed King of Elfrieden and engaged to its princess, because the old king was really impressed with Kazuya's incredible (offscreen) rational thinking skills. This chapter starts by expanding on that with some worldbuilding—specifically a superficial mention of the local calendar, a visual description of That One Isekai City, and some proper nouns. But once it gets past that, we get something interesting—a brief glance at what commoners think of the situation! They were confused about the new king, and this caused tension...that immediately died down once they found out that the new king would be the summoned hero, that he'd be marrying the princess, and that the old king was fine with it.

Is there some tradition here, about summoned heroes becoming kings? I feel like explaining the cultural significance of the hero-summoning ritual could go a long way towards both making the setting more distinct and making the plot make more sense. Why does the Gran Chaos Empire ask for a hero, and why is Elfrieden reluctant to give the hero up if they can avoid it? Why is everyone just accepting this nobody from another world as king? Why didn't they try the ritual as soon as a seemingly-apocalyptic demonic invasion happened? All this and more could be answered before the question is even asked by telling the reader what this ritual is and what it's "supposed" to be used for. At this point, it feels like the only purpose the ritual serves is to get our hero from sekai to isekai...which is true, of course, but it shouldn't be this obvious.

The fact that the commoners care so much about their king's decision (and are also glad he's relieved of the burden of rulership) is interesting. It indicates one of two things: Either some sort of state religion promotes reverence of the beloved monarch, or this specific monarch has made a positive impression on the general public. The text indicates the latter, attributing this to his good nature and popularity rather than any kind of devotion to the crown as an abstract entity. This sort of thing is basically impossible in a premodern community of any significant size; you need some form of mass media to propagate something like that over an entire kingdom in a single lifetime.
But this world has magic, so some kind of mystic communication system acting as a replacement for radio or TV is far from impossible. A fantasy equivalent to FDR's "fireside chats" could easily engender this kind of trust, even in a king who didn't deserve it. I can easily believe that King Albert could have made the people care so much about him if he'd done the same.


Next, we see Princess Liscia riding to the palace to speak at her father. The peasants treat her with much the same reverence they gave the former king Al, though whether this is just because she's connected to the beloved (former) king or because she's personally popular for some reason is unclear. We learn that Liscia is a low-ranking officer in the army, which hints that Eldfrieden is surprisingly meritocratic in both theory and practice; Liscia gets sent on a disproportionate number of safe ceremonial assignments, but otherwise doesn't seem to be getting preferential treatment despite being (at the time) the crown princess. That passage1​ is followed by the king explaining that he abdicated to Kazuya because he was better-suited to the position. This reminds me of (what little I know of) Confucian bureaucracies, except without any glaring corruption problems that often let nepotism trump merit. It makes me wonder if Elfrieden has a system like that, which tests people on their ability to serve the state in certain capacities.
This fits with what I derived last time, both in the sense that it vaguely reminds me of an Imperial Chinese institution I don't understand and that this country runs on a simplified set of ideals—uncluttered by either the inefficiencies of the real world, vestigial institutions, or people in power consolidating that power over several generations.

This scene also had an aside characterizing Kazuya as modest and practical. Rather than go to the trouble of moving into the royal chambers2​, he set up a "simple bed" in his office. One can only assume this is meant to contrast the way Al and his wife are sitting around in their luxuriant bedroom, feeding each other scones with cream—and it's certainly an effective contrast, if that's what the author was going for. Liscia is embarrassed by her parents' casual behavior in the wake of what she assumes was a coup. Al reassures her that it was his choice, and briefly assumes a regal demeanor (which he hasn't done before now) to defend that choice [pg 26], indicating how certain he is that it was the right one. How obvious it is that they should be ruled by this outsider with a superior—well, there will be better times to beat that drum again.

LIscia then complains about not being asked about her own marriage, which Al defends by saying he didn't ask Kazuya either (which is not a good defense) and that he probably won't press the issue if she doesn't want to marry him (which is...complicated3​ but probably irrelevant unless they actually break the betrothal). It's worth briefly pointing out that the idea that a child should be in charge of their own marital arrangements is, especially for the upper class, relatively recent; in many premodern cultures, marriages were seen as vows between two families more the individuals being married. But the trope of princesses wanting to marry someone (usually the hero) for love instead of their chosen political husband is prevalent enough that fantasy stories which loosely follow historic customs are the exception rather than the rule, and a culture which puts as little stock in bloodline as this kingdom seems to might not consider their in-laws to be unusually trustworthy.
Anyways, the former queen (who we learn is named Elisha) encourages Liscia to meet Kazuya before making a decision, and Kazuya is the protagonist, and Liscia is on the cover of the book, so we can safely assume the series won't end without the two of them banging.


Faced with arguments that basically amount to "Nah, I'm fine with it," Liscia recognizes that further discussion with her parents would be pointless and slinks away. She notes that everyone in the castle is running around, rather than strolling leisurely as they normally do. Liscia naturally assumes something's gone wrong and grabs a maid to ask what's going on. The maid explains that the new king is so hardworking that everyone in the castle, down to the maids, was guilted into working harder [pg 27], which...
...

beleagured sigh

It makes the castle staff—and by implication, possibly the rest of the kingdom or even world—seem lazy. They clearly can do so much more than they were, they just needed an example of good work ethic. This also matches with the contrast between Al and King Kazuya—one eager to wallow in decadent luxury, the other content to work in austere simplicity. Ugh.
This really bugs me. Maybe this reminds me of how Protestant Work Ethic™ was historically credited with the success that certain Western nations (or at least the United States) had over the countries they dominated—implicitly justifying that domination, since the people being dominated were "lazy" by comparison. Maybe it connects to the vaguely colonial themes I mentioned in the prologue section. Maybe it's the creeping dread that Kazuya is almost certainly going to have at least one scene where he solves a problem through an exceptionally obvious use of some magic the inhabitants of Elfrieden had but didn't think about—something they could have done, if they just had an ordinary Japanese university student to point out the obvious.

Which would be fine if this was a silly story about a NEET using his familiarity with JRPG or isekai conventions to change a genre-blind world, but this is supposed to be a story about a rational-thinking "Realist Hero" rebuilding the kingdom through good socioeconomic engineering. Suggesting that the locals' problems might be because they just weren't trying hard enough until their savior showed them the way is, beyond all the stuff I've said, boring. If all Kazuya needs to do to improve the palace's administrative efficiency is to show up, if his problems can be solved by really obvious solutions that the local dum-dums didn't think to try, then there's nothing interesting or clever in the story or plot. Rational fiction is only interesting if the characters involved actually need their nigh-superhuman rationality.

I realize I was planning to focus on the worldbuilding, but I feel like this sort of rant is part of that for two reasons.
First, it's part of how Elfrieden has been characterized so far. The king is indolent and weak-willed, and his servants follow his lead. They quail in fear when the GCE sends demands. Elfrieden's characterization so far has been positively decadent. Even the stuff about how tolerant Elfrieden is and how there doesn't seem to be any institutional sexism (e.g. Liscia is allowed in the army) could be seen as decadent, from the point of view of the sorts of people who are most concerned about decadence. I don't want to go too far into this until a later chapter, both so I can focus on that more fully and so I make sure I'm not jumping to conclusions.
Second, we can make assumptions about how the story will progress based on what it considers important to introduce early. The first we hear of Kazuya's work ethic is the effect it has on the castle staff, which suggests that the effect Kazuya's personality has on the people around him will be a significant part of the story. That's good if you're telling a story about the power of friendship, but simply inadequate if you're telling a story focused on administration and economics. Having an inspirational leader (or one you hate) can have an effect on those things, but it's far from the most important one; centering it like this suggests the story won't really dig into causes of the problems Kazuya tackles.

I hope I'm wrong, but if I am, this is a baffling sequence to include. There are better ways to show how hard Kazuya works if that's all you're doing; e.g. the royal ministers have to pick up the pace or hire more clerks just to keep up with the volume of decrees and paperwork Kazuya completes. Of course, if you don't frame it as the castle staff choosing to work harder, it might seem like Kazuya chose to overwork his staff. That would probably be seen as a Bad Thing, and the stereotypical self-insert light novel protagonist isn't allowed to have such major flaws as being a garbage boss. Again, I hope this isn't what the author is going for; I hope Kazuya is allowed to make mistakes and have flaws...but also again, this feels like it's setting up him being another generic (nominally) unproblematic light novel hero.


Should be interesting to go back through these edited and mildly curated streams of consciousness when I'm done reading the book.


At last, Liscia reaches the new king's bed-office. Paperwork covers every spare surface, including a long table that several "bureaucrats" are working at. Kazuya glances up, asks if Liscia can read and do math, and hands her some paperwork. It's not a great first impression, but given that Kazuya is visibly exhausted, she tries not to hold the mistake against him.

The mountain of paperwork is, itself, interesting to note. First off, while paperwork has existed in some form for at least as long as we've had writing, paperwork that might reach such a volume is something you only see after the Industrial Revolution or so, filling the administrative needs of contemporary industrial facilities. (And, of course, supplied by cheap paper and printing.) It both drove and was fueled by increased public education, because it is basically impossible for an organization to function if all its functionaries are drowning in paperwork. An institution in that state would either cut back on unnecessary paperwork (so the clerks could focus on the critical stuff), hire/educate more clerks, or both.

At first, I assumed that this paperwork was the result of Kazuya trying to single-handedly force a modern-style bureaucracy into a society ill-fitted to support one. That struggle could be interesting! But Kazuya's retroactive narration makes it clear that the paperwork "piled up in the confusion since [he] had been given the throne" [pg 31]. The most literal interpretation of the text suggests that this is just ordinary King-of-Elfrieden work that piled up while Kazuya was getting his magic tested and whatnot, while a more charitable suggestion is that abruptly transferring power like Al did generates a bunch of paperwork. Kazuya's eventually provides an explanation which makes seem like the confusion of the regime change had nothing to do with the paperwork, which makes me wonder why his internal narration blamed it on that confusion—

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Did I mention that Kazuya had his magic tested? Surprisingly enough, this fantasy world has magic. It has magical artifacts that the text goes out of its way to note nobody here understands, which is a common fantasy trope; I only note it because it lines up with the theme that the locals are incapable and ignorant. More importantly for Kazuya, some people have special magic abilities, and Kazuya is one of them. He can "transfer his consciousness" into up to three objects at once. He effectively gains another mind in that object which can watch and manipulate it; he uses this to control three pens and process three times the paperwork. Which he has been doing for three all-nighters. And just what has he been doing all of this time?

