SCORE (Blue Lock)

Afterword by ImagiWorksNation

January 7th, 2025

Dear Readers,

Hi, it's me - the person who been giving you this strange yet beautiful content for the past 77 chapters. I just want to say that this project, SCORE, has meant a lot to me over the past years. And so do all of you lovely readers who made the experience 1000000% better.

Fun Fact: This story is 463,012 words and 1,685 pages long. The first two novels of the Game of Thrones series are 1,462 pages long put together, so basically you've just read more than two really big books. 😂

SCORE actually was the second Blue Lock piece I tried to write. The first one is still in my drafts as an unpublished one shots work that inspired this story. One-shots are hard for me to write because I get attached to OCs so quickly. And sure enough, I wrote a Isagi beach one shot with a female character really really similar to Keiko. And...... well, you know what happened next, lol.

Iteya Keiko will forever be a permanent fixture in my heart.

Anyway, I wanted to share some things with you that I think you will find interesting.

This was fully supposed to be an Isagi x OC story with competition between him, Bachira, and Nagi. Rin was always supposed to be her former best friend turned rival and Shido was always planned to be the ex-boyfriend.

I don't know how many of you knew this, but I was originally writing chapters that were like eight chapters ahead of what I had published and I did this until right after the U-20 vs Blue Lock match. So when I published Chapter 1, I was actually writing Chapter 10 behind the scenes... so the Isagi objective was something I was chasing and this worked until I published chapter six and I was writing like chapter 16 and got way too into the Rin and Keiko backstory that I was like... shit... I gotta consider this.  So I did and thought about it for a while. Ultimately, somewhere around the end of the Second Selection chapter publication was when I officially moved forward with Rin as the main and final love interest.

And if you were curious, I'm going to spill the tea even more.

THINGS I PLANNED FROM THE VERY START:

1. Keiko was always going to be eliminated from Blue Lock.

It had to happen for many reasons. First - Let's be realistic. There would be a probably a lot of problems globally if she did join a World Cup team as the only female so I knew at some point she had to be eliminated or quit (quitting was out of the question tho). Second - I realized quickly I was gonna run out of manga reference to write the kind of conclusion I wanted. That's when I came about the time skip arc. I thought about how to transition from her time into Blue Lock to her time in Spain long and hard and even wrote out several creative plots to lead up to it. Originally, I was gonna kick her off after the U-20 match because the JFU simply told Ego that they were cutting her from the roster or something. Sad, but it would have worked. Yet, I wanted her to develop a little more with the characters before I did this awful thing to her, including imploring her relationship with Rin. Then I came up with the super Sae sabotage of the 21st century during the NEL. The rest was pretty set in stone after that.

2. Sae was always going to end up being the asshole.

Sae is one of my favorite Blue Lock characters, but to be honest I kind of saw him as a guy who would turn really desperate if he wasn't able to get what he wanted. And that's exactly the direction I took him in. I guess his continuous rejection from Keiko made him snap and led him to the events that took place in her elimination. And even though he got what he wanted, I knew she would never be okay with what he "did for her". So it added that extra spicy angst twist there at the end. I'm so sorry for making you the bad guy Sae, but you low key deserve it