BONUS STORY
I Feel Like Animism Is Easier to Come by than Anime? Yeah, ’Cause This Is Fantasy?
“WAAAAAH! HARUKAAAAAAA! I miss animeeeee!”
Ha. Neeeerds.
“We don’t even have manga here. How do you expect us to reinvent anime?”
“Magic.”
“Magic can do anything, man.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with movies first.”
“Fine! Then I’ll settle for an OVA!”
“We are not reinventing anime.”
Animation was a grueling art, demanding enormous amounts of time and labor. We were not reinventing it, and that was final!
“First, we’d need the cultural shift from paper-art street shows into manga. And then where are we gonna get artists from, huh?”
“We can be the artists.”
“You? Well, then who’s gonna voice act? You know you won’t settle for second best, or you’ll riot.”
“Because VAs are king! Second best is sacrilege!”
Oh my god, dudes… Shut up.
“What’re we gonna do about the ‘eternally 17’ problem?”
“Nothing to worry about! We’re up to our ears in people stuck at age seventeen!”
“Okay, but like… What would our anime even be about? Dungeons?”
“Nah, that feels too ordinary.”
Fiction, from sci-fi flicks to weekly anime, needed a vision. A grand imagination, something that departed from the everyday. Which, in this universe, meant no battles.
“Building off of the dungeon idea… Adventuring, maybe?”
“Girls, form up! We’re going to earn dessert from this!”
“Ja!”
“Adventuring in a dungeon is just shorthand for a massacre…”
There were thousands and thousands of stories out there, no end of which manifested as battles in dungeons.
“Somehow, I don’t think the isekai fans would be satisfied with a story about a bunch of girls demanding dessert from me at every opportunity. That would never make it as anime. Heck, what publisher would even think of picking it up?”
“True.”
In a story like that, there could be a boy-meets-girl element. Passions would spark; a romance would bloom. But a gang of girls who chased down monsters to fund their sweet-eating habits…just didn’t sound like the ideal heroine backstory.
“Oh, if only your spellstone were made of chocolate…”
“Right?!”
Rrrraaargh!
Stories also needed twists and turns, but here the only twist was the girls twisting my wrist to hurry up and make more chocolate. Before making an anime, I had better get on making a chocolate factory!
“I mean, it just sucks, dude. We got isekai’d and everything, but there’s still no anime?”
“You mean, you want to see an anime about waking up, going to a dungeon, fighting monsters, eating lunch, fighting more monsters, beating the dungeon, getting pressed into making snacks, eating the snack, doing one more set, fighting even more monsters, going back to the inn, eating dinner, and going to bed? That doesn’t strike you as, uh, boring?”
“Yeah, I feel like that leaves something to be desired in the fantasy department…”
Yeah…that “fiction” was now just our daily life.
“Gimme chocolate!”
“CHOCOLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE!”
“Forget heroines, we have a whole class of villainesses…”
“And a chocolate parfait, Haruka-kun!”
“Ooh, yes! Me too.”
“Die, monster! Be my parfait money.”
Yeeeoorrrgh!
The girls couldn’t wait for the still-cooling chocolate to set before they, well, set into it. Next thing I knew, they were back to bashing monsters with chocolate-covered lips. I guess next is parfaits?
“I’ve heard that fact is stranger than fiction, but an anime built on these factual grounds…would be a gorefest.”
“Whatever happened to our sweet, sweet bog-standard isekai anime?” Sniff sniff.
Yeah, it probably wasn’t a good idea to put teenage girls in dungeons, if for no other reason than that it threatened the local monster population. ’Cause I just knew the girls were gonna ask for chocolate ice cream next. Yup. There was no making an anime out of this mess.
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