Afterword
“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.
5. Kudou Mirei. The student council president. While I did quite a bit of planning in regard to the other four’s traits and personalities, Kudou’s ended up coming about entirely off the cuff. To be brutally honest: She was actually a guy in the series’ initial plot outline. It was only when I was nearing the end of the writing process for volume one and finally hit the scene where the student council president would be introduced that it struck me that nobody would really be happy to see a guy get thrown into the story at that point, and I changed her into a girl on the spot. That was such a good call, seriously! She ended up being so, so much cuter than I ever imagined in the anime, to the extent that it influenced me to give her more screen time in the later novels as well. As for why she ended up with a stupidly broken power like Grateful Robber...well, I think this volume’s main text already explained that in a nutshell.
6. Saitou Hitomi. A heroine in her mid-twenties—specifically, a heroine for the final boss rather than the protagonist. She started the story out already in full-blown maximum-affection mode, unlike the other heroines, which made her quite fun to write. To be totally frank re: Kiryuu et al, when they showed up back in volume 2, my driving motivation was to just throw out a whole squad of villains all at once. I ended up coming up with their basic characters and power names, then didn’t really think them through much beyond that. I blame the fact that power names are so fun to think up for that questionable decision! Let’s just call it my special move: Leave It for My Future Self to Figure Out. It’s a tactic that I use pretty often, and it works out a surprising amount of the time.
7. Futaba Tamaki. A rustic sort of girl with a thick accent. An aspiring heroine, but one who just couldn’t make the cut. I feel like she ended up coming across as a conniving villainess sort of character, in a sense, but from another perspective, I would say that she’s the most normal girl in the whole cast. Not a heroine—just a normal girl. I really do have to wonder if anyone actually appreciated her having that Fukushima accent in the end, though.
Next up, the men!
1. Andou Jurai. The protagonist. Dark and Dark. A chuuni. The moment I came up with the name “Jurai,” it hit me that this series could actually go the distance. That’s a relatively common thing to have happen in my writing process, actually. Although Andou’s a chuuni, he’s a chuuni with the capacity to look at himself from an outside perspective—in other words, he’s a character whose nature is self-contradictory from the word go. Volume 6 was born from that contradiction, and I think it played a pretty big factor in this final volume as well.
I spent a long time thinking over how this series would end, to be honest, but when all was said and done, I decided that having it conclude with Andou moving on from his chuunibyou would be the right direction to take it in. That’s how a line that I wrote back in volume 1 with no intent of it having any deep significance—“Let us begin the end of the beginning”—ended up being a surprisingly perfect note for the series to wrap up on. And, speaking of which...I ended up making “hella cool” into something of a catchphrase for Andou, which in the long term had the unfortunate side effect of making me have a character sing the praises of names I came up with myself. So, that was sort of humiliating! It was like I was shouting “All right, readers, this is how you give a supernatural power a cool name!” every time I put a new one in, raising the bar for myself to a stupid degree over and over...and god damn if it wasn’t fun as hell!
2. Sagami Shizumu. A self-proclaimed reader. A character who would honestly be even cringier than Andou if he existed in real life, and who threw the story for a loop in all sorts of ways, repeatedly. If it weren’t for him, I feel like the series would’ve probably wrapped up after half as many volumes. I do have to admit, though, that I really like meta characters like him. He also ended up playing the roles of both narrator and protagonist in volume 11, and speaking as the author, even I’m shocked that he of all characters managed to reform himself.
3. Kiryuu Hajime. A final boss, protagonist, and author all in one. A chuuni who’s a step ahead of Andou in terms of both age and his place in the overall story. A man who loves being a chuuni more than anyone and who wants to stay that way more than anything, all the while having already realized that having that desire means he’s started to stray from the chuuni path.
