“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind.” Those are the first words of “Youth,” a poem by Samuel Ullman, and although on their face they express a downright invigorating sense of positivity, if you look at them from another perspective, it’s just as easy to read the idea that “no matter how old you are, if you don’t have the right state of mind, you’ll never have a youth” into them. As it happens, if you go on to read the remainder of Youth, its central concept is surprisingly severe. People like to say that the heart is sometimes more of a liability than the body, claiming everything will turn out just fine as long as you keep the right perspective, but the problem is that keeping the right perspective isn’t nearly that easy. In fact, that’s exactly what makes life so hard sometimes.
Youth and chuunibyou: two words that are by no means synonymous, but that nevertheless fall into a very similar bucket. Chuunibyou is not limited to the time you spend in the eighth grade; it is a state of mind. From another vantage point, however, that same idea means that if you fail to keep the right perspective, any age can spell the end of one’s chuunibyou.
Youth may be a wonderful thing, but could youth’s end not be just as wonderful? Chuunibyou may be hella cool, but could chuunibyou’s end not be just as hella cool? I’d certainly like to believe so.
All that said, hello! This is Kota Nozomi, and this has been the final volume of When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace. This series has carried on for a long time now, but with this, it’s reached its conclusion. It took more than five years in total for me to complete it, and now that all’s said and done, I can proudly say that I wrote everything I set out to write. I hadn’t even begun to think about how the series would end up wrapping up in the long term back when I wrote its first volume, but I guess you could say that everything went about as far off the rails as it possibly could. The theme of this volume, by the way, was endings. I wrote it with the ending of chuunibyou, the ending of a story, and all other kinds of endings in mind. Also, although I wasn’t intentionally aiming for it, I’m pretty happy that the series wrapped up with a total of thirteen volumes.
Now then—I’d like to do some commentary on the series’ characters next! I’m perfectly aware that a series’ own author commenting on its characters like this is kinda lame by definition, but I want to, so I’m doing it anyway. First up, the heroines!
1. Kanzaki Tomoyo. Closed Clock. A former chuuni tsundere. Technically the main heroine—or, well, the one who got featured on the first volume’s cover, anyway. Chuuni heroines were going through a boom back when I was writing the first volume, but I was absolutely convinced that a heroine who used to be a chuuni would be way cuter, which was the mindset that Tomoyo sprang from. Being a former chuuni, she ends up being put in the position of calling out the main character’s nonsense more often than not. That said, despite being a comparatively sensible person, she’s not great academically, not even decent athletically, low-end average when it comes to communication, and not incredible at cooking either. When you really look at her in a broad sense, her specs are pretty low across the board, though I guess you could say that’s just part of her appeal.
Incidentally, Closed Clock was the very first of the many power names that I came up with over the course of this series. My first thought the moment I came up with it was “Huh? Is it just me, or am I actually surprisingly good at making these up? And for that matter, is it just me, or is making up this sort of name really fun?” Thus did the direction this story would develop in, as well as my journey down the path of naming, begin. The name Kanzaki Tomoyo, meanwhile, is one that I took great care to make come across as pretty cool, but not too cool. I actually made an effort to ensure that all of the chuunis in this story’s cast had names that felt like they would lead into a chuunibyou infection—after all, having a name that feels special is one of the key risk factors for chuunis...probably? It sure was for me, at least (oh, the shame).
2. Kushikawa Hatoko. Over Element. A pleasant and mild-mannered childhood friend. There are some concepts that people who don’t get chuunibyou can never really come to understand, and Hatoko is a character I intended to embody that phenomenon. Even though she’s Andou’s childhood friend—or rather, because she’s his childhood friend—she doesn’t understand him. Her extralong rant in the second volume is a favorite moment of mine, by the way. In fact, if I can be even more real for a moment, it was the scene that I was most excited about writing back when this series was first starting up—though I found more and more parts to get excited about writing after that point, of course. That rant was really something else in the anime too.
3. Himeki Chifuyu. World Create. A mysterious little girl. For better or for worse, not even I, the author, could ever understand what exactly she was thinking. You’d think that would make her hard to write, but it actually did quite the opposite: No matter what she did, “Eh, it’s Chifuyu” could explain it, just like that. Whenever I was at a loss for what to write, I just had to shine the spotlight on her and things would start moving right along again. Writing the Chifuyu-and-Cookie combo was really fun too. Oh, and when I found myself wondering how an elementary schooler would make the trip to the clubroom every single day on her own, I eventually realized “Oh, right, she can just use her power” and solved the whole problem in two seconds flat. World Create can make anything, so why not let her make a gateway that connects straight to the clubroom? Though, honestly, I can’t believe I got away with that one.
4. Takanashi Sayumi. Route of Origin. A reliable older sister type. Not only is she older and more mature than the rest of the cast, her skills in academics, athletics, and general domestic tasks are all top-notch, making her Tomoyo’s exact opposite: a super high-spec character. She tends to shut down the protagonist’s off-the-cuff trivia with proper, respectable knowledge. It’s a little hard to believe she’s really in high school, actually. A certain trickster starts manipulating her partway through the story, but in the end she pulls herself back together again in a very proper manner. The reason she ended up with Route of Origin as her power was that I had this idea in mind that it made sense for a character who was individually strong to have a recovery-based ability, basically. Hatoko’s power, by the way, was the exact opposite way around: Since she was a soft, gentle character, I gave her a power with ludicrous offensive potential. If I may self-analyze for a second, I have a feeling that I tend to work that sort of contrast into my characters quite often. It helps them stand out, I guess, though it’s not something that I’ve ever made a conscious effort to do.