Thank you for reading "A Girl and her Splatling". This has been my first ever fanfiction and, spelling errors aside, I'm very proud of it.
A couple of things:
* All the names, aside from Judd and location names, were generated with Google Translate.
I'm serious! English to Japanese on words I thought that fit. Check it:
Sorui = algae
Yutaka = rich
Shurui = nice
Saigono = last
Meisho = name
Danwa = talk/discourse
Urusai = loud
I know, aren't I clever? They're obviously not exact translations, but they did come from Google Translate.
* The main problem I had was determining how long the story should go on. At first, I had Yutaka in love with Sorui by the 5th chapter. Then I thought about making it so that Sorui would become a turf war champion before she fell for him. I wound up going with it in their second battle because I had a thought about how a kraken might ram into the walls at Walleye and make everything come tumbling down. At first, I thought about making him do it on purpose, then I thought that it being an accident would work better.
* My favorite character archetype is the "shy girl" character type. Granted, male characters can pull it off too (Girls Bravo anime, but not the manga, does so very well), but the "shy girl" characters are my favorite. Sumino Hikage of "Koko Ni Iru Yo" and Nodoka Miyazaki of Negima
* I cannot SFX well.
* This story was based entirely on a Reddit post in the /r/Splatoon subreddit. /u/CSLucaris drew a series of images on Tumblr of a cyan Inkling getting a Splatling as a present:
cslucaris. tumblr. com/post/126343770159/134-a-girl-and-her-splattling-i-had-to-make-a
Remove the spaces
/u/PuffSmackDown2 wrote the following:
"Clearly a girl in a well-off and functional family and was spoiled rotten with the latest and freshest expensive weaponry and outfits money can buy to show off to her friends in Turf Wars. Just look at her: she has a 3-star shirt and she actually sleeps in her own room, probably nearby Moray Towers.
Meanwhile, in another significantly less affluent apartment complex outside of Bluefin Depot, there is a lone worn-out squid boy, whose parents struggled to barely survive, was given a measly bucket, which costed his parents the savings they've been putting aside for over a year. His parents did all they could, as they just wanted to see him happy and having fun with his friends, instead of thinking of the poor conditions they reside in.
However, all the other squid kids pick on him at Turf Wars for showing up in rags with a terrible excuse of a weapon. Especially that girl with the brand new Heavy Splatling. Oh, if only she understands."
/u/Daitenshi replied with:
"Love story in the making."
/u/ReleaseTheBogus replied with:
"Still a better love story than that one with the sparkly octoling"
And I responded with what was the first draft of the story, which is still present in the story in chapter 2. I had never intended it to be as long as it is, or to ever really go past that first draft, but it got my creative juices flowing, and once I have momentum, I don't like to stop because I'm afraid I'll lose it.
I feel like I did well. Obviously I made some mistakes, but I feel I did well. A part of me wonders if I should have continued it, or ended it another way, but I know I shouldn't do either. Stories don't really end, do they? They continue. That's why I picked up reading fanfiction in the first place long before Splatoon had even been announced, maybe even conceived of. A part of me wants to see headcanons play out when actually written down. A part of me wants to see the characters of a non-romance actually have romance. A part of me wants to extend the universes that have already ended officially, or see what happens if two universes cross. Even if I have nothing left to say, their universe isn't gone, it just means that a story has been told, and now it's not being told. Really, I just wrote down what popped into my head. All I really hope for is that it was good.
Thank you for reading.