A special conversation between Nagatsuki teppei of Re:Zero and Maruyama Kugane of Overlord, two of the most popular otherworldly reincarnation/transference stories! They talked a lot about the appeal of otherworldly stories from web novels and how they started writing otherworldly works from the unique perspective of writers.
quotation ダヴィンチ
The entrance to otherworldly stories was through secondary works.
-Please tell us why you both started reading otherworldly reincarnation/transference stories.
Maruyama: Originally, I read a lot of second-hand works of otherworldly stories.
Nagatsuki: I was reading derivative works too.
There was a time when secondary works that called characters from other works into the world of “The Familiar of Zero” (published by MF Bunko J) became popular. The Familiar of Zero” itself is an Otherworldly Transition story, but works in which characters from different works crossover with each other are also Otherworldly Transition stories, in other words.
-In those days, when you read web novels such as ‘syousetsukaninarou’, you used a PC, didn’t you?
syousetsukaninarou is the most famous novel submission website in Japan, with over 550,000 registered users in 2015. 小説家になろう =narou
Maruyama I used a PC browser.
Nagatsuki: When viewing on a PC, I want each story to have 5,000 words in order to make it worth reading.
Maruyama: If there are only 1,000 words in an episode, I also think “1,000 words? (laugh).
Nagatsuki: But today’s smartphone readers prefer short stories. Especially at the beginning, they try to find interesting works from the huge number of submissions on the submission websites, so it is important that the beginning of the work is interesting. From the writing side, nowadays, if you want to gain popularity with new submissions, you have to make a Beginnings and Conclusions story with 3,000 characters per story and update it every day until it ranks and stabilises, and it’s tough because trends change so quickly.
Maruyama So you have to do that much now?
Nagatsuki: Assuming that the content is interesting, I’m positive about making such efforts to gain popularity. But the only thing I was aware of at the beginning was the time of posting, around 2012, we both knew what time it was for Jobless Reincarnation, what time it was for The Rising of the Shield Hero and what time it was for Konosuba. It was interesting to see how the topics of the threads on 2chan (Japan’s largest and most popular message board) changed with the time of day at that time.
Maruyama: I posted my novels not on ‘narou’ but on ‘Arcadia’, so I wasn’t aware of that at the time (laugh).
-How did you two start writing web novels in the first place?
Nagatsuki: We started out doing second novels, and before we knew it, we were doing first novels as well. Originally, I was submitting to light novel newcomer awards, but when I was rotting away because I couldn’t win any awards, The Irregular At Magic High School, which was serialised in narou and released by Dengeki Bunko, became a hot topic. Then I thought, “From now on, novels on the internet will come!” So I entered the market with Re:Zero. As it turned out, the wave came earlier than I had expected.
Maruyama: I was also mainly writing derivative works, but when I read the first novels, I didn’t find any that really touched my heart, so I thought, “I should try writing them myself”.
-Did you analyse other works before you started writing?
Nagatsuki: I read the top-ranked works. Apart from The Irregular At Magic High School, which was ranked number one by narou at the time, most of them were otherworldly stories, so I thought, “Is this what’s popular now, and what would I do if I were writing it myself? I’m not good at coming up with stories where the hero is simply strong, so I started writing stories where the hero dies several times and then comes back to save the heroine, who is put in a disadvantageous position. I also liked stories in which the hero and heroine were buddies and won out, so I was conscious of that kind of storyline. For example, Fate is also a story about a pair of Master and Servant fighting, isn’t it?
Maruyama What light novels were popular at the time? It was around 2011, so was it the ones where the hero is the strongest?
Nagatsuki No, there have always been stories with the strongest protagonist, haven’t there?
Maruyama But “Re:Zero” isn’t about the strongest protagonist, is it?
Nagatsuki That’s just a matter of my taste. If the protagonist is overwhelmingly stronger than the people around him, it’s hard for him to get into trouble, and I don’t think it’s possible to create ups and downs in the story.
Maruyama: That’s true. I often worry about that when I write (laugh).
Nagatsuki: That’s right, because in Overlord the protagonist is the strongest.
Maruyama However, I thought that novels were written as a hobby, so unlike Mr Nagatsuki, I didn’t do any research at all. When you listen to other professional writers, there are people who do a lot of research. But no matter how much you know that this kind of thing is popular, in the end, you can’t write unless you like it.
Nagatsuki: Of course that’s true. But it’s amazing that Overlord became popular as a result of you writing what you liked.
Maruyama That’s why life is all about luck, luck (laugh).
-What works are memorable for you as a reader?
Nagatsuki: It’s Hello Weather’s The Magician of the Otherworld, which I read around the time I started submitting. Hello Weather also wrote World Customisation Creator and Spirit Migration, but at the time he was already famous for several popular works.
