First, thanks for the nice messages, guys, as always. To the comment that thanked me for still translating with the fandom so slow nowadays, I am unworthy considering how I also spend a lot of time flirting with other fandoms right now >.>

In fact, I’ve only got the Afterword for this post…I’ll get to the rest by next week hopefully.

My First Egosurf

This space was originally to feature the preview for the next volume, but because the chapters in the magazine haven’t gone beyond this volume + 1 chapter, it doesn’t seem like there’s much that can be used for a preview, and so I will hastily write an afterwordish essay here.

Now then, egosurfing. Searching for things about yourself on the internet (probably). Ashihara’s mind is about as fragile as baked pudding, so Manager had strongly forbidden me from egosurfing. Up until now, I had lived in a dystopia-like censorship system where I just smirked at the funny impressions that Manager had found, but with the return of serialisation after 2 years I was slightly worried: ‘with a 2 year hiatus would they read this?’ I lost to my desire to see the impressions of the first chapter after the return in real time, and tried my hand at the forbidden egosurfing. The result was that it was very interesting.

Actually trying out egosurfing, the biggest problem I felt was that ‘egosurfing really takes up a lot of time’.

More than: you’ll get full of yourself from praise, or you’ll lose energy from scorn, what was really bad was that it ‘can use up time infinitely’.

This time what I egosurfed was internet impressions from Ch165~Ch169. I had saved up to Ch169 at the point of reserialization so I had the free time, but I thought egosurfing each chapter is a bit too much for Ashihara who is slow at all kinds of work (especially after, with the hospitalisation and the surgery, all the free time was gone). And so I think I will return to the censorship style from now on and listen to impressions through Manager.

By the way, it seems Manager does the fixes for the manga volumes by looking at the internet impressions on the day the magazine comes out, so if you notice anything please write your impressions.

That is to say, ‘the fans see more than we do’.

What surprised me was that, just from the fact that: ‘Taichi thought up Suzunari’s plan’, ‘the stage is Shopping Mall’, and ‘the setting is night’, quite a few people got right that it was a ‘mall blackout operation’. World Trigger readers are sharp. Ashihara is the kind of manga artist who doesn’t really get bothered when future developments are guessed right, so I got quite excited.

Besides that, what was interesting was that in regards to Murakami’s black Kogetsu there were people saying ‘has Lead Bullet’s effect been added to the Kogetsu?’ For some reason, the idea of Blade + Lead Bullet had never come to Ashihara, I thought ‘that’s really interesting!’ and was really moved. In the future, when they go on expeditions, I had thought it’d be pretty difficult to wave blades around enemies in human bodies, so a Lead Bullet blade seems like it’d be a good solution. If it does end up in the manga, people who advocated the Lead Bullet Kogetsu theory, please make a smug face that ‘it was my idea’.

Also, separate from the egosurfing, I received a lot of letters with impressions of the story or support after reserialization (and during the hiatus), and it really encouraged me.

As always, thank you very much.

Those who only follow the manga volumes might not know what I’m talking about, but in the first half of 2019 Ashihara had a series of problems with my physical condition and I couldn’t draw manga the way I wanted. Even now, I’m still not back to normal condition yet, so I intend to rally in the second half.

The plan is to have a preview in this space in the next volume, but if there doesn’t seem to be enough for the preview again I might write about the hospitalisation and surgery.

See you in volume 21.

- Ashihara Daisuke