Serious Trouble (What’s So Serious? The Fact That It Happens All the Time)

On a late afternoon near the end of April, Itsuki was working in his apartment when he got a call from his editor, Toki.

…He didn’t want pages from me, did he?

Volume 6 of All About My Little Sister was due out in June, and he had already wrapped up the first draft. Volume 8 of Sisterly Combat was launching in July, and while D——ki or F——mi would be at his throat for a submission right now, if G——GA or GF Bunko was the publisher, there was no need to panic about that yet.

No, there was nothing to fear from picking this up.

“Right.” Nodding, Itsuki pressed the “Talk” button.

“…Sorry for the rush, but can you come to the office tonight? The anime production team has something they want to discuss.”

“The anime…? What do they want?”

“I haven’t heard the details yet…but if I had to guess, some kind of trouble’s come up,” Toki replied, and Itsuki froze.

Thus, Itsuki reported to the Gift Publishing conference room at nine that evening. The room contained Toki, editor in chief Satoshi Godo, All About My Little Sister anime director Munenori Tarui, producer Tsutomu Oshima, and screenwriter Masahiko Hirugano.

“Good seeing you again, Mr. Hashima,” began Tarui, as calm as ever.

It had been about two months since Itsuki met with the anime staff. The scripts for all twelve episodes were nearly done in late February, and the rest of their anime-related discussions were mostly handled via e-mail. The way Toki described it, storyboard production was well underway by now, but…

Itsuki glanced at Hirugano. The scripts should’ve been finished by now, but having the screenwriter show up at this emergency meeting was a red flag. Fighting back the crashing waves of fear in his mind, he sat down and waited to hear the news.

Oshima, the producer, was the one who spoke first, his face tense. “…Well, to be frank, it’s all but a given that our production schedule is lagging seriously behind.”

“Wha…?! Wh-what do you mean by that…?!”

Itsuki was floored. Toki and Godo, likely just as in the dark until now, nervously scowled.

“…Could you explain why?” Godo, with his yakuza looks and low, threatening voice, asked Oshima to continue.

Beads of sweat began to appear on Oshima’s forehead; in his place, Tarui laid out the story.

“Well, Yamada, our production assistant, has fled.”

“What?” Itsuki, unsure what this meant, did a double take.

“Our production assistant Yamada fled.” This was Kakeru Yamada, who was in his mid-thirties—a tall man with a tanned, athletic build. He was always there for any important meeting, but Itsuki hadn’t talked directly with him too much, so he didn’t know a great deal about his temperament. He did recall that he looked kind of tired most of the time, though.

Itsuki wasn’t exactly sure what kind of work a production assistant did, but he knew it was something important. They literally had to assist the production, and that involved keeping each section collaborating with the others, making contacts, retrieving art from the animators, sorting out location scouting, and so forth.

“Um…what do you mean by fled?”

“He hasn’t contacted us at all in the past two weeks. He also hasn’t been back home in that time, so he’s currently missing. I think we’re gonna have to assume that he took off.”

“How can you be so calm about that?! Like, did he get involved in something bad, or…?!” Itsuki’s voice was starting to rise. Tarui displayed his usual calm demeanor.

“Well, the chances of that aren’t zero, no…but it’s actually pretty common for production assistants to ghost.”

“It is?!”

“Yes.” Tarui nodded.

Oshima and Hirugano both closed their eyes and shook their heads.

“Very common.”

“You hear about it all the time.”

Toki and Godo were wincing. For an editor, writers and illustrators flying the coop was fairly common as well. This wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory.

“Seriously…?”

“Right now,” Tarui calmly told the stunned Itsuki, “we’re having other people take on Yamada’s work, but at this point, there’s no way to avoid production delays.”

“There’s no way…? That’s crazy! It’s terrible for me!”

“I know it is,” Tarui earnestly said as Itsuki began to shout. “At the current pace, no matter how hard we try, there’s no way we’re going to make all twelve episodes as planned. So we wanted to discuss things with you, Mr. Hashima, and you, Mr. Hirugano… Essentially, we’d like to rework the series into eleven episodes and place a clip show or special program into the broadcast run.”

“…I see,” Toki said. “So taking a break for one episode will allow you to get back on schedule?”

“Yes.” Oshima nodded. “At this point, it’s cutting it close…really, really close…but we can adjust things for it in time.”

