My understanding of how tp_bases/tp_base is utilized is that it takes the best type object to fill tp_base. But thinking about it now, another issue about offsets that is derived from CPython as it stands. C based types + objects aren't inheritance friendly as it stands, more specifically, they're only really usable as the LAST base type in a base tuple, this offset system can be redone to make it more friendly, but as it stands, it mimics the existing behaviour fluently. The one-way conversion is only if you discard the initial "PyObject *" stack variable as it contains the runtime type of the object. This is a problem for if the runtime type is not the C based type object BUT a PEP accepted for Python 3.9 lays the framework that solves this issue.