#Ikko Watari: the Ultimate Scam Artist

[chessanator]

❔ for the WIP ask game

Thanks, Anon!

❔Choose a random WIP and talk about it.

I've only got one real WIP on the go. I've talked about The Ultimatum of Haruhi Suzumiya in various places, but I'm not sure how much of that you'll have seen and it'll be nice to have it all in one place.

TUoHS is my Haruhi Suzumiya/Danganronpa Crossover fanfic, in which Haruhi is accepted as a student at Hope's Peak Academy and consequently Kyon, Koizumi, Nagato, Asahina, and Asakura end up there as well. I've, um, bodged the timeline so that they're in the same year as Makoto Naegi, in a second class.

The roster for that class, 78-B, (and the roster for the killing game) is filled up by OCs:

Satoru Ishihara: Ultimate Journalist

Konosuke Kamio: Ultimate Film Critic

Katsuya Terasaki: Ultimate Firefighter

Hitomi Maeda: Ultimate Chemist

Mayumi Uehara: Ultimate Mathematician

Arata Nakayama: Ultimate Archaeologist

Taichi Fujino: Ultimate Driver

Yayoi Mikawa: Ultimate Cosplayer

Ikko Watari: Ultimate Scam Artist

The story will be in two halves once it's completed: a future side that's a Fanganronpa with these characters, and a past side with the Haruhi characters at Hope's Peak, sort of blending standard Haruhi antics in that setting with showing how Ultimate Despair and the killing games will start in this crossover.

I am nearly 300,000 words into the future side and I'm only halfway through the third arc so I'm still miles away from being able to publish and that fact weighs on me every day of my life.

[chessanator]

★★★

Thanks for the ask! (Each ★ gets a fact about an OC) Let me break out the random number generator to see which OCs you’re getting facts for…

★ Konosuke Kamio (The Ultimate Movie Critic)

There’s been some anon trolls going after him over the few weeks before he joined Hope’s Peak. They’re not related to anything going on behind the scenes at the Academy, though the extra publicity since he was accepted can’t have helped.

Konosuke doesn’t show it, and he hasn’t responded, but it’s getting to him. He wouldn’t say that he’s being less opinionated in his reviews lately but, subconsciously, he is.

★ Hitomi Maeda (The Ultimate Chemist)

I quite like the concept of Hitomi’s first crush (or at least first female crush) being Sayaka Maizono. I’d need to check the timeline to make sure Sayaka’s career started early enough (There’d need to be a couple of years where Hitomi’s like, ‘It doesn’t mean anything: she’s like officially cute!’ and then she realises that it totally does mean something, and by the time she arrives at Hope’s Peak she’s comfortable with the fact that she’s bi). I don’t think Sayaka would be her type nowadays, but who knows?

★ Ikko Watari (The Ultimate Scam Artist)

Ikko has this rule… If he scams you without announcing that he’s the Ultimate Scam Artist beforehand, the money goes to charity; if he has announced it, then… who knows where the money might end up? Naturally, he’s still comfortably wealthy.

(Honestly, I just think he gets off on telling people his Ultimate Title)

[chessanator]

Bloop bloop! >w

Two bloops, two rolls of the dice…

…

Ikko Watari: Ultimate Scam Artist

While thinking about the answers I’d give to an earlier ask meme, I suddenly realised that while the vast majority of my cast is just Japanese, Ikko has to be half-Japanese half-something-else. I don’t really know enough about Japanese racial politics to say what the other half should be from the way I’ve portrayed him (though half-European is completely incorrect; if you forced me to pin it down right now he’d be half-South-American) but I think some of the small details I’ve written for him make it clear he’s used to being somewhat an outsider. 

It’s not much more than a headcanon at this point, but I’m glad I can keep it in mind as I continue writing.

Mayumi Uehara: Ultimate Mathematician

For fairly obvious reasons, I’m projecting so hard onto Mayumi at literally all moments of night and day. So one thing that troubled me when designing her was deciding what area of maths she should specialise at. (Of course, being a Danganronpa Ultimate and with mathematicians peaking early, she would be better than anyone else at any area of maths, but she has her favourites.) I didn’t want it to be my own area so that I wasn’t self-inserting too blatantly, but I also wanted it to something my own knowledge would contribute to.

I’ve settled in the end for making her a logician at heart, if only because I wanted to show that actual logic people are nothing like the stereotype.

Thanks for the ask!

[chessanator]

11 Questions WIP tag meme:

Thanks for tagging me, @pomegranate-belle!

I’ll tag: @blackflirtlarping, @kiichu, @transezual, @eatingfireflies and @i-demand-a-hug.

1. How long have you been writing?

I’ve tried to start writing something a bunch of times during my life, but I only really got anywhere when I did some writing for the college magazine when I was at uni. Which was... eight years ago now oh fuck I’m old.

