#I feel like the ROK novel pretty much sums up what would have been changed

[ridiasfangirlings]

K seem to have a lot of important stuff just later created or expanded through years worth of extra materials. If the K anime had been created after all of these things had been made instead of the other way around, how different do you think the anime's story would have been?

Less flashbacks in ROK, probably :/ One of things with K is I think they tried to make the side materials supplement the main anime story without being required in order to actually understand the anime, so I don't necessarily think they would have added a bunch of extra stuff to the anime if the anime had been made last. I do definitely think there would have been some streamlining and switches of focus in the story for both seasons though. Season one I definitely wonder if the show would have spent less time meandering at the school island with those characters and more with the Reds and Blues, since Homra and S4 are ultimately more important for the story as a whole.

I think S4's place in the narrative might have been altered somewhat too, at least to be less...sinister, I guess? I've mentioned before that I feel like they get much more of a villain treatment in the early part of season one and I wonder if we would have gotten less of things like Awashima discussing violating Mikoto's human rights or Fushimi looking vaguely unhinged if we had more characterization for them (the episode five Sarumi fight is particularly interesting as a possible point of change, because on the one hand LSW does explain his behavior there but on the other hand Gora walks it back a lot in all subsequent media, without having that moment there first I wonder if Fushimi would have been at least a little more gloomy and less yandere from the start if the side media had come first). I also imagine season one would have had more foreshadowing for the rest of the series, I definitely think we would have at least gotten Kotosaka talking to Colorless to give more of a hint as to who was behind all this. I personally would have liked them to add maybe a couple mentions here and there of the Gray King, even just saying he died in the Kagutsu Crater, just so we know that King exists and it feels a little more organic when Iwafune appears. Giving Zenjoh at least a cameo would have been nice too, again knowing that he'll be more important later.

Season two I could see the changes being largely what was done in the novelization, stuff like adding in an actual storyline for Neko that the anime just hinted at. I'm actually kinda curious about how the novelization came about versus the anime, if some of the additional bits in the novel were things Gora wanted to put into ROK but couldn't because they felt limited by runtime (and possibly budget, I wonder if episode ten in particular wasting time on flashbacks was GoHands being cheap). The stuff with Fushimi's 'betrayal' I think was also a lot stronger in the novelization, especially since the novelization actually bothers to make it clear that yes, Hisui and co know that Fushimi was once in S4 and yes they are actually suspicious of him because of that, which the anime was really frustratingly vague on. With the novelization being just completed I think that stands out pretty strongly as what Gora 'would have written' if they could when the anime aired, it still follows the same basics as the anime did but makes the story a lot stronger and spends a lot less time on filler, which was for me very much the weakest part of ROK.