Trivia / Dominoes

• Reality Subtext: The plot of the story was and is deeply influenced by the conflicts and culture of its day, both through the continued post-9/11 popularity boom of superhero media in the United States, the pendulum swing against police brutality, the highlighting of the experience of underserved, underrepresented, and discriminated demographics, and the visible rise of authoritarian and fascist ideology and its inevitable polar pushback. It's also influenced by the direct experiences of its author, who participated in Black Lives Matter protests on their college campus in between writing the earlier chapters and experienced police retaliation as officers filled their college dorm with tear gas. As Word of God puts it: "At this point, the years Dominoes has been written in have been just as much an influence upon it as Case Closed itself has been."
• What Could Have Been: Dominoes's outline went through several variations on its plot before being written in its current form. Some of these were slight differences, some much larger.
  • In an earlier version of Ran's and Shinichi's break up scene, it was revealed that Ran actually had fallen out of love with Shinichi and into love with Hakuba and thus was "emotionally cheating" on Shinichi when she ditched him to spend time with Hakuba instead, a change in feelings that Shinichi knew about the whole time because he's an empath. Scrachienails comments that it's a pity the original and "more brutal" scene got cut, because Scratchienails loves writing break-up scenes, but they felt fans would never forgive Ran if it wasn't.
  • At one point, there was a bomb-in-a-store plot that would have highlighted Sonoko's character more. This was imagined in a version of the story whose Four Lines, All Waiting plot threads were more disconnected at the end of Part 1 than the story's current incarnation. As the choice was made to slim down and connect more of the disparate parts, the bomb plot (and Sonoko's part 1 relevance) fell by the wayside, being considered too cliche for the direction the author was taking the story.
  • Initially Hattori was planned to be Shinichi's cameraman, but the author discarded this as not fitting with the rest of the work.