He's been combing thousands4​ of budgetary documents, looking for signs of fraud. Kazuya explains how he intends to check for discrepancies to find wasteful use of excess budget or embezzlement disguised as such. On one hand, Kazuya's audit is tackling a real problem premodern (and early modern, and to an extent even 21st-century) states faced: The unintuitively challenging task of knowing what your own people are doing. This is sometimes referred to as "legibility," and attempts to render a nation legible drove a wide variety of administrative and economic reforms, from censuses to enclosure.

However, the author has the problem almost precisely backwards! The problem isn't that premodern states didn't have enough bureaucrats to audit the volume of documents they produced; it's that the documents were mostly not produced. (For instance: As late as the 18th century, even with a thorough audit like Kazuya's, the British Empire could only estimate the amount of money in its treasury. Not its expected revenue or expenditures, the amount of money it had available to spend.) This makes sense; a society without enough clerks to read reams of paperwork doesn't have enough clerks to write reams of paperwork. (And, of course, audits are a priority for any bureaucracy; hard evidence of fraud is one of the big advantages recordkeeping offers!)
A society with the capacity to swamp itself in paperwork generally has the capacity to drain itself of paperwork. There can be local exceptions, of course—offices whose inboxes get flooded during a crisis—but under ordinary circumstances, societies with a chronic paperwork problem either cut back on the least-important paperwork or train more clerks.

In Elfrieden, the problem is either that people are writing documents nobody is expected to read, that the bureaucrats just need to work harder at their existing jobs (that again!), or that the old bureaucracy never bothered to perform audits! That last idea is ridiculous; auditing practices date back at least to antiquity (ie, ancient Greece and Rome), though obviously we've gotten more sophisticated since then. The middle idea would be repetitive to discuss again; take everything I said about the "lazy" castle staff nine hundred words ago (geez) and add more ink smudges and paper cuts.
That leaves the first idea, which...I can't dismiss entirely. Administrative inefficiencies like that aren't uncommon. But I find it a bit difficult to believe that such documents would be A. produced and stored in a way that leaves them easily-accessible to Kazuya (e.g. that administrators pay to ship a bundle of reports nobody would read from border forts and backwoods provinces to the capital), and B. reliable enough to be useful in an audit. And, of course, "producing documents nobody reads" seems like something Kazuya should cut out of the budget, if he isn't planning to set up an Elfrieden Revenue Service of some kind.

I am trying to find a proper pretext for all of this pristine paperwork being produced yet not processed. But...I've got nothing.


After a couple hours of auditing, Liscia finally speaks up and introduces herself. Kazuya identifies her as "the princess," but Liscia says that title is in doubt since he "usurped" the throne. Kazuya argues that it wasn't usurpation, and this transitions into summary of information we already know, which in turn transitions into Kazuya's game plan for dealing with the GCE's demands: Just pay the war subsidies. He intends to pay for this by implementing spending caps and selling off "some state-owned facilities" and the king's "personal assets". I'll start by noting that I find it hard to believe a state which last week didn't perform effective audits would be able to enforce a spending cap.

More importantly, the things Kazuya is selling are kept vague. We get more detail on the "personal assets," but the "state-owned facilities" are left abstract. What might they be?

• First off, it might be the most important "facilities" in any agrarian society—land. It was extremely common for premodern states to own farmland that was rented out to tenant farmers and the like (or worked by state-owned slaves) to generate revenue. It could also be non-farm land, such as royal forests; these are best known as royal hunting grounds, of course, but forestry has many non-recreational uses. Ones which generate revenue.
• Mills were frequently owned by the state, though private ownership was also common. Of course, mills are a great source of revenue—every farmer needs to mill their grain, after all, and laws were often passed which forbade unauthorized mills. Of course, state control of mills also granted some level of control over the food supply, which was ridiculously important.
• States might own toll roads, toll bridges, ports, and so forth. These could be sold, but they generate revenue for the state and losing control over them means losing control of trade in the country, which can have unwanted side effects.
• In most premodern societies, mines were usually owned by the state (either directly by the institution, or privately owned by various lords). Mines are, of course, another source of revenue, but many are also valuable strategic resources to control.
• Military assets like fortresses could also be sold off—though I don't know who would buy them. The king's squabbling vassals? Anyways, these don't generate revenue, but their strategic importance (and the extreme expense in replacing them) should be obvious.

I could go on; there are many other kinds of state-owned facilities, especially if you exploit the fuzzy boundaries of many "states" to include facilities owned by state-affiliated religious organizations, nobles in the state's power structure, wealthy associates of the head of state acting on their behalf, and so on. But there's the same pattern—for every facility a state owns, there's a reason it's owned by the state.
Maybe the reason the author kept the "state-owned facilities" vague is to make sure the reader doesn't think Kazuya shouldn't have sold them. We can't question the hero's decisions if we don't understand them!

But onto the "personal assets"...by which I mean the national treasures of Elfrieden. Kazuya just sold them—not all of them, but a solid third. He says he only sold ones that lacked "historical or cultural value" [pg 37], but...there are two possibilities. One is that this is yet another example of Elfrieden's natives being stupid—that they stuck a bunch of random "jewels and ornamental objects" with no value beyond looking pretty in a vault, a fact which was obvious to even a complete outsider, and didn't even think of selling that expensive junk to help solve their financial crisis. This is probably what the author had in mind, but it doesn't seem like the most straightforward conclusion.

The most straightforward conclusion is that Kazuya looked at what they had in the royal vault, made some decisions about what seemed important to him, an outsider, and sold anything that didn't meet his criteria. This is supported not just by the absence of evidence for anything else (say, Kazuya mentioning that he consulted with Al or some historians to figure out what mattered), but by the fact that he asked Liscia about selling a "full set of Hero Equipment" [38]. Given that this was categorized alongside grimoires and magical artifacts, and that Kazuya was treating that category as "weapons," it seems fair to assume that the "Hero Equipment" is probably enchanted with JRPG-endgame-level magic. Even if the summoned-hero Kazuya doesn't intend to personally use that gear, selling that seems incredibly dumb. Luckily, his gamer instincts clued him in that he should probably ask a royal if it's important before pawning it for tribute/reform money. What else might Kazuya have sold without thinking to ask?

I've mentioned before that the way the narrative treats Kazuya and the Elfrieden people feels like historical narratives used to justify imperialism. This doesn't feel like that—it just feels like Kazuya doing imperialism to Elfrieden. Oh, he's doing less imperialism than most historical empires; he's actually making a token effort to preserve the culturally-significant artifacts rather than selling anything that isn't nailed down, and he's trying to follow through on the promise of civilizing the savages improving the kingdom's socioeconomic systems (by making them more closely resemble a modern liberal democracy's, I'd imagine) to make their lives better rather than pocketing the money and moving onto his next conquest. But the way Kazuya effectively seems to have appointed himself the Judge, Jury, and Auctioneer of Cultural Significance for a culture he has known less than a week, sells their treasures to be shipped to god-knows-where, and talks about putting the stuff he didn't sell in museums (to produce a steady stream of revenue, of course)...it feels a lot like how imperialist powers treated the cultures they colonized.

And after Kazuya gives his explanation, Liscia's only complaint is that Kazuya spent the money on Imperial tribute instead of putting it into the military (to defend against the Empire). That's her only problem with Kazuya looting the royal treasury's artifacts. That he didn't put the money into the military.

I'd like to again reiterate: This is only a problem because Kazuya is from Earth, and so far being from Earth hasn't really played a part in his motives, actions, or abilities. (Unless Earth's superior culture is the source of his rationality, but with how little the book has explained his "rationality" beyond "Kazuya's smart, S-M-R-T," there's no way to frame that in a non-racist5​ way.) If Kazuya Souya was an Elfrieden farmboy, selling off the national treasures of Elfrieden wouldn't read like looting a colonized country's cultural artifacts, because Elfrieden!Souya would actually be part of that country. We'd know he had at least a basic understanding of which artifacts mattered to the Elfrieden people and which could be sacrificed, because he is of the Elfrieden people!
Or if you need to make this an isekai, look to Dr. Stone. It avoids falling into that trap by making the future people smart. Senku's scientific knowledge is necessary to making the Kingdom of Science, but the other residents (especially Chrome and Kaseki) have opportunities to display brilliance in their fields of expertise. Probably the moment where this is clearest is when he drips his own sweat on the concave lens of Suika's melon mask so it will concentrate light instead of dispersing it, which probably sounds like nonsense to anyone who hasn't read/watched Dr. Stone but I swear makes sense in context. Senku assumed Chrome's lack of scientific education beyond what he had taught him meant Chrome wouldn't understand the difference between concave and convex lenses...but he did, because he isn't just a cunning savage.

I hope I'm not harping on this point too much. I wanted to have fun making a plausible society out of the nonsense this book spat out, but I keep getting sidetracked by the elephant in the room. Stories about people from "advanced" cultures who use their knowledge to improve a "primitive" society need to be written with care to avoid Unfortunate Implications, Realist Hero was not written with such care, and focusing on relatively minor problems like empty worldbuilding or boring characters while ignoring those Implications would feel wrong.


Speaking of boring characters...if I wasn't A. focused on digging socioeconomic details out of the text and B. cynical about whether either Liscia or Kazuya would have any interesting character traits, I'd probably find their conversation kind of cute. (The parts of it that aren't just turning the plot gears, anyways.) Neither quite knows what their relative should be, and while Kazuya is too tired to care, it clearly bothers Liscia. We also learn that Kazuya plans to "quit this whole king gig in a few years" and will cancel the engagement at that time. It's not clear whether he plans to abdicate to Liscia, Al, or someone else, or if he'll try to set up a republic before he nopes out of power. It's also not clear what he intends to do after stepping down—get a job in the finance ministry? Grant himself an estate to support himself on the labor of the peasants? Run for political office in that new republic? Go all Roman Senator and farm grapes in the hills?

