Chapter Text
Welcome! This is a bit weird and different from what I normally do, but I had so many thoughts and ideas for this fic and I felt like sharing them could be fun, so I'm doing so here. This is far from everything I've ever written about this fic, but this is what I feel comfortable sharing.
As I mentioned in the chapter summary, I highly recommend watching Your Name and playing through all of Until Then before reading these notes but also reading the fic in general. Consider this your spoiler warning!
With that out of the way, these are more or less sorted by the order these thoughts came up in the fic.
Daily Life
I wanted to open with both of their normal lives to showcase just how different they were. Nicole’s life was always filled with people she cared about, and she rarely had to struggle with things academically or socially. In contrast, Mark’s life is pretty much empty if he’s not with one of his friends, and he struggles to apply himself in pretty much any situation. I know this is all pretty much a rehash of the game’s information, but it felt necessary to set up the story in my eyes.
Time Is Tearing Us Apart
Making it so Time Is Tearing Us Apart was co-written by Nicole and Mark might initially seem like a bad idea, and I struggled with the idea of changing what the piece was for a while, but I decided it made sense for this version of the story. In this version, Nicole has no reason to write the piece because Jake isn’t pulling away from her when they’re kids. They’re friends well into being teenagers. So, the piece lost its meaning, and simply porting it over seemed like a bad idea. But you know who pulls away from Nicole, through magic? Mark! The two of them are literally co-writing a piece about finding each other despite forces beyond their comprehension pulling them away from one another. To me, this change in meaning for the piece elevates what this story does, even if it means I have to change it from its original purpose.
Of course, there’s also the significance it has to Mark and his connection to his mom. Unfortunately, for what I wanted to do, there wasn’t a natural fit for finding that connection anymore. Instead, Mark’s mom and his connection to her is more generally connected to the piano. It’s weaker than it is in the source material, I know, but I think that’s the only issue with this concept. And it was a sacrifice I was willing to make.
Your Name and Gender
Doing anything with Your Name inspiration, especially when the characters are different sexes, can get bloated with things about gender dysphoria and affirmations. I took a lot of time trying not to dive too hard into those themes, as those were not and never were going to be the subject of this particular story, but to completely exclude them would be foolish and miss some of the fun of the Your Name inspiration. I hope I kept those tones light enough that it didn’t take away from the story that I wanted to tell, but I hope I gave enough that people were reminded enough that they were fully body swapping.
Mr. Corpuz
We don’t really know what Mr. Corpuz’s deal is outside of the allusions to him being abusive, but to me, he mirrored the way Mr. Miyamizu acted with his kids. Putting them in the same role allowed me to do a couple of things - firstly, it gave Mark, i.e. ‘Nicole’, a direct way to tell the mayor to evacuate, something he would need to do in order to save people. Secondly, it allowed me to get Mark to empathize with and befriend Kate and Jake. Both strike me as the type to be concerned when Nicole is clearly struggling, because it's a rarity, and Mark is rather avoidant in conflict, so this would obviously create a bad impression for him. Having him be visible and around in front of Mark, he’d notice how that made Kate and Jake feel, thus creating a way for him to care about more than just saving Nicole and her family.
Dark Fiends Character Builds
There’s a moment in the first time Mark notices Nicole’s GameStation where I talk about the builds they both used in Dark Fiends, and I thought I was pretty clever with the use of them, so I wanted to talk about how much I actually thought about this.
“Turns out, she was pretty far along in the game, with a more defensive build that focused on being able to take hits and stun enemies so she could regenerate health. She was stocked up on healing items, the defenses were easily her highest stats, but her offense meant she was in fights much longer. It was the opposite strategy he opted for in these games - he would often play evasion tanks that moved quickly and did a lot of damage, relying highly on taking enemies out fast and not getting hit at all.”
