My Stepsister is My Ex-Girlfriend - Volume 3 - Chapter Aft

Afterword: Real, Fake, and Manufactured

When I was in middle school, there was this really funny guy. Now, he wasn’t the leader or anything of the popular group he was in, but he got a lot of laughs. He was the class clown. From my perspective as a light novel otaku, he seemed right in his element at school.

But one day, he suddenly stopped coming to school. Our homeroom teacher told us that acting like someone he wasn’t had taken a toll on him. Honestly, now that I think about it, it was pretty tactless of the teacher to disclose such a private matter to everyone in the class, but I’ll leave that outrage for another time. I still vividly remember the reaction of the class. We were speechless.

The group that he’d hung out with had absolutely no clue about his struggles. Everyone plays a role, but no one was really aware of his. They had no idea what toll it had taken on him. The entire time, he was forcing himself to be someone he wasn’t. Why? Because those were the expectations pushed onto him by the group.

Humans are, by nature, creatures that play a character to match the expectations of the people around them. Just as there are people who find it difficult to do that, there are people who can do it as easily as they breathe. There are also people who see this as growth, and others who see it as submission. Either way, though, there’s no escaping the observer effect.

Since this volume features the self-proclaimed ROM expert, Kogure Kawanami, there was no way I could pass up the opportunity to talk about this. Sure, he’s a very talkative person and not really a ROM expert, but I wanted to show that how someone perceives you is strongly affected by your own actions. Without that, it’d be hard to understand Mizuto and Yume’s circumstances.

It was fun to explore what kind of roles two people who first saw each other as family and then as exes would make for themselves. But next volume, we’ll return to our roots and focus on the relationship between Mizuto and Yume.

A very big and heartfelt thanks to my editor, the illustrator, TakayaKi, everyone involved with this book, and everyone who’s been supporting this series!

This has been Kyosuke Kamishiro’s My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex: “Childhood Friends No More.”

Truth be told, I generally write the opposite of what I want to say in a conspicuous place.