User blog:Seieireppa/God Eater:Universitas: Final thoughts

Well, with the epilogue, GE:U has come to an end. This three-month project of mine has reached its ultimate conclusion, and I've told all the stories I've wanted to tell.

Here, I'll just go on about a few miscellaneous things that went into the production of this project. And that's that! Stay tuned for my next (as of yet unnamed) project!
 * The final word count is somewhere around 57,000 words.  It's the length of a short novel and then some.
 * Initially, I had no idea who the final antagonist was going to be.  I had zero idea how I was going to work the end out.  It was just going to be someone from Idenn's future.  I had the idea to make Feldman the villain when someone commented on the first chapter wondering what happened to Feldman, who should have been the director of the Far East Branch, since Sakaki was currently installed as the director.  In that instant, I had the idea to have him come back as the main antagonist, so I based the rest of the plot around him.
 * On that note, probably around 80% of plot developments were written on-the-spot, by the seat of my pants.  Most of the time, things I plan out in the long-term don't match up to things I pull out of my ass on-the-spot.
 * Similarly, I often make plans for certain developments only to forget them later, before I write them.  That's why I wrote that Will had settled down at the Glasgow Branch, because I'd forgotten that he was supposed to just leave via time-space portal, so I added that back in at the last minute.
 * Originally, I wasn't planning on writing another big project after GE:U.  But Will's moment in the epilogue was too good not to follow up on, and I hadn't really explored him at all beyond Reverie.  So he'll be the protagonist of something new, coming... whenever.
 * This is a bit of a digression... but Sigma x Idenn.  That was completely unplanned.  I had planned on Idenn being Will's mother, and Idenn being the metallic Aragami, from the very beginning, but once I decided to link Will into GE:U, I figured that making Sigma his dad would have been rather thematically appropriate and allowed Will to fit in better when he appeared in GE:U.  Initially, his dad was just some dude, as evidenced by the fact that Will's God Arc was initially a buster blade as opposed to Sigma's short blade.
 * Strictly speaking, Lifespring isn't actually a Blood Art.  It's a scientific application of manipulation of Oracle energy and has nothing to do with Power of Blood or Blood in general or anything like that.  Theoretically, anyone with the right mind for science and the ability to grasp how Oracle energy is manipulated could pull it off.
 * Idenn was named after the final boss of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade (FE6), a Mage Dragon named Idenn (formerly translated by fans as Idoun).
 * Sigma was named after Sigma Klim, the main character of Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward.  His name now denotes ∑, the mathematical symbol denoting a summative operation, but that's where it came from.
 * Nanako's name came from how I tried to make an adult version of Nanako Dojima from Persona 4 when I first got GE2... only to find out that the character creator kind of sucked.
 * Will's full name, Willard Knox, is a fusion of Willard Huntington Wright and Ronald Knox, both of whom were famous mystery authors.  The name Willard Knox is also the name of the protagonist of a mystery novel I'm planning out, as an homage to these two authors and to the mystery genre.
 * Idenn's mechanical God Arc body was inspired by the Mechon from Xenoblade Chronicles, specifically Metal Face a.k.a. Mumkhar.