These builds were meant to represent the way these two characters handle trauma. Nicole is said multiple times to be constantly thinking about the past and that she’s a tough person, often carrying on as best she can despite how hurt she is. Her defensive build really lends itself to that idea, I think. She’s able to take a lot of pain, and she’s able to move on for a little before it hits her again, and she’s right back to being in pain. Thanks to her offensive stats being low, I could also allude to how long she was hurting. Jake disappeared 3 years ago in the source material, and she was still constantly thinking about him in the events of the game.
On the other side, Mark runs away from his problems. He pretended his mom was simply unresponsive for a full year, he refuses to give up on the search for Cathy in loop 2 when she disappears, and he is the one that decides they need to keep causing the world to reset despite how poorly things are clearly going. He avoids the obvious and just keeps on relenting on the lie that things are okay, or that they are fixable. The idea of an evasion tank who just does a bunch of damage really made sense to me as a comparable way to how he deals with grief and trauma.
Mind you, I never played Dark Souls, so whether or not any of that made sense for that game, I wouldn’t know.
Nicole’s Binder
I specifically chose each mentioned real life piano piece in Nicole’s binder for a reason. I didn’t want to just pick a few pieces from a quick google search, I wanted them to have meaning. And I wanted them to foreshadow Nicole’s life, from where it was at the beginning of the story, to the middle, to the end, to the epilogue. Below I’ve talked about the reasons I picked each individual piece.
Prelude No. 1 in C (Bach) represents the present, the beginning of the story and the hope that Nicole feels in her life. She still has everything in her life, without much discomfort or sadness. Jake and Kate are still her best friends, with little tension between the three, and she has her childhood home with her town and family very much intact. I felt this piece was whimsical and, while containing some sombre chords and melodies, still remained hopeful and happy.
Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven) represents the entwinement and the swapping of their lives with one another. They both describe body swapping to be dream-like, with details being spotty at best. Moonlight Sonata is often described as dreaming and floaty, the way I imagine trying to recall the memories of each other’s lives would feel. There’s a tone of dissonance at the song that would hint at the reason they were swapping bodies, that they were trying to save Nicole, Jake, and Kate, and that they became entwined officially the day Mark’s mother vanished.
Prelude in E Minor (Chopin) represents the Ruling, and what it will do to Nicole’s life. Initially, before the finale, the Ruling kills everyone in the town, leaving few survivors. After the finale, Mark and Nicole will have saved a majority of the town population, with only a couple dozen casualties, including Jake’s mom. This piece always felt to me like it starts sad and only gets more sombre as it goes on, with little uplifting about the piece. To me, that’s what the ruling is. It crushes Mark to find out that Nicole has been dead for a year, it literally crushes Nicole and the Corpuz family, and the longer the ruling went on, the worse things were for everyone involved.
Liebestraum No. 3 (Liszt) represents the future, the epilogue, and what these characters can do after altering history. Nicole and Mark may not immediately meet and remember everything after all they’ve been through, but after graduation, on a random day, they’ll remember one another, even if only vaguely. The people around them will be happy; Louise will be well on her way to becoming a revered scientist, Jake will be making people laugh, Ridel will be making short films, Kate will be away from her abusive father, and Cathy will be opening her bakery with Sofia. Are there better outcomes than this reality they live in? Maybe. But this is the one they live in, and they’re all generally quite happy.
The Realization
I’m sure there were some eyebrows raised that Nicole was able to figure out the body swapping on her own, but I think it's perfectly in line with how hard we know she works. Mark didn’t often try to solve things on his own, often relying on Louise for stuff like this to figure out what might have happened. Nicole, however, is a thinker, and I think she would be able to figure out from the handwriting samples she had that something about that dream was real. I think it’s very reasonable for her to take precautions after figuring that out, even if it took Louise explaining her theory to her for her to fully understand what might be happening.
On Understanding
While I know that the montage scene is lacking, I struggled to think of a way to make that montage suck less. In the end, I figured talking about the ongoing developments in their lives and giving insight to how they were changing as people while they were swapping bodies was the best way to do anything like this. I also thought for a brief time about making the entire chapter small 10 paragraph snippets of those months, but it would’ve really taken up more time than I wanted to spend on those months, so I opted to ignore them.
