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That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Author Says He Only Discovered Story's Theme in Volume 2

In an interview on Excite News posted on Tuesday, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime author Fuse shared the circumstances in which the novel was initially created. He said that he first began posting the story on the popular Japanese web novel site "Shōsetsuka ni Narō" (Let's Become Novelists) as practice before submitting his work to writing competitions, and that he was making up the plot as he went along. As a result, he admits that he did not figure out the theme of the story until after the web novel got a publishing deal and he edited the part of the novel that would become volume 2.

Fuse specifically commented on the "country building" theme of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, saying that when he first started writing the story, he hadn't envisioned that Rimuru would build a country. He simply wrote about Rimuru accomplishing all kinds of feats, and before he knew it, he had ended up building a country. Nowadays, Fuse feels that "Do what you can do for today" is one of the themes of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, and that the friends and community he made along the way are an integral part of the series.

Fuse said that he initially wrote That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime purely for the fun of it, which allowed him to fill the story with everything he wanted to do. However, his lack of attention to pacing and structure posed difficulties for him when it came to adapting the novel into an anime. He said that the anime gave him an opportunity to re-examine the structure of the series as a whole and decide which scenes were important to keep.

Fuse launched the story serially on "Shōsetsuka ni Narō" website from 2013 to 2016. Micro Magazine began publishing the series in print in 2014, and it shipped the 13th volume on September 28. Taiki Kawakami launched the manga adaptation, which the television anime adaptation is based on, in Kodansha's Monthly Shonen Sirius magazine in 2015. The anime premiered on October 1 last year.

Yen Press licensed the novel series, and it describes the story:

Lonely thirty-seven-year-old Satoru Mikami is stuck in a dead-end job, unhappy with his mundane life, but after dying at the hands of a robber, he awakens to a fresh start in a fantasy realm...as a slime monster! As he acclimates to his goopy new existence, his exploits with the other monsters set off a chain of events that will change his new world forever!

Source: Excite News