Changing yourself is hard, but forcing yourself to not change can be even harder. I believe that I, myself, have changed considerably as an author over the five years that When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace has run. You could call that growth, in a sense, but you could also call it degeneration. In any case, for better or for worse I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write a story like this again. I could probably write another supernatural battle story, and I could probably write another high school rom-com, but I don’t think I could write this story or these characters anymore. In that sense as well, this final volume represents an ending and a moment of moving on. I’ll still be writing more stories from here on out in general, of course!
And now, it’s time to completely ruin the sentimental mood I have going here with an incredibly blunt announcement! On the same day this final volume goes on sale, the first volume of my brand-new series, Isekai Tennis Musou: Tennis Player Toka Iu Nazo no Otoko ga Chotto Tsuyosugirun Desu Kedo! (Isekai Tennis Warrior: This Mysterious Tennis Player’s Just a Little Too Overpowered!) will be released! I’d explain what it’s about, but I think the title pretty much says it all. It also has an ever so slight connection with When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace’s setting, in the sense that Andou’s child makes an extremely minor cameo! Please check it out, if you’re interested!
Finally, I’d like to offer some thanks. First, to my editor, Nakamizo, and my illustrator, 029. Next, to the good people at Studio TRIGGER, who not only handled the anime but also helped out with the interior illustrations of the novels. And finally, I’d like to offer my thanks to my readers for sticking with this series this whole time. The fact that I was able to finish it off with a proper ending is all thanks to you, and I offer you my greatest and sincerest gratitude.
And that’s all! May we meet again, if the fates allow it!
Kota Nozomi
Bonus Translation Notes: On Endings
I was already a fan of When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace long before I began working on the series, but in retrospect, it wasn’t until I translated a certain scene in the first volume that I really fell in love with it. That scene: the fateful conversation between Kiryuu Hajime and Andou Jurai in a chain restaurant, and specifically, the moment in that conversation where Kiryuu invoked the name of the Man of La Mancha himself, Don Quixote.
I was prepared for the endless media shoutouts, the impenetrably Japanese language gags, and the flagrant disregard for conventional storytelling, but a shout-out to the story that inspired one of my favorite childhood musicals came completely out of left field. Thankfully, that shout-out would set the tone for the whole rest of the series, both in terms of how fascinatingly eclectic the concepts and philosophies the novels dug into could be, as well as how layered their characterization often was (considering the subtle revelation later on in the conversation that everything Kiryuu said to Andou over the course of it came straight off of Wikipedia).
In short: while I was ready for this series to be a hilariously good time, I was not prepared for just how dang much there was to it beyond that. The more substance I found between the gags and geek culture indulgence, the more I came to appreciate just how well-considered Supernatural Battles was from start to finish. Plenty of light novels can do silly parody and meta gaggery, but very few can fit those elements in seamlessly alongside genuinely well-developed themes that are essential to the plot rather than incidental to it.
Anyway, we’re four paragraphs in now and I haven’t even begun to touch on this essay’s ostensible subject, so I’ll cut to the chase: as the previous three paragraphs might have hinted, I unabashedly love how Kota Nozomi chose to conclude Supernatural Battles’ story! I firmly believe that this was the ending that this series deserved—and, to paraphrase Andou, that this was quite possibly the only ending that could have tied it all together in a believable and satisfying way.
Kiryuu Hajime’s plan—insofar as he ever had one—could only ever have been a failure, and that failure could only ever have come about thanks to his own mistakes. After all, for all that Kiryuu was an overarching enigma, he was also an open book from his very first appearance. For every moment when he took someone in with his mysterious, dangerous badass shtick, there was another moment where he was undermined by his own lack of forethought. For every moment that the series implied that he held all the cards and pulled all the strings, there was another where it was made abundantly clear that deep down, he had no idea what the hell he was doing. And, well, of course he didn’t! At the end of the day, Kiryuu was a chuuni, and a chuuni who actually managed to live up to their own hype would not, in fact, be any sort of chuuni at all.
