Toaru Majutsu no Index:Railgun Afterword
Afterword[edit]
This book is meant to celebrate 15 years of Railgun, so it ended up like this. When we were first deciding what to do, there was apparently a lovely suggestion from Straight Edge to Daioh saying I should write a full novel. And so I finally got to write Railgun for Dengeki Bunko!! Thanks so much to Fuyukawa-san and everyone in the Daioh editorial department!!!
This is Kamachi Kazuma.
To jump straight into some inside information, the plan was originally to have Chapter 4 be the entire novel. Chapters 1 and 2 would have been the search for the missing sister in the supposedly safe School Garden and Chapters 3 and 4 would have been the fight for survival and climax atop the airborne School Garden. But the usual editors instructed me to turn it into a short story collection where each chapter was dedicated to a character from the usual four: Misaka, Shirai, Uiharu, and Saten. F-for real!? That’s why I had to rework the structure from the ground up. I’m kind of amazed it came together as well as it did.
Anyway, while I was rereading the manuscript to rework the story, I realized how convenient Judgment is. Thanks to that, it may look more like the book is following Judgment activities rather than Tokiwadai stories. I had the group of four go through some of the standard ideas, like a detective story. (Honestly, I can’t even remember if I really had Saten written as the victim in the original plot for Level Upper or if that was a position she took on when Fuyukawa-san turned that plot into a manga, so I never really expected the four of them to fit together as a group like this. The credit there goes to Fuyukawa-san for completing the story as a manga and to the anime staff for expanding the world from there.) But from that perspective, wouldn’t Shokuhou be something of a gang leader with her large organization and Hokaze as her bodyguard? It might make a fun mental exercise to compare her to Leivinia Birdway.
Shokuhou Misaki was born(?) in Railgun and Mikoto refers to her as a she-fox a few times in this one. I’m not sure why, but if I have to compare her to an animal, I think of a fox rather than a cat or a dog. Maybe because she’s beautiful, keeps her cards close to her chest, and can disguise herself as anyone, yet is strangely dutiful and always keeps her promises.
But what kind of animal would Mikoto be? A dog? A cat? I get the feeling people’s opinions would be split on that one. I have my own thoughts on the matter, but I think I’ll keep them to myself and let all of you discuss it instead. Maybe she is such an interesting person because she has so many sides to her, including both protagonist and heroine.
Resanerié Sadis Dialine came from the fact that it has been said Tokiwadai would fail a real princess if she took the entrance exam and didn’t have what it took. Railgun has been blessed with more than one spinoff and media mix project showing Tokiwadai from the inside, but I realized we still hadn’t seen a truly royal Tokiwadai student. That made for a convenient way of building up a boss for Mikoto to fight, so I went with it. I couldn’t decide if I wanted her to be from an empire, a principality, or a kingdom, but I finally chose an empire.
I decided on her power pretty quickly, but since she needed to be able to overwhelm Mikoto in a direct fight, I had a hard time deciding what kind of weapon to give her. I was ultimately drawn to the halberd’s dubious legend of being well-known and looking cool, but having so many different functions that it was hard to learn and everyone but the elites gave up trying to use it. I also love the way it looks like a child’s invention where they combined all the weapons they like into one ultimate weapon but gave no thought to how you would actually use it.
I also realized I had never included a girl in horse riding clothes in anything I’ve written, so I ended up with a formidable foe who would sacrifice everything for a more unorthodox, but no less precious, life. I hope you will all accept her.
Oh, right. I’m sure some of you will be appalled that this horse girl doesn’t use a whip as her weapon, but try to forgive her. She sees the riding crop as a precious memento carrying so many happy memories with her partner, not as a weapon meant to inflict pain and subdue an enemy. Also, it wouldn’t be a good fit for her power and even with a metal whip she would have to throw it away every time it rusted over.
I give my thanks to the illustrators Haimura-san, Fuyukawa-san, Itou Tateki-san, Kogino Chuya-san, Yamaji Arata-san, Nogi Yasuhito-san, Tachitsu Teto-san, and Kisaragi Nankyoku-san. I also give my thanks to my editors Miki-san, Anan-san, Nakajima-san, and Hamamura-san and to everyone else involved like the Daioh editorial department. Academy City has many sides, but I think the transformations it underwent this time were especially impressive. I mean, Musashino Milk and an angry mob of girls shouting guilty both exist in the same city! I cannot thank you enough for drawing so many different versions of Mikoto and the others and illustrating this world that shows a different side of itself in each chapter. Thank you so much!!
I also have to give some extra-large thanks to the readers. This novel left me feeling lightheaded at times as I went back and forth between the anime footage and worldbuilding information to write a novel version of a spinoff manga that exists independent from the original novels, so thank you so much if you thought this looked interesting and picked it up.
It is time to close the pages for now while praying (even harder than usual) that the pages of the next book will be opened.
And I lay my pen down for now.
Come to think of it, I haven’t done tea ceremony, flower arrangement, or calligraphy girls yet. Three sisters maybe?
-Kamachi Kazuma