Some plot stuff is probably going to get in the way of that plan, so in a sense it doesn't matter. But in another sense, it's critical. A Kazuya who just wants a humble job in the finance ministry after bringing democracy to the kingdom is very different from one who hopes to retain some influence within the state and builds with that plan in mind, or one who plans to retreat to the countryside at the first opportunity he gets. Stuff like this is why I'm cynical about Kazuya ever being an interesting character. It wasn't obvious on a casual read, but in this more analytical pass I'm noticing all sorts of places where Kazuya is written to display as little personality as the plot allows. Why would you do that, if you weren't trying to make Kazuya relatably generic?

Liscia is shocked by Kazuya's plan, whatever it is. But she's not so shocked by the fact that he plans to abdicate the crown as she is by the fact that Kazuya expects to clean up the country in a few years. Granted, massive institutional reforms aren't the kind of thing you pull off in such a timeframe (barring generous application of torches and pitchforms to the institution in question), but I feel like someone shocked that her father would willingly abdicate the crown in a time of crisis should also be shocked that the current king plans to abdicate the crown for reasons he didn't bother explaining. Though maybe she'd have gotten there if she wasn't interrupted by Kazuya selling a third of the treasury.


On that note, remember the argument about tribute versus defense spending?1​ Kazuya argued that they need to literally buy time to solve Elfrieden's domestic issues before fighting a war. If they can't solve the famine and refugee crisis, there could be riots. Liscia argues that the people love the country too much to riot, but Kazuya counters with:

"Only once people are clothed and fed do they learn manners". In the end, you can't have morals or patriotism on an empty stomach. If you're too busy looking after yourself, you can't look after others.

Click to shrink...

I'm not sure if that's true in Elfrieden—it seems like every day is We Love the King Day there—but it's definitely true in the real world. It's hard to find records interested in the working class more than a few centuries old, but you can still see the masses' interest bubble up to the elites' history here and there. The transition between the Roman Republic and Roman Empire is a pretty good example of this; aside from the occasional grain riot (that is, the urban poor rioting because they can't get food for one reason or another), you can tell that ending the civil wars wracking the late Republic mattered more to the common Roman citizen than preserving their Republican, anti-monarchist traditions. They were sick to death of war, and calmed down once someone finally got the patricians to stop their heavily-armed squabbles.

However, I'm not sure if Kazuya's reasoning is as accurate as his conclusion. Putting the bit about learning manners in quotes makes it feel like a proverb that I'm missing context for, but a Google search doesn't give me anything useful, so I just have to take it at face value. Everything else seems to be Kazuya's own ideas put to words, including the bit about peasants needing to learn morals.
I'll give Realist Hero one thing: The attitude implied (though not quite explicit) in his word choice is supported by our sources! Ancient and medieval authors often saw commoners as a pack of uncivilized vileins, treacherous peasants, unscrupulous merchants, and so on. The problem is that this attitude pretty obviously has less to do with historical realities than how the upper class always describes the working class. Believe it or not, commoners who revolt don't need to be taught manners, and haven't lost their morals; they're just desperate enough to cast those things aside to fight for their rights and/or survival.

The "if you're too busy looking after yourself, you can't look after others" line has a different problem: It assumes that the two are mutually exclusive. For a middle-class worker living in a modern capitalist society, this is true to some extent; money you spend on charity can't be invested, or tucked in a retirement fund, or spent on things you like. But for agrarian peasants (and to an extent, poor or marginalized people living today), looking after others is looking after yourself. (Scroll down to "banqueting the yields" for the part I'm trying to point you to—I don't know how to link you straight to a specific heading on Wordpress. Or if that's a functionality the platform has.) The most important defense a premodern farming family has against one bad year killing them all is their peers, who in most cases won't all have a bad year at the same time.6​ "Look after yourself or look after others" isn't a dichotomy the people Kazuya is talking about would recognize; it would be more like "look out for our community or look out for our king".
Which would actually frame the commoners as people looking out for their collective interests, rather than an ill-mannered, amoral mob requiring bread and circuses to tame! Funny how the criticisms I have of each of Kazuya's arguments line up with each other, almost as if there's something behind them that I'd criticize if I could directly observe it.

Now, if all of this was meant to show Kazuya's limited understanding of the society he wound up in, it would be fine that he showed limited understanding of the society he wound up in. But it doesn't.
Liscia doesn't question Kazuya's logic; in fact, she calls it a "harsh and realistic view" (emphasis mine). And, of course, there's the general framing of Kazuya in the novel so far; he's a guy whose rationality impressed the king so much that he gave up his crown, who is working day and night to audit the kingdom's finances, whose ideas are never questioned once he explains them properly. Finally, the book is called How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom, not I Tried to Rebuild the Kingdom or something. So far, everything about Kazuya's framing identifies him as a smart guy whose statements should be treated as fact by default. Kazuya's statements attitudes can be criticized almost as clearly as if they came from an omniscient narrator.

---

But now I can move from implicit descriptions of the kingdom's citizens to explicit descriptions of its structure. Did you know there are Three Dukedoms, capitalized like that, in Elfrieden? Because nothing about them has been mentioned so far. No members of the ducal families or representatives from their courts were mentioned at the hero-summoning ritual, which sounds like the kind of significant event you'd want to offer important nobles a place of honor at. Nobody wonders how the dukes will react to the king abdicating to an otherworldly stranger, or mentions what they think about the Gran Chaos Empire's demands. Heck, nobody references their existence in any of the exposition-dumps we've gotten so far. The dukes are apparently important enough that Kazuya hesitates to extract any revenue from them, but not important to be consulted about anything else.
(And come to think of it, I'm not sure how Kazuya would extract revenue from them. Is the king allowed to just sell the Dukedoms' stuff?)

There's also that line in the prologue, where the expositor claimed that anyone could attain any job they wanted, except for specifically "king". Are the dukes considered equivalent to the king in some way? Do the ducal titles function like Western viceroyalties (among other titles), in that they are prestigious but non-hereditary titles? Did the author forget the dukedoms when writing that line, or perhaps only added them into the story after he'd finished writing that part of the prologue? Are there any other noble jobs that not just anyone can hold?


Hopefully, some of these questions will be answered. For now, Kazuya just wants praise for funding his first set of reforms without touching them...and to play with Liscia's hair while she's asleep in her office. (In her defense, it's the wee hours of the morning and Kazuya is literally the only person awake. In his defense...he doesn't get a defense, they barely know each other, that's creepy.) This rouses her, so Kazuya pretends he wasn't doing anything, and the two of them go on a morning ride and chat. It's mostly another "I'd probably enjoy this if I cared more about the characters" scene, but with a couple of notable tidbits. First, Liscia almost gets Kazuya to say something about the world he left and his place in it, though sadly all we get is that Kazuya's grandpa's death happened shortly before he was summoned. Second, Liscia mentions that pretty much everyone in Elfrieden can ride horses, including peasant farmers.

Now, I'll admit that I don't know much about ancient equestrian patterns, but I do know that agrarian societies didn't have enough horses for everyone to ride. (Don't you "unless you're the Mongols" me—steppe nomads aren't agrarian.) In fact, most peasant families didn't even have their own plow-horse; they had to borrow a village plow-animal or rent one from a richer landowner, or just make do with hand plows. The fact that Elfrieden is horse-rich enough that even peasants ride horses is very interesting. Not sure what it implies, beyond large land-owners having one less tool for extracting labor from the peasantry. (Optimistically, it could also mean that the means of agricultural production are distributed among the commoners rather than concentrated among the wealthy, but that hypothesis won't survive two more pages.) But hey, it's something!


Speaking of the peasant farmers, they're all farming cotton. Every single field around That One Isekai City is cotton. "The demand for clothing and other daily necessities has skyrocketed," Kazuya explains, so cotton has become an extremely valuable cash crop; because of that, "the farmers have entirely stopped growing the food crops they had produced up until that point." Obviously, this means less food is being produced locally. Furthermore, this has caused a spiraling economic recession; everyone needs to import food, which costs more than growing locally, so people have less money to spend on luxuries, so they spend less money, which causes the economy to fail. Liscia, stunned by this analysis, proclaims herself a failed royal, fully submitting to the judgement of our awesomely smart hero, who in turn discusses his solutions to the problem. "Put limits on the growth of cash crops, bring back the growing of food crops, and improve our self-sufficiency rate.

This is the thing that struck me as horribly, horribly unrealistic the first time I (tried to) read Realist Hero. However, my analysis was based on a deeply flawed understanding of medieval economics that projected a modern market-based economic model into a period that didn't support it. My bad—I didn't know better. However, in my defense, the author also doesn't know better, because this scenario is utter nonsense unless this society has a modern market-based economy.

I'll start with two things that the story gets right.
First, cloth and the raw materials for making cloth were probably the most common trade good in the premodern world. Part of this was because there was such great regional variation in every step along the way—the raw flax/wool/cotton/etc, local methods of spinning and weaving, dyes, even clothing styles (though premade clothes were only desired by a limited market—most households made their own). Cloth's only real competitor, food, was extremely costly to ship—particularly overland, since anything you use to transport food that isn't a ship will eat food. In some circumstances, mass transport of grain overseas to densely-populated regions near the sea—notably, the city of Rome—was recorded, but supporting grain import on this scale requires unusual circumstances.
Second, Liscia is a failure of a royal if neither she nor anyone else at court could figure out that the country was having food shortage because nobody was growing food!

But now, onto the stuff Realist Hero gets most wrong: Agrarian economics.

Historically, very few people wanted to engage with markets. There are a wide variety of complicated reasons for this, which I'm not going to get into today (but will probably have an opportunity to later). Instead, most people aimed for self-sufficiency; peasant farmers tried to grow or gather all the food, cloth, wood, etc that they needed (with only minimal market interactions to get things they couldn't grow or make), while large estate-holders tried to produce everything their household and workers needed on their own estates (partly to minimize the amount of money they spent buying goods). There were exceptions, of course—most notably (and obviously), urban populations can't grow their own food or flax, so they needed to buy bread and thread at the market—but the overwhelming majority of the population aimed for self-sufficiency first and foremost.

This isn't a consumerist economy which starts to collapse if people don't buy enough useless junk. People aren't buying that much junk (herein defined as "anything that isn't an agricultural product") to begin with, and the people making junk comprise less than 10% of the population, so lowered junk sales won't affect most people's livelihoods. And food prices wouldn't skyrocket for most people, because most people are farmers who want to grow their own food before worrying about selling anything.

