Unnecessary Addition:
Rubix speaking. I've written 17 chapters of 'Super Seven', so I think this is as good as time as ever to make an extended author's note. I don't usually do this ( I think the last time I did was back in the original 'To Aru Super SS' ) as chapters are usually super short, and having an author's note as long as a chapter itself is usually frowned upon by readers. At least, I would frown.
In any case, I just want to talk about 'Super Seven' at length, since as its author, there are things I feel like I should say about it.
Like for instance…
It's weird.
"Super Seven" is really weird.
I'm writing it, and even I think it's weird.
…
Well…
Let's jump down the rabbit hole. ( My god do I sound pretentious here ). I promise to make this as short as I can.
Pilot
Brief background. There's a certain chapter in 'To Aru Super SS II' that I liked conceptually.
Let's stick all the Level 5s in a room together for some HILARIOUS shenanigans! Puhi! Puhihihihihi! ( ^w^)/
This is what I said out loud at the time of conception. So in that chapter, I took the setting and drove it to its logical conclusion: everyone disbanding because they all don't like each other. ( Which is obvious. I mean, what else would happen? )
'Super Seven' is pretty much the same thing. But everyone more or less has a reason to stay.
I switched the straight man character from Shokuhou Misaki to Misaka Mikoto because that makes vastly more sense. And expanding on that, Misaka Mikoto is very much the protagonist in that only her thoughts are directly communicated. 'Super Seven' won't necessarily revolve around her, but she provides a point of focus.
As an ironic joke, I decided to not include her in the character tags. Sogiita Gunha also gets that treatment because fuck that guy.
( ^w^)/
Anyhow, at the end of this chapter, I made a Himouto! reference with Misaki ( if that wasn't clear ) as I could very much see her turning into a trash monster when left to her own devices.
The Name Game
When Misaki pulled out the tissue box for a lottery, I wanted to pull a Kaiji reference…
( Narrator: SHE HATES IT! )
( Mikoto: I HATE IT! )
I couldn't make it work. I wanted to describe how the art style changed to characters with thick lines and big noses to make the joke obvious, but writing something like that out… I didn't find a way to make it click. So the joke was scrapped.
…
And speaking of references, I wonder if anyone got all the club name allusions?
It's a worthless detail, but I'd like to think there's someone out there who appreciates finding all the obscure references I make. But I don't know. Maybe no one does.
Garden of Guts
Okay. I'll make this clear. The arcs in their order:
[ Club Formation ], [ Movie Meltdown ], [ nth-child ], [ Gutsy Girl ], [ Devil Delinquent ], [ Super Collision ], [ Wrong Expectations ], [ Worst End ]
That's the general gist of the timeline ( I could squeeze in another arc somewhere in-between, but these arcs are pretty much set to happen ). Chapter 3 takes place before Gutsy Girl and is part of the arc prior. It's a mess. I know it's a mess. This fanfic is a mess. Please just accept it.
Thank you.
Oddly, there's a quite a bit of foreshadowing to Gutsy Girl in Chapter 3, but this is assuming I knew exactly what I was doing when I wrote it out. HAHAHAHAHA!
Bread and Butter
It's a chapter about Accelerator and Misaki struggling to open a jar of pickles.
What else do you want from me?
Wrong Expectations
Now here's an arc that took way too long to make and became almost irrelevant immediately.
Briefly, 'Kono Light Novel ga Sugoi!' is guide book which happens to contain light novel and light novel character rankings. When I was writing Wrong Expectations, I was planning to finish it before the newest edition came out. You see at the time, Misaka Mikoto had been dethroned as the top female light novel character after a long streak of first place victories.
Wrong Expectations was going to explore that, sort of. There was going to be some kind of moral about how popularity rises and falls with the times, and that this kind of decline doesn't devalue anything. It was going to be like a character growth moment for Misaka Mikoto in accepting her competitive nature towards extremely petty things, leading up to her looking forward to next year's "battle". You know, quasi-enlightening moments like that told in an amusing way.
And then I learned the 2016 edition already released.
And she was back as Number 1.
