The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Safe & Sound in the Arms of an Elite Knight

What's It About? 

Born with an unusual birthmark on her back, Chloe Ardennes was immediately branded a “cursed child” by her superstitious family and locked away in their estate for her entire life. Forced to cook and clean, Chloe's world shatters one day when an encounter with her mother at knifepoint drives her to flee the only home she's ever known. Desperately seeking refuge, she escapes to the only sanctuary she knows: the royal capital. But is the big city everything she hoped it would be? Just as she finds herself on the brink of despair, a mysterious, gallant knight rescues her, offering a glimmer of hope and the promise of a new beginning.

Safe & Sound in the Arms of an Elite Knight has a story by Fuyu Aoki and art by Yuyu Kouhara, with English translation by Dawson Chen. This volume was lettered by Giuseppe Anteppe Fusco. Published by J-Novel Club; PublishDrive edition (September 18, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

For what starts to be a very basic Cinderella retelling, Safe and Sound in the Arms of an Elite Knight makes one very interesting choice: the woman who abuses heroine Chloe isn't her stepmother. That's such an integral element of Cinderella stories that it's right there in the ATU description, a major difference from other fairy tales, where biological mothers were deliberately changed into stepmothers. It's also the most visceral part of this manga because Chloe's mother Isabella is undeniably awful. Not only is she so superstitious as to declare her new baby cursed because of an unusually dark birthmark on her back, but she also attempts to kill her twice: once as an infant, then again when Chloe is sixteen. While there's some room to interpret her as broken by grief (her husband, sister, and son died of a plague in quick succession), that doesn't win her any sympathy. The scene where Chloe has to flee from her mother chasing her with a knife is impressively tense.

While things look up for Chloe after that point, they look down for readers expecting to find that level of tension maintained. Chloe does have another dangerous encounter with a group of hoodlums once she reaches the distant royal capital, but most of the book takes place in three rooms with two characters. Chloe is rescued by Lloyd, the eponymous elite knight, and taken to his house, where the majority of the volume plays out. It consists of them conversing, eating, and Chloe learning what a bath is in one particularly credulity-straining instance. It's by no means bad; it just doesn't live up to the action standards established by the first chapter.

A lot of the interest in the book comes from watching Lloyd figure out that if Chloe is a runaway as she claims, she obviously had a very good reason to become one. Although he hasn't noticed any scars on her visible skin (just scratches from her two-week trek through the woods), he's taken aback by the way she expects him to be casually cruel to her, or the fact that she keeps defaulting to a full-body kneeling bow whenever she has the chance. That makes him the most uncomfortable, but he's also mildly aghast that Chloe only prepares enough supper for him, declaring that she'll eat the equivalent of a power bar herself when he's finished. If nothing else, Lloyd's reactions let us know that Isabella's treatment of Chloe was very much outside the norm for their kingdom, and his offer to hire her as his housekeeper seems to be a compromise: he wants to keep her safe at his house, but he also wants her to know she's useful, since that's where she seems to get her self-worth.

The book doesn't adapt all that much of the source light novel, but that works. The fact that it's mostly two people talking means that it will lose some appeal for readers who prefer action, but it still has sufficient charm. It's not hard to want to see Chloe learn that she's worth it, and it looks like Lloyd is more than willing to help her see that.

I always have mixed feelings about stories like Safe and Sound in the Arms of an Elite Knight, where the heroine's greatest goal is to take care of the man she loves. Well, Chloe and Lloyd, the two leads of the story, aren't in love yet, but it certainly seems inevitable

In many ways, the structure is a classic Cinderella story: Chloe was born to a noble family with a large port wine stain on her back that made her mother think she was cursed. When Chloe's father dies of a plague, her mother and older sister abuse her and treat her like a servant. One day, her mother tries to kill her in a fit of rage and grief, and Chloe flees to the capital, where a handsome knight named Lloyd takes her in.

I quite liked the story up to this point; while not the most enthralling or startling, the execution was strong enough to keep my attention. The art is cute but not so cutesy that it robs intense moments like Chloe's mother trying to break her window with a rock of their impact, and the characters sit just on the right edge of generically attractive. The story moves along at a decent clip, hinting at Chloe's struggles to reach the capital without dwelling on them since that's not important to the story. It didn't excite me, but I enjoyed it.

But then Lloyd tells Chloe to pass the time however she likes, and Chloe realizes she doesn't know what that means for her – her life has been a 24/7 drudgery up until now. It's a good moment, acknowledging how a lifetime of abuse has left her without a sense of personal identity. But instead of exploring her options, she decides to spend her time cleaning and cooking for Lloyd, but this time it's fun because she's choosing to do it! And it's just a disappointment because she could be reading, learning an instrument, or jousting… There are so many options!

There's been a big uptick lately in titles that are about performing traditional gender roles in a fantasy world, and I don't care for it. There's nothing shameful about femininity and I don't have a problem per se with young women getting gratification out of cooking and cleaning – I love to cook for my family although I detest cleaning – but there's an insidiousness to how pervasive stories that elevate that over all else have become, especially in shoujo manga and light novels.