— — — — — —
Inside the "Copycat Fan Club" group chat—
After getting thoroughly exposed and roasted by the internet, the group had started tearing itself apart from the inside.
The admin, Kentaro, was going off on everyone.
[Kentaro (Admin): "How are you all this shallow? Couldn't you have waited two more days before reposting that tweet? Hell, even waiting until tomorrow would've been fine! Look at this mess now. Everyone's pointing fingers at us! It was just dinner face-to-face with Copycat. Was it really worth losing all your dignity over?"]
[Kentaro (Admin): "Weren't you the same ones saying we'd rally the fans to boycott Clannad so we could buy it more easily? And now look at you. You've got no backbone at all. You're even worse than the fans online! Damn it, now there's no way to get a copy of Clannad without a hassle. Ugh. Seriously disgusting. I'm ashamed to have allies like you."]
The chat went dead silent.
Then an account named Justice Bringer dropped a screenshot. It was a repost of the Full-Drive Bunko tweet.
And the account that reposted it? Kentaro.
[Justice Bringer: "Admin, you shameless bastard. What the hell are you pretending for? You thought using an alt would hide it? You clearly don't know why they call me Justice Bringer. Even if you made a girl account, I'd still dig you up."]
That single screenshot hit like a bomb.
The whole chat group exploded.
If the admin hadn't done it himself, then sure, maybe he'd have the right to lecture them.
But he had. So what was this saint act supposed to be?
The group members snapped instantly.
The insults came in waves, one after another.
And every single one was rich with family-related profanity.
In less than a minute, there were nearly a hundred messages, and it looked like there was no end in sight.
—[The admin has turned on all-member mute]
The scrolling chat stopped instantly.
Abuse of power. Classic.
But Kentaro hadn't muted everyone to fight back. He had another plan.
[Kentaro (Admin): "Brothers, let's be honest. We all caved. We're all in the same boat. No one gets to judge anyone. I was just uglier about it. But now that we've got a problem, there's no point fighting each other. We need to solve it."]
[Kentaro (Admin): "I've been thinking. Since trashing Clannad isn't working… why don't we flip it around? Instead of insulting it, we praise it. As the saying goes, overpraise is the sharpest kind of slander. We go into the fan circles for mainstream literature and start comparing Clannad to books like No Longer Human and I Am a Cat. We hype Clannad up like it's the second coming and trash those classics like they're worthless."]
[Kentaro (Admin): "Think about it. Those books are sacred to their fans. The second we insult them, they'll lose their minds. And then they'll come tear into us. While we sit back and watch them fight. Kekeke~ When that happens, regular readers will get sick of Clannad by association. Fewer people will buy it… And then we swoop in. This plan is flawless."
—[The admin has turned off all-member mute.]
The chat fell quiet.
Everyone was clearly considering how viable Kentaro's scheme was.
Soon enough, the first reply appeared, ["I think it'll work. Those literary fans are fanatics. They'll definitely tear Copycat and Clannad apart."]
Once that first message landed, the floodgates opened.
["Yeah, I'm in. Once both fandoms start fighting, the ones most disgusted will be the bystanders."]
["Admin's a scumbag, but every idea he comes up with is more underhanded than the last. Classic fisherman profits while the snipe and clam fight. This can work!"]
["So what, we start now? I've been sick of those Keigo Higashino fans for ages. Always going on about Journey Under the Midnight Sun. I'm starting there."]
["I'm going after Osamu Dazai fans."]
["I'll take Natsume Sōseki!"]
["I'll—"]
Watching his group members getting fired up again, Kentaro smiled in satisfaction.
No way. After coming this far, there was no way he was leaving without getting his hands on Clannad. No way was he going to spend hours standing in line just to get a copy.
At that moment, Kentaro felt like an absolute genius. Time and time again, he managed to come up with brilliant, efficient schemes, and he found himself admiring his own greatness.
...
..
At a small apartment in Chiba—
At the desk, a girl in upside-down-frame glasses sat working through practice problems, page after page.
She kept at it like that for over an hour and a half without stopping.
Eventually, fatigue started creeping in.
She took off her glasses and rubbed her temples gently.
After a while, she rolled her neck to loosen the stiffness, then pulled her feet up onto the chair, grabbed her phone from beside her, and started scrolling through Twitter.
The first few posts were all cat videos.
A blissful smile spread across her face.
But it didn't last. One long tweet instantly ruined every bit of her good mood for the night.
"Dinner together? And there's even a chance to exchange LINE? Heh. Oikawa, you really do have a lot of free time, don't you?"
Yukino Yukinoshita muttered through gritted teeth, her face icy enough to freeze the room, her eyes sharp enough to make anyone uneasy.
She was furious. Nothing but furious.
Ever since she was little, Yukino had always ranked first.
This was the first time she'd ever been knocked off the top.
If the person who beat her had been someone who worked just as hard, she could at least comfort herself, tell herself she'd gotten careless and deserved it.
But it was him.
A guy who slept through class every day.
A guy who spent all his after-school hours playing games or reading manga in his club.
And on top of that, he'd published two light novels in six months, both selling over a million copies.
Even like that, he still crushed her in exams.
Yukino couldn't accept it.
Lately, she'd been sleeping barely five hours a night.
Every spare second had gone into studying, all for one thing: To beat him in the final exams and take back first place.
And yet Oikawa acted like exams didn't matter at all. It made her feel like she was throwing punches into cotton, all her effort swallowed up without effect.
Seriously… he was the worst.
Yukino slumped forward onto her desk, exhausted. But the moment she closed her eyes, Oikawa's smug, grinning face popped into her mind.
That only made her angrier.
After hesitating for a long while, something in her expression hardened with resolve.
She picked up her phone. Opened LINE.