Maruyama: I think it’s ‘KONOSUBA! That sense of conversation was something you were born with and you couldn’t steal it even if you wanted to. It’s irritating to praise him when he’s not around (laugh).
Synchronous connections
-The two of you are good friends with Natsume Akatsuki and the other writers of KONOSUBA!
Nagatsuki: I think of the authors who debuted in the three years before and after 2012 as somewhat ‘classmates’. We send books to each other, like Akatsuki, Carlo Zen of The Saga of Tanya the Evil and magonote of Jobless Reincarnation.Until around 2015, we also had a chat room, where we showed each other the illustrations we received for the book adaptation.
Maruyama: That’s right. It’s a great feeling when a character that was only in your head until then becomes an illustration.
Nagatsuki: I’m happy when they become illustrations, and when the finished book arrives, I think, “Paper is good! I think.
-Do you like paper even though you come from a web novel background?
Nagatsuki: In the book version, I try to make it so that when you turn the page, there’s a shocking line of dialogue, but with e-books, the reader changes the size of the text, so it’s impossible to do that because the lines are out of place. With Naro, the sender can devise ways of presenting the story and making it readable on the premise that it will be read on the internet.
Maruyama: On the web, if you write a lot of text, it can be hard to read, so it’s better to think of paper as paper and the web as the web.
Nagatsuki In Naro, some people write with fewer line breaks, while others use a lot of line breaks even in dialogue, and the way the story is read is unique to each author. Also, compared to paper books, there is more freedom in the overall length of the story and the length of each story. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, nowadays, new submissions need to be creative and follow the theory to some extent in order to gain popularity.
Re:ZERO, Overlord, konosuba! and The Saga of Tanya the Evil collaborated on the TV-anime Isekai Karutetto, how did you feel about that?
Maruyama: Director Minoru Ashina is amazing. He really balances and highlights the characters from each work and makes them all play an active role.
Nagatsuki: As someone who has worked on derivative works, I think it’s wrong to ‘raise one work and lower the other’, but there is no such raising or lowering. The director strictly follows the rules of ’30 characters in an episode of 15 minutes’, ‘the main character of each work always speaks in each episode’ and ‘the word count of the dialogue for each work is almost the same’.
Maruyama: It’s a craftsman’s skill.
Nagatsuki: I don’t think there has ever been an anime that officially crossovered the works of different authors, so I think we opened up new possibilities. It would probably be easier to collaborate with other worlds if they were all set in a single world. For example, works set in modern Japan can also be mixed together.
Maruyama: Yes, that’s true. I wonder if we could do a crossover of villainous daughters? (Laugh)
-Both of you said that you started from secondary works, but I wondered if otherworldly works themselves are secondary works. ……
Nagatsuki: Yes, there is that. It’s easy to read and write because everyone shares the same Dragon Quest-like medieval European-style alternate world and it’s easy to picture the scenes.
Dragon Quest
Maruyama: And there were a lot of people who liked that kind of thing. To use an analogy, the pork as an ingredient is the same, and it doesn’t matter whether you make ginger-yaki or pork cutlets from it. However, I personally think it would be a bit of a shame if customers started to demand only ginger yaki, and tasty tonkatsu was left out. Recently, when I look at the ranking of ‘narou’, I feel that compared to the past, only the same kind of works come to the top.
Nagatsuki Nowadays it’s hard to get into the rankings if you don’t follow the trendy format, but in the past, while there was a common thread of ‘other worlds’, the restrictions were looser and you could do all sorts of things.
Maruyama On “narou”, the system allows readers to rate and bookmark works to add points, but back in 2011 and 2012 I was aiming for around 16,000 points on “Rouro”.
Nagatsuki If I had 20,000 points, I would have been in the top 100 in the cumulative ranking.
Maruyama Nowadays, the cumulative number one “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime” is about 600,000, and you need at least 200,000 points to get into the top 100, so it’s as inflated as “DRAGON BALL” (laugh). Compared to the past, there are that many more readers, and the number of works has increased, so readers have to spend more time looking for works that suit their tastes, so it’s understandable that popularity is solidified by easy-to-understand fads. However, I think that there are many interesting works hidden in novels that have not yet been published in book form and have few ranking points and do not stand out.
What do you like about them? What do you enjoy?
Nagatsuki: I don’t know …… where it’s fun. I’ve only slept for an hour and a half today (distant look).
Maruyama I wonder if you can call what you are doing while you are puking blood and vomiting enjoyable (laugh).
-I’m very sorry. As a reader, what kind of otherworldly works do you prefer?
Maruyama: Well, I like works like ……’s Overlord.
(laugh). What about Nagatsuki-san?
Nagatsuki: I like works like ‘Overlord’ (laugh).
Maruyama To answer properly, I love romantic comedies. I like to read them and laugh ‘nichaaa’ (laugh).
