Thread:Lilliana:3/@comment-397235-20140912011340/@comment-397235-20140918020639

I'm very afraid now.

As for the characters themselves, the story is set in Colorado, in the central United States, so most of the cast is white; that's just how American demographics shape up for small towns. There are three exceptions:

Isabel is Hispanic. Originally I'd planned for her to be blonde (Shane and I even "cast" a blonde actress for her when we were spitballing this as a TV show); to me, she works better as a Hispanic. I picked Isabel because it's close to Izumi, but her middle and surnames are more or less literal translations of "Izmumi Akazawa," which means something along the lines of "Beautiful River Stronghold;" thus we get "River Castle."

William Mauna, who shows up on Kirk's first day of school, is Hawaiian. I did this because Junta Nakao, who he's an analog to, has an Okinawan name. Okinawa is more or less the Japanese equivalent of Hawaii. A lot of the girls have a thing for him because he's exotic; it irks him on some level because Kirk's even more abnormal, since they've known him for a while. Junta's name more or less means strong and thick; William, supposedly (if Jack Sparrow is any judge) means "strength" and Mauna is Hawaiian for "mountain" which Nakao literally translates as.

Carly Tachibana is, obviously, Japanese. She's a composite of Sayuri (the girl with the glasses and the pigtails) and Tachibana, who was an upperclassman and one of Mei's friends in the manga. She crops up more often than Sayuri did, and fills a similar roll to Tachibana; however, personality and appearance wise, she's Sayuri. I even picked her name this way: Carly means "little woman" while Sayuri means "little lily;" we already had a Lily, so I figured Carly works too.

As for what I draw from: my fan fiction (which, I guess, this technically is) is unique in that I try to draw from as many different universes without the fandom as possible. For a Resident Evil project I worked on for years, for instance, I took elements from the novels, games, films, comic books, and cancelled games and Romero's scrapped film, then combined them into my own alternate universe. I've done much the same with Another.

I've only read a few snippets of the novel, but it's all written in first person and narrated by Kouichi. I dislike first person point of view immensely; I used it for papers in school and that's it. The narrative style I prefer is third-person-limited: it gives you a very good idea of how one character thinks and reacts to a specific situation without giving you a god-like knowledge of everything. The (CHARACTER NAME) thing you see in this story was something I started doing on Fanfiction.net to make it easy to tell when PoV shifts, since I do that a lot and FFN likes to both, A, delete anything not an actual character (so underscores and asterisks) you put in, and B, delete extraneous gaps (like paragraph breaks); I needed something to make it more readable, but now it's become a part of my writing style for everything.

The more you read, the more you'll understand where Isabel's coming from. She's a hybrid of her character from the manga and anime. Each "episode" (the sections) focuses on a specific character, who is given flashbacks. I'm not sure how effectively I used those with Sherry; mostly she was an experiment. Isabel gets two episodes to herself, and her first is the next one. You probably won't like everything she does, but you'll understand why a lot better. She's definitely sympathetic.

A lot of characters are composites of the different versions of each:

Thomas Martin is based heavily upon Tomohiko Kazami in the manga, with a little bit of his film counterpart thrown in; the only thing he has in common with the anime version is his crush on Sherry.

Amy Belle is a composite of Yumi Ogura in the anime and Takako Sugiura from the film and manga, with some of my own twists thrown in. She also has a few elements of Reiko Mikami for good measure.

Alexandria Nobel is more or less Takako from the anime, but she has some of her reluctance from the manga and film thrown in; her relationship with Isabel is a cross between the film and anime, but she's also close to Amy, Violet, and Sherry, none of which exists anywhere else (Takako saw and was disturbed by Yukari's death in all versions of Another, seems to be jealous of the time Junta spends with Yumi in the anime, and can be seen giving Aya a disdainful glare when Kubodera kills himself and she breaks down).

Holly Jordan is based very heavily on my favorite version of Mei, the one from the movie. However, she also has elements of her incarnations from the anime and manga, and like everyone else there's also my own take on her character to consider.

As for Lily telling Kirk she's going to be his teacher right off the bat, that's something Reiko does in the movie pretty much immediately. I didn't like that at first, but I realized how absurdly difficult it'd be to keep that under wraps for people watching the film; I mean, anyone who pays close attention will figure out it's the same actress. Plus, since Kirk is one of the main points of view, it'd be weird for him not to think of her as Lily even at school; it's a constant struggle for him. It's also much clearer the farther you get in. Also, since Reiko will have PoV a few times, and it'd be weird if she thought of herself as "Mikami."

As for your question about Isabel surviving...well, I can't really tell you that, can I? I mean, why spoil it? I can tell you she goes after Holly, though.

Also, keep in mind, I'm planning to do three of these: set in 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011; surviving one Calamity doesn't automatically protect you from all of them.