I also think this is the weakest chapter of the fic, because it largely sets up the main conflict at the end of the story. I generally think this section of Your Name is also the weakest in the movie for a similar reason, so this is something that may have put me in a bad space mentally when trying to write this chapter.
Italicized POV
You may have noticed that, if I had two POVs happening at the same time at any point in the story, Mark was always the normal text while Nicole was the italicized text. I did this primarily to hint at Nicole’s fate during the initial events of the ruling. Nicole, for much of the story, is dead, a ghost inhabiting Mark’s body on a day to day basis.
Obviously, it helped clarify whose POV you were looking through at the time during those sections, but I did put thought into why Nicole’s was always italicized.
Mrs. Corpuz
We’ve talked about their dad, so let's talk about their mom. She’s a character we never see in the game, but we know about one particular action she took in the game - she ran away with Jake. In this fic, I wanted to alter her character a little bit, mostly to fit the narrative I was trying to construct. Here, she’s much the same way in that she wants to protect her kids. Kate never felt very loved by her parents, and I chose to hint at that by her mother realizing that she picked Jake arbitrarily and wants to save both, but only has the money to save one. The choice to stay and alter the timeline there means, to me, that she wants to save both, but doesn’t have the means other than taking all the abuse herself. The scene where she has a heart to heart with ‘Nicole’ is my attempt to explain why Jake is both not missing and still around during high school, as well to make her a bit more fleshed out.
Whether I succeeded in those explanations is another question, but that’s why I wrote her that way. Her death is what originally gets all of them killed in the ruling, as well as the reason they eventually survive when Mark warns Nicole about what happens.
Mark’s Audition Daydream
I had a lot of ideas of what this could be. I knew I wanted Mark’s performance to have a daydreaming element to it early on, but what direction the daydream would take really changed as I wrote.
Initially, I wanted it to be a daydream of Mark and Nicole getting married. This would be a fun way for him to clearly get his feelings out to the reader, but I realized pretty quickly that this idea didn’t work very well for the plot. It didn’t really connect anything, and readers coming into this story almost certainly have either played the game already or watched the movie, so it wouldn’t have actually done anything but be self-indulgent, which would be nice, but I knew I could do better here.
I then thought about this being his vision of Nicole dying, mirroring Taki’s vision of Mitsuha dying after drinking the sake. And while this idea works in isolation, it didn’t really make sense for where we were in the story. After all, if you know anything about Your Name, the fact that the tragedy happened is supposed to be a surprise for after one character goes looking for the other.
At this point in the story, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do for Nicole’s death. I knew I wanted Mrs. Corpuz to be dead at the end, as this would allow me to bring Jake and Kate to the Lacsamana household after the Ruling, giving them a much happier ending. But the scene of the death in my head up to this point had always been in the Corpuz house.
It wasn’t until I was looking for what to make of this daydream that I realized I had the perfect chance to foil Mark’s performance with the performance that would change Nicole’s life. In game, this performance is directly followed by the revelation that Jake is missing, and she quits piano until she meets Mark. In this story, the performance is interrupted by the Ruling, which ends up killing Mrs. Corpuz under debris. Her kids and Nicole try to save her, but if they do, they’ll suffer the same fate.
So instead of including Nicole dying in this daydream, which would’ve been a premature reveal, I held off until later to finish this vision, leaving it at just before the Ruling takes full effect.
Mike
Dude I had no idea what to do with Mike. Aside from the one Nookface post that mentioned him and the epilogue appearance, bringing him up in any Louise scene felt impossible to fit in naturally. Even during the scene where Nicole and Louise are talking about their “date” the day before, it felt like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. I’m so sorry to any Mike fans who wanted to see more of him, because I would have LOVED to have him a little more present, but I just couldn’t find a non-janky way to include him other than the brief cameos I already gave him.
