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Tuning pins: Pins that exist to make piano strings coiled and in tune. Also known as wrest pins.
Musical instruments were perfect for characterization. By showing a character being capable of carrying a tune, it shows diligence, patience, good timing, and depending on the instrument, a facet of their personality. Someone known for the harp is elegant, maybe a little snooty. The guitar is for a rocker, wannabee or not. Tambourines are for free spirits- or those that think they can get away without practicing. But none of those came close to the characterization of the pianist.
So much rich design potential is stored in the luxurious 88 keys. Pianos are not cheap, so the character must be rich, or maybe it’s a family heirloom. Or, if they don’t own one at all, perhaps they are close with the owners of a church and take lessons there. The shape of the piano, the size of the piano, all windows into the character’s personal life. Grand piano, baby piano, keyboard, keytar. While they weren’t equally beloved, it showed a sliding scale of grace, and how they used their music to entertain themselves and others. Their stiff posture, their nimble fingers, a sense of rhythm, a sense of time. The ingredients of a dedicated musician.
And what’s more, it’s very easy to bullshit when writing a pianist. There are so many famous pianists, all one would have to do is make them a fan of one without needing to explain why. Beethoven, Chopin, Elton John. Household names that an audience doesn’t need fully spelled out to them, each with recognizable pieces that don’t take much effort to add to a show’s score.
But Tsumugi didn’t want to bullshit this. Tsumugi wanted to make the perfect pianist.
Because Kaede was special.
She was so pretty in the auditions, and she seemed so sure of herself, so capable. Not a shred of faith in anyone. To write something so refined out of someone so dire, it was like being handed a rumpled mess of fabric, yet knowing how to make a perfect dress skirt from it. And the look on other people’s faces when you tell them where it came from is as beautiful as letting it fall to ash just the same.
The Ultimate Pianist would be a plain seeming girl who in reality was nothing but trouble. A comic relief taken seriously, in ways. Falling pianos were a form of comedy after all, at least that was what Tsumugi understood from Western cartoons. Smooth graceful fingers, ones she feared of breaking or cutting, self-sheltering herself, yet she stuck them in everybody’s pies.
But still, she falls back on her confidence, her ironic and soon-to-be-tested faith in humanity. Oh, how the despair will rain on cast and audience alike when she “learns” from the flashback light after the first trial that humanity turned on her. What sour discordant song will she play? Will she play at all? Or will the greatest betrayal to her sweet and simple life change it all and make her snap? Tsumugi couldn’t imagine how Kaede would kill, but if she did, what a fascinating concerto she would make for the orchestra that was the killing game!
Really, Kaede didn’t belong in a killing game. As Tsumugi wrote on her character sheet, she kept crossing out things, adding new footnotes. Kaede was nice to everyone but she especially liked… weirdos. Weirdos who didn’t fit in. She wasn’t projecting by any means, the new Tsumugi wasn’t necessarily a weirdo she was just… plain. But Kaede found beauty in the weird and the plain. Maybe she would still kind of hate it, but she knew why it existed. Kaede was a spark of hope that the losers who obsessed over this show would cling onto.
Tsumugi rubbed her thumb against the side of her pen as she sighed dreamily. She really outdid herself with this one.
Tsumugi told herself to never get attached, but it wasn’t the first time she made that mistake, and it wouldn’t be the last time either. The audience would love Kaede, because she did. And she knew her audience more than her audience knew themselves.
As she bashed in Rantaro’s head and fled from the scene of the crime, Tsumugi composed her breaking heart by remembering that it took more than just tuning pins to make a killing game work.
Like pinning the blame on those who knew too much.