Then there's perhaps the biggest problem: Food is a daily necessity! It's even more of a daily necessity than cloth; go without cloth for a year and you'll be wearing rags, go without food for a year and you'll be eleven months dead. Transporting food is difficult, but possible under unusual circumstances...and a demonic invasion (presumably rendering large amounts of farmland near the frontier, at minimum, less productive) probably qualifies. At least in coastal agricultural regions, I'd expect cash-crop farmers to fill their fields with wheat and barley to export to the GCE or wherever. There is no real distinction between food-crop and cash-crop, because food can be a very profitable cash crop.

"Well," you say, "maybe Elfrieden is actually a capitalist monarchy." Interesting thought, and I'll return to it. First, though, a quick note about agricultural patterns around cities. In fiction, cities are usually surrounded by one of two things—cleanly-mowed grasslands or amber waves of grain. I shouldn't have to tell you that the first image is, by and large, wrong; however, the second is only slightly better. Firstly, premodern farmers tended to work more fragmented and varied plots; that way, if a cold snap wiped out the wheat, you could survive on the barley until next harvest. Second, premodern farms next to cities looked much different than more distant farms. (For simplicity, I'm going to call the ones near cities sub-urban farms, because they occupy roughly the same area and, arguably, role as modern suburbs.)

I'd like to quickly cite my source's source (Neville Morley's Metropolis and Hinterland), because I'm about to make some very specific claims and I remember exactly where to find the origin of those specific claims. According to Morley, the key factor shaping sub-urban farmland is transport costs. Transporting goods to a city is expensive, unless your goods are produced right outside the city gates. In modern economic terms, land near a city has steep competitive advantage when growing things that are needed in the city, due to high local demand and miniscule transportation costs. Hence, land around the city will be extremely expensive; it will also be exploited to its fullest potential, producing as great a volume of goods desired by the urban inhabitants as possible, particularly ones that are difficult to transport. (Intense cultivation is also easier, because urban population centers are a cheap source of both cheap labor and fertilizer, and also usually near rivers.) I could go into more detail about the successive zones of land use as influenced by a city, and the details of how each zone functions, but I'm already drifting off-topic. For now, just know that premodern cities' immediate surroundings should be orchards, gardens, and pigpens—not monoculture grainfields, and not empty lawns.

(As an aside: I'd argue that suburbs are a modern incarnation of this same idea. With modern transportation infrastructure, the cost of importing fresh produce from halfway around the world is low enough to be competitive with local farmer's markets. The thing cities need most that can't easily be transported is...housing. Suburbs provide cheaper or more comfortable housing than can be found in the urban centers, with relatively modest commutes; hence, they displace much of the agricultural and industrial activity that surrounded cities in earlier centuries, as intensive gardening and orchards displaced grain farming.)

Now, back to Elfrieden. What if it has a capitalist economy? Well, a lot of this would work out. In modern capitalistic systems, competitive advantage is crucial for any business; if one region can provide a good more cheaply than another, it makes sense for companies trying to provide that good to concentrate their operations in that region, with inhabitants of that region buying goods imported from distant regions. Farmers would be used to selling their cotton on the market and buying food from elsewhere—if they're the ones who make the agricultural decisions and pocket the agricultural profits, that is, and not just workers employed by large agricultural firms. (That would make this sort of disaster even easier—it's easier to convince large land-owners who will eat no matter what to abandon food crops than it would be for more marginal subsistence farmers.) Heck, if productivity is high enough, there might be a bit of consumerism going around, meaning that enough people being forced to cut back on luxuries could cause a negative economic feedback loop!

There's just one problem: It's practically inconceivable that all farmers (or, more likely, farm-owners) would switch their farms to cotton. First off, not all land is equally good for growing cotton; it needs warm climates, lots of water, etc. Plants more tolerant of cold or drought (barley, for instance) would be more advantageous to grow in drier or colder areas, both macroclimates (the entire Duchy of Herzogin is too cold) and microclimates (this hill is too far above the water table). And some regions aren't suitable for agriculture at all, instead being used as pasture for sheep and such. And then there's another source of competitive advantage that you've probably figured out. It's cheap to transport all the cloth a city needs long distances (especially wool from those marginal areas—it can walk itself to market), but food is another thing entirely. Like any other premodern city, the land around Elfrieden's capital is valuable for growing food, more than almost anything else.

To summarize: There are two big problems with Realist Hero's cotton catastrophe. First, it requires projecting modern economic ideas into a society where they don't fit; I suppose "it is easier to imagine the end of the going to another world than it is to imagine the end absence of capitalism". Second, it requires blowing the scale of the disaster to ridiculous proportions—not just that food prices are rising, but that nobody in the entire kingdom is growing food! I don't know why; maybe so that Kazuya can implement a solution that doesn't seem either pointless to us armchair economists or overly-coercive to free-market lovers.

But if you reduce the scale and change the causes, it's easy to make this disaster work. First, drop or de-emphasize the idea that cotton is displacing food crops; cloth isn't the last thing people in warzones need, but it's probably not higher than bread. Second, add the idea that merchants are buying grain for prices the urban poor can't match, to sell at even higher prices near the Demon Lord's Domain. And third, limit the problem to mostly affect urban areas; 10%-15% of the population potentially starving isn't as bad as 100%, but it's still something a king needs to solve. (If you need a higher percentage, say something about how local lords are extracting more grain from their peasants, to sell while the price is high; now it can affect anyone who isn't rich.)
Of course, at this point we've gone from extremely charitable interpretations of the text to outright ignoring the text. As written, the cotton catastrophe doesn't make much sense.

Of course, the downside is that a more nuanced disaster like that requires a more nuanced solution; if the problem is caused by perverse economic incentives that discourage people from selling food to starving commoners, you can't just say "Stop growing so much cotton!" and expect anyone to think that would solve the problem. Plus, readers might worry that Kazuya just displaced the famine from Elfrieden to the demon frontier.


Simple as it is, let's examine that solution. He goes into detail about how he wants to see land-use patterns change, but that's all pretty generic stuff. Plant beans for their "wide range of uses" (and also to restore the soil's nitrogen, but Kazuya doesn't reference that) and potatoes for being "resistant against famine" (not sure what he's talking about, but potatoes are pretty productive per acre), then build rice paddies later. (Liscia doesn't recognize the term "paddy fields"...either Elfrieden has no significant rice-growing zones, or the locals are too stupid to know how to grow rice well, because rice paddies are really hard to miss.) But all the ideas in the world on how to change land use patterns are useless if you can't actually change land use patterns, so let's see his policy proposals. He mentions three:

1. Place limits on the growth of cash crops7​
2. Bring back the growing of food crops
3. Improve Elfrieden's self-sufficiency rate8​

Well, #3 is just a policy goal established previously in the conversation, don't know why Kazuya brought it up here. The second seems like that, too. The limits on the growth of cash crops might be the only actual policy he plans to implement. The ability to put limits on cash crop growth implies some pretty broad regulatory powers. I'm not sure how a growth cap would be implemented, either—selling a limited supply of "cotton credits" and forbidding anyone from growing cotton without sufficient credits? Without implementing some way to determine which cotton producer is responsible for going over the cash crop limit, the limit is effectively unenforceable.

Unless, of course, the cotton fields are owned by the state (or state agents) and the king has the power to directly command certain farms to stop producing cotton. In this case, Kazuya focusing his efforts on figuring out an optimal set of crops to grow in the fields makes sense. It clashes with Kazuya claiming that "the farmers have turned to growing only cash crops" [44, emphasis mine], but we can handwave that by speculating that Kazuya was referring to local lords or agricultural ministers in charge of farmers.

There's just one problem: Hardly any states have ever had that much power. (Before you point to hydraulic empires, please note that—like many theories which lump China and the Fertile Crescent into the same category—the idea of "hydraulic despotism" has not stood up to further scrutiny.) It's not impossible, any more than an agrarian country with a capitalist economy is; however, it is highly irregular. As far as I know, no societies with that much centralized control over food production existed before the Industrial Revolution or so, maybe not until the rise of Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships and (arguably) agricultural conglomerates. But I'm sure putting a city kid like Kazuya in charge of all agriculture in Elfriede will result in a great leap forward, eh? Eh?

Okay, maybe that was a little tasteless. Anyways, if I want to go into full fanfic-author mode, I might suggest that Kazuya was using his reform budget to nationalize huge tracts of prime rice paddy land. This would be a pretty clever move—it would let him recover revenue lost by selling state assets and increase the food supply available to the population at large! Nothing in the text actually mentions how Kazuya intends to implement his agricultural reforms, so it would be an outright lie to say this was supported by the text...but this time it's not contradicted by the text, so I'll take it.


I don't think I finished reading Kazuya's solutions when I first read Realist Hero, because what comes after that is...memorable. The last page or so of the first chapter is Liscia basking in awe over the reader-self-insert genius character, over his unique epiphany that Elfrieden could solve its food crisis by growing more food. She comes to the conclusion that she needs to keep Kazuya in the country at all costs. She figures that since he doesn't have any family in the other world, she could keep him in Elfriede by becoming his family—ie, marrying him. There are ways to write Liscia having that idea which don't come off as manipulative, but none of them start with deciding that she needs to ensnare her husbando, realizing marriage is a good tool for that, and then choosing to play on his lack of a family. That series of events makes it sound less like a young woman realizing that she could fill a hole in Kazuya's heart and more like...well, how incels think women plot to ensnare a high-income beta cuck.

But then she realizes that securing the marriage would require her to "do that with him" and gets flustered, so I guess this incel-dark-fantasy shit is supposed to be cute? I confess I have a blind spot when it comes to romance, but I can usually guess why other people might find it compelling. This...what was the author thinking?

---

Alright, let's try to summarize what happened this chapter.

Plot wise, we were introduced to Princess Liscia, the high-Martial low-Stewardship former heir to the throne. She bounced through Kazuya's castle, trying to make sense of what was going on, before getting dragged into a massive auditing session triggered either by the chaos of a new king or by Kazuya trying to trim the fat out of the royal budgets. We were then introduced to some of Kazuya's brilliant solutions to Elfriede's problems, like selling valuables so they can afford to pay tribute and growing more food to alleviate starvation. You know, when you put it like that, it sounds stupid! Also, Liscia and Kazuya had a few potentially nice conversations, before being really creepy to each other.

