May 18, 2024
Author's Commentary #37:
Time to talk about Chapter 37: The Madagascar incident.
There truly is a lot to talk about this chapter. First off, the history of this chapter itself. Believe it or not, this chapter was actually one of the earliest ideas I had for a story line in the series. Obviously, there were some major differences like Rebelle and Cyril, the lemur, not being present. Masaru was also originally going to be present and the one to do the cook-off against the poachers, however, Rika getting attacked by the poachers and killing them was still present in the original draft.
As for Cyril, he's Rebelle's pet lemur she got as a gift from her mentor shortly after she left Britain. He's highly trained and one of the big reasons Rebelle has so much blackmail material. シリル is how his name is spelled in katakana.
His birthday is October 30th. The reason I chose this is because it is a day that World lemur day could be celebrated on. Since the day is celebrated on the last Friday of October, I decided to choose this date to be his birthday.
While this will likely be Cyril's only major appearance in the story, I might end up doing something with his character in a different novel.
In the original Spice of life, this chapter was more of a minor chapter, but here, I decided to make it more important, mainly via the inclusion of Hinari Nozomi. First off Hinari's bio.
陽愛 望 (Nozomi Hinari) is how her name is spelled in kanji. 陽愛 means "positive" and "to love" while 望 means "hope".
(If I made any mistakes with the translations, feel free to correct me).
Her birthday is July 28th which is world nature conservation day.
Her favorite food is rice.
In the original, Hinari also ended up being killed by Rika, but the circumstances were much different. There, Hinari was suicidal and was preparing to hang herself when Rika stopped by her place. Since she hated Rika for flirting with Masaru, a member of the Makihara faction, she attempted to kill Rika, but ended up getting accidentally kicked into the noose by Rika and hung to death as a result.
Since I was going to submit Spice of life to a contest, I felt that chapter was too dark and decided to rewrite Hinari's role in the story. It ended up working out much better in the end as rewriting Hinari's role in the story not only allowed me to not have Rika infiltrate the remedial course disguised as a student, but also make the Madagascar chapter more of a major plot point in the story.
Speaking of Rika, the time has finally come to reveal her favorite food, and as stated in the chapter, her favorite food is snakes. Due to her assassin training, she was often fed various venomous animals in order to build up immunity. As a result, she ended up developing the 3rd highest poison resistance amongst her family as well as a genuine appetite for snake meat. Snakes are actually on the menu at Ryokoma, but naturally they're the of the safe-to-eat variety. Of the snakes on the menu, rattlesnakes are by far Rika's favorite meal.
While the hyped up Madagascar chapter has finally been released, this arc is still far from over. In fact, there's still a few chapters left before the catering gig begins. I hope you look forward to it.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
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