We’ve discussed the origins of the feisty girl/posh guy idea before, and the evolution of the feisty girl in my head into Chloe Fortabat of Wolf’s Trail. The evolution of the posh guy was less dramatic, because for a long time I thought primarily of him as a foil to the heroine. Here are the different phases, numbered to match the entries under Feisty Girl:

0). Fantasy Belle Epoque New Orleans: still very heavily influenced by Swan Laurence of Criminal Games. He even had a Marlene analogue, although she was his sister and not romantically interested in him.

1). In the initial Isekai concept, he was basically this guy from Love Nikki, minus the Captain America stuff.

1a). By the time of the Back and Forth Isekai, I’d figured out that the Love Nikki character was possibly a partial homage to Colin Firth in Kingsman, so I made the isekai hero young Colin Firth in my head as kind of a placeholder. The “back and forth” element of this isekai was also influenced by the scene in Lost in Austen, when Darcy arrives in the 21st century and is kind of horrified by it. There was a whole series of vignettes about Feisty Girl acclimating Posh Guy to her world. I was gobbling up the Pride and Prejudice comparison vids as they were coming out, and discovered Franco Volpi, the Italian Mr. Darcy, in the process. This will become somewhat important later.

2). In this Victorian fantasy, the heroine blamed the hero and his brothers for…something or other but got taken in as a housekeeper and got to like them better. The hero was one part Hajime Ryudo (from Sohryuden) to one part OG Optimus Prime to one part angst: a tall, imposing man who was warm, earnest, kind, and deeply emotionally wounded by an estrangement inside his family that I don’t believe I fully got the details of. He looked kind of like Sam Heughan, whom I’ve only seen in stills.

3). The millionaire playboy/Arsene Lupin type was something of a vigilante or Robin Hood figure, and of course the whole thing about keeping his feisty but somewhat clueless wife in the dark probably owed a lot to the Scarlet Pimpernel. In looks and mannerisms, he was kind of a cross between the Criminal Games character and Italian Mr. Darcy.

4). Alouette’s counterpart was named Cygne or Griffe at different times. He owed something to the #2 hero mentioned above, in terms of being this very tall, powerfully built, but surprisingly agile man (“Italian Mr. Darcy but scaled up to Christopher Lee size” says one of the notes). He had a more stern, aloof manner than the #2 hero, and an angsty backstory involving the head villainess of the series. His job in the series was to explain stuff to the heroine and hold her back when the cursed dagger made her go full Taz. He was a cool guy. He was also boring enough to where I gave him an adoptive brother patterned on Audie Murphy (look, I was aiming for Exact Opposite of Griffe, okay?) to be kind of an alternate love interest for the heroine in case I lost interest in Griffe partway through what was vaguely projected to be a 4-5 book series.

5). As previously recounted, watching Rings of Power got me to thinking about Numenor, which got me to thinking about Steampunk Numenor, which led to me wondering about what Steampunk Dunedain would be like, a few thousand years after the fall of their homeland. I did a bit of, ahem, research, in which Horror of Dracula, Brides of Dracula, the 1959 Mummy and Hound of the Baskervilles figured prominently, along with the new-to-me Legend of the Werewolf and The Beast Must Die. Suddenly, I had a culture and a mythos, or something more like one than the vague ideas I had been kicking around before. And I had a man to go with them: more quirky and vulnerable, less of a superman, perhaps a little absurd in his austere formality. He had his own arc to go through: “I’m a doctor, not a king.” He was very willing to fall in love with Chloe Fortebat, the nicer, more grounded successor to Alouette Fortebat, but he was not just a prop in her story. He was and is a man with his own destiny. I hope you will get to see it unfold along with me.