Theme-wise, the running theses seem to be "Kazuya is smart" and "Everyone around Kazuya is dumb," naturally with a dash of "Putting smart people in charge of everything will solve all our problems". The first two coagulate into a weirdly colonialist narrative that I refuse to ignore but will repeatedly apologize for pointing out.

Setting-wise, we learned a bit more. We learned that Elfriede has a population that loves a king who hardly any of them have even seen (which makes sense if we assume some form of magical mass media), an agricultural disaster based on individual farmers' choices which the king can dictate (which makes sense if we assume Kazuya is buying a ton of farmland), and shockingly detailed and accurate records of all state expenses, but not enough bureaucrats to do anything with them on a practical timescale (which makes sense if we ignore it). There are three duchies—sorry, dukedoms—whose dukes are significant enough that the king wants to avoid angering them, yet too insignificant to be mentioned outside that context.

What else? Well, the crown princess has a modest rank in the military despite her status, so Elfrieden's meritocracy is working surprisingly well. There's magic, and that magic seems to include Quirks/parahuman abilities/the X-gene. (Less facetiously, we haven't seen mention of standardized spells people can learn, but we have learned of unique innate abilities individuals can possess. Also mysterious magical artifacts.) Elfrieden's climate is suitable for growing cotton and probably rice, but the heir to the throne has never heard of rice paddies, so who knows if they've ever grown it. (It's also suitable for beans and potatoes, but both have a wide variety of cultivars that can grow almost anywhere people grow crops.)

Oh yeah, everyone in the palace was characterized as being lazy or outright decadent, only working as hard as they were able once they had Kazuya's virtuous example to follow. Not only do they need his inspiration to be efficient at the jobs they have, they need someone to suggest selling unneeded valuables to raise funds and growing more crops to avoid a famine. Fucking hell, how did I remember the supply-and-demand problems but not that nonsense? And let's not forget that the royals like to emotionally manipulate people through engagement and marriage.


I swear, I don't like ripping this book to shreds. I don't think I can convince you of that after how long I've spent ripping every individual component to shreds, though, so instead I'll try to convince you that I don't think this was malicious.

You might notice that I've avoided mentioning the author, Dojyomaru, until this sentence. There's a reason for that! Any piece of media, even a novel, is more than the raw intent of its primary creator. Dojyomaru's intent is limited by his ability to express that intent (and avoid expressing unwanted implications), and further altered by his editor and publisher's demands (for better or for worse, though always for profitable). I don't think Dojyomaru—or his editor or publisher, for that matter—wanted to write/edit/publish a book where a Japanese student imperializes a fantasy kingdom. I think they just didn't consider the story they were telling through that lens, and stumbled into a trap that wasn't on their radar. I don't think they tried to write unrealistic economics to justify simple solutions; I think they just didn't do the research, and wrote Elfrieden based on a cocktail of fantasy tropes, half-remembered historical facts, and modern assumptions unconsciously projected into societies they fit poorly. I don't think Dojyomaru intended to write Liscia as a hypergamous femoid, he just combined "Keeping Kazuya in Elfrieden is good for its strategic interests" with "Liscia wants to be part of Kazuya's family" into a composite creepier than the sum of its parts.

I think Dojyomaru had a cool idea, but stuck too close to genre conventions for one reason or another—whether to get his cool idea published, or because his version of that idea was more closely bound to the genre. For worse and for lousier, isekai conventions are extremely restrictive on the types of story you can tell; sticking to them so strictly leaves little room for character growth, mistakes, or nuance. And by "conventions," I mostly mean "protagonists". Most of the problems I've been talking about can be traced to Kazuya, and specifically how the story frames him as always right—as more rational, more knowledgeable, more capable than the extras around him, as having the solution to Elfriede's problems. Drop that and you lose the appalling colonialist implications; you have room for more nuanced (and flawed!) solutions to problems, and room for more verisimilitudinous problems alongside them; you can even admit that he's overworking his staff. I don't know if replacing Kazuya with a Subaru or Kazuma would make Realist Hero a book I didn't regret spending twelve dollars on, but it would give it the room it needs to do that.


Anyways. This is where I stopped reading previously, so I have basically no idea what to expect from here on out (except "brilliant" ideas from Kazuya and the scene in the color illustrations behind the cover page). I'm not going to ask that people posting in this thread avoid spoilers, but I'd like to ask that they avoid just posting spoilers, if that makes sense. I'd frown on just saying "You say such-and-such about the Dukedoms, but this is contradicted in chapter 4," but if that Dukedom fact is part of some point you're building up to, feel free to speak up.

I'm also interested to hear if the anime significantly changed anything I mentioned. I'd be surprised if the anime was more nuanced than the novel, but it would be a pleasant surprise! (And it's always interesting to see how a novel like this gets adapted to a visual medium, as lonf as you don't have any emotional attachment to the story in question.)


Miscellaneous thoughts:

• Yes, I am ignoring that the crops Kazuya talks about planting are from scattered corners of the globe. It's a fantasy world; as long as you're not growing rice next to millet9​ or having caribou pull plows for cassava, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.
• I remember someone saying the author doesn't distinguish between the narrative voices of his various POV characters and impersonal narrators, and...that person was right.
  • I'm not sure the author really gets first-person narration. If you're going to use it, use it to get us in the character's head; if you're not going to do that, use third-person limited or something. Don't have a character say "Normally I would have been stunned by how beautiful she was, but I was too tired, so I just saw another set of literate hands."
  • The third-person omniscient narrator for a scene Kazuya wasn't present in described her uniform as looking like it came out of The Rose of Versailles. Aside from being a weirdly specific reference for a series that isn't doing much with its setting's pop-cultire-ish aspects, it's more appropriate for an otaku's inner monologue than an impersonalized narrator. Granted, being third-person omniscient means the narrator would recognize any pop culture references, but that doesn't mean it would comment on them. It's just...odd.
• Liscia describes herself as being well-schooled in military stuff, but weaker at politics. Presumably, this will give our World History student an excuse to be better at diplomacy than the crown princess.
• Marx was all for Kazuya's plan to privatize "state-owned facilities," so he probably isn't a caricature of Communist ideas from someone who only knows of Communism from thirdhand stories of the USSR.
• I'm probably not going to post individual segments quite this long in the future—I wanted to have the chapter 1 analysis finished when the thread was posted, and didn't see the point in splitting this part up. I might not analyze a full chapter in every subsequent post, though.

Spoiler: Footnoted Nitpicks

1: Kind of a self-nitpick, but I want to point out that I'm not summarizing these passages in the order they appear in the chapter. I'm loosely going from the start of the chapter to the end, but I'm also trying to group linked ideas together. I think that helps the flow of the Let's Read.

2: Moving what in? He just got isekai'd, what's he accumulated in two days that would be a pain to move in? Wouldn't it make more sense to say he wanted to spare Al and his wife the effort of moving out? That would make him seem more selfless, too, which seems to fit with what the author intends for the character.

3: Okay, first off, "If the two of you hate it you can break the engagement" isn't the worst excuse for engaging two people without their consent, but it's still not a good one. An engagement—especially one broadcast to the entire country—is a public promise; breaking that promise will have consequences for one or both of the people involved. It's kinda like showing up at a girl's house waving a sign professing your love and blasting her favorite song—when you make your ship into a spectacle, sinking that ship becomes a public travesty.
Second, it's implied that the forthcoming marriage to Al's heir is part of why the commoners were so willing to accept Kazuya's rule. If this was a significant part, Al shouldn't be so cavalier about the possibility that the marriage won't happen. Even if it isn't, Kazuya breaking the promise that Al made on his (and Liscia's) behalf would at best make him seem untrustworthy and at worst wreck his legitimacy—sure, he was a hero chosen to lead by the old king Albert, but he betrayed Princess Liscia! (And if the marriage doesn't affect Kazuya's legitimacy at all, why the fuck did Al insist they marry?)
From a Doylist perspective, it's okay because Al meant well and the two are going to get together, because that's just how romance subplots work (and I don't trust this story to try anything different). But from a Watsonian perspective, it's a blatant abuse of Liscia and Kazuya's trust; and the casual way he treats the possibility of breaking the engagement indicates either that he's manipulating his daughter (who he knows wouldn't risk the stability of the kingdom) into thinking she has an actual choice in the matter, or a rather extreme carelessness about the stability of his realm (and also thoughtlessness about both Kazuya and Liscia's emotional well-being). The latter seems more in-character, for what it's worth, but neither is good!

4: Quick math: Assuming he only works half the time (when you account for meals, bathroom breaks, asking for context, catching himself staring at a wall instead of working, etc), that's 36 work-hours (for three days), times three (he has three spare consciousnesses) makes 108. If each budget takes five whole minutes to read and process, then he processed roughly 1,300 budgets. This is probably a conservative estimate—we're clearly not expected to think Kazuya only worked 12 hours a day. And this is only what Kazuya himself did—even if there are only five and they're only working 8-hour days, that's more than 1,400 budgets!

5: Another self-nitpick. "Racist" might not be quite the right term, but explaining it properly without disrupting the sentence flow requires a footnote.
I said "superior culture," because this isn't necessarily about genetics. Our modern conception of "race" is mostly genetic, so racism that doesn't rely on genetics sounds like an oxymoron.
But look at Islamophobia. It's largely indistinguishable from racism in its substance; the only difference is target and sometimes rhetoric. Or look at history; people were racist in the past, but were more likely to blame other races' "inferiority" on their environment or barbaric culture. Race is a social construct; today it's based on genetics (usually), but it wasn't in the past and it might not be in the future.
Maybe there should be a different word for non-genetic racism, but I don't know what it is. So, "racism" it is.

6: Obviously there are exceptions; an enemy army rolling over the village or a fief-wide drought would give everyone a bad year at the same time. But those sorts of big disasters are much rarer than smaller crises—a robbery, a single-field crop failure, a critical worker's absence, etc. For the family to survive to the next big disaster, they need to build friendships with their neighbors.

