The Template Temptation

Apart from the male contingent hitting it off over robot model construction, nothing else of great note happened during the mixer. It ended about two hours after everyone arrived, their stomachs full of Italian food and drink. Haruto and Kaizu split the bill for everyone between them.

“Well,” Haruto said in front of the restaurant, “thanks for coming today! I’ll see you all around the publishing office, huh?”

“…Thank you,” Aoba said. The two hours together hadn’t improved her mood as she trotted off.

Chihiro watched her go. “I’ll join Kasamatsu on the way to the station. It’s getting late anyway,” he added before bowing and setting off after her.

“Wow, Chihiro’s a good-lookin’ guy, huh?” Kaizu may have sounded like he was making fun of him, but he wasn’t. He sighed. “…Aoba Kasamatsu, though… I don’t mind if someone’s aggressive like that, you know. Hungry. But if that’s how she’s acting before she’s sold a single book, that worries me… I can only guess she and her editor aren’t getting along, either.”

“…If you’re that worried,” Ashley countered, an ironic tone to her voice, “then why don’t you look after her?”

Kaizu chuckled. “That’s not my job, now, is it? Plus, if their relationship deteriorates to the point that she doesn’t even make her debut, that’s just fine by me.”

There was nothing ironic or joking about Kaizu’s tone. He seemed to be honestly hoping for that.

He turned back toward Ashley. “By the way, you wanna get another drink with me somewhere else?”

“Mmm…?!” Haruto reared back, visibly surprised, and scrutinized Kaizu’s face.

“All right,” Ashley casually responded.

“Wha…?!” Haruto’s eyes darted between them a few times.

“Well, thanks for tonight, Fuwa.”

“Hee-hee-hee! Let’s meet up again soon, Haruto.”

The two of them walked off together, leaving a dumbfounded Haruto behind.

“Uh… What…?”

A few seconds was all it took to plunge him into turmoil. They’d barely even exchanged any words in the bar. What was it that made them so naturally pair off and walk the city streets at night?

“Didn’t they know each other before now?” Ui asked.

Haruto nodded. Then it clicked in his mind. “Ohhh, yeah, maybe…!”

But how did they know each other before? The most natural explanation was that he was a taxpayer client of hers, but that wouldn’t explain why he readily invited her out without any warning. They were both in their thirties, though. Were they actually an item before now…?

“Um, Fuwa?” Ui asked as Haruto’s mind raced over this.

“Y-yes?!”

“…What do you want to do now?”

“Well, um…”

Haruto failed to provide a coherent answer. Ui looked up at him.

“Because if you have some time, would you mind if we chat a bit?”

“A-all right.” Haruto nodded, swept away by the advancing wave.

The two of them stopped by a coffee shop on the way to the train station, sitting across from each other. Haruto eyed Ui carefully, heart racing. She seemed to be brooding over something, which made him feel even more nervous.

…She isn’t gonna say “I love you” right now, is she…?

If she did, he’d all but have to tell her no. But he knew how it felt to have one’s feelings denied like that—his own experience with that was still fresh. He didn’t want to put another girl through that same kind of pain. He knew by now that it not only hurt to be denied but to do the denying in the first place.

…In which case, it wouldn’t be for her sake at all. I’d just be trying to avoid more pain.

Sometimes, he knew, you had to lay your feelings bare if you wanted to move forward in life—but still, he hoped against hope she didn’t choose now to do it. He hoped with all his heart.

“Um, Fuwa?” she suddenly asked.

“Y-yes?” he replied, voice wooden.

After a couple of false starts, Ui finally said it:

“…Is writing to a template that bad of a thing?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t—um? T-to a template?”

He was already reflexively offering an apology before he parsed the question.

“Remember what Aoba said at the bar?” she pensively continued. “Like, ‘unlike your typical template otherworld fantasy’ and so on. I used to do the same thing, until I went to your lecture at school. I used to pick on other series for using the same template, over and over.”

“Oh… Right.”

Haruto recalled what she’d said at the class and smiled.

A template, of course, is a standard style or format one could use to create perfect copies of the same thing repeatedly. In the creative world, it was a teasing way to refer to characters or story developments that were all but copied from other works.

“But once you yelled at me,” Ui continued, “I realized I made fun of things like otherworld fantasies and super-powered battle series without ever really reading them. So I did. I read a lot of them. And once I did, I saw a lot of books in the same genre really do share a lot of the same elements.”