And then there’s the literary club side of the spectrum! Sure, it would have been fun to see them really go all in on the Spirit War, and I’m sure some readers will be disappointed that they don’t get one final on-screen moment to let their powers shine...but once again, that would have flown in the face of everything we’d learned about them as characters up to that point. However much fun having the literary club crew get involved with Fallen Black’s world of supernatural battles might’ve been, it never really would have made sense for them, and personally, I think it’s really cool that the series both acknowledged that truth and actually followed through on it. The powers were the inciting incident for the literary club’s story, but in the end, that story was never really about the powers. Andou himself put it best all the way back in volume 1: “Supernatural powers are the coolest thing ever—and that’s all they are. That’s all they have to be.”
There’s so much more that I could gush about—like how clever it was to front-load the volume with four separate epilogues, thus letting the climax be the climax without needing a lengthy cool-down period afterword, or how delightful it is that when all’s said and done, the entire conclusion was brought about by Sagami being a smarmy little prick back in volume 11 and ruining everything entirely by accident—but I think I’ve more or less made my point already. Are there characters and aspects of the series that I would’ve loved to see more of before the end? Absolutely, but I could also keep reading about these characters for years on end without ever being completely satisfied, and as the story itself argues, it was far better for them to go out at the top of their game in a real, definite ending.
But of course, this isn’t just an ending. With every ending comes a beginning, and with the ending of Supernatural Battles came the beginning of the rest of Kota Nozomi’s writing career. That brings me to the one last elephant in the room that I’d be remiss to not address—an elephant that, I confess, I willfully glossed over back in the TL notes for volume 7, but that this volume’s afterword makes it very hard to ignore. That elephant’s identity: the controversy surrounding Isekai Tennis Musou, the novel that released alongside volume 13 of Supernatural Battles and that, as Kota Nozomi described in its afterword, features Andou’s son (whose name, by the way, is revealed to be Andou Mei) in a cameo appearance.
Why was the novel controversial? Simply put, shortly following its release, it was accused of being a Prince of Tennis rip-off. In particular, two aspects of the novel—its illustrations and the names of some of its special moves—were seen by some vocal Prince of Tennis fans as going a step beyond parody or homage and entering the realm of plagiarism. The matter was never litigated in any sense beyond the court of public opinion—and for that matter, I’ve been unable to find any statement or even acknowledgment of the controversy from anyone associated with Prince of Tennis, though there’s every chance it’s out there somewhere and I just missed it—but regardless, the previously planned second volume of the series was ultimately canceled as a result of the backlash.
Now, having read neither Prince of Tennis nor Isekai Tennis Musou in their entirety (and being almost comically not impartial when it comes to Kota Nozomi’s work), I am very much not prepared to offer a fully informed take on whether or not the novel was a rip-off. That being said, I do feel comfortable critiquing a common thread that I found in online comments left by Prince of Tennis fans at the time of the controversy: the idea that Kota Nozomi was essentially trying to slip the inspiration under the radar and pretend that he’d never even heard of Prince of Tennis, much less incorporated elements of it into his series. Simply put, I just can’t possibly believe that an author who directly referenced Prince of Tennis more than half a dozen times in his previous series—sometimes by name—could ever possibly think that he had any hope of stealing its concepts without anyone noticing. The idea that he was trying to pay homage to the series, on the other hand, is so plausible I have a really hard time imagining that any other explanation could be more convincing.
So, that was all pretty depressing, huh? Fortunately for the tone of this section, though, this particular story doesn’t end there! Kota Nozomi didn’t stop writing after the Isekai Tennis Musou controversy—in fact, he’s written so many books and been involved in so many projects since then that it’s actually kind of hard to give a concrete number for how many of them there’ve been! He’s had two new novels published in the past several months alone, in fact: one called Kotori Yuu-chan ha Uchikiri Manga wo Aishisugiteiru (roughly, Kotori Yuu Loves Canceled Manga Way Too Much), published by MF Bunko J, and a spinoff novel for Sakurai Norio’s manga The Dangers in my Heart (a series that he seems very well-suited to adapt, considering it stars a character with a very distinct case of chuunibyou!).