7: I'm not going to point out the aforementioned fuzzy line between cash and food crops, because the legal definition of "cash crops" obviously isn't "crops which are profitable to sell"; it's more like "non-food crops". But there are plenty of ambiguously foody crops. Livestock, for instance, produce things like wool and leather in addition to food. Grapes are a core part of Classical-era Mediterranean cuisine, but they're also processed into wine, which probably shouldn't count as food. And what about flax? Flaxseed oil can be a foodstuff, but it's mostly grown to make linen. Is it a cash crop or a food crop? What about haygrass, or oats sold to feed horses—does animal feed count as food crops? What about—Okay, I'll stop and assume that the next stack of generic paperwork Kazuya throws himself at is disputes over whether a given crop counts as a good crop or not.

8: Which, for the record, is actually a thing, though it seems it's usually referred to as food self-sufficiency rate, since total self-sufficiency requires other goods. Maybe the Japanese term is slightly different and the translator translated it differently?

9: Millet is grown in exceptionally dry farmland. More arid than most grains, anyways.

 

[Terra Novan]

Ah, I have heard of this. I think this would have received less criticism without that title.

From my understanding, the adaptations (manga and anime) made the issue worse by cutting some details in process of compressing the plot.

 

[GreatWyrmGold]

Oh geez it's almost been a week. Didn't mean to wait this long.

Before we get started, I'd like to try and synthesize all the things we know about Elfrieden into a semi-coherent picture depicting my best guess (at this point) about what the kingdom might be like.

Let's start from the bottom: It's a country with a warm, wet climate—subtropical, maybe? The state seems to be run as a very successful meritocracy, where even the heir to the throne is given little special treatment in whatever ministry they find themselves in. This meritocracy is somewhat weakened by the hereditary, possibly-absolute monarchy (and possibly hereditary ducal titles?), but there may be some tradition or belief that justifies replacing unmeritous kings with meritous ones. Former king Albert, who I call "Al," is beloved by everyone in the kingdom, possibly bolstered by some kind of magical mass media. The dukes may or may not have significant power—the king is possibly allowed to sell their stuff, but doing so is seen as a bad idea. A prime minister...exists.

The country's economy and administration seem to be more modern in some respects than the most obvious historical points of comparison. The kingdom's bureaucrats record incredibly detailed budgetary information that would be the envy of any pre-industrial state, though apparently they don't do much with it. The economy is probably more capitalist than agrarian; the cotton crisis makes even less sense if the kingdom's farmers are subsistence-farming peasants and not profit-maximizing agri-guilds or something. Horses are extremely common, to the point that practically everyone rides them, down to the poorest commoners; possibly this indicates that the means of production are distributed fairly equitably among the population, but for all we know the horses are owned by powerful corporations/guilds who simply rent them out for prices even peasants can afford.

Kazuya's first reforms have gone into effect. Aside from some vague fund-raising efforts (selling vague "ornamental objects" and vaguer "state-owned facilities," making vague adjustments to the kingdom's budget), he may have nationalized ("bought") a significant amount of farmland, with plans to eventually build rice paddies on them.
(Which brings me to the first big mystery that this book will almost certainly have no interest in solving—what's the state of rice cultivation in Elfrieden? Is it basically unknown? Is it common, but the princess somehow has never heard of rice paddies? Are rice paddies unknown to Elfriedens, because the locals are ignorant of even the fairly basic agricultural knowledge an urban student like Kazuya is familiar with? Is there some nuance to the type of paddy that was lost in translation?)
Kazuya also mentions limiting the total amount of non-food crops which can be grown, which raises a bunch of questions about both crops which are grown for both food and non-food purposes and how this limit is supposed to work in the first place, but something tells me the author doesn't think that's worth explaining.

Abroad, the supercontinent of Landia is a sea of assorted countries. We don't know much about them, except for the Gran Chaos Empire. The GCE is the most powerful country in Landia, with the exception of the Demon Lord's Domain (if that counts as a country). Unfortunately, both are evil; the GCE's evil is mostly a banal type of power-hungry imperialism with a side of vivisection, but the Demon Lord's Domain is inhabited by "monsters" (disorganized otherworldly creatures with animal-level intelligence that attack any humans they see) demons and demons (organized otherworldly creatures with human-level intelligence that also attack any humans they see). The demons' origin, abilities, and goals are unknown, aside from the fact that they hold a third of Landia and occasionally attack people on the other end.
Luckily, humanity has tools to fight against them. Magic exists, at least in the form of unique individual powers and mysterious magical artifacts. Magical rituals also exist, including an Elfrieden one which summons a hero from another world. It seems likely this ritual has not been used in some time, but it can apparently be quite effective when used...

Demons and empires are not the only problems in the kingdom, however. Refugees from lands near the Demon Lord's Domain (which I call "the demon frontier," since no term for it has come up in the actual book) are slowly reaching Elfrieden, exacerbating a food shortage. If this problem can't be solved, the state's ability to effectively mobilize its levies will be significantly hindered.


But I hear that some people are reading this book for reasons other than economic analysis, so I should probably summarize the plot too. Last time, our realist hero started rebuilding the kingdom and met its princess. He accidentally wooed her with two incredibly brilliant ideas: Raising funds by selling stuff, and stop a food shortage by growing more food. I realize I pointed out how ridiculously obvious those solutions are a few times already, but I just can't get over that.
Especially the second one. "Your people are running out of food? Have they tried...growing more food?" And Kazuya's solution doesn't involve changing the economic systems that prioritize profit over the national good, he just tells people to grow food instead, which is a thing the king can apparently do.

Sorry about getting hung up on that point. There's a new chapter to analyze.

---

Alright, bouncing off last chapter's big thing that grinds my gears, we open this chapter with something that grinds my gears about fantasy in general: Acting as though the presence of magic f*ks up scientific progress.

If you wanted to fly freely through the sky, you could just ride a wyvern. These people had skipped past the concept of lift and propulsion systems and just gone flying.

Click to shrink...

I want to make it clear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that technological development would be unaffected by the existence of magic; quite the opposite! The way this opening section is written—especially the opening sentence, "The technology in this world was kind of all over the place"—suggests that there is a proper place for each technology, one true path for science and technology to take, like the Civilization tech tree.
This is, of course, bogus. Subsaharan Africa skipped its Bronze Age and went straight for Iron. Polynesia and Native America lacked metal tools, wheels, and for the most part writing, but Polynesian ships and navigation were superior to European equivalents until the past few centuries, and Native American medicine was often better than anything in Europe—the Inka had brain surgery, for heck's sake!

There are a few origins you could argue for this flawed assumption about reality, and all plausible options predate Sid Meier. Most of them boil down to looking at your own culture's history, and fitting what you understand of other cultures' histories into that framework, ignoring all context. Subsaharan Africa just skipped the Bronze Age, that doesn't suggest the typology is flawed. Polynesia and the Americas were so primitive—they didn't even have bronze! How can third-world countries have cell phone networks if they don't have clean drinking water? We figured out the water thing centuries before inventing cell phones!

Again, if Kazuya was supposed to be a Japanese student out of his depth in a world he didn't understand, this passage would be unremarkable. But he isn't. Last chapter, he solved multiple issues previously considered unsolvable by the kingdom's greatest minds (and also Al), before the end of his first week in the new world. Kazuya convinced Al that he would make a better king through little more than the rational questions he asked. He is the realist hero who is rebuilding the kingdom.
Also, I'm suspicious that this passage is meant to deflect historical criticism. "So what if they have 16th-century Maximillian armor but not 14th-century gonnes? Magic invalidates one and not the other because I said so!" Mind, that criticism is somewhat flawed to begin with, but responding to it with handwaves about how being able to conjure fire changes what's possible is an even more flawed response.

That said, Kazuya does provide a handful of examples of how magic and magical creatures have changed what's possible. I'll start with his conclusion:

Comparing it to a point in our own world's history, they were probably in the late Middle Ages or early modern period, at best. The feudal system was still intact, and the industrial revolution a long way away.

Click to shrink...

Alright, first off: Feudal system is a thing in this kingdom, good to know. That does clash with some of what we've heard so far, however. Serfdom is largely incompatible with both capitalistic market economies1​ and the idea of every citizen being allowed to choose what job they have. In the interests of coherently charitable interpretation, I think I will assume that Kazuya is calling vassalage alone "the feudal system," even though that's arguably the less-significant part of what is classically considered "feudalism," unless we get some indication that the citizens of Elfrieden are not so free as was initially claimed.
(Terminology note: From what I've read, modern scholars don't like the term "feudalism". They prefer to differentiate between vassalage and serfdom, arguing that the relationship between a king and his lords is only superficially similar to that between a lord and his serfs.)

It might be possible to make a quasi-serfdom angle work if I assume the agri-guilds act less like background institutions for a farmer to sell excess produce to and more like monopolistic cartels, owning all the land and forcing farmers to work for them or starve. I'll keep this potential interpretation in mind in case we ever learn anything about the economic conditions of Elfrieden farmers beyond "they all have horses".

Anyways. Tech level loosely equivalent to late Middle Ages or early modern period, definitely pre-Industrial. The Middle Ages as generally defined ended sometime between the 13th and 15th centuries, while the early modern period is agreed to have started around 1500. So let's give a loose date range of 1200-1600. The inventions Kazuya mentions include:

