Warning: This afterword contains spoilers of the manga One Piece, specifically the Wano Country arc.
First, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for picking up this book. I’m the author, Kurokawa Hitsugi. This might be a sudden question, but do you guys have a favorite character? I’m not talking specifically about the characters of this series—I mean, do you have a favorite among all the anime, manga, and books that you’ve consumed? Do you have a character that you just genuinely like, no matter what?
As you can tell (since I’m writing a series about a villain), I find myself inexplicably drawn to villains. If you’ve ever watched this children’s TV show, I’m more of a Baikinman fan than an Anpanman fan.
Baikinman’s played the heel for many, many years, so the character I’m about to bring up might seem young in his eyes, but out of all the villains, I like Basil Hawkins from One Piece. I love him so much; I think he’s my favorite out of all the characters I’ve ever seen. He isn’t exactly the most prominent figure of the series, but I find myself empathizing with his way of life and being deeply moved by how he acts.
He trusts his own foresight and makes choices that give him the greatest probability of survival, and ultimately, he only had a one percent chance to survive. He’s a cunning realist, and he didn’t bet everything on that slim chance. He clearly was prepared to face his imminent death. Here was a man who continuously cast his pride aside for survival, even submitting to the enemy if necessary, but in his last moments, he prioritized his pride and honor, even if that meant going against his way of life.
I fell in love with Basil Hawkins when I saw his final moments. He’d submit to the enemy, take hostages, and be cruel and employ cheap tactics in order to survive—I’m sure many people see him in a negative light.
He’s the type who will do whatever is necessary to achieve his goal, and he will easily abandon others if it ensures his own survival. He could be dismissed as nothing more than a cowardly minor villain, but when he made his final choice, he was elevated to a man with a faithful and honorable side, something that made him so perfectly human. It was at that very moment that Basil Hawkins became complete in my eyes. All’s well that ends well, as they say. His death completed his character arc, but I’m one of the devout believers who trust that he’s actually still alive somewhere. He did say that he had a one percent chance of survival, after all. That’s not zero! He could still very well be alive! One day, he might make it back into the spotlight! Okay...maybe that’s too much wishful thinking, but you never know. He might suddenly appear on the cover art and reveal that he’s actually alive! Anyway, that’s what I’m hoping for.
Now, if I only make this afterword about my favorite character, my editor will be furious with me, so I’d like to get a little meta about my series, Repeated Vice. First, I’d like to say that this series is a treasure chest full of everything I like...or depending on how you look at it, a Pandora’s box.
I think you can sort of get a hint of my tendencies now that you’ve got a grasp on the main character of this first volume, Lofus. He’s a cursed, heterochromatic, one-armed prodigy of dark magic. This character’s honestly stuffed with every single characteristic that I adore, and it definitely reminds me of the first page of my cringey journal where I jotted down what the very strongest character would be like. Which kinda makes me writhe with embarrassment, really...
The scary confession I’ve got to make is that Lofus initially wasn’t a character like this. Sure, I was the one who wrote the story, so Lofus ultimately ended up this way, but the curse, heterochromia, and the one-armed bit wasn’t initially planned. He just...turned out that way as I wrote the story.
In other words, this is all a coincidence that meshed with my embarrassing childhood days that I thought I’d sealed deep within me. Yeah, I definitely feel my sanity points decreasing fast. But this is a story that I started, and I’m up against a depressing monster of my own creation: an innocent creature. In any case, I hope you’ll continue to follow the adventures of the manifestation of my childhood fantasies, the sad monster known as Lofus. I’m very grateful to you, the reader, who picked up this book, and I look forward to the day we meet again!
Kurokawa Hitsugi