“…Oh? For example?”

“…Well, like how a proud, determined girl with red hair appears as a main character, or how the hero winds up dueling a famously powerful student on the first day of his new school, or how he fights with a sword, or how he traces his lineage back to some kind of important family, or how there’s battle tournaments and this mysterious enemy appears in the middle of them, and also how titles use a lot of complex terms no one understands unless you leave a note in the ruby.”

“Sounds a lot like Chevalier of the New World.”

“Yes,” she replied as Haruto giggled. “And those elements do appear enough that you could call them a template. But when I read the books to the end, or went on to Volume 2 or 3, I realized the only things these series had in common were just a very small handful of elements behind their framework.”

“…”

Haruto remained silent but kept a small smile on his face as Ui continued.

“For example, maybe the hero comes from some fancy lineage, but the full backstory can be totally different between series. Maybe he underwent special training from a young age; maybe he was raised without knowing his lineage; maybe there’s literally some kind of power in his blood; maybe he has a particularly unique sister or parent; maybe he grew up loved; maybe he didn’t. And an enemy jumping into a tournament midway? Maybe his identity’s revealed; maybe it’s not; maybe he’s actually a robot or a monster; maybe he’s human; maybe the hero beats him; maybe he doesn’t. The same element can be depicted in a ton of different ways by different series. And maybe they’re part of the same abstract category, but I don’t think you can really say they’re all the same just because of that.”

“…Right, right.”

“That’s most obvious with all the ‘hero gets reincarnated or summoned to another world’ novels on the Web. The heroes live in all kinds of different ways after that summon or reincarnation. People accused those novels of being immature power trips starring invincible protagonists, but—at least with the series that have lasted a while or made the jump to print novels—no matter how invincible the hero is at first, he’s always going to run into someone equal to or better than him. Even if he’s still got the most power in the universe, he’ll face challenges in dealing with the world and its people in one way or the other, and every series depicts him solving those challenges in a different way. Lately, you’re seeing more variety, like people getting reincarnated as spiders or vending machines or trucks, and some popular series like Konosuba and Atelier Tanaka are tweaking the formula for laughs, too. There’s this ‘template’ of people going into other worlds with their past memories or other ‘cheat’ abilities, and thanks to that, writers are asking, ‘What happens next?’ and using that as a starting point to take their own paths. The fact we have so many books that share a common set of rules that we call it a ‘template’ is the whole reason we can have parodies of that, or series that turn it on its head. The existence of templates is a sign of a mature genre, and I don’t think you can dismiss entire genres out of hand like I did.”

Ui took a few short breaths after finishing her tirade. Haruto gave her a short round of applause, which made her blush a little.

“…I’m sorry, Fuwa. I didn’t mean to ramble quite so much…”

Haruto smiled. “I can tell you’ve studied a lot of series, Aioi, and not just your personal favorites, either. I don’t think you’re the kind of person who’d throw around terms like ‘the good old days of light novels’ without thinking about it.”

“Oh, don’t bring that up again,” Ui replied, visibly embarrassed.

“Ha-ha! Well, I mean, about your series… You know, I Woke Up as the Demon Lord of Another World, so I Just Started a Harem?”

“Y-yes?”

“That didn’t get picked for the grand prize just because you studied the trends and produced a really good summary of them.”

“Huh?”

“It wasn’t some kind of cheap magic trick you pulled off. Me, Kaizu, and the editor in chief all agreed that here was someone who really liked what they were writing. That’s what convinced us to make the pick. And you do love the otherworld tropes, don’t you?”

“…Yes,” Ui said, a bit reluctantly. “…Not always, though. I made fun of them without reading them. Even when you compelled me to start studying them, at first I was just like, ‘These are all the same.’ But once I started honestly appraising each series, I realized each was different in its own way, and it turned me on to how deep this genre could be…and I guess I started really enjoying it. That’s why I wanted to write in it.”

Haruto nodded sagely. “I get that. It was the same way with me and Chevalier.”

When he began to write that, the chief trends in light novels were harems and battle-centric series. He purchased several for research, and somewhere along the line, he got addicted. He fell in love with the whole subject. So he dove in. And maybe there were true-blue craftspeople in the world who could write a book 100 percent based on their own skill, with no passion involved—but Haruto could never do that.

