I wouldn't say this was the first fan fiction I had ever written, but this was the first one that I had put so much effort into it. There was a certain point where I was wondering if the idea should have been an original novel with original characters as opposed to a fan fiction. The Darkness Preys was first conceived in the autumn of 2015. Halloween was nearing and I wanted to write a scary story of some sort. After much daydreaming, the idea eventually evolved into a fan fiction after thinking, "What if Dir en grey was thrown into an unbelievable situation?". It was never specified in my story, but the events that occurred in the timeline was intended to begin on Halloween. To add to the scariness, I began drawing up ideas of grotesque and horror.
My aim was to create a fan fiction like no other. This is why I specified that it contain no pairings of any sort. This would be a story purely about trials and tribulations through horror, blood, and death. One of the biggest challenges was fleshing out real people into fictional characters. As much as I know about the members of Dir en grey, I still had freedom to change their character for the sake of the story. At the same time, I needed to retain a bit of reality so that the members' personalities wouldn't be too far fetched. For instance, Kaoru is the leader of the band in real life so I decided to incorporate that into the story by making him a responsible person. You see that he's usually the one deciding how to direct the other members in a crisis situation. Of course other little quirks are imagined by me though I do take inspiration from various interviews. Shinya is a reserved character so I gave very little dialogue to him. However it is known he can be very stubborn as revealed by other members so I typically reserve the sarcastic and snappy remarks for him. Die is an optimistic person so I made it so that he's always energetic and upbeat. Toshiya out of all members is perhaps the least developed in characters which was my greatest regret. Kyo on the other hand shows duality often times in his public appearances wavering between volatile and calmness so I chose him to be the most mysterious out of all characters.
During the writing, I was always struggling to maintain a balance between perspectives. Die was originally the main character, but I had changed it halfway through the story and made Kaoru the main character and Die became secondary. Juggling between two many different characters would be too confusing for the reader and it would be too difficult for me to keep track of. I didn't want too many characters in the story as well so I kept it at a minimum with some original characters of my own. They must add something to the story, but they cannot be too involved with the main characters. This was also the struggle to create the antagonist, Mavros. Even after completing the fan fiction, I am not completely satisfied with the creation of Mavros as a villain. I made someone an embodiment of complete evil, but he had no purpose other than perpetuating events.
The different supernatural appearances that you see in the story spur from my interest in folklore and magic. The ones you see in The Darkness Preys are a mixture of Eastern and Western beliefs. It may not be too obvious, but the different poisonous animals that attack the individual members are related to the Five Poisons in Chinese culture. Though the five animals may vary from different accounts, snake, scorpion, centipede, and toad are generally accepted. You may recognize that in Shinya's episode, ghostly possession is a common theme in both Eastern and Western supernatural cultures. I used the lore of possession through haunted objects and hex bags. Remember when Die got attacked by a red monster? That was inspired by Japanese shiki, familiars derived from magical paper seals. Witchcraft was also a big inspiration, having the ability to create something from nothing. Toshiya's episode involved gu or kodoku depending on the language you prefer to use. It was ancient way of cursing someone by having your intended target consume a poison in the form of insect larvae. The larvae would in turn destroy you over time resulting in death. The whole creation of the rasetsu and Kaoru's vision was all kodoku related. The idea of having multiple poisonous beasts consume each other to create an even more poisonous substance resulted in my imagined spell of creating a monster through the most vile means. You see that rasetsu Kyo had an appetite for human meat and was stripped of any emotions or thoughts. As much as I wanted to put more folklore into the story, too much would result in overwhelming the reader. Plus it would take away from the main story, which was why I stopped writing too much about Kaoru's dreams because they are chock full of symbols.
Will I make a sequel to The Darkness Preys? I am in fact sketching out an outline of a possible sequel. Writing this fan fiction was a delight and took me a whole year to work on it. I think I will be willing to spend another whole year on writing a new fan fiction. Thank you to the readers that have completed the crazy journey together.
