#they didnt invent it. they just literally RECOGNIZE something that a majority has ALREADY been doing

[syrips]

'you wouldnt like villain blorbo if they were officially redeemed/romanced because the excitement is in the mystery and how canonically it wouldnt make sens-'

wrong.

ravenloft i10 (1e). DoD (2e). VRGtR (5e).

thank u

[fuanteinasekai]

Thnx 4 your reply, & I too wondered about that Natsume/Taki moment, Sensei might've tried to give it a spin. But remember this quote? "I feel like I'm chasing characters around with a sketchbook & megaphone" (1st vol) She follows their natural course. She also made sure to show Taki/Tanuma/Smol Natsume act similarly to Taki/Natsume/Kai & tied the stories, Taki: "yes! thats the field we made flower crowns" but Natsume didnt remember her or that moment. Tanuma/Natsume tho? *waves at your meta #1

Hi! I love this ask!!

First, it actually hadn’t occurred to me that the Kai story was chosen as a reference specifically because of the “faux parents” comparison. I assumed it was just because it was the only location besides Taki’s house we had any reference for. But we’ve never actually seen Tanuma fishing, and that was one of his memories, so there’s no reason Midorikawa-sensei couldn’t have made up something similar with Taki. In retrospect, it does seem a little much to be coincidental.

On the one hand it’s slightly worrisome, since Tanuma and Taki have basically negative romantic chemistry in this story, whereas Natsume/Taki was at least plausible. So it could be read as supporting Natsume/Taki through contrast. On the other hand, I’m not sure how you would reconcile that reading with the rest of the story. There’s so much implied intimacy between Tanuma and Natsume, and the cleaning cupboard is an incredibly domestic choice of location for Natsume to recognize. Like, you pretty much have to be a very close friend to be involved in the household on that level, haha. I’m still not ruling out Taki as wife—heteronormativity is a powerful force, and I’m wary of letting my guard down. But yeah.

Second, I love that you bring up her writing style, ‘cause I was literally in the middle of writing about it. I hadn’t actually read that particular author’s note yet, but it’s exactly the impression I got from reading between the lines of her other notes:

描きかた

「こういうシーンのあるこういう流れの話を描きたい」と思って、それに合う子をそこに放り込んで動いてもらう。メガホン片手に追っかけていってスケッチする、という感覚で描いている気がします。特に学生さんのお話は。

そこは右だー、左だーと指示を出しながら追っかけていって、セリフや動きは任せる感じです。なのでネーム中はかなり疲れますが、とても楽しいものでもあるのです。

“The Way I Draw”

“When I think ‘I want to draw a story with this kind of scene and this kind of flow,’ I pick a kid who fits, throw them in and put them to work. I feel like I’m drawing intuitively, as if I were trailing after them with a megaphone in one hand, sketching. Especially in stories about students.”

“I feel like I’m trailing after them while directing, ‘That goes to the riiight, that goes to the leeeft,’ but leave the dialog and labor to them. Because of this, I find the preliminary work exhausting, but really fun.”

This is pretty much exactly what I was getting at with the “Taki test” thing, just reversed. My theory with the Kai story was that she chose a setting and environment where Taki could break through romantically, then dropped her in to see what would happen. So rather than picking a character for the environment, she picked a specific environment in order to give a character an opportunity to evolve in a specific way—and then let it go when that evolution didn’t happen. That’s my theory, anyway.

This is the bit I was already working on:

Midorikawa-Sensei did not originally intend this series to have any sort of character or relationship development or emotional arc. At all.

If you read her early author’s notes, she’s fairly up front of about this. I get the impression she’s basically a folklore nerd who wanted to write stories about yōkai. So she cloned one of her male protagonists, gave him the Book of Friends to justify all his yōkai encounters, and slapped him into a shoujo manga. It was supposed to be a series of independent yōkai stories bound by a single character, much like Mushishi but with a different tone and more strongly centered on existing Japanese folklore. She flat out says this in the author’s notes for the first chapter:

可能なら読切シリーズとして描きたいと本心を担当様にお話しして描いた作品です。

“This is a work I drew while telling [the editor] that I truly wanted, if possible, to draw it as a series of stand-alones.”

*pauses to laugh hysterically*

Shigeru-san was supposed to be “like Columbo’s wife,” always alluded to and never seen. Reiko was just a device to set up the Book of Friends, not a real character. Tanuma was supposed to click with Natsume instantly, without any angst, presumably so that Natsume would have someone to explain things to. If you compare the first twenty chapters to those that followed, you can see how recurring characters used to be mostly in the background, and yōkai dominated heavily. Natori stories were disproportionately common because he (as an exorcist) was part of world-building, and because it was easy to write him and yōkai at the same time. Now these yokai-dominant stories are the exception, rather than the rule. These are all still yōkai stories, of course, but now the yōkai largely serve as vehicles for the stories and emotions of humans.

Unfortunately for Midorikawa-sensei, she’s clearly the type of writer who lets her instincts play a role in her writing. This is visible even without her direct admission. So when characters started acting in unexpected ways, she let them. And now, despite having originally planned absolutely no plot arc at all, she has at least two major ongoing plot threads: the question of Natsume’s grandfather and how it ties to the Book of Friends (possibly separable from “how to return all the names”), and The Thing with Tanuma. 

One of the interesting conclusions we can draw from this is that character-centric stories she’s “wanted to draw for a long time” are not stories she has always wanted to draw. If Reiko was originally just a plot device, then Souko must have been invented later, probably in response to some sort of plot development. *cough*Tanuma-related*cough* To a lesser extent, it’s unlikely that Ito-san was planned from the start, either. Unlike a series that was planned out and structured from the start, we can’t assume that foreshadowing or a particular theme started early. We have to be really careful about what kind of assumptions we make, and about how old our sources are. 

To me that actually makes all this more fun—trying to figure when something changed, when she gave in to a particular theme, and so on. I do think she’s been leaning into the choices her characters have made, but she’s not necessarily up front about when that started, or exactly what that means. It’s an extra challenge.