The Boy With The Blank Stare: The Promise

Thank You

Well...here we are again. It's always such a pleasure, remember when you tried to-no we're not doing that XD

When I first made the awful decision to have The Boy with the Blank Stare have multiple timelines and alternate universes, I was actually consistent at the beginning with uploading them all at the same time, however, working on three stories with the same plot at the same time became...well-draining to say the least.

This was also the time I had an itch for new story ideas, one being Love Is along with Dear Saihara, so I decided to make sure I wouldn't just pump out chapters to have chapters was to just focus on one sequel at a time.

While I don't think I made a mistake, I'm a bit proud of my younger self for realizing their limitations, I am not proud of how long it took for me to FINISH the other two sequels. Mainly because past Aki did not like making plans for books back then in documents, instead let's keep it in the unreliable brain.

That worked out great.

SO one massive overhaul of the original promise story, one that involved a lot of Ouma abuse so you can thank me right now that this story only had the minimum requirement for an AGeekyBear story, and we ended up with this.

It's actually interesting to see how my writing changed over the years. My style has just gotten longer with chapters. When it comes to developing characters and interactions, I think it's more realistic or more fleshed out?

DICE for one, I didn't even have really distinctive personalities for them back then, I had only done one book with them previously at the time (I mean if we don't count their small involvement in Panta) and that was Life of a Liar my first fanfic, and even then both of those were Chiasa centered when it came to DICE. But now in the future, I have fleshed out them as individuals more, so it was kind of interesting to write them in this new scenario, it made them almost matter more I guess? 

In the original book when it came to Ouma's mother, I just thought he still loved her, story over. But the more I matured over those years and the more I thought about it, I realized what a complicated relationship the two really did have, because Ouma didn't get that chapter in the previous book, he never had that kind of closure with his mother and I decided to really reflect that on his mixed feelings about her death.

I also made sure to include over the story how it wasn't just Saihara that made Ouma happier, but that he finally got the right tools to cope with his PTSD and depression, he got therapy and a more stable home environment than he had before which is what allowed him to grow more. He finally had adults and other people other than just Momota who he could rely on and allowed him time to heal.

So even though back in 2019, II thought I would hate The Promise the most...I actually think it's better than Punishment Time now in terms of quality, and story progression. So thanks to everyone who waited all this time for me to FINALLY finish the book, and thanks to all who keep continuing to support me.

I will return to Future now, as it's the last one left as of the time of writing this and I want the satisfaction of having done what I set out to do all those years ago, might be a short hiatus though because I want to plan out the story completely so there's less of a bad upload schedule.

So I hope you enjoyed the story and have a good day.