If you are curious, one of the scenes in the aforementioned “On Understanding” montage I had originally envisioned would have included Mike and Louise going public and being cute in front of ‘Mark’ and their collective friends, which would’ve sent Sofia into a joking spiral. It truly wasn’t anything personal, I just couldn’t make myself feel it worked well with the pacing of the story.
Mark’s Travel Buddies
In the movie, Taki is accompanied by his coworker who he’s gotten close to with Mitsuha’s help and one of his best friends. I wanted to replicate this, so of course I had Louise take Okudera’s role and Cathy take Tsukasa’s role. It isn’t a perfect comparison, nothing is between these two properties, but I really like the idea of Ridel and Sofia also being ready to go on this journey with him if not for their commitments. The plotline with Sofia’s grandmother means a lot to me so I try to mention it a little any time I think I can get away with it, and Ridel being successful but not forgetting his friends is the perfect ending for him IMO, so while he doesn’t join the group here he definitely does care a lot and makes it known as much as he can help it.
Time is Tearing Us A Restaurant
I really toyed with how Mark finds out about the Ruling affecting Nicole a lot. There were drafts where he found the Lacsamana’s Nicole-less by chance, but that didn’t make sense to me if they moved nearby afterwards. There was also a draft where he met Mr. Corpuz at Riverbanks miserably working without any of his family remaining. As cathartic as it would be, and he definitely deserves it, I don’t think there’s a reasonable way for this appearance to actually advance the plot. So I included a throwaway line about the art teacher, Mrs. Flores, early on in the fic to make a full circle moment where she’s the reason Mark is able to find out about the Ruling’s effect on Purok Pagasa.
Jake and Kate's Dreams
This was a big point of internal discussion for me. How do I make it so Kate and Jake believe there's a chance Mark is telling the truth?
In Your Name, Tessie is into the occult and the like, so he's able to buy in and convince himself and Sayaka that there's a chance, especially when he finds the history of the lake that Itomori surrounds.
There's not an equivalent for Until Then, the closest coming in the form of Maria and Jake's involvement (read: they're meddling with time). But Jake is alive in this story, and I didn’t want him to die. So I needed some reason for them to believe Mark despite how ridiculous it sounded.
My solution came to me while I was sort of just writing versions of the scene at the beginning of chapter 10. I wrote something about Jake having nightmares about the tragedy and being really confused by them, and then the solution clicked into place; Jake and Kate were getting visions from their mother in the original timeline, where they had all died.
It helps explain earlier parts of the fic that I had already thought about a lot, like Mrs. Corpuz’s willingness to sacrifice herself and why she was mentioned a number of times.
The Worst Day In Mark’s Life
This was one of the first scenes in the fic I conceptualized. I knew early on that I wanted Mark and Nicole to meet for the first time the day Mark found out about his mom. The following day would then be the day Nicole died in the original timeline.
That said, when I first conceptualized it, I had yet to come up with the idea that Nicole wanted to see Mark’s audition, or that the band Mark wore around his wrist was from the shred of fabric he got from Nicole’s ribbon. This scene initially was a lot less packed with small details, as most early conceptualized scenes are, but the more I wrote, the more these details felt vital to making the story make sense and connected to the original works.
Chapter Titles
You may have caught this if you were paying close attention, but each chapter title was based on a section title from Until Then. I toyed around with a few of these names for a while, but I eventually settled on these chapter titles with some obvious references and some much less obvious. I’ll explain each of the chapter titles here if anyone was curious;
Chapter 1, Nicole Lacsamana, is named after Loop 3, Chapter 2, during the segment you play as Nicole and it is revealed that Kate has perished. The only real connection in this is that you play as Nicole in this section and you're reading through Nicole's POV. There weren't a lot of other good fits here, so this is one of the weaker ones.
Chapter 2, Awakening, is a reference to the first section of the first chapter in Until Then. Obviously, we follow Mark as he lives out a fairly normal day in his life, if not for the apparent odd things that are brought up from yesterday.
