Hello all, this is tickles.
Some first thoughts: this volume took much longer than I anticipated. I thought the COVID situation would speed it up, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Despite the time spent and word count, I liked how this volume finished, so I’m still satisfied with the results.
At the start, I was planning on a Romeo & Juliet-esque premise, and even physically re-annotated the play’s script with pen and paper to refresh my memory of the story’s details, but then I was taken by the Broadway rendition of American Idiot, which I thought was amazing as a long-time Green Day fan. There was so much in that album that reflected the sociocultural conditions around millennials in their formative youth—the 90s and early 2000s—of which I was a part. From teenage angst to anti-establishmentarianism, from romance to rebellion, from substance abuse to coming-of-age, the album encapsulated all of those themes—and the very character of millennials—in one brilliant story. (Of course, I’m speaking from a North American perspective, in reference to American Idiot.) That’s why there’re many references to American Idiot in this volume—heck, the drama department’s musical was exactly the Broadway musical. While I’ve already decided that regardless of direction Caius would be at the centre of this volume, it became a double-win when I realized that his character could be exactly portrayed through this lens—an angsty millennial teenager.
Mayumi is a character that I didn’t realize could be Whatsername until after I started writing: every chapter title is a reference to a Green Day song or lyric except the first, so there you go. Originally I was going to give Caius that role, but Mayumi turned out to be more fitting of it. So, the post-relationship dynamic’s comparison between Johnny/Whatsername versus Caius/Mayumi is what I settled on to be the main focus of the story, instead of the pre-relationship dynamic a la Johnny/Whatsername vs Cecilia/Caius.
Once I had that role in mind for Mayumi, most of the story fell into place from very early on. The backstory to the Elites, the fact that Kato wouldn’t return her feelings, and how Caius muddles through his reactions to it, were all cut and dry to me since the first few chapters. The challenge was on the execution, and filling in the gaps to maintain the story’s continuity. That was why this took so long, as the scheming from all sides, especially from Mira, took more and more screen time in the second half of the volume, and eventually to also set up for the next volume.
If you haven’t already noticed, my favourite character is Bianca. She has such a difficult personal problem to characterize that it’s both challenging and refreshing to write every one of her scenes. She will definitely get a story centred around her in the future. Mira and Ariel had much more screen time this volume, and thankfully, too.
Surprisingly, I didn’t expect the Mona-Gilbert-Stephen triple to have parts of their back stories to be fleshed out in such a satisfying way. I always wanted to portray them as situational villains, and they are. They’re opportunists with their own goals, standards and materialistic way of life, and have them to contrast with Kato’s comparatively idealistic and romantic (in the romanticist sense) foundations.
One minor theme I wanted to touch on in this story was dealing with sickness, and in some strange twist of fate, I myself became afflicted with not one but eventually two chronic illnesses, the first in 2022 and the second in 2023 in the botched process of treating the first. My personal experiences aside (see my Twitter if you’re interested), I was originally going for something based on taking care of the sick elderly, but eventually I graced Katia with that unenviable position; that was the original basis for Eon and her to sing Speechless (by Lady Gaga). And so, I hope you all are in good health, and if you’re not, I hope you will find a way to challenge, if not overcome, it.
On to Kato and his friendships: if you also haven’t noticed from volume 2, EC is just a thinly-disguised reference to Eason Chan, who’s the original singer (and a very prolific singer in his cultural sphere) of the song about estranged friends. I’m a fan of all of his old songs, and this particular one is a very, very good karaoke classic. Friends are what high school is all about, innit? While I don’t want to explicitly comment on current events from this song’s place of origin, I’ll just point to what had unfortunately happened to the Act of Neutrality in this volume, and that one of the chapter titles I considered was a variation of American Eulogy.
As for the future, volume 4’s story is still up in the air. I already know how volume 4 will start and which characters I’ll feature, but I still need to think of the themes I want to touch on. Another idea I’m considering is to rewrite volume 1 into a longer, more fleshed out arc. Right now, I haven’t yet decided on doing one or the other.
This volume has an unbelievable word count, enough that my word processor takes a while to count it all, split into five separate files because of the lag that its length would cause on Google Docs. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Thank you for reading and for bearing with the extended timeline, and see you again next time.