Thank you for reading The Princess of Convenient Plot Devices, Volume 5! Mamecyoro here.
If you think of Volume 4 as “Part 1” of an arc, Volume 5 is the concluding Part 2. To clear Klifford of all suspicion, Octavia embarks on her survey in Esfia’s castle town with her brother, Sirius, when unexpectedly… —That kind of story.
Speaking of Volume 5, Volume 5 of the manga version came out earlier in December, so definitely read that if you missed it! It ties up the Junior Ball Arc, so you get to see all those scenes in manga form! After you finish reading it, I guarantee you’ll become a devout worshipper of Yoneda.
Anyway, let’s talk a little about what it was like writing Volume 5.
In the afterword for Volume 4, I mentioned that I was having doubts about Klifford being a good romcom character, but in this volume I had the same question about Octavia.
_______Um, Octavia… Isn’t it, like, kinda hard to get you onto the right path for your romantic arc…?
At the start, it’s easy getting her to become friends with a love interest, so you think there’s a wide range of hitboxes to attack…when in reality, the true hitbox that will move you along the Romance Route is an extremely small target. And it’s rigged with booby traps, too…!
So your attack won’t land unless you aim at a very specific point, and if you screw up the timing, it’s instant death, too. Your Romance Flags will snap in half, and these little buggers are set up so that even if you hit the target, it won’t work unless you’ve met all the requirements first. Huh? You mean, I can’t just hit the target and be good to go? Nope. You can’t.
And the icing on the cake: In addition to the small target, your target is dressed in camo, hiding in a dense grove of trees, so you can barely see it. Your psyche is just way too complicated, Octavia. It’s like, do you even want to fall in love? That’s just how hardcore a challenge this is.
Still, I wrote Octavia with the idea that she is ready for love at any time. That was the plan, at least.
But she’s just so ill-tempered!
And accident-prone!
But then…I had an epiphany.
Eureka…! If this is going to be a romance (romantic comedy…?), our heroine needs to contribute to that!
If you consider the male hero of this story to be the main character, getting him onto the Romance Route with the heroine, romcom style, is no easy task…but I arrived at the conclusion: Whatever. I’ll make it work.
As always, I gave my editor a lot of headaches with this volume. And I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but thank you Fuji for the wonderful illustrations. Thank you to my proofreader and my designer, and to everyone else who had their hands in this book.
Lastly, to everyone who’s read this far in the series (and to the people out there who, after reading Volume 4 were like, “Volume 5…truly…?”), thank you so much for being so patient!
I narrowly escaped becoming the boy who cried wolf.
May we meet again in Volume 6!
Mamecyoro