Chapter 3, Monotone, is named after the section of the first loop where Mark comes home from Nicole's house for the first time, and he suddenly feels, in full, how lonely his house is for the first time. Obviously the connection is that Nicole is coming to Mark's life with this full and colorful life with many important people in her life, and Mark's life is much duller because of how busy his friends are. No one is home to greet her like she's used to.
Chapter 4, Colorful, is named after the section of the first loop where Mark goes to Nicole's house for the first time and sees how much fuller her life is at home. The connection here is obvious, Mark is going through Nicole's colorful life and realizing just how empty his own feels in comparison.
Chapter 5, On Understanding, is named after the section where Nicole and Mark try to clear things between Kate and Mark's dad respectively. The premise is trying to understand where someone else stands on something. And it's not a perfect fit for the chapter where Mark and Nicole finally realize what's happening between them, but I felt the name made sense regardless of the lack of similarities between the game and fic's chapters.
Chapter 6, Audition Day, is extremely self-explanatory. Both game and fic chapters surround what happens at the Audition for piano practice. I DID have to move the day Piano practice was to be February for the story to fully line up the way I wanted, but it felt like a small enough change that it didn't matter too much.
Chapter 7, Decoherence, is named after a couple of sections in Until Then. I primarily thought about the section where Mark, Nicole, and Louise are trying to figure out what's happening at the hotspot where Nicole's journal was, as the trio are pretty central to that chapter AND the fic chapter where Mark and Louise decide to go out looking for Nicole.
Chapter 8, Many Worlds, is named after the chapter where Mark, Nicole, and Louise all hit the road to get to the aforementioned hotspot. The entire chapter takes place on the bus, and given how much of the chapter in the fic takes place while Mark, Louise, and Cathy are on the road, it felt like a good connection.
Chapter 9, Objective Collapse, is the chapter where an older woman drives three teens to her home while the mood has significantly tanked. That description fits both the game's loop 2 Objective Collapse and the fic's ninth chapter. This is one that felt right not just because of that connection, but also because Mark's objective had changed. He could no longer find Nicole in his time, so his objective became saving her in the past.
Chapter 10, Singularity, is the chapter where Mark travels through multiple timelines trying to save Cathy and failing in every single timeline. In the fic, he's trying to save Nicole, and has failed to make a plan that succeeded with Kate and Jake's help. He's about ready to give up in both when he feels the pull of a supernatural entity, either his mom or Mrs. Corpuz depending on the story.
Chapter 11, Save Me, Please, is named after the section of Until Then where he's trying to save Cathy in the original timeline. In the fic, it's pretty much a continuation of the plot of Singularity, and the name doesn't mean much other than Mark trying desperately to save the people of Purok Pagasa.
Chapter 12, The World Hasn't Ended Yet, is named after a meeting between Mark and Nicole where they try to understand one another and prepare for the future. The fic's plot actually more closely resembles the section, Until Then, but I felt that the name didn't quite work for this story as well, so I borrowed from the loop 1 section with a similar but smaller scale premise.
Chapter 13, Epilogue, is exactly that - where are these characters and people a few years later? And will our deuterologists meet again? Speaking of the epilogue…
Epilogue
Truly, this was one of the hardest chapters to write. Partially because it meant I was done with the story, partially because there were so many ideas floating around in my head. There's a draft where they meet at Louise and Mike's engagement party (this was the closest to being the real epilogue), a draft where they meet at the cafe to pay homage to the game, and a draft where I thought, screw it, they're competing in the same competition, but none of them felt cohesive enough for me to be satisfied with. So, I went back to the original Your Name epilogue, and I tried to figure out how I could make each of those scenes work with the plot as I've written it.
I think I did a pretty good job splicing the two stories together in an interesting way, and it could probably be cleaner than it is, but I'm happy with it as it stands. Thank you all so much for reading!