Afterword

Afterword

GREETINGS, Yasohachi Tsuchise here again.

This time around, I’ve been gifted with four whole pages for my afterword. To be quite honest, I kind of said everything I needed to say about this series in the last volume, so I’m sorta stumped. I suppose I’ll just dig deeper than I did in the first volume.

First I’d like to dissect the main character, Alan the miner. As I said last time around, he’s essentially Ichiro Suzuki. I then fused him with the shovel, the very same tool used by that one idol you all know, and bam! Alan was born. Both bats and shovels are made from wood, so there was a sense of familiarity there.

That said, Alan isn’t just Ichiro. He’s slightly different in some key ways, the biggest difference being that Alan represents “lone wolf heroism.” Baseball is a team sport, but mining isn’t.

I’m sorry, I realize this is probably a little hard to wrap your minds around, so let me try and explain.

Look, real-life miners absolutely work with other miners. But the type of miner I’m thinking of here is the type who would appear in a dungeon exploration game, or a rogue-like RPG. If I had to name a series in particular as an example, it’d be Shiren the Wanderer.

The protagonist in these kinds of games is almost always a loner. They explore the endless (or at least endless-feeling) dungeon on their own, floor after floor. They rarely even have rivals to race against. The objective is to just push past obstacles with their own knowledge and abilities. If they fail, they die, and when that happens, they leave nobody behind to mourn for them. Hell, even if they succeed, nobody’s there to praise them. It’s kind of awful, when you take a minute to think about it.

That said, I think a true hero is someone who can get the job done and move past that sad fate. The type of hero who can push past hunger and thirst; defend against all manner of attacks; calmly analyze even the worst of situations; defeat gods, demons, and dragons; overcome death itself; and generally deal with anything and everything by themselves.

I love those types of lone wolf heroes. Over the last ten years or so, I basically only played games with protagonists like that. You know, like Nethack, Hengband, Diablo (solo play, of course). That’s why I decided to make my protagonist a fusion of those sorts of protagonists, Ichiro, and that one idol who likes to dig holes and bury herself in them from embarrassment. That’s how Alan came to be. He doesn’t need anything but his trusty shovel. In my head at least, he’s the perfect fantasy hero.

Now then, I suppose I’ll talk about the main narrative a little bit.

The first volume was Alan’s story. The second volume largely revolves around the people surrounding Alan. As I noted, Alan is a perfect existence in and of himself, so even if the rest of humanity were annihilated, he’d be fine on his own. But the reality is that the people around him aren’t perfect, specifically Princess Lithisia. I’m sure it’s hard for some of you readers to believe this, but she is in fact just a regular human.

Princess Lithisia is in shovely love with Alan. She wants to be with him through thick and thin. Cute, right? But by the middle of volume two, she comes to a hard realization—she’s not a vital part of Alan’s existence. That being the case, she still loves him, and after thinking long and hard about it, she comes up with a way to stay with him: becoming a Shovel Princess.

In other words, she found the determination to become a shovel itself. If all Alan needs is his trusty shovel, then the simple solution is for Lithisia herself to become a shovel. The founding of the Holy Shovel Faith and the Holy Shovel Empire; the spreading of her bizarre shovel language; the shoveling of that poor naked young girl; Catria’s rise to Holy Shovel Knight; the plot to take over the world; the book publishing; all of it is so that Lithisia can become a shovel.

But can she really surpass her limits as a human so that she can become a shovel? And what does that even mean in the first place? I’m hoping to express that to you all, the readers, starting in volume three and moving forward. If Lithisia, a regular old human, can find a way to become a shovel, then perhaps the rest of us can become shovels as well… Granted, I suppose the bigger question becomes, “To what end?” Meh, we can figure that out when the time comes.

Either way, let’s all work toward a shovel world together!

***

And last but not least, I’d like to express a whole lot of gratitude to my editor. All I can ever do is say thanks, but I will keep working hard. Of course, Hagure Yuuki-sensei’s amazing shovelstrations (spectacular illustrations) already go far past what a human should be capable of.

I’d also like to thank the readers. Thank you so much for enjoying this second volume of The Invincible Shovel. It’s thanks to you all reading the first volume that there will be a third. I’m still a bit worried about how far I can take this, but I’m going to do everything within my power to keep moving forward.

This has been Yasohachi Tsuchise, signing off. Shovel you later!