2. What are the major themes of your current wip(s)?

The main theme of TUoHS has to be, ‘Haruhi Suzumiya would be a dangerous fucking nightmare in any piece of fiction that wasn’t at its base slice-of-life.’ Because, duh, she would be. I’ll also need to work in my take on the usual Danganronpa hope/despair themes, but I’m willing to let that develop as I come up with later murders rather than lock it in precisely now.

3. What do you want people to take away from your story once they’ve read it?

An experience similar to playing the Danganronpa games. If readers can enjoy the murder mysteries - following along closely enough to enjoy working out some things in advance but not finding the whole thing too obvious - I’ll be happy.

4. Would you be excited if people write fanfiction about your wip(s)?

Probably? There’s some good hooks in the past half of the story which might attract some recursive fanfiction. And maybe people will like the OCs and want to do fluffier stuff with them that I wouldn’t consider. I think I would feel more comfortable if people were to contact me before doing something so I could vet it. Everything before the story is fair game, but there’s quite a bit of idea-space after the story that I’d want to reserve for sequels I want to write.

5. What’s your go-to writing beverage?

When I’m doing ‘write drunk, edit sober’ my go to drink is vodka-coke.

6. Who is your favorite oc? Tell me about them!

Ooh! Close choice between two:

Mayumi Uehara (The Ultimate Mathematician): Is essentially a self-insert (I knew long before starting to plan that I wanted an Ultimate Mathematician character) and also the OC slotting into one of my favourite Danganronpa archetypes. Plus my favourite line from TUoHS, the one I go and re-read when I’m feeling down, is a line of dialogue by her.

Hitomi Maeda (The Ultimate Chemist): I’ve got a database of all my characters, and one section is for descriptions of their personalities: quite a few paragraphs of text for most OCs as I’ve built them up. Hitomi’s now just reads ‘I have a massive crush on her.’ That’s enough to make her the easiest character for me to write by far. Plus she’s gotten me out of a couple of dead-ends while writing.

7. Do you feel that mistakes are important learning tools in the writing journey?

Not really? Unlike with maths or chess, I don’t really learn from my writing mistakes as I look over them. I just get locked-in on them, unable to change them without the help of the help of a beta-reader.

8. Rank your ocs by their capability in a footchase (either running after or from smth, your choice)

Let’s see:

Katsuya Terasaki (The Ultimate Firefighter)

Taichi Fujino (The Ultimate Driver)

Arata Nakayama (The Ultimate Archaeologist)

Ikko Watari (The Ultimate Scam Artist)

Satoru Ishihara (The Ultimate Journalist)

Hitomi Maeda (The Ultimate Chemist)

Yayoi Mikawa (The Ultimate Cosplayer)

Konosuke Kamio (The Ultimate Film Critic)

Mayumi Uehara (The Ultimate Mathematician)

I’ve long had a similar list ranking (both my OCs and the Haruhi Suzumiya characters) by who would win a fight. The big changes for this list are that Ikko Watari has shot up from last-but-one place, while Yayoi has dropped from third among my OCs. Also, while Katsuya is first out of my OCs on both lists, I’ve decided that his Talent has enough of an impact that he’s about equal to Haruhi in a race, rather than significantly worse than her in a fight.

9. Does your wip have romance? tell me about it!! if not tell me about a friendship/important relationship in your wip!!

I was about halfway through the sixth chapter when I realised that Arata Nakayama was crushing like hell on Mayumi Uehara. Had a bit of a think about it, decided it was mutual, and edited back to chapter four to hint at more of it. It doesn’t come from a particularly positive place for either of them: Mayumi is one of the few Ultimate students who doesn’t trigger Arata’s hangups about Hope’s Peak, while Mayumi (who as a self-insert - of me, no less - is about as close to an existence of pure selfishness as you can get) notices that Arata treats her better than the rest of the cast, and likes it. But I’ve decided that their romance itself will be happy and healthy.  It’s not a major part of the story - just offstage and a side detail like most of the other romances are in DR - but it does have effects on the plot. I’ve also decided that they will also get together in the past half of TUoHS, and that they would in any non-killing-game AU.

10. Do you believe in the advice kill your darlings?

Yeah: I have had cases where getting out of a block has needed me to get rid of a particularly witty but dead-end-aimed sentence. Most recent one was during the last part of the first trial, where I had three clues left to use and wrote a pithy way of introducing the first of them. But I quickly realised that talking about that clue would set the killer off, so no-one would get the chance to bring up the other two. I had to go back and use a different clue first, even if it wasn’t quite the same slam-dunk. That’s a general point, really: ‘Kill your darlings’ is particularly important in a mystery story like TUoHS, where controlling the information each character has is crucial for keeping the story on track. If a pretty phrase gives or requires from a character details they shouldn’t know, then it needs to go.

11. Do you prefer plotting or worldbuilding? Why?

The stories I’ve written haven’t needed lots of worldbuilding; they’ve all been hugging close to the world of the originals. I’d like to be good at worldbuilding, but I suspect I won’t be nearly as good as I am at plotting.