#what's eri's surname omg

[greysfall]

[A story only Hachiko knows] long comic strip and birthday gift for @areiml​. This is my imagination of a story set during the 3 years between OG and Neo, featuring a short meeting between Eri and Beat as they talked about how everyone was coping with Neku’s disappearance and moving on with their own lives. 

This comic referred to several comic strips I made before, sorta intertwined between canon game lore, my thoughts on the unexplored potentials of Eri’s role in the story and my friend & I’s BeatEri fever dream. I imagined it would be set at around 3-6 months after Neku’s disappearance and shortly before the gang entered high school. I never thought it was gonna be this long as it all started out as a few whimsical panels. While the comic has mentions of NeShiki and BeatEri, you can read it as general friendship if that’s your preferred interpretation (save for the bonus piece below). 

I actually have zero confidence writing Beat’s dialogues, tho I’m pleased with his design - which I put together by imagining Beat without his knitted cap, plus changing to some of his favourite WildBoar threads. My friend joked that since I’m used to draw sparkly Composers, I made Beat so handsome that even his parents won’t recognise him. Eri is canonically pretty, so I wanted to depict her as TV-star-pretty. Another trivia is that Beat generally isn’t a dessert fan, he also tends to dislike fruit-flavoured desserts and only enjoys chocolate-flavoured ones so it was a surprise that strawberry is his favourite boba flavour lmao. Now who does strawberry boba remind me of? Guess.

With this done, I’m one comic strip away from having enough materials for an anthology. The “final” strip was already drafted along with the Composers strip. If we’re lucky, I might get to draw it next year.

There is a Japanese version of this comic on Twitter in case you need it. And lastly, here is the bonus piece which is a redraw of my friend’s comic strip. Happy Birthday! (have fun being at the same age as Asa while I’m Tougou’s, teehee)