• Tamed "beasts" that could haul as much as a four-ton truck.
  • If that's the weight of the truck, a quick Google search indicates that that's near the upper edge of the "light truck" category, which can carry half a ton. So depending on how you interpret the text, that's either "beasts" that can haul about as much as an ox (wow, very fantastical) or about as much as eight oxen. Assuming strength is proportional to weight (it's not), the latter would be a bit larger than an African bull elephant.
  • The presence of strong animals isn't going to replace trucks by any measure—draft animals need to eat, no matter how strong they are! If the beasts are just supernaturally big, the economic difference would be marginal at best. On the other hand, if the "beasts" are mules as strong as a team of oxen, which only need to eat as much as an ordinary mule, that would be significant indeed!
  • I initially thought that domestication of such large "beasts" was itself notable. Then I double-checked the text and saw that they were only "tamed," like elephants. So, no speculation about special animal-domestication magic today—just a note that even the super-mules would have limited economic impact, because every individual super-mule on the road would need to be caught from wild populations.
• Steel battleships, drawn by massive sea-dragons
  • First off, tame dragons are sweet, but they deserve better than being a beast of burden.
  • The fact that steel warships are an asset almost certainly means cannon or equivalent also exist. If your naval technology doesn't permit any naval tactics beyond boarding, why armor the ship? Against rams? Perhaps, but I somehow doubt that ramming would be a common technique if cutting-edge warships have a dragon in front of them—you can't easily convince living creatures to run straight into a big, heavy object at speed if they can just go around.
  • More interesting is the fact that they can make steel battleships. Whatever your era, ships are big, and making steel (or any metal) in large quantities or pieces was basically impossible until the Industrial Revolution. (For various practical reasons, you can't forge a waterproof object bigger than the forge's fire, and forging with fires several times bigger than the smith isn't really possible if you can talk about a specific smith doing the forging.)
    • The ability to produce large quantities of steel is one of the most famous things developed in the Industrial Revolution.
  • The fact that they are called battleships and not warships, if not just a quirk of translation, is very interesting. The transition between ships-of-the-line and battleships was marked by several (possibly co-dependent?) technological advancements made around the same time, including metal hulls, steam power, explosive ordinance, and possibly turrets (which were present in some early ironclads, but from my superficial research don't seem to have become standard until the pre-Dreadnought era). Elfrieden battleships definitely have the first and lack the second, but armament is not mentioned.
• Phosphorescent lightmoss streetlamps
  • Streetlamps using candles or oil lamps date back to antiquity, but public street lighting as we know it was developed in the 16th century...which probably has more to do with fuel distribution and possibly institutional change than actual technological capacity.
• No gas, so they use "firewood, ovens, and fire magic" to cook
  • Gas stoves only date back to 1802 or so. Coal stoves were developed earlier, and it doesn't seem Elfrieden uses those either.
  • ...I'm not sure how to compare fire-magic ovens to historical cooking devices.
• Instead of aqueducts, water spells draw water from deep beneath the earth
  • This is either a fancy well, or a way to set up wells literally anywhere. One of those maybe saves some digging labor, the other either reduces or eliminates concerns about water availability...which, come to think of it, would make it easier to grow cotton and rice in a wide variety of areas. Not everywhere—it doesn't do anything about temperature, soil quality, or topography—but it means Elfrieden might be less humid than I expected.

For the most part, these innovations are either hard to judge or in line with the "late medieval/early modern" estimate Kazuya provides. But Bessemer-level processing of iron ore into steel is very much not! I can handwave that as a mixture of fire and air magic, but if Kazuya was framed differently, it would make me wonder what other Industrial-era innovations might be lurking below Kazuya's ability to recognize them...

This discussion of technology has no relation to the following sections, so I assume it's there to serve as exposition for the audience, either foreshadowing later developments or just adding texture to the world. And to be fair, it's not ineffective texture; I wish some of these details (especially the streetlamps) had been mentioned earlier.
But that's kind of the thing, isn't it? I might not have a problem with the exposition (aside from the dragon abuse), but the placement is...odd. All of this is dropped in one big lump at the start of chapter 2.


In the chapter's first actual scene, Kazuya and Liscia are discussing short-term agricultural plans over breakfast (presumably right after returning from their cotton-field ride). Kazuya notes that it'll take time for his agricultural reforms to take effect, so they'll need to import food until domestic production is recovered. What he says is very obviously true—farms don't produce their food continuously—but it's even more true for rice fields. I don't know the details, but continual rice farming causes the soil to undergo podzolization, which makes the soil more favorable for rice cultivation over a paddy's first few years; to put that another way, rice paddies underproduce in their first years.

Anyways, Kazuya plans to have the state import food and sell it at loss, noting that this will cause Elfrieden to lose money in "tariffs". Firstly, the strategy is far from unprecedented in history; if anything, it's moderate. Rome's famous grain dole (at times) gave free grain to some of Rome's poorest families. (Note that the dole lasted several centuries and changed a lot in that time, especially since it was a popular political target for both conservatives trying to cut expenses and reformists trying to appease the public by not letting them starve. It consistently provided food subsidies to residents of Rome who theoretically needed it the most, and that's about all that was consistent.)

Secondly, the note about tariffs...at this point, I should probably stop wondering if this could be an awkward translation issue and just merge the localization process into the abstract construct of The Author, composed of everyone whose influence shaped the final book. Having done so, The Author's use of the word "tariff" is awkward. Tariffs are taxes paid on certain imports or exports, so obviously they would apply here; either Kazuya is saying that they'd have to pay more money to acquire the food because of foreign tariffs, or he's saying they won't receive revenue from imports of food. The second would be an interesting point—a poorly-chosen method for the state to generate revenue making the commoners' problems worse—but neither point is actually related to the rest of what Kazuya's saying. Charitably, Kazuya is mentioning that some tariff issue will add additional costs to the venture. Uncharitably, The Author is using big words because just saying they'll take a loss from selling at a lower price than they bought it would sound too basic.

Kazuya notes that he plans to make up the difference in exports, which is another sentence with a lot to take in.
Firstly, "make up the difference"? It sounds like Kazuya is planning to run Elfrieden a bit like a business, trying to export goods to other nations to keep profits high. It's too vague to derive real conclusions from, but it feels either a bit mercantilist or a bit "Trump was a great businessman, he'll be a great president!"-ish. For the record, governments are not businesses and mercantilism is bunk.2​ However, this sentence on its own isn't worth drawing conclusions from on its own; I just want to make note of this in case this turns into a running thing. It's entirely possible that this is just a mildly suspect way to say "I don't want the treasury to run dry".
But even accepting that (and for now, I do), the fact that Elfrieden's exports can be used to fill the royal treasury is interesting. Either there are some serious export tariffs in place (which seems like it would have had a chilling effect on growing crops for export), or Kazuya plans to have the state itself produce goods and sell them to foreign buyers. The latter is a valid possibility—I've mentioned before that it was common for premodern states (or associated institutions/families/etc) to own everything from mills and farms to mines and bridges. But if the Elfrieden state is producing goods for sale, that tells us something about how its economy works.

The fact that he describes these exports as replacing cotton suggests that the state was profiting off cotton in whatever way he intends to profit off a replacement good; either he's planning to collect export tariffs on businesses largely outside his control, or the Elfrieden state was previously directly involved in the cotton business. Neither is a contradiction or anything like that, but they're worth noting. Either Kazuya doesn't have as much direct influence over the exports as he's suggesting, or Elfrieden state officials were in charge of replacing food with cotton in the first place and still nobody realized they could fix their famine by growing more food. A point that I should probably stop dwelling on.


This economic discussion is interrupted by Liscia asking why they're eating in the castle cafeteria—specifically, the general cafeteria "guards and maids" use. I'm not going to dispute the terminology here, because while "castle cafeteria" is an odd term, "cafeteria" is a vague enough noun that it could probably incorporate most castles' great halls. However, a whole separate room for low-status servants to eat in does not seem to be a thing castles had. Far as I can tell from my (superficial) research, castles tended to have just the one great hall, with servants eating at different times from the lords and their guests. This was obviously more true the lower the lord's status—small castles only had a handful of rooms in the first place—but I didn't find a reference to even large castles having class-segregated dining halls. It's not impossible that a castle might have a separate dining chamber for the commoners, but it would be odd for the builders to go to such expense for their sake. (Letting servants eat in the grand hall in its off hours doesn't cost any extra stone or mortar; a second hall does.)

More notably, the idea of having class-segregated dining halls—a grand hall for royalty and high ministers, a general cafeteria for guards and servants, where it's embarrassing for a king or ex-princess to be seen—clashes with Elfrieden's nominally egalitarian nature. There are two conclusions we could draw from this; either The Author did not think Realist Hero's setting through, a conclusion I want to reject whenever plausible, or Elfrieden is one of those societies which prides itself on having no official caste system yet is strongly stratified in reality. Ancient Sparta comes to mind as a comparison; even if you leave out the more than 90% of Spartan residents who were either slaves or non-citizens, and also the two royal families, the social status of Spartiates varied greatly based on their (inherited) wealth, despite Sparta making a big deal about how equal all the Spartiates are. Or look at modern capitalist democracies, which make a big deal about how everyone has equal opportunities when they very clearly do not.
Looking back, our evidence that Elfrieden has a successful meritocracy is pretty thin. Everyone's fine with the king abdicating to a more meritous stranger, Liscia doesn't have a high rank just because of her birth, the Prime Minister is only half-human, and...is that it? Little enough that it can be explained by the Elfrieden state projecting an image of equality ("Look at the crown princess, leading routine patrols like a commoner!"), which the people buy into because they are not immune to propaganda (and neither are you).
Something else to put a pin in, I suppose.

Liscia tries to square Kazuya's personal thriftiness with his anti-austerity economic policy; Kazuya explains that the point isn't to spend as much money as possible, but to "spend properly". It's hard to judge this statement in isolation, because it's so tautologically true; spending money on things that are good for the economy is good for the economy, thank you. But it's broadly accurate. Letting wealth accumulate in the hands of the powerful—whether the national treasury or the upper class's pockets—is bad for the economy, while spending it on programs that help the general population is good for the economy. As the old joke goes: "If you give the poor money, they'll just waste it on food and shelter!"

There's a brief discussion of where Al and Elisha get their cakes if Kazuya's cutting back on the luxury food budget. Apparently "large stores and stores owned by the nobility" send the king samples (formally "offerings" or "gifts") for the prestige of giving stuff to the royal family. More evidence that the Elfrieden family is idolized. Kazuma notes:

"I nearly put 'if they have no bread, let them eat cake' into practice myself."
"If people didn't know the circumstances, there could be a revolution over those words," [Liscia] said.

Click to shrink...

This isn't a criticism of the book—it's just making a joke, and the joke works—but I'd like to point out that "Let them eat cake" was not something Marie Antoinette ever said. In fact, it was attributed to various callous nobles before Marie was a twinkle in Emperor Francis's eye—it turns out that people thought of aristocrats as insensitive and ignorant to the common folk's problems since long before the French Revolution, what a shock. Speaking of which, I wonder if the Japanese original referenced a different apocryphal quote more familiar to Japanese audiences. I have no evidence one way or the other, but I want that to be true, because the idea of different cultures around the world being united in recognition that the elites have no clue what the f*k they're talking about amuses me greatly.

Also, nobles definitely seem to exist. Whether this is a job anyone can have or another quiet inegalitarian institution is unclear.


