Apocalypse Witch:Volume3 Afterword
Afterword[edit]
This is Kamachi Kazuma.
Apocalypse Witch has reached its third volume. The real Threat finally appears this time. What is the most frightening being for Karuta and the others? That was always my focus while coming up with ideas and you saw what I ended up with. Volume 2 had an awful lot of bugs, so I wanted to include a bit more variation for Volume 3. Dammit, if I don’t watch myself, I end up drifting toward grasshoppers and mantises. I do quite like aquatic creatures too, though.
Now you’ve seen what kind of world this is.
Destiny is cruel, hopes are never answered, and none of your ideals will come through for you.
Utagai Karuta started to grow cynical after the less-than-perfect endings of Volumes 1 and 2, so Volume 3 was one response he had to face. As long as you have the resolve, you can stay true to yourself even in this world. That is why he could not remain righteous and had the title of justice taken from him after he immediately gave up on doing things fair and square. He and the others ended up being the world’s strongest magicians against their will, so I thought this might be the most frightening thing for them. Karuta just barely avoided a total collapse on his part because the Problem Solvers did that to other humans while he had the barrier between human and Threat to cushion the blow. Yet ironically, he is now starting to question that barrier itself.
Letnahe was the unexpected unfaithful(?) wife heroine. I like how giving her the ring and watch on the same hand created a sense of guilt around perfectly ordinary items. I also realized this is something I couldn’t do in an ordinary series. The one thing keeping her from real infidelity is that her feelings for her husband have not cooled and this is not some casual fling. By the way, she never actually dated Hadome in her school days. I think the fact that they were separated without her ever telling him how she felt has led to a lot of “what ifs” in her head which are what prevent her from forgetting about him.
Karuta and the other protagonists started their story with an unspeakable desire for revenge. They have turned their backs on justice and bared their fangs toward their own goodness, but they will still risk their lives for what truly matters to them. I think this series is less about good prevailing over evil and more about the strength (or terror) of raw feelings. I hope you felt a shiver from President Omotesandou Kyouka who took things a step further and has settled down into her spot as a wicked girl. Isn’t she great!? The wicked upperclassman who’s hot and sexy but still has some childish mannerisms!!
It’s strange how Anastasia’s words grow more important with each new novel. They do say that truly great people will continue speaking even after their death. Anastasia was not a good person and she was an extremely irresponsible and self-centered person who reigned as the strongest until someone came along who could kill her (she did not care at all what the world would be like after her death), but maybe it’s easier to look fondly on people who stayed true to themselves even in death. You wouldn’t want an actual leader to have a death wish like that, though.
Since this volume was about taking back their school, I couldn’t use the school itself, so it was difficult finding a way to still give it a schooly feel. When I get too focused on the battles, I end up with no one going to school in a series that's supposed to have a school setting. Index is probably the most obvious example of that, like how they were fighting in England for so long recently.
Compared to my other series, Apocalypse Witch has a lot more group battles and shared living spaces, so it focuses more on the location than the individual people. I thought maybe I could keep the schooly feel if I always focused on that even during the battles. I want to create an attractive place where you feel like you’d want to go to school there even as the battles escalate and more unexpected things happen. That was my wish as I wrote the manuscript, but what did all of you think?
The first and second ships are both important parts of Grimnoah to Karuta, but will Natlena and the other newcomers accept that “infidelity”? That was the question facing him in Volume 3. He eventually managed to shake free of Kyouka’s temptation, but giving in and succumbing to her may have been another option for him. There were multiple paths he could have taken in this one volume, so I hope I made you think about those “what ifs”.
I give my thanks to my illustrator Mika Pikazo-san and to my editors Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san. Volume 3 was all about how your usual school seems so scary at night! That different atmosphere could not have been easy for the illustrations. Thank you so much yet again!!
And I give my thanks to the readers. What do all of you see as symbols of justice and heroes? With katanas, large handguns, special attacks, transformation, and giant robots, it probably differs from person to person, but what did you think of the form shown here? I challenge you to a duel. I hope you could smile and accept Apocalypse Witch as a series where that challenge comes from the side trying to kill the protagonists instead of the protagonists themselves. Thank you so much yet again!!
And I will end this here.
Oh, no. Yamane Deiri is looking a lot more like an upperclassman now, Karuta-kun.
-Kamachi Kazuma
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