“Back when I was still just a light novel reader and not a writer,” he continued, “whenever you saw a ton of books in the same genre come out at the same time, I’d be like, ‘Why are all these people writing the same thing at once? Are they all that hard up for money?’ But that’s not it. I mean, sure, there are industry reasons for jumping on the bandwagon—it makes it easier for editors to say yes, since they know they can sell at least X number of copies. But the real reason is simpler. I think it’s just, you know, they want to write it. If you read a book that was great enough to launch its own trend, you start wanting to try to make your own. Like, you want to test out this plot point, or you think you can pull people in better than this other guy. You can’t help it.”

“I definitely hear you…!” Ui nodded.

“…And maybe I’m looking through rose-colored glasses a little, but I really don’t think there’s such thing as a ‘template’ novel. Even if you borrowed a plot wholesale from somewhere else, unless you’re just copy-pasting and changing only the proper nouns, I think the author’s own will is going to creep into it. If the feeling behind the work is different, the product’s going to be a separate thing, too.”

“Yes… I agree with you.” Ui seemed to be taking it to heart. But her expression was clouded.

“…What’s up?”

“Well, Fuwa, you and I know otherworld fantasy can vary wildly depending on the series, and you can see that for yourself when you read them. But most readers just aren’t like that.”

“Right…” Haruto had to nod at this.

“And I’m scared,” she continued, visibly concerned. “Because I personally believe that my work is the only one of its kind in the whole world, but to the masses, I’m sure it’s just going to look like something off a template. Even if someone reads it to the end, I’m bracing to hear them say, ‘That was a really good riff on the template.’ Just like I used to be, and I guess just like how Aoba is now. This story I love and cherish is going to be dismissed by so many people as just another rehash, and that really scares me.”

“……”

Haruto fell silent. This fear on Ui’s part was something Haruto himself had felt in the past, something that gradually diminished as he kept producing books. But the anime version brought in all these people who’d never read the novels and only knew the title and basic plotline, and that made the fear fresh in his mind all over again. There were so many out there who looked at a template-ish series and used that as a reason to trash it without even reading page one.

Saying all otherworld fantasies are the same was really ignorant. It was like stating, ‘All mysteries are the same, because they have these weird crimes taking place,’ or ‘All sci-fi is the same, because it has all this advanced technology,’ or ‘All novels set in schools are the same, because they’re set in schools.’” But Haruto had no way of taking this ignorance—brought about by a lack of understanding, critical thought, and (most of all) interest—and enlightening the detractors, and he doubted anyone else in the industry did, either.

“I’m sorry, but I have no idea how to get rid of that fear.”

“No…?”

Ui looked disappointed. She probably wanted to discuss this more than anything today.

“…But I think it’s the job of each author to face up to it. A lot of them get used to it as they keep producing stories. A lot of them change their writing style so it’s hard to say they’re working with a template. I’m sure some of them even go after their critics on the Net or in their series. And…I know some of them leave when they can’t take it anymore.”

“What about you, Fuwa?”

“I…don’t know.” He chuckled. “It’s hard to say. I thought I had come to terms with it a while ago, but when I see a bunch of anime-only people trashing me, it makes me want to freak out.”

“You too, huh?”

Ui smiled at him a little tearfully—the vague sort of expression Boogiepop makes all the time.

As they walked toward the station, Ui stopped and bowed to Haruto.

“Thanks for everything today, Fuwa. It’s only a month until my first book is published…and now I feel like I’m ready to be on the same stage as you.”

“…Oh?” He smiled a bit. “Well, there’s no need to be so formal about it.”

Ui froze. “Huh?”

“You’ve studied a lot. You’ve worked hard. You’ve thought, and worried over, the same things as me. We’ve been sharing the stage for a while now. I’m not above you or anything.”

“…Well, what should I call you, then?” Ui asked.

“Anything is fine.”

She thought for a moment. Then:

“All right… Haruto.”

It was a simple shift, but it came as an epoch-making event to Haruto. Being called by his first name, in this kind of scenario, by a woman—that hadn’t happened since high school. It was a completely normal thing to call him, but there was this oddly sweet echo to it in his ears. He never noticed it until now. He wondered if Itsuki felt that way with how Nayuta talked to him, and it made him jealous.

“…Is that all right?”

“Oh, sure! Totally! Please!”

Ui smiled at the reddened Haruto, then bowed again. “In that case, Haruto, thank you. I know I still have a lot to learn from you.”

“Sure. Me too,” he replied, unable to keep his heart from racing.