Afterword

This is my 51st book. Zounose here. This was (another?) book really heavy on personal interpretations. However, whereas usually I start with some interpretation or idea based on the official works and then mold that into a story, this time it felt more like I started with a story I wanted to draw and built everything else on top of that.

I experimented with a rougher brush texture in this one, but I'm anxious to see how it will look in print form. Titania has been used as a motif in several different works. I first ran into her in Shin Megami Tensei II. In that game, she's simply a top-ranking demon of the Fairy type with no role in the story itself, but her husband Oberon appears in a unique event that left a strong impression. Because of that, he's also in all kinds of strategy guides and other supporting materials, giving Titania the occasional boost in visibility as well and getting her stuck in my memory.

For the record, that thing about her having butterfly wings is simply the way she's drawn in a lot of places, not strictly canonical to her character or anything. Actually, she didn't even have them in SMT II. As for Touhou, since the moment Larva's image was shown on the demo disk casing, some people expected her to have more of a Titania motif. (So did I, to be honest.) The title of her theme definitely didn't help either, but in the end, she ended up being tied more to Tokoyo-no-kami instead, which was a very Touhou-like twist. I feel like I want to draw a book about Larva sometime, which is why I don't go too deep into her character here.

That gory scene of Cirno's, ahem, "time out" was something I added as a dramatic twist almost out of bad habit. Not too much deep thought went into it. Even the official works such as PoFV make it sound a little disturbing, to the point that it feels weird to take too lightly, but I think it worked out as a dramatic setpiece. Maybe I should do a story exploring that too sometime. Speaking of, anybody here seen the movie Midsommar? It wasn't my intention in the slightest, but I may have unconsciously ended up drawing some influence from there too.

The next book (Summer Comiket, if I get a spot?) should be about Suwako and Toutetsu. Truth be told, I was actually trying to get it done for this Reitaisai, but I decided that it was too much work to finish in time and urgently switched over to this book. Although, this book turned out longer than expected too, so I was really running it close! But, well then. I hope we can meet again.