Introducing Characters | #2 Tsukasa/Haruna Nozomi (TSSC) (Patreon)

This time, the nonexistent raffle has given the green light to present a girl who’s beloved by the fandom and, interestingly, one of my personal favorites to write.

The real story behind how this character came to be... All thanks to rookie mistakes.

Tsukasa Nozomi was the original concept for this young girl: reserved, serious, with a high ego and hard for others to get along with due to her constant teasing.As the time to introduce her in an event drew closer, I started to feel it would be even harder to connect her with the rest of the cast, except by pairing her with Yuzue.Ignoring my own warnings about the character, I decided to stick with her initial attitude and present her as someone cold, distant, and even slightly disdainful toward others for being “beneath her” in the socioeconomic sense.

Then something interesting happened.While I was working on the CGI for a scene featuring Arisa, Sensei, Matsuura, and Nozomi (Images 2 and 3) right before they buy a cellphone, and with the script already fully written, I completely forgot that Nozomi was even in the scene. I kept working on the other characters without even realizing she was there. Oops (?

So when Nozomi finally had a line of dialogue, I had this moment of realization—“Hmn… right, she’s supposed to be here... And for some reason, I just ignored her...”Then I thought: “Okay, this is meant to be a comedy game, and adding another grumpy character… it’s not really that funny anymore.”

So I made a decision on the spot: to rework Nozomi’s character. Not her appearance, but her personality, and I changed her surname from Tsukasa to Haruna.

She went from being the reserved, irritable, and arrogant girl I had originally planned…to becoming an open-minded, curious, kind, and airheaded girl who’s easy to talk to. Or sometimes, hard to follow, depending on where her mind is wandering.

And since I had personally forgotten about the character while working, I decided to make that her thing: that she often just “zones out.”

More than once, I also forgot to position her pupils correctly, which made it seem like she was staring off in a totally different direction rather than making eye contact during conversations.This was even brought up by Kaede in the Christmas event, when she tells Nozomi “Hey, my eyes are up here,” as if Nozomi were focusing more on her breasts than her face. (Not gonna lie, Kaede’s got a great bust.) (Images 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11)

In its early versions, Two Sides was heavily criticized because the characters all felt flat and practically the same, except for Shunnaru and Yuzue.So giving Nozomi a personality even goofier and more scatterbrained than Danielle’s turned out to be a huge improvement.Originally, Nozomi was meant to be a side character, just someone to support scenes and get a few laughs (like Matsuura does), with no real impact on the story. But I liked her a lot, and so did the community. She quickly became a fan favorite, and before long, I made her a main character, switching her to a new classroom just so she could stay with her buddy Yuzue!

All these little mistakes ended up breathing life into Nozomi.She’s the result of many, many missteps. But as they say:"The real mistake is making a mistake and not correcting it."So in the end, Nozomi wasn’t a mistake— she was a happy little accident.