And that’s not even the half of it! In a stroke of serendipity so implausible it fits in right alongside Sagami’s mother waking up the moment the Spirit War ended, literally eight hours before I sat down to start writing this afterword, Kota Nozomi just happened to post a short story follow-up to Supernatural Battles! That short story, titled Guiltia Sin Jurai Reborn, features the main cast of Supernatural Battles having an extremely meta chat about the series, its ending, and how it relates to the modern day. It was written in commemoration of the anime’s tenth anniversary...kinda? Technically, it was written to commemorate an instant udon commercial that used the anime’s tenth anniversary as an excuse to do a cheeky retake of Hatoko’s ever-famous rant scene, photoshopping in instant udon bowls all over the place and re-recording all the lines (using the original voice actors!) to make it all about udon instead of chuuni nonsense. It’s extremely funny, and I really couldn’t think of a more hilariously appropriate way for this series to end up getting a short-story follow-up.
So, in short: though Supernatural Battles the series has ended, its author is still going strong, and it lives on in the popular consciousness! I really couldn’t have asked for a better note to round out the decade-plus-long tale of Kota Nozomi’s meta masterpiece. I would love to translate the short story itself someday, though the world of publishers and licensing—even when it comes to content that’s freely available online—is complex and unforgiving in a way that means I absolutely cannot make any promises whatsoever on that front.
And with that, we’ve come to another ending: the final conclusion of my TL note sections! I’ve certainly had more than my fair share of fun writing them (as evidenced by the—oh, gods—sixty thousand-plus words I’ve put into them over the course of all thirteen volumes), and I can only hope that reading them has been at least somewhat close to as entertaining for you! We’re not completely done, to be fair—there’s still the unusually short list of citation-worthy media references to go through, as well as the author and artist jacket comments—but as far as my own self-indulgent ramblings go, this is it. It’s been an honor and a privilege to work on this series, and I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Supernatural Battles’ editor, its project managers, its image editor, its many, many proofreaders, its readers, and—of course—its author for making this possible. Translating these books has been the greatest and most enjoyable challenge of my career to date, and I desperately hope I get the chance to work on a series even half as gleefully weird and clever in the future.
I never really bothered making up a consistent sign-off a la Kota Nozomi, but I’m feeling the irresistible urge to do so now by aping a certain verse that comes to mind: may the wild winds of fortune carry you onward, whithersoever they blow!
-Tristan Hill
Chapter 1
🜂 Thousand Winters/Pretty Pigeon/Colorful Bow/World Alight Route: The End
We touched on this back in volume 11, which used similar naming conventions for a number of its chapters, but as a refresher: each of these route names is a play on the kanji used to write the names of the characters that they focus on! It’s worth noting that, like in volume 11, the names—and, in fact, the whole phrases—were in English in the original text, though we had to do a little more tweaking this time to make said English come across naturally. In the original text, they read “Route of [thousand winter/pretty pigeon/colorful bow/the world light] is the end.” Our goal in tweaking the lines was to make them come across more naturally as the sort of message you’d receive upon clearing a character’s route in a visual novel (on account of the fact that the way Sagami’s power is described in relation to Andou’s visions is dating sim coded from start to finish—hence why we decided to keep the word “route” as is).
🜂 Questions like the one on this test turn up quite frequently in the National Center Test, so you’ll have to master that as well.
The National Center Test is a standardized exam used by many Japanese universities for the sake of admissions! If you’re familiar with the American college admission system, think the SAT or ACT, but notably more intensive and complex in structure. The whole process takes place over the course of two days, and a large number of tests are offered, out of which students only have to actually take a set selection as determined by their college of choice—hence why having to take the Ethics test wasn’t necessarily a given for Andou and Sayumi. Roughly half a million students take the test every year, and although it’s usually just one step in the long, complicated, and grueling process of applying to college in Japan, it’s the one that tends to get the most representation in media on account of its scale and how (mostly) universal the experience of going through it is for anyone who tries to go on to higher education.
