Hello!
This is the blog series where I (the writer) write commentary on each episode of Roy Kaplan. These are all written with the assumption that you’ve listened to the episode (and the ones preceding), so if you haven’t listened to (or read the transcript for) How to Date Your Dragon, check it out here!
Let’s go!
How to Date Your Dragon is probably the epitome of a low-stakes case, and a case that probably wouldn’t exist in most mystery serials of this type because nobody even comes close to getting murdered. One of the things that I like about Roy Kaplan as a series is that there’s a lot of different kinds of mysteries going on, not just murders, or cases that turn into murders. Roy fortunately doesn’t have quite as strong of a magic death field that materializes dead bodies in his vicinity as most hardboiled detectives do.
This was one of the episodes that I brainstormed way back at the start of all this when trying to think of a bunch of different weird mysteries that would work in this setting to fill out the season. Originally, the idea was that the missing person went missing for actual possibly being pressured reasons and that their cover story would be something about leaving the city. I think originally the client and the missing person would have known each other virtually to maintain the secret identity factor, but that ran into the issue of how the client would actually know that the missing person’s gone missing. Back at that time, my working title was “Missing Masquerade” just because that was all I could think of on short notice, and it was before I decided to play into the whole fantasy roleplay deal. Obviously, a lot of elements got changed around by the time I started actually writing, though I think that the spirit of it has stayed the same since I brainstormed the idea.
Writing this, I wasn’t sure how familiar people at large would be with host clubs, which is more of a Japanese thing, but I figured that the target audience of this studio (queer nerds in their 20s or 30s) would probably have enough passing acquaintance with Ouran High School Host Club (or to a lesser extent, the Yakuza games) to know what I’m talking about. I mostly decided to do a host club setting because I think that in the cyberpunk future where a lot of things are done virtually and automation is actually being used responsibly to relieve people of doing long hours of underpaid work, it’d be harder to regularly make friends without going out of your way to do it, so hospitality and being able to meet actual people would be a major market of its own. That’s just my speculation.
One of the things about this episode is that Roy, despite being a massive pain in the ass and a literal thief and con man, is a pretty decent person. Obviously he doesn’t care that much about the law, but he tries to not get other people into trouble and if nobody’s getting hurt. He keeps things to himself instead of spilling other people’s secrets everywhere just for the sake of a paycheck. I don’t really think of Roy as the same kind of noble hero that say, Philip Marlowe is, but when it comes down to the wire, Roy is kind. I don’t think all protagonists have to be decent people to be interesting, but the fact that Roy is decent is one of the reasons why I like him as a character. The fact that he’s a decent person when it really matters is something that’ll be relevant for the rest of the series.
This episode references the 1959 Billy Wilder film Some Like it Hot, mostly because I think it’s a really fun movie. For those who haven’t watched it, it’s a comedy about two musicians crossdressing to escape the mob, and both of them end up having some romance stuff going on. Jerry in this episode is named after Jerry from the movie, and his last name Lemmon comes from Jack Lemmon, the actor for Jerry. The ending line “Well, nobody’s perfect” referenced in this episode is also quite famous. If you haven’t seen the movie, I definitely recommend it–it’s a lot of fun.
I suppose that while I’m here I ought to address the romance thing. If you’ve gotten this far into the series you’ve probably noticed that there’s little to no romance. If you’re listening to Roy Kaplan because you’ve read my other stuff and want more, this is probably not news to you. If this is your first experience with my writing, then, well. I think that if you want a story with romance, there are plenty out there, and a lot of them are even very good, but it’s something I’m not interested in writing. I don’t know how many people listening to this series or reading these blog posts are aspec, but my personal experience is that it’s hard to find aspec stories that aren’t specifically about being aspec–not because they don’t exist, but because the absence of attraction is something that’s difficult to have as “background information” when people assume attraction by default. It’s sometimes difficult to find stories where you can even get that far because a whole lot of them will add a minor romance thing even when it doesn’t have anything to do with the plot.
All this is to say that Roy won’t have any romance here or in future seasons–not with Wes or any future hypothetical love interest. Maybe not everyone will agree with me and will say that some of his interactions are in fact romantic, and that’s fine. You can interpret my writing however you want, but at the end of the day I’m making it explicit that Roy’s not interested in that kind of thing and he’s not going to suddenly become interested in it later on. Do with that what you will.