Found one contact and hit video call.
Smooth. Instant. No hesitation.
Ring. Ring.
The ringtone echoed again and again.
After five or six rings, Oikawa finally picked up.
Yukino didn't even give him a chance to speak.
"Baka, Jerk, Scumbag, Pervert, Creep!"
She unleashed it all at him in one breath.
After she finished, there was a smile on her face... Then she hung up.
"…Much better."
She pulled her legs back onto the chair, wrapped her arms around them, and rested her head against her knees.
A faint, satisfied smile lingered on her lips.
Even the exhaustion she'd built up over days of nonstop studying seemed to melt away.
And like that, she quietly drifted off to sleep, her breathing slow and even.
Beside her, her phone lit up over and over with incoming messages.
[Oikawa: What the hell was that for? Are you crazy?]
[Say something! What, hit me and run? Coward.]
[Still not replying? Flat-chested girl. Hope you stay an A-cup forever and never grow.]
[Hope you lose to me again on the next exam]
...
Yukino never saw any of it. By then, she was already deep asleep.
In her dream, Oikawa had turned into a panda plush, and she was mercilessly squeezing and tossing him around.
Judging by the smile at the corner of her lips, it was clearly a wonderful dream.
..
.
Meanwhile, Oikawa was completely speechless.
He'd been in the middle of a ranked match in Mobile Legends when Yukino suddenly called.
At first, he thought it might be something important. But the moment he answered, he was hit with a whole barrage of insults.
Who could put up with that?
No one. Absolutely no one.
Unfortunately for him, Yukino was a girl, so his counterattack felt weak.
If she'd been a guy, Oikawa would've shown her the full extent of the survival skills he'd honed in the toxic battlegrounds of online trash talk.
Oikawa flopped onto the sofa.
He was just about to pull out his "saved videos" for a little nostalgic revisiting when a message popped up from Utaha Kasumigaoka.
[Utaha: "Oikawa-senpai! Did Full-Drive Bunko threaten you or something? You actually agreed to have dinner with fans?"]
The moment he read it, a headache started forming.
That promotional event had been proposed by Chris Yamada on Saturday night.
If it had been brought up over the phone, Oikawa would've rejected it without a second thought. But Chris had clearly seen that coming.
At nine that night, the guy had driven straight to Oikawa's apartment, fruit basket in hand, ringing the doorbell like an uninvited relative.
After half an hour of polite small talk, he'd finally shown his true intentions.
And from the look of it, if Oikawa refused, the man was fully prepared to move in and camp there until he agreed.
To sweeten the deal, Chris had even offered to raise the royalties for Clannad to fourteen percent, a full two percent higher than before.
Good lord. Full-Drive Bunko had clearly gone red-eyed after seeing Your Lie in April break a million copies. They were all in now, determined to go for broke.
What was Oikawa supposed to do? They'd used both pressure and temptation.
At that point, agreeing was the only option.
"My editor literally came to my house. If I'd refused, I'm pretty sure he would've stayed here until I said yes," Oikawa typed helplessly.
Utaha replied almost immediately, "Haha. I'll spare you one second of sympathy, Senpai. But if the person having dinner with you ends up being a female fan... just imagining it makes me a little jealous."
Seeing her message, Oikawa couldn't help smiling.
After thinking for a moment, he typed back, "Sounds like someone's feeling a little threatened. Understandable, really. I am an outstanding man, after all. Handsome, talented, and with plenty of women out there dying to chase me. Utaha, I still think you should seriously consider my proposal and send me more, and better, pictures. That way, I'll build up some immunity to women, right?"
The moment Utaha read his reply, her cheeks flushed red.
"Tch... pervert."
She huffed under her breath, "All he ever thinks about is dirty stuff."
Several times she started typing a reply, only to delete it.
In the end, after a long pause, she chose not to answer.
...
..
At Full-Drive Bunko's editorial office—
Chris sat in front of his computer, dark circles under his eyes, brows tightly furrowed.
The wave of haters who'd been trashing "Copycat-sensei" and Clannad online had suddenly vanished without warning.
In their place came a new breed.
A bunch of fans overhyping Clannad so hard it bordered on parody.
These people swarmed into every major literary fandom space, forums, review sites, everywhere. And then they started comparing Clannad to classic literature.
The comments wre like:
["No Longer Human? That trash isn't even worthy of carrying shoes for Copycat-sensei's new book Clannad. Osamu Dazai was just born a hundred years earlier, that's all."]
["Natsume Sōseki wants to compare his writing to my idol Copycat-sensei? Tell him to have more realistic dreams. And his book, I Am a Cat? What kind of ridiculous title is that? Did he have no shame at all?"]
["You think Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino is the greatest novel in the world? That's only because you haven't read Copycat-sensei's new book Clannad. Old people need to learn to accept new things."]
["I don't care what anyone says. Clannad is the number one book in the world. Every other book combined couldn't beat it."]
["Copycat-sensei is the greatest writer Japan has ever produced. To me, he's an unmatched literary giant."]
...
If you asked these lunatics to curse Copycat, they probably wouldn't come up with anything original.
But sarcasm and baiting? That was their specialty.
When it came to stirring up trouble, every single one of them had legendary-level talent.
And naturally, once those literary classics got mocked, their fans traced the chaos straight back to Full-Drive Bunko's official account.
The moment they arrived, the insults started flying. And before long, an all-out war broke out between both sides.
You insult my father. I curse your grandpa.
Simple.
But this left Chris in utter despair.
Staring at the battlefield raging beneath the official account, he muttered in disbelief, "Who the hell is targeting Full-Drive Bunko this time? Could it be Dengeki? No... that doesn't make sense."
"What the hell is even happening here?!"
Chris was on the verge of a breakdown.
.
.
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