Hoshizora Meteor interview in Kwai & Yoo magazine May 2026 edition (Cthulhu Mythos special)
At the time of Heretical Salem's release, the Fate/ series had yet to tackle the Cthulhu Mythos in length and detail. Back then, it was quite a shock to see this as the first title covering it.
Meteo: True. It was a very nerve-wrecking chapter to write, as it had me constantly thinking about how Morise Ryou was going to slap me silly if I got anything wrong (laughs).
Ok, clarification for the readers here: as you might know, I, Morise Ryou, work in Fate/Grand Order assisting with character and lore research. However, 99% of the time, I'm not touching the Lovecraftian cast.
Meteo: Oh, right, they wouldn't know that (laughs).
Due to these circumstances, I've always been meaning to ask you about it. Meteo, where did the idea of making FGO's then-latest story chapter about Cthulhu Mythos and Salem's Witch Trials come from?
Meteo: Right. My chapter happened to be the finale for Epic of Remnant, the collection of stories made to serve as a bridge between parts 1 and 2, thus there was a wish for it to deliver a surprise at the gameplay level, with the specific request I received being to center the story around the debut of the Foreigner class. Back then, Cthulhu still wasn't a part of the picture. Nasu's commission instructions only said that there was an outer universe different from ours, and that unidentifiable figures from it could descend into our plane of reality, with his intention being for the Foreigner class to serve as a catch-all class for those figures. I still couldn't get a clear picture of what he meant by that, and felt that the players would have an equally difficult time grasping the concept of the class, so I proposed using the Cthulhu Mythos. The problem here is that if their inclusion to the FGO world was faithful to their source material, that would make them literal entities on a universal scale, too far above the standards we work with. My solution to that was having a layer of separation between us and them: a format where they can only watch us from outer space and attempt to interact by manipulating characters from our history.
Salem, MA and the witch trials held there are deeply involved in Lovecraft's mythopoeia. Were the land's ties to Cthulhu Mythos your reason to choose that region?
Meteo: No, the location was chosen first. I happened to have a previous interest in witches and the history of American colonization. While researching the history of the Founding Fathers, I took a personal trip to the location. Going there, I wasn't planning to write any narrative about it, but I came out of it wanting to immortalize my discoveries there in story format. I was informed that in EoR, the writers would get to choose the setting for their chapters, so requested to write the Salem witch trials. In 2014, I rented an apartment in New York for a month and half, and used that as my home base to explore the whole East Coast for research material. Initially, I had reserved 4 days of my time there for Massachusetts, but after touring through Boston and Plymouth, I quickly ran out of time. But there was no telling when I'd be able to visit the US again, so on my last two days before returning to Japan, I rushed to the Amtrak overnight bus and fulfilled my dream of going to Salem. I got to visit the famous Witch House and the House of Seven Gables (two museums in Salem, the former being the inspiration for Lovecraft's The Dreams in the Witch House, and the latter for Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables). Their architecture and decoration were the models for FGO's environments. It happened to be Halloween on the day of my visit, so the whole city had this grotesque ornamentation. I had none of Japan's cutesy Halloween imagery. It was all scary and gross. Some of the houses I found were decorated with giant cockroach dolls, slices of human bodies, etc.
I've also been there before. They go so hard with the touristic theming.
Meteo: It's baffling. While I do think they go overboard, at the same time, I think this way of making something more lighthearted and arguably positive out of such a somber subject says a lot about the American spirit. I see some elements of idolization of the tragic witches. With these ideas running on my mind, I visited the Witch Museum. There, they were doing a… dramatization? Not the right word. More like a reenactment with puppets. That was one of the most memorable parts of the experience, and I referenced it in Salem's storyline by including segments where the main party performs on theater.
Were there other elements based on your research trip?
Meteo: Let me see… There was this sailing ship docked at the port. The real life witch trials took place in Danvers (formerly Salem Village), which was not a port town, according to the maps. However, I considered the idea of the sea as an entrance to outer space, and the iconic sailors of the Cthulhu Mythos, to be pretty easy symbols to include, so I depicted Salem as a port town in the story. Another major source was The Crucible (1996 movie adapting Arthur Miller's homonymous play), which is set in Salem.
The House of the Seven Gables (left). A sailing ship docked at Salem's port (right). Photos by Hoshizora Meteor, 2014.
Let's bring the subject back to the game. Tells us what led you to choose Abigail Williams to be the Servant representing the witch trials.
Meteo: The Servants in FGO come in two forms: the characters requested by name and the characters proposed by their writers. She's an example of a character proposed by me. I believed Abigail Williams was the most obvious choice of main character for a witch trial narrative. When the promo video first aired on TV, quite a lot of people saw Kuroboshi Kouhaku-sensei's character design and immediately guessed her name. There were also theories about her being Lovecraft in a dress. Those really caught me off-guard. It hadn't occurred to me that this was a thing I could have done (laughs).
We also had a few fictional characters from Lovecraft's novels as NPC, such as Lavinia Whateley and Randolph Carter.
Meteo: I believed some things needed to be made explicit early on to convey the idea that this was a Cthulhu chapter. Emblematic of that is Carter, Lovecraft's self-insert character. In FGO's world lore, the Cthulhu Mythos and its associated collection of novels are unknown to the non-mage public. Lovecraft is a person who unquestionably existed in the past, but he's nothing more than a practically nameless ghostwriter. As far Lavinia, I borrowed her straight from her source novel for her deep involvement with the deity depicted in-story, so she could be the figure who provides the trigger for Abigail's awakening.
One of my favorite scenes in Heretical Salem is when Carter is scared of a cat. It's a really high-context character moment, because only the readers who know Carter is a cat lover in his novels would realize something was off with his behavior.
Meteo: It's an honor be hearing those words from Morise Ryou himself. My priority with my storytelling is to convey all the information that a player who never read a Lovecraft book would need to know… But they're not the whole audience. The Lovecraft fandom is there, and they will want something more. Thus, I mounted the script full of Cthulhu easter eggs for them to enjoy a fun little