“Mmm…mmmmmm…”

Itsuki murmured to himself as he thought about this. Yes, instead of forcing the current schedule and running the risk of missing a broadcast date or wrecking the show’s visuals, maybe it’d be better to just cut out an episode from the start. But the current twelve-episode setup of the All About anime had been discussed time, time, and time again by Itsuki, Hirugano, and Tarui, occasionally with loud voices and emotions boiling over. It was an arduous, painful process, but they had slogged through it successfully.

“…The current setup, I think, couldn’t be better. It respects the original novels, but it still stands on its own as a complete anime work.” But Itsuki was not the one sternly refusing, but rather Hirugano. “If we have to change it, the results are clearly going to be lower in quality than we first pictured. Do we still absolutely need to make this change?”

“Yes. That’s what we’re asking you for,” Tarui said, nodding as he met Hirugano’s eyes. “…And also, I apologize, but we’ve already completed the storyboards for episodes one through four, so we can’t change those.”

Itsuki and Hirugano winced even harder. If you had to compress twelve episodes to eleven, the common-sense approach was cutting just a bit out of every installment, but apparently that wasn’t possible.

After an extended silence, Hirugano, his mind made up, gave his answer. “If we can’t change the first half, then from a quantity standpoint, it’s gonna be physically impossible to compress twelve episodes of content. Which means…”

“Which means?” Itsuki asked, nervously gulping.

“…We’ll have to apply our original ending to the anime.”

“The original ending…”

Itsuki and Toki gave each other embittered looks.

The first time they met with the anime staff, Hirugano’s proposal involved a patchwork of scenes from the novel, followed by an anime-original “final boss” character the cast defeated in the final story arc. Itsuki had been dead set against that, and that’s how the novelist, screenwriter, and director’s passionate march of intense story meetings kicked off.

“So…it’s back to the drawing board…?”

Itsuki’s voice sounded powerless and distant. But:

“We won’t go back to the drawing board. No matter what.”

Hirugano’s voice was driven, somehow inspired.

“Not that I’m one to talk, but I can’t let us have the slapdash approach I proposed to you first. I’ve read the original novels multiple times since then, to the point that I’ve all but memorized each one, and I understand what the ‘little-sister love’ trope is all about now. I’ve also been cleaning up with my little sisters more often lately.”

“I didn’t need to hear that,” Itsuki scornfully muttered—but it was followed by a small snicker. “You’re right, though. It’s not back to the drawing board…! Let’s do it! Let’s restructure this series! We’ll plot out an original story arc that’ll shock and amaze the novel fan base!”

“Yes! We can do it, Mr. Hashima!”

Itsuki and Hirugano stood up, their resolve firm.

Tarui looked on with a quiet smile. “…All right. In that case, let’s start making suggestions for the new structure right away. I’ll let you guys keep going for as long as you like.”

And so it was back to story-pitch time, Itsuki taking an active part in the discussions. Hirugano, now fully awake to the little-sister appeal, had four real-life little sisters giving him insights that Itsuki—even with the fruitful imagination he had to work with—couldn’t have stumbled upon. It was tremendous inspiration for him.

The meeting continued well into the wee hours…and by the end of it, they had a basic plan. Episodes five through nine, based on Volume 2 of the novel, would now foreshadow the ending on a more frequent basis. Episode ten would trace the first half of Volume 3 but then veer off in its own direction, and episode eleven would end with the final boss being defeated.

It meant a full rewrite of episodes ten and eleven, but in order to stick to the updated schedule, they’d need to punch out those scripts in no more than ten days. Two episode scripts in ten days was asking a lot of Hirugano, so they decided that Hirugano would work on episode ten (with the novels as a base) while Itsuki himself cranked out the fully original episode eleven at the same time.

“This schedule’s a real tightrope,” whispered Itsuki, wincing at the morning sun as he exited the publisher’s building. “My stomach hurts just thinking about it.”

“It’s a pretty common thing in the anime biz,” Tarui replied with a soft smile. “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being ‘We’ve completely exhausted every means possible,’ this is still about a two or a three.”

Tarui seemed mild mannered, almost aloof as he said it, but to Itsuki, he looked like a war-hardened hero, involved in countless desperate conflicts and still around to tell the tale. (Instead of going home, by the way, he apparently had to run right back to the production studio.)

The anime industry is way too crazy…

It wasn’t the first time he thought that, but it still sent shivers down his spine.