Thread:Shanethefilmmaker/@comment-397235-20140722012358/@comment-397235-20140722035923

With the whole Yomiyama Misaki thing, I think at first I'd alternate between Mei and Kouichi's actors, but make sure it's not readily evident who they are (they'd not even be credited this way). Once Mei reveals Misaki was a boy, Misaki of course stops being a girl in the flasbacks. You're meant to think Kouichi is the extra until the very end, even going so far as to thinking the student Reiko protected from Kazuma was him and that she'd survived her wounds, which wouldn't have left scars in the first place if Kouichi wasn't there to get shot.

When Mei takes Kouichi to kill Reiko, at first she's very vague and open ended, and you're still not sure who she's talking about. It looks like she's going to attack him, and he even tenses up, but she calmly explains she wanted him to understand, before telling him what happened the previous year.

As an added bonus, the rough equivalent to Misaki in the West would be Jordan. Jordan is an asexual first name, and can also be a surname. Of course, we don't use last names here very often, so Takako wouldn't remember going to school with a "Jordan" (and even if she did it wouldn't matter; it's a really common name); she'd remember someone who looked like Mei, whose name is never revealed in her flashbacks so you don't know it's really Misaki until later.

As an added, added bonus, I think it'd be interesting to give Kouichi the same name as someone from one of the more famous high school shootings; this would be especially sensitive given what's just happened at this school the previous year. If this were set in 2000, for instance, that'd be one year after Columbine (you couldn't set this in 1998 for the same reason; Columbine was the first of its kind, and happened in late '99).