Ayu Tsukimiya - Creation and Conception

Creation and Conception

Naoki Hisaya, who wrote Ayu's story, commented in an interview that the night before he was to present the beginning of a Kanon scenario, he suddenly remembered wanting to write for some time about a ghost girl who waits for the protagonist to come back to her. He said that he wanted to write this no matter what and quickly drew up an outline for the premise of Ayu's scenario. At the time, Ayu's premise was the start of the entire Kanon story, though it was still very vague. Eventually, Hisaya was able to form her story into the style of a romance visual novel, and in the process the characters in the story started to multiply. Hisaya said that Ayu was the one character in Kanon that he felt he grasped the best, but noted it was very difficult to write her character due to Ayu being primarily energetic. Hisaya said that he is much better at writing about quiet characters, so Ayu gave him a lot of trouble. Hisaya noted that Ayu's frequent use of "ugū" was not decided from the beginning, and that it merely turned out that way during the natural writing process.

Ayu's character designer, Itaru Hinoue, commented in an interview that she put a lot of effort into Ayu's design, and Ayu was her favorite character to create among the Kanon characters. Hinoue was able to design Ayu any way she wanted, and by all means she wanted Ayu to wear her large tan duffle coat, and be depicted as a strong character. Hinoue said that she was very particular about Ayu's attire, but not about everything. At the time she was formulating the character design, many festivals were going on in Osaka, Japan where Key is located. When Hinoue had a chance to attend, there were many people around wearing angel wings as part of the festival, and because she thought they looked really cute, chose to later draw them onto Ayu as well. Hinoue later read Ayu's finished scenario and became aware of an unintentional form of foreshadowing on her part due to wing imagery factoring into Ayu's story. Shortly after, Hisaya suggested to Hinoue, "Since they seem to have become a spoiler, let's lose the wings." The wings were thus removed, but before long they were attached again. While Hinoue had originally chosen the colors for the hair and eyes of the characters herself, these were later discussed by the development team and altered accordingly, though Ayu, Mai, and Nayuki did not change much. It came to the point where Hinoue had to constantly go back and forth between her intentions and what was later decided by consensus.