This conversation is interrupted by a new character. Sir Ludwin Arcs, head of Elfrieden's Royal Guard. He's described in terms that make his physical appeal obvious—he's tall and strong, with long pretty hair and a pretty face "that probably made him popular with the ladies". I hope he doesn't turn into a romantic rival. Luckily, the text doesn't focus Liscia thirsting over him, instead giving us an explanation of Elfrieden's military structure.
The king controls two military forces of note, both commanded by the head of the Royal Guard. The Royal Guard itself maintains order in the capital and security at the royal castle. (It's not actually described as a military force in the text, but unless Elfrieden has a 19th-century policing institution, there's not much else it could be.) "In times of crisis," the head of the Royal Guard commands the king's "personal forces," called the Forbidden Army, a group which gets a little explanation later on. It's primarily considered a force for defending the capital and monarch, though the phrasing suggests that this is more de facto than de jure. Of course, the "in times of crisis" note and the fact that it's called "the Forbidden Army" lets us guess that it's intended as an emergency measure. My intuition says that the Royal Guard is a semi-professional military force, while the Forbidden Army is something like a general levy from around the capital.

"Practical military control" of Elfrieden lies in the hands of the Three Dukedoms, which we finally get some information about! The dukes (and duchess) are nobles that are "allowed to hold territory within the kingdom" and "given self-rule" in exchange for serving the king. The command they're given of the Elfrieden military is divided neatly into a land army, an air force, and a navy, with one Dukedom holding each.
The army is commanded by a passionate lion-man, General of the Elfrieden Kingdom Army, Duke Georg Carmine. The prestigious Wyvern Knights (and possibly other air assets) is commanded by General of the Elfrieden Kingdom Air Force, Duke Castor Vargas, who is not described beyond his race. (He's a dragonewt, by the way.) And finally, there's the Admiral of the Elfrieden Kingdom Navy, Duchess, Excel Walter, a sea serpent descended from—hold on, she's a sea serpent?

Excel Walter's presence can tell us some interesting things about Elfrieden. First off, my suspicions about all Elfrieden elites being human or human-like seems to be unfounded. Second, sea serpents are apparently sentient, and "monster" species are recognized as citizens of the Elfrieden country. Third, she's descended from pirates, which may be proof that A. upward social mobility seems to be possible in Elfrieden (I'll talk more about this next time) and B. sea serpent pirates are a thing that exists in this world.
How does that work? Do the sea serpents just wrap around the ships they target and tell them to put all their valuables in a bag? Do they have ships crewed by humanoid pirates to hold their loot? Can sea serpents turn into humanoids to make piracy and politics easier? (Speaking of which, Excel is described as being good at both naval battles and politics. This is the only non-military trait mentioned for any of the dukes, so I assume she's going to be either a major threat, a major ally, or a love interest.)

Also, if sea serpents are intelligent and recognized as citizens of Elfrieden, I have even more questions about the sea dragons pulling their battleships like carthorses...

Anyways, these dukes are cool, but they all love and respect Al, and it seems like they also think the throne was usurped by the incoming hero.3​ So the three dukes have taken their forces to their own territories and sat there. Even Liscia writing to Duke Carmine (who "loved [her] like a daughter") couldn't get him to just meet with Kazuya. This is a big problem, because the Dukedoms each comprise a third of the kingdom. Wait, sorry, I read that wrong—they comprise a third of the kingdom combined.

There are a couple of reasons I'm unconvinced that the Dukedoms are an effective military or economic threat to Kazuya's rule, and the fact that he holds twice as much land as the three of them combined is only part of that. (There's no indication that the Dukedoms hold the most productive or populous lands, leaving the royals with only shepherds in the hinterlands, so land is probably a decent estimate of relative power.) There's also the way the military is divided by function rather than region. This is probably obvious, but just to put it out there: Historically, a vassal's military was usually just a smaller version of his liege's force, composed of the members of the king's military force that came from his fief. (Or more precisely, the king's military force from that fief was the duke's army.)
This isn't to say military forces were homogeneous; specialized troops existed in most organized armies (at the very least, light infantry for scouting and screening advances and heavy infantry for shock), and auxiliary forces from allied states/tribes often had important specialties (most strikingly, horse archers from steppe/desert nomads in armies bordering their lands). But as far as I know, medieval-style vassals did not specialize their military forces for the benefit of their lord; they wanted fully-capable military forces they could use in their own wars, internal or external, or at least to defend from/deter raids. Certainly, no kingdom had a "duke with all the army but no navy" and a separate "duke with all the navy but no army".

Duke Carmine is probably the biggest military threat out of the three; land armies have been the core component of nearly every military throughout history for a reason. There's a lot you can do with them, while the strategic goals you can accomplish with just a navy are more limited, and the goals an air force alone can achieve (assuming its role and capabilities are anything like the real-world use of the term) are basically limited to terror attacks (e.g. bombing) and maybe raids. If the three teamed up, they could probably wreck the Forbidden Army and overthrow the kingdom, but dividing the three branches of the military into geographic regions and giving them coequal titles seems like a pretty straightforward measure against that. Also, the king retainins most of the country's land (and hence economic productivity) and a notable military force loyal to the head of state rather than the dukes.

It's possible that the dukes could collectively (or even individually) pose a political threat to Kazuya and his regime, but that's not what this segment focuses on. It focuses primarily on the military side of things, secondarily on the history (which I'll talk about next post), tertiarily on economics if you're generous, and not at all on politics or administration. As far as this section is concerned, the dukes are "just" military officers who happen to own a lot of land. Them being a political threat isn't contradicted by anything in this section, but it isn't supported by anything, and for narrative concerns like "what kind of threat is posed by Duke So-and-so?", first impressions are critical. If something is important and isn't established at the earliest opportunity, something has gone wrong.

But let's focus on worldbuilding. There's a clash between the framing and the content. The Dukedoms are framed as a power potentially rivaling the king himself, but the information we're given about their assets and powers is underwhelming. If there aren't other unmentioned major landholders (e.g, nobles, regional governors, agri-guilds) likely to side with the Dukedoms against the king, their collective economic and manpower isn't that impressive. Commanding almost the entire military between them is notable, but it seems organized in a way that breaks the military into competing and ineffective fragments; without a pretender for them to unite behind, I don't see an effective alliance between them against their own country being likely. (Especially if the common soldiers love the king as much as the other commoners do—it seems likely that their loyalties would lie with the Crown rather than the individual dukes.)

The framing works if you only consider the raw military power commanded by each noble. The Forbidden Army sounds smaller than Carmine's, and it presumably doesn't have the materiel of Duchess Walter's navy or the air superiority of Duke Vargas's wyvern knights. But it seems unlikely that nearly the entire military might of the whole kingdom is funded, equipped, and fed entirely from one third of the kingdom; it doesn't seem like the Dukedoms have the economic strength required to back up their threat, meaning they would start to run out of supplies (and possibly reinforcements) if they came into conflict with the rest of the kingdom.


I fee like I'm just repeating myself at this point, so I'll just make one last point before wrapping up: I am very curious how Duke Carmine organizes his army. Broadly speaking, effective military structure must either reflect or replicate civilian social structures—that is, either the chain of command needs to reflect authorities that the soldiers would recognize from their civilian lives or you need your soldiers to be—here's your ten-dollar word for today—deracinated4​ from civilian society. A duke of ~10% of the kingdom commanding soldiers from across the entire kingdom probably doesn't reflect civilian power structures (unless the Duke Carmine is the semi-secret power behind the throne), but historically "feudal" societies weren't capable of producing significantly5​ deracinated armies—I think because they lacked centralized political power or sufficient administrative infrastructure or something along those lines?
The answer is either another anachronism injected into this increasingly non-feudal fantasy kingdom, a pile of nonsense, or really interesting. I'd put my money on the first, but I'm hoping for the third! And we get a hint later in the chapter.

---

So far, this chapter has been providing a wealth of detail largely absent from the first chapter. Optimistically, this will set the tone for the rest of the book and the first chapter was just trying to establish its main characters and overarching plot. Cynically, these details might not go anywhere, the plot could easily just be a series of brilliant schemes on the level of "Let's solve the famine by growing food," and the first chapter failed at establishing anything interesting about the main characters.

We've learned some interesting details about the setting. There are "Huh, that's cool I guess" details like the fancy wells, meaningful descriptions of things like Elfrieden's military structure, and everything in between. We have evidence for and against Elfrieden's purported egalitarianism, description of luxury goods marketing strategies, and perhaps most significantly, we know what the hell the Dukedoms are: glorified generals (and an admiral) with significant but not overwhelming land-holdings.

Plot-wise, not much happened; these seven pages were full of the exact kind of worldbuilding detail I want to analyze in exhausting detail. (I hope it's not actually exhausting to you guys, though.) Liscia and Kazuya are breakfast, and they were interrupted by a...I believe the term is twunk? A buff soldier dude who wanted to speak with Kazuya about something we'll get to next time, because the next seven pages have only scattered crumbs of worldbuilding compared to the feast we just went through.

Spoiler: Footnotes

1: By "market economies," I do not simply mean "economies where markets exist". I mean "economies where most goods are distributed by markets". (And I'm using the more abstract definition of "markets" rather than the literal space in market towns where goods were bought and sold.) Markets were heavily used by elites, most urban residents, and (obviously) merchants, but the farmers making up the overwhelming majority of the population avoided them as much as possible, preferring to build relationships with their peers and make deals with the local landed elites when that was insufficient.

2: It's true that Elfrieden's treasury is running dry, and the kingdom might lack the sorts of financial institutions that would let them borrow large sums of money like modern governments can. But talking about the economy in terms of governments needing to extract revenue equal to their expenses is a bit of a red flag.

3: Which is true of all four nobles we've heard of. I wonder if the nobles know something the commons don't that makes them more suspicious, the commoners just don't care much who sits on the throne, or if this is another way that the nobles are portrayed as less thoughtless than the common people. "The commoners just accept the suspicious claims of the new king at face value, but nobles know to ask questions"? There are more charitable interpretations, so I won't dwell on this, but...it's there.

4: A word whose definition is a bit more precise than "separated" or "uprooted," but it basically means "separated/uprooted". Read more about it in this historical blog post about orcs.

5: Medieval armies absolutely had components that were uprooted from ordinary civilian society—knights, for instance. But they didn't have enough knights, men-at-arms, etc to effectively fight wars against peer competitors.