Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion

Episode 5

Broken wagon wheels: they're not just for Oregon Trail anymore. And more importantly, for this episode, a broken wheel in Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion means the possibility of escape rather than leading to your entire party dying of dysentery. This show may not be without its issues (most of them visual), but if there's one thing it consistently gets right, it's how determined Raeliana herself is. Why wait for Noah to show up and save you when you can take matters into your own hands and escape?

This comes from a much more interesting place than Raeliana merely being unaware of whether Noah and Adam know she's been abducted or not. Raeliana has been determined not to die again, the moment she opened her eyes after dying as Rinka. She's ready to flip Fate a big middle finger, and everything she's done thus far has been in the interest of her own continued survival – and she'll be damned if she escaped Francis Brooks once only to be killed by him anyway.

It's worth wondering how much of this is really “Rinka” rather than “Raeliana.” The original Raeliana may have been more willing to go along with social expectations, but if she had been aware that Francis was going to murder her, would she have continued to be quiet and meek? Her proficiency with a gun, something that Rinka fully acknowledges she acquired once she possessed Raeliana's body, might indicate otherwise. Yes, Raeliana learned how to use a firearm for hunting, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't have used one to defend herself had the need arisen. The other question we need to consider is whether Raeliana and Rinka were ever two separate people – the scene this week when Adam pushes her off the cliff and she lands in Noah's arms gives her a flashback, but suddenly we have to wonder whether that's what happened the first time she fell. It seems significant that she can't remember the face of the person who shoved her, and the idea of being deliberately sent to another world to meet someone is something I've seen in at least two other titles: Shinobi Life and The Violet Knight. Similarly, in the K-drama series Rooftop Prince, the story deals with people who failed to find happiness together in one life, so fate stepped in to help in the next. While I can't say for sure that this is what's going on, I think it's a possibility that we need to keep in mind.

All that aside, Francis Brooks is a dink, isn't he? He certainly wasn't a good man before Jake Langston roped him into his Raeliana murder plot (why he did that is still up for debate), but his weakness of character seems to have doomed him from the start. While we could say that he deserved everything he got for swindling women, there's still something tragic in his story - not for him, of course, but for Sophie, Jake's sister. The poor young woman was used twice over: once by Francis, resulting in her death, and then again after her demise by her brother, as a way to manipulate Francis. This makes her parallel to Raeliana – in her original role, Raeliana was supposed to function as a catalyst for Beatrice to get Noah, a death that's only significant in what others can get from it. This raises the question of whether Francis and Beatrice have more in common than we'd like to think.

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Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.