Cardfight!! Vanguard: Spiral Terra

The Final Author's Note

So.

Spiral Terra came to a close. It's c'est fini. It's finished.

I didn't had to cancel it or shrink it down to ten chapters because of bad publishing schedules or a new format. *laughs in NEXTAGE and Thunderoys Rebellion*

This feels highkey weird. After three Vanguard Stories, only now I'm making a "Final Author's Note". It's ironic.

Almost a year ago, I started writing a story, a story to which I had already planned forward. Sorta. I came into Spiral Terra with everything planned up to the finale of Act II. Some things changed before the story began, there's no doubt about that. And I mean, A L O T changed before the story began. Let's take a quick look at some of the ideas of the original draft:

-Ryuuga's original design depicted him as a boy with green eyes and white dreadlocks with headphones around his neck. He wasn't a shy bky and was quite active, being a lover of parties and socializing.

-Hikaru's original role was someone who wanted revenge againat Ichigo and who's originak avatar was Battledore Fighter. Yes, I did tried to have Hikaru play pure Heroes during a time where everything overshadowed Nova Grappler.

-Emon's original role was to be the Kai to the current Ryuuga. You can see why this didn't happen, although if I had went forward with it, Spiral Terra would always be in first in the ranks since Kaichi fics are always up there.

-Ichigo's original personality depicted him as a super cocky guy who couldn't back it up and was an actually giant pussy. If you are in the Discord server, one of my promos had Hikaru attack Ichigo and Ichigo being a scared rat. I'm glad I changed him into the Ichigo "You are a scrub" Akio that everyone loves.

-Although the plans for Apex were made during Act I, the original plan was to have all members being connected to Harmonics Messiah. That later changed to only Masato being connected to it through his family's history so that Renji, Yuri and Bruno could have their own personal narrative.

Hikaru: I want super millennial Ryuuga for the sequel! LET'S MAKE A PETITION FOR IT!

Ryuuga: niBBA NO! *unholy scream*

Bad ideas of the original draft aside, I'm reallt happy how Spiral Terra turned out. It was an amazing journey. It's like what they say these day. What matters are the friends you make during the journey and part of the journey is the end.

This story establish Spiral Terra as the starting point of the future part of the CCEU and made Ryuuga the godfather of future Standard Format CCEU protagonists, that's a minor thing I wanted to get out of the way.

One of the greatest parts of writing this story was writing the characters, every character is so different. Ryuuga went from shy to a "normal" teenager, Hikaru was the one with the jokes over the top and then mixed it with his seriousness from Act II, Fujiko's "tsundere" side (if you can call it that), Emon was the wise and serious one, Akira was more of a generic anime best friend to Emon than Hikaru was to Ryuuga, Ichigo and his scrub addiction, Taira's over the top shouting and so on; every character had it's own quirk in their personality, no character was the same. On the side of the adults in the story, writing a now wise and grown up Ryuzaki who is a mentor and a father, writing adult Payic, Inu and Maverick (which is up to Fox to say if I wrote them well or not), Kamishiro's own quirkness and Yuichiro's cool mentor uncle personality; my point is that the adults, despite grown up and mature, were also different from each other.

Another thing that I loved to write were the fights. As a Vanguard writer, fights are sometimes my favourite thing to write. Comparing so many different playstyles and decks with extreme sound bangers and big character moments (Ryuuga vs Despair, #15), I love those things in a Vanguard story.