fencer-x:

Interviewer: So who was the character you were most looking forward to writing in Season 2, Yokotani-san?

Yokotani: “That’d be Makoto, seeing as I left his scenes largely up to other writers to handle in Season 1. Dealing with things like his relationship with Haruka, Makoto’s a really tough character for me to write.”
Hatta: “Makoto only really focuses on Haruka and his immediate surroundings, so it’s difficult to discern his own feelings, what it is exactly that he wants to do himself.”

Interviewer: In Season 2, we saw him express his desire to face off against Haruka in an official race.

Yokotani: “That would be Episode 6. That was a really great episode. For Makoto, when it comes to swimming, he’s just not as good as Haruka or Rin—he’ll never be able to be a part of their rivalry, he’ll never be able to be their rival. So it was our job to figure out how to really use those feelings of Makoto’s.”
Hatta: “The reason Makoto wanted to race Haruka in freestyle was because he wanted a chance to finally face his feelings.
Yokotani: “That’s what the Director said. By making Episode 6 a Makoto episode, the plot has thickened. Initially, we’d been planning to only fleetingly touch on the individual stroke races for Prefecturals.”
Hatta: “By writing this important scene involving the Prefecturals race in Episode 6, we see a shift in Makoto’s emotions, with the hazy feelings Makoto had been shouldering internally finally being resolved through swimming with Haruka.”
Yokotani: “He’s finally been unburdened.”
Hatta: “In that sense, this was a really important scene for Makoto. The director also really wanted to write about Makoto’s emotions with regard to Haruka and Rin, so I feel that this was one of the major hurdles we needed to get past.”
Yokotani: “Though there’ll be plenty more of those to come!”
Hatta: “Episode 3 was something of a hurdle, too. It was an important episode for Rei and Rin.”

Baybee~ ;__;