Note that although I’ve been referring to the Center Test in present tense, it technically doesn’t exist anymore! It was replaced in 2021 by a new exam called the Common Test. That said, the Common Test shares all of the traits of the Center Test that I described above and is mostly distinct in terms of the specifics of the subjects offered and the methodology of the tests themselves. In other words, for media consumption purposes, you can more or less think of the two as interchangeable—just know that if they call it the Common Test, the series is probably set in 2021 or later.
🜂 “I...I love you too, Sayumi...”
As you may have noticed at some point over the course of the past thirteen volumes, we chose to not directly carry over the original Japanese honorifics in our translation of this series! Our reasoning behind that choice was pretty simple: the use of honorifics throughout the series just isn’t impactful or significant in a way that isn’t simple to portray through natural English dialogue...with the sole exception of this line, which in the original text hinges upon Andou dropping the “-san” from Sayumi’s name. The intent of the exchange is to show how Andou and Sayumi still aren’t totally comfortable talking to each other in a way that expresses intimacy, which made it a relatively straightforward one to handle, but I just find it amusing that it was only right at the end of the series that it finally decided to throw a curveball and make the honorifics matter in a way that had to be written around.
Chapter 3
🜂 She’d so mercilessly used strength in numbers to crush a single foe, it’d make even a Super Sentai hero wince.
The Super Sentai franchise, more or less by definition, involves teams of five or more protagonists fighting the forces of evil. As you might imagine, having five or more protagonists gang up on a single villain can, from time to time, come across as a little unsporting. The series tradition of giving its villains hordes of literally faceless minions to call in whenever the fighting starts is presumably intended to rectify this issue, but it’s just not quite enough to dispel the impression that Sentai heroes are all about winning through strength in numbers.
🜂 To pull out another card game analogy, it was even worse than playing a one-of-a-kind card and informing your opponent that all of your cards are toons now, so nothing affects them anymore.
It’s time for one last Yu-Gi-Oh shout-out! Toon World is the signature card of Pegasus, one of the series’ arc villains. In the manga and anime it essentially renders all of your cards untouchable (though the actual, real-world version of the card is, of course, significantly less overpowered). Being as Pegasus is both the creator of the card and the only one who has a copy, it comes across as more than a little unfair when he uses it!
Chapter 4
🜂 ...Hajime could just use the Reverse Crux Errata to Mary Sue his way into winning anyway.
I feel the need to clarify that this is not, in fact, any sort of localization—the original Japanese text really did use the term “Mary Sue,” entirely as is.
Chapter 6
🜂 I really get how Oda Eiichirou and Aoyama Goushou must feel right now.
Oda Eiichirou is the creator of One Piece, and Aoyama Goushou is the creator of Detective Conan! Being as those are respectively the 20th and 27th longest-running manga of all time by volume count, as well as the first and fourth best-selling manga of all time, it’s very safe to say that Kiryuu is indeed comparing himself to creators who are far, far above his pay grade.
Author: Kota Nozomi
I played tennis all the way from middle school to college, and I’ve decided to make the most of my experiences from that period in my next work! Incidentally, my tennis player title back in the day was “the mirthless clown: Bad Trick,” on account of the fact that my completely unpredictable playstyle made fools of my opponents. Note that absolutely nobody other than me ever knew about said title.
Illustrator/Character Designer: 029 (Oniku)
Illustrator for The Devil is a Part-Timer!, Yuusha no Segare, and Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear.
I just can’t stop imagining who Andou might’ve ended up going out with in the end. Thank you so much for the past six years!
Interior Illustrator: Shiori Miyazaki (TRIGGER)
Animator who recently worked on Kiznaiver (2016), Little Witch Academia (2017), etc. Currently working on Darling in the Franxx (2018).
Congratulations on the final volume’s publication! I wasn’t able to participate in the anime’s production, but I’m very happy to have gotten involved with Supernatural Battles by doing the color illustration at the start of this volume.
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login