Afterword
Afterword
Hullo, Sakaki here. And this is the last volume of Outbreak Company: The Power of Moe!
First off, I want to thank all the readers who have stuck with me so far, as well as my editor W-san (along with apologies for all the trouble I caused), and, if I may use the expression, my trusty partner Yuugen-san for always creating unstintingly excellent illustrations.
It’s been quite a while since the anime adaptation, but I’d like to thank the staff and cast of the show once again.
In a world where mountains of light novels are published (to which mountains yours truly has contributed some works), and 90% of them struggle to even generate a single sequel, to have a series that goes for well over ten volumes and also gets a manga version, a drama CD, an anime, figures, and more is an absolute boon.
One reason Outbreak Company was so long-lived might have been because it took advantage of the craze for stories where a character goes to another world and uses their knowledge from this one to “cheat.” I wasn’t actually thinking about that trend when I started writing; it was my good luck that my idea for this story happened to be along the same lines.
I often build up my story ideas logically, considering marketing strategies and making plans to push the franchise, but I don’t want to suggest that it’s my own cleverness alone that results in long-running series that get turned into anime and that sort of thing. Usually, you need a little something extra, too; a bit of good luck.
Part of that luck in this case was getting the star treatment as one of the launch titles for Kodansha’s Lanove Bunko line. So was the fact that the editor-in-chief of that project understood that, although he was a veteran manga editor, he had no experience with light novels, and he brought passion and humility to learning about them. More luck came in the form of Yuugen-san, who was a reader of my novels before they became an illustrator of them, accepting the assignment to do the illustrations. And I was lucky that Fumisato Araki, with her extensive knowledge of BL, joined me as an assistant.
One more bit of luck? When the series became an anime, the (presumably) high quality of the show boosted sales considerably, and for perhaps the first time in my career, electronic versions of my books were selling as well as or better than the paper versions.
I can only say that I’ve let everything happen organically.
It’s all too easy to look at a novel and think it’s all the work of a single author, but in fact a lot of people have to pitch in to create a book, and they’re all responsible for its success. (You’ve probably heard that before.) Outbreak Company was a classic example of this, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
Now! The following contains spoilers, so if you haven’t read the rest of the book yet, consider yourself warned.
An unabashed, full-throttle otaku character like Shinichi is unusual as an MC in my works (although they appear plenty of times as side characters), but I found him immensely easy to write, and really enjoyed tucking little references everywhere.
Myusel, on the other hand—I initially conceived of her as a simple, innocent maid-san, but somewhere along the line she took on a bit of a yandere-ish quality. (Maybe I was influenced by the anime? Who knows.) She wasn’t hard to write, and she was a lot of fun, but she surprised me more often than you might think.
Petralka was supposed to be Myusel’s opposite number, a tsundere queen (er, empress), but simply by virtue of her position, by the second half of the series she didn’t have many opportunities to do stuff with Shinichi. It’s sort of a shame. Petralka seems to have a lot of tense, heart-racing scenes. Maybe she was reflecting the author’s anxiety!
Elvia turned out about the way I planned. If I may say so, Yuugen-san’s character design made her ears floppier than I’d initially envisioned, leading me to emphasize her puppy-like qualities, and that never really changed.
Minori-san—ah, Minori-san. She had the good grace to follow my exact plan from beginning to end. She was a convenient character, by which I mean she did an excellent job of keeping the story moving. I’ve got this vague idea that after being discharged from the JSDF, she takes up permanent residence with her BL buddy Garius as his (fake?) wife.
Hikaru has the distinction of not having been a part of my original pitch, and also of being the character about whom my feelings changed the most while I wrote. Having someone start as a headache, only to become, over the course of many plot twists, a redoubtable companion of the MC is a typical arc, but the thing about him and Elvia was an idea that didn’t occur to me until I was drafting the forbidden armor story.
On the subject of Garius, I actually came up with a fair amount of backstory for him during the planning stages, but as the volumes went on I got farther and farther away from it, until we ended up with what you’ve read. Miki Shinichirou voiced Garius in the anime, and really made the character his own. In the script for the drama CD, there was a line where Garius was supposed to whisper, “O most precious treasure...” but Miki-san ad-libbed “Oh, thank you for this untrammeled joy!” instead. That just shows you what a voice actor can do when they truly understand a character.
Brooke and his family: I worried a little about them, but you see how it turned out. By the way, Yuugen-san floated a version of the design for Cerise that was much more of a bishoujo (beautiful girl—or would that be beautiful wife?) look, but it just made her look too different from Brooke, so we went with making her a more ordinary lizardman.
I had a kind of vague picture in my head of Man’ya and her siblings, sort of like something out of the anime S*itch. I know there are people out there who don’t like reptiles, but baby reptiles have those moist-looking eyes... Don’t you think they’re cute?
Matoba-san was... Matoba-san. He was a sort of wildcard, a very useful character to have around, and as you might expect, he didn’t depart much from my original idea. My original concept was for a faux-villain, a guy who wasn’t black-hearted, but maybe sort of gray-hearted. Think I pulled it off?
Loek and Romilda weren’t in my initial plans, but they were helpful for fleshing out the Eldant Empire, and especially for highlighting unique features of its demi-humans and the all-around fact that it was another world.
Anyway, I could go on like this forever (what about Zahar, Amatena, Clara, Jijilea, Lauron, Theresa, Falmelle, Shinichi’s family, and on and on?). Time goes on for them—their story doesn’t end with this book—so as the author, I would be gratified if you imagine what might happen to them.
I considered having the “invaders” who appear in the epilogue be the children of the main characters, but it would have narrowed down the possibilities too much, so I thought better of it. Shinichi and Myusel were obviously already together, so I didn’t go further into that, and as for what happens to the rest of the cast, we’ll just have to leave that to your imagination.
One more time before I go, I want to thank each and every one of you very much. I hope we’ll meet again over another story, sometime, somewhere.
Sakaki Ichiro
5 Jul 2017
