Afterword
Hello, this is Asari Endou. I write the Magical Girl Raising Project series. There are quite a lot of characters in it, and since every one of them has a story, there are often things I can’t fit into the main novels. The result is that I take these sorts of secret tales, make them into short stories, and send them out into the world.
This book is composed of those short stories. It’s the second of its kind in this series. The second book—That’s a scary thing, huh? On the special site Monthly Magical Girl Raising Project, which is currently on This Manga Is Amazing Web, they have stuff like popularity contests where you vote for which girls you want to be featured in a short story. The winners end up in this book for you all to see.
For those who are curious about who won the popularity contest and which were the most popular short stories, please do check it out on Monthly Magical Girl Raising Project. I refresh the page about three times a day to check the rankings. There’s lots of info about the anime, the merch, all sorts of stuff. It’s seriously a lot of fun.
Now then, as you can see, the new short stories for this volume were produced a little differently from usual. And if you ask how it turned out, in the end… Below is a conversation between S-mura and me after all the short stories were done.
“There’s a bit of a problem.”
“A problem?”
“One of the magical girls shows up too often even though she never won the contest.”
“Huh? Is there?”
“Tot Pop appears in three stories.”
“Ahhh… Now that you mention it, yes. About where was Tot Pop in the ranking, again?”
“Around the middle. She had about the same number of votes as Mina Mad Gardener Acre.”
“Leaving aside how that character got enough votes to be ranked that high—what do we do about this? I can’t really change who shows up in the stories…”
“Just do some casual teasing in the afterword.”
“Oh. That’s all, huh…?”
So that’s what happened.
As a writer, having a character who’s a veteran magical girl, friends with Keek, a student of Frederica, affiliated with an antiestablishment faction, and able to befriend pretty much anyone is so convenient—er, charming, so surely you can understand that, right? Give her thirty minutes, and she won’t just be showing up in stories, she’ll even pop up outside the book to get in the way of things. She can easily break through the fourth wall. Watch out for Tot Pop, readers.
To everyone from the editing department who has offered me guidance, and to S-mura, who has so kindly educated me on the dangers of Tot Pop: Thank you so much.
To Marui-no, thank you very much for your wonderful illustrations. Over the course of this series, you’ve illustrated a whole lot of characters who hardly get any time in human form. Thus far, my style has been to have magical girls watching over me while I write about magical girls, but you’ve shown me a new path: that humans are also not bad. I think I’ll enjoy this path for what it is, too.
And to all my readers who have bought this book, thank you very much. The official anime site has launched, and the manga adaptation of Magical Girl Raising Project restart has been announced, and there will be various forms of media coming out in the future, too. I hope you enjoy those as well.
Now then, let us meet again in the next story.
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