Hello there! Light novelist Sakaki, at your service.
Today I bring you Volume Four of Bluesteel Blasphemer.
.........
............Um.
What with this and that, we rather suddenly decided to call a halt to the series with this volume (sweats). That meant strong-arming the story a little bit... I hope you’ll forgive me.
Please don’t ask for details. I might cry. Me! A grown man!
But setting that aside.
Major spoilers below! I recommend you stay away until you’ve finished the book.
Whenever you’re doing a series like this, you keep one eye on public opinion (i.e., the readers) as well as the various people involved in the books, and massage the setting and story based on their reactions. For better or for worse, with a light novel series that’s going to span several volumes and be published over the course of more than a year, if you determine things too strictly in advance, you can end up tying your own hands and not leaving yourself a way out.
To be very blunt, if a series sells well, you can easily run to ten or twenty volumes—and if it doesn’t, in the worst-case scenario you can wind up with things ending after the first volume. I’ve been in the light novel business for over fifteen years now, and I’ve seen it happen plenty of times. Heck, I’ve seen it happen to me plenty of times.
Under the circumstances, there are a few things that I deliberately left vague. One of them is, in fact, Dasa’s past (?).
As far as Yukinari’s older sister, Hatsune, I had always planned for her to be essentially the final hurdle before the “last boss.” That’s one reason why the prefatory scene of Yukinari’s death was not the traffic accident so beloved of Other World Reincarnation Cheat Harem stories.
Incidentally, I’ve occasionally had readers say, “Dasa is obviously the reincarnated Hatsune, right?” To which the series’ poor author (namely me) can only reply, “Huh? Really?”
When it comes to Dasa, I didn’t start out with a very clear idea of her past; truth be told, at first I barely even knew what she looked like other than that she was a “meganekko,” or girl with glasses. I vaguely recall that I imagined her to look “plain,” and that at one point she was going to have brown hair.
Then I got the character designs, and wouldn’t you know it, Dasa had the same silver hair as Yukinari.
I suppose some authors might have gotten upset that the design was different from their imagination, but the illustrator knows what “pops” in an image better than I do, and when I receive suggestions like this, I usually follow the artist (unless, of course, something about the art hopelessly conflicts with some plan I have for the story).
So I basically thought, Ooh, cute! and bam. Dasa had silver hair.
But then, so did Yukinari. That seemed to make readers suspect that silver hair was the proof someone was a homunculus. I suspect that’s where the “Dasa = Hatsune” theory started.
Well! At first I thought to myself, How about we run with that? Dasa’s past was already sort of a blank slate, so I played around with it a bit. But I eventually realized that if Yukinari’s older sister was supposed to be very nearly the last boss, then “Dasa = Hatsune” presented some problems.
What to do, then? After much thought, I decided to take the risk of deliberately not spelling it out.
I wonder what my readers’ reactions will be.
Ichirou Sakaki 2016/4/6