Afterword
Thank you for buying the nineteenth volume of Realist Hero. This is Dojyomaru, who visited Fukuoka’s V Gundam and the Yoshinogari Ruins in 2003. Is this the future or the past?
At this point, I’ve followed up on all the foreshadowing and setting details I hinted at back in the first volume. Whew! It sure took a long time. Has it been about a decade since I started writing the web version? I’m truly grateful to those who have stuck with me throughout this journey.
Having written all of this, you might wonder how much was planned out from the beginning. I had the content up until volume 4 locked in. I think anyone reading this will already be aware that it was a good cutoff point. It was the threshold I had to reach if I wanted to have something still worthwhile in the event the series got canceled... I believe I’ve mentioned this elsewhere.
From there on, I just decided on the broader flow of events, and ad-libbed the rest. This larger flow included the collapse of the Gran Chaos Empire, the truth of the Demon Lord’s Domain, and a great man emblematic of the era standing in Souma’s way...or something like that. I figured if I just touched on all those points, the larger story would come together.
As for the parts I made up as I went along, it was a matter of considering what stories I could tell with the characters at hand and what I wanted to write. After all, up until this nineteenth volume, hardly any of the named characters left the stage, except for Gaius VIII... Oh, and Georg and Beowulf, right? For some reason, I always seem to forget that those two left the stage. Funny, that.
Anyway, there were lots of characters, so it was easy to find ones suited to the kinds of stories I wanted to tell. If Souma’s involvement was enough to solve everything, that would’ve been too convenient and would have gotten monotonous. That’s why I focused on perspectives other than his after volume 4.
For instance, volume 8 concentrated on the story of Julius’s return during the demon wave, while volume 11 mainly focused on Tomoe, Ichiha, and Yuriga for similar reasons. This style of focusing on the character that fit the situation is the ad-libbing I mentioned earlier.
The one that stands out in this regard is volume 6, which features Naden. Most of her story was originally part of a different novel. I had the idea of an Eastern-style character living in a country of Western-style dragons but rejected it as not strong enough to stand on its own. So, I fit it into the world of Realist Hero. (Did I mention this somewhere before?) That’s part of why the world of Realist Hero grew far beyond what I’d initially envisioned.
Now, the curtain will fall with the next volume, volume 20. The main focus will be on doing epilogues for each character and concluding the stories of theirs that I haven’t been able to finish yet, so I hope you will stick with me until the end.
With that, I’d like to thank everyone involved with this book, and all of my readers.
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