Welp.
[ delete, delete, delete, delete ]
It's my own fault really.
Anyhow, various games between the Majutsu and Oregairu casts were scrapped. Such as: charades, quiz shows, and re-enactments. Also a sort of homecoming dance between Mikoto and Hachiman.
With charades and quizzes, I was going to repeat the "genuine" joke ad infinium, with Hachiman attempting to perform and describe the concept in weirdly abstract ways.
With re-enactments, I wanted to replay scenes from both series, but switching Accelerator and Hachiman's characters, and having them be graded for performance. ( Accelerator blows up a car with Yui looking back in horror/Hachiman has an oddly Iroha-esque exchange with Mikoto in a train yard which somehow ends with him being run over by a car ).
But even with all that scrapped, the arc ended nicely.
I even snuck in a Megumin cameo ( which someone was quick to pick out ).
Work in Progress
Going back to the Club Formation Arc…
The titles of Chapter 8 were taken from the manga 'A Method to Make the Gentle World'. It's not something many people would get. I guess this is an instance of me reaching too far.
The Misaka Mikoto/Accelerator dynamic is something I've done before. I don't think I can do it much better than 'Parallelogram', but eventually I'll touch on it again here in 'Super Seven'.
Fun fact: Since Accelerator usually refers to Last Order as Shitty Brat, I'd thought it'd be fun if he referred to Misaka Mikoto as Shitty Kid. Also, Piece of Shit refers to Hamazura Shiage. I did this in 'To aru Super SS', so I'm continuing that headcanon.
Startup
Part 3 of Work in Progress. And technically the first event in the timeline.
For Chapter 10, I had a few goals in mind. Give Accelerator a reason to participate in the experiment. Take the edge off Accelerator. Reference Lincoln Park. And still be kind of funny. Doing those last two are nigh high impossible, and I feel embarrassed for even trying.
There's a broad spectrum present in this chapter which, I don't know, might be too much? There's whiplash here, and the whiplash is sort of necessary to put everything into place. Contextually, Accelerator "teleports" from one scene to another, is given critical information, and has to process this on the spot. It's a little surreal. Though, I imagine that Accelerator has a level enough of head to come around quickly and get to the conclusion he did here.
I ended up referencing 'Parallelogram' a few times. Don't think about that too much.
Restless Nights
There's a post I made a while back in some forum where I pretty much detailed a Railgun radio show. Or part of one. I'm pretty sure no one read it.
This chapter… is a sequel to that post…
Why would I go out of my way to alienate my audience?
I'm not so sure myself.
…
In any case, this chapter is heavily inspired by the Bururaji Blazblue Radio Spring Raid Special, which you can probably find online ( If you like Japanese voice actors, it's an entertaining watch ). If I ever made a Restless Nights II, I'd have to include Kakine Teitoku and Sogiita Gunha's obscene dancing, but I highly doubt anyone's interested in me continuing this.
…
An aside…
There's a music video from the Japanese band 'A Crow is White' for the song 'fake!fake!'. It is stunningly animated as well as being quite adorable. The song is a nice listen too.
Brief summary of that music video…
A girl is having nightmares about these monster creatures. At first she's scared of them, but then she decides to "overcome" them. And by "overcome" I mean she tries to take them out with a baseball bat.
So as she makes her assault, the girl accidently breaks the nightmare to pieces and this colorful world is revealed to her. And finding herself with stuck with these monsters, she becomes a part of their group. They play games together from hide and seek to Gamecube to just rolling around on the floor, they all appear to get along.
Eventually, the girl starts wishing to become a monster herself.
As the dream ends, the monster creatures bid farewell and she sends them off.
And in real world, she confronts these monsters' real-life counterparts with these feelings intact.
…
Of course… this has nothing to do with 'Super Seven'…
Gutsy Girl
Gutsy Girl is a simple grounded story where not much really happens. I suppose what makes it different from the rest of the arcs ( and why I wanted to do it early ) was the introspection. I can't say if it paid off in the end, but I hope people liked it.