Nagatsuki: My motivation for reading is often influenced by the pictures rather than the genre.
-Often there are no pictures attached to the works on submission websites, but do you read them in books or manga editions?
Nagatsuki: Well, originally I didn’t read that many novels. Since I started writing Re:Zero, I read less and less. I do read famous titles, but I can’t read them in my spare time. I feel impatient when I read them.
Maruyama: If you had time to read other web novels, would you write your own?
Nagatsuki That’s right. But manga is a different category for me.
For example, I really enjoyed reading the comic adaptation of Knight’s & Magic, which is also in the ‘Naro’ series.
Maruyama I read the manga version of Knight’s & Magic too, and the robots are well drawn. But I haven’t read most of the other manga versions. It seems that many of the manga versions sell better than the book versions of the novels, doesn’t it?
Nagatsuki: I heard that the manga version of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime sold very well. I heard that in 2018, when the anime aired, it was one of the top sellers of all comics for the year.
Maruyama I see. In my case, I read a lot of novels on the web. Just recently, I enjoyed a work called ‘mizuhanomori’ that was posted on ‘narou’. It has a certain atmosphere.
-Do you also read novels that have been published in book form?
Maruyama: No, I bought a couple of books. Then I bought the first volume, but the second volume was never released, and I thought, “Am I wrong?” So I stopped buying them, not to bring good luck, but I stopped buying them.
Nagatsuki: Nowadays, if a work becomes popular on the internet for a while, it is immediately published in book form, so it is not uncommon for the rest of the work not to be released, but when we were around, it was still rare for novels to be published in book form, so there were not many that ended after one volume. It is often said that light novelists have a low survival rate, but many of the writers in our generation have survived.
Maruyama So, as I said before, it was luck, luck. The times were good.
-Do you watch the animated versions of the novels from “narou”?
Nagatsuki I watch a lot of anime, but what if it’s better than Re:Zero? I watch them with nervous anticipation (laugh). It’s interesting that the anime adaptations come a little later than the ‘narou’ trend.
Maruyama: With “Re:Zero”, whether it’s the anime or other developments, Nagatsuki-san goes to other fields and says, “Let me do it”, and that’s amazing, isn’t it? In my case, I leave it to him, separating the novel from the novel and the anime from the anime.
Nagatsuki: I can’t do that because of my nature. Because fans love Re:Zero, that’s why they get involved even if it’s a collaboration scenario for a social game that charges money. It would be sad if I didn’t supervise the game and the fans were not satisfied with the result. I want to do things properly for things that fans pay for.
The ease of sharing and freedom to ignore
-Lastly, what do you like about otherworldly stories?
Nagatsuki: It’s easy to share the image and it can be enjoyed instantly. Instant doesn’t mean bad at all, just like people like hamburgers that are easy to eat, it’s easy to read without prerequisite knowledge. If you know the promises that you have naturally understood in your exposure to comics and games, you don’t need any further prerequisite knowledge. You can go into it like enjoying a game you know how to play, and you can think, “I might as well try writing it myself”.
Maruyama: I think it’s the ‘not being tied down’ part. For example, if you try to write a contemporary story, you are inevitably bound by modern common sense. But with otherworldly fantasy, I can create the story I want, including the selection of promises.
Nagatsuki: There is also the option of not using the promises of a medieval European-style alternate world. Konosuba!” and “Re:Zero” were called “anti-narou” because they did not follow the “narou” template.
Maruyama: “Overlord” has not been called that. The Saga of Tanya the Evil” was also not mentioned.
Nagatsuki: “Overlord” is a story with the strongest protagonist. And The Saga of Tanya the Evil is a work from another dimension (laugh).
Maruyama: But “Re:Zero” is a “different thing” that only Nagatsuki-san could write. Even though it sold so well, there are hardly any derivative works.
Nagatsuki: It’s not just second creations, most popular works are copied, but ‘Return to Death’, the otherworldly loop, didn’t catch on. In my mind, I’m writing it with a gal-game-like adventure game lineage in mind.
Maruyama: I want Nagatsuki-san to go down his own path, which no one else can write.
-Finally, do you have a message for the readers?
Nagatsuki: Please give my best wishes for Overlord!
Maruyama: Give my regards to Re:Zero!
Nagatsuki, please take care of konosuba!
Maruyama: Please take care of The Saga of Tanya the Evil!
-(laugh).
Nagatsuki: To be a little serious, there are many otherworldly stories out there, but we’ve continued to write what we thought was interesting, and as a result we’re here now, so you can either dig into our works according to your own tastes, or you can write your own, and enjoy them as you like without worrying about our biased opinions.
Maruyama …… and I would like you to pretend that I was making this statement (laugh).
Thank you very much for watching. See you soon.
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