https://youtu.be/_aeD-bx7ZMI?t=8550
>So I used to draw an original manga, one I thought I absolutely had to take to Shueisha once I'm able to go to Tokyo on my own. It was a mishmash of various manga settings. I think I still have it. Not the whole thing, but... It continued for 9 volumes. I started writing it in elementary and kept at it until I began high school. A monumental work, right? The protagonists progressively got more abilities the more manga I got hooked on. It was stupid long. I think I have the first volume on hand, actually. Probably. It's sealed history, but it's still there. I couldn't throw it away, it had too many memories. I started in year 4 of elementary and continued until year 1 of high, so that makes 5,6,1,2,3,1 - 6 years of hard work! It was too precious for me to throw away, so I kept it. No, no! I can't show it! No way! It's straight up, straight up Bleach. It's about shinigami kids... About two female childhood friends without parents and how they live without any idea why they're shinigami to begin with, that's the setting. [table slam] [shriek] Aaagh... Hahaha! And one day... One day they get attacked by some kind of monster, and then… A big sister kind of character appears, a shinigami doing her job, who they’ll eventually be calling “senpai”. And she saves them. And yeah, that’s a straight rip-off from Ichigo’s situation. Hahaha! The monster reacted to the two girls because they had high spiritual power and attacked. The super pretty later-senpai shinigami saves them, but the senpai used to be a human in the past, so she can’t swing a sword. That setting… Hahaha! I mixed some Soul Eater in. She doesn’t have her own sword, so her partner, whose name I stole from Okita Sougo, named Sou-kun, he turns into a sword and she always drags him around. Hahaha! And they fight! [laughter] [shriek] [continued laughter] And so, those two childhood friends - and this is I add Precure - when they hold hands, both of them kinda power-up, like in Max Heart. Both of them store their powers in their fists and then launch them! [laughter] [shriek] Aaagh… This is so embarrassing. This takes me back.
>But I’ve loved Namori-sensei’s illustrations ever since then, so I tried to imitate her - not that it looked any similar - I remember looking at her pictures a lot to draw like her. I was so happy that she drew a picture of me - let me just plug an emotional episode in here.
>And so, those two girls get, like, separated by the enemies and enter a training arc. So when they enter a training arc, since they didn’t have parents growing up and were always together, it’s the first time they part ways. Toradora was all the rage back then, so one of the two heroines… What was her name, again? I think I called her “Rei”. There was a scene where she yelled “REIIIII”, all in tears, a reference to “RYUJIIIIIII”. Hahaha!
>I can’t show it, but it was one reference after another. A monumental work, I tell you. The fact I kept at it for 6 years is a precious memory to me, yeah. That’s right.
>Oh yeah, about Rei. I was in elementary and didn’t have the skill for cool names. Shinigami are ghosts (yuurei), so she was Rei (from yuurei). Kind of like that.
>How nostalgic…
>Have I considered doing a remake? Oh, you bet.
>I tried to remake it in year 3 of high school. But I couldn’t understand the story Elementary 4 Nene wrote, so the remake failed, completely. It was so straightforward that High 3 Nene, with her matured understanding, realised that it would be for the best to bury it in the annals of history. And then I stopped.
>Pfft, yes, I did remake it myself. Man, it was fun.
>I drew, like, 30 pages of that manga every day. It’s so nostalgic.
R8 Nene's OC fanfiction.