The Gutless Gunha
As expected, Sogiita Gunha is a little different in this arc than he is anywhere else. I refrained from having him say the word 'guts' throughout.
There's a prototype drawing of Gunha by Haimura where he just looks like some normal guy, and I described this different Gunha as that prototype. Interestingly, this drawing served as a basis to Kamisato Kakeru. When I found that out, I kind of wanted to do a scene where Gunha meets his 'doppleganger'. To say the least, Kakeru's character would have become an intense bastardization of himself.
( Kakeru: I mean, fucking MAGIC GODS, am I right? *spastic*)
It didn't come to fruition since the arc would lose a lot of focus. But, in the parallel universe where I did do the scene, it involved him chasing Othinus around in a Tom and Jerry-esque sequence before him falling off a bike and cursing at magic gods.
( Kakeru: DAMN IT! Fucking MAGIC GODS! )
Otani Eiko
A timid girl with long soft-colored hair and a petit figure. She's the instigator that threatens the status quo.
I'm always wary about seeing new characters suddenly pop up in any medium, so I limited her screen time and kept the things she said to a minimum. She has her beats, and she does what she needs to do for the arc to progress. There's little outside of that. After all, this arc isn't really about her.
If I could describe her more, I'd say that she isn't a bad person. And that she would rather live life vicariously through others than live it herself. Her powers reflect that aspect.
She's also the type that would immediately fall for a certain spiky-haired hero and no one else, if she hasn't already.
I don't know if I did too much or too little with her, so I'm interested in how everyone perceives Eiko and her actions. I'm also interested to know if people perceived her as a villain or a victim.
The scene where Accelerator slams her up against the wall, I went back and forth with a line of dialogue. She says 'I can't…' a few times. The full line she wants to say is:
( Eiko: I can't… breathe. )
Accelerator
The fight between Accelerator and Gunha could have gone two different ways. In the failed technology path, Accelerator would have access to these crazy gadgets and drones. His cane would have transformed into something that would allow him to move around a lot more. I also played around the idea of a cocktail serum that would bypass his collar's limiter.
( Shinobu: If by cocktail, you mean horrible deadly poison that turns your insides into gelatin, then yes. I remember it. You didn't inject it into yourself, did you? )
Another path would have been the comedy routine where giant rolling boulders and confetti would have fallen from the ceiling. Eventually, Gunha would venture through a spooky hall filled with traps.
( Gunha: What is this?-! A test of courage?-! )
Neither happened since I wanted to finish this part in a single chapter. Despite what everyone thinks, I show a lot of restraint in my writing.
Shokuhou Misaki
Part V of Gutsy Girl was done way before anything else, and I technically had to write myself up to this point. I think it shows, but it's not too noticeable.
With how events unfold, it builds up to Misaki having a cute moment with Gunha.
…
I'll say this once. There is no shipping.
This isn't that type of fanfic.
Never ever.
( Misaki: Haah? I show you a bit of kindness and suddenly you're acting so familiar? See… this is why you'll always be a virgin. )
Epilogue
If Part V had ended differently, if Gunha went with his gut and lashed out, the events in the epilogue probably would not have happened.
That is to say, status quo would have remained.
…
There are certain events I don't think deserve describing. Such as: the confession, the breakup, and the final scene at the end. Sometimes, what most matters is the general feeling behind it.
I suppose the epilogue felt somewhat like a horror.
…
I didn't mention any names in Chapter 17, but those involved were the third, fourth, and fifth.
Kakine Teitoku
I have no idea what to do with this guy. No idea. While everyone else had their moment, he opens a door and disappears.
Super Seven
I appreciate all the feedback I've gotten in the reviews. It's really hard to gauge interest, and when I do a different thing like Gutsy Girl, I have no idea if this is something that… works.
For better or worse, other arcs won't be like this last one. And they'll be noticeably "crazier" ( I'm using that word loosely ).
Chapter 19 will go back to the past. Right where I left off from the Club Formation Arc.
If you've reached this far, thanks for putting up with me.
-Rubix
Suggested listening for 'Super Seven: Phase 2': Himitsu Spark by A Crow is White
