Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!? Shunkashuutou: Afterword

Afterword

To everyone who joined through the novels, it’s been a while. To everyone who joined through the anime, it’s good to meet you, I’m the author, Takehaya.

This book is a series of mini-episodes the cover how the characters’ relationships change with the seasons between episodes one and twelve. In the original books, it’d be from volume one to seven. I thought it could be a review for those who read the original books and supplementary material for those who only watched the anime.

This time, I decided to pull an about face and play at the end of the book, including some extra. A scene where the characters are only organised by lines. That plan ended up becoming an experiment to see if it was possible to distinguish the characters only by their speaking style. I wrote four pages with nine characters this time.

‘Rokujouma no Shinryakusha!?’ has many scenes were there are many character talking in one place. This is decided in the planning stages. Individually saying who was talking each time would quickly use up all the pages. So being able to tell the characters apart from their lines and the usage of sound effects is important. I haven’t explained it properly yet though, I thought I’d try it once, that’s what the thing at the end of this book is. Everyone that read it, how was it? Could you properly tell who was speaking? I’ll be happy if you could.

I might do something like this again, but detached from the original story like this, I think it’ll be fun to read.

Now that I’m here, I thought I’d talk about the anime a little.

It was around volume five when making this into an anime came up. It’s currently at sixteen volumes plus the side-story, so eighteen volumes, thirteen volumes more. The series is published every four months, so with a rough calculation, it’s been about four years and four months. However, many things happened all at once and it only actually started last year. I think I kept all the readers waiting quite a bit. Or maybe a lot of people gave up on it, I’m sorry for making you wait so long.

However, those four years were good luck for me.

I planned to make this a long series from the start, but I made it so it could be ended properly at any time if it were discontinued, when I started, I prepared four endings, at three, five, seven and the original planned lengths. (Strictly speaking, the long version has several degrees too.)

I did this because I wanted to avoid the series not getting enough popularity to continue and betraying the fans that had bought it.

However, that structure made the whole work more complicated. For example, in episode one on this DVD/Blu-Ray, Koutarou meets a mysterious girl in some ruins, but in each of the four paths, her design was slightly different. In the novels it was fine to not have an illustration, but the anime needed a design. There were several things like that in the series.

However, it started around volume five, where it wasn’t clear whether it would be the seven volume or long version. So if the anime had gotten the green light then, the design wouldn’t have been finalised but a design would need to be chosen. I think everyone would understand that that would be a minus to everyone.

Three years passed and last year the anime development committee came to life. I think there were fifteen volumes out at that point, including the side story, and the setting and design were finalised so the anime didn’t have anything to hesitate over. Thanks to that, everyone could see the anime as it was planned. Rather, I think the parts that weren’t drawn in the novels or were vaguely misdirecting were clearly drawn.

That’s why I think those four years were good luck.

I want to deeply thank the editorial department who worked so hard on this series and the anime, Poco-san who is in charge of illustrations, all the companies involved, the voice actors and everyone who bought this DVD/Blu-Ray.

If luck is with us, let us meet again.

August 2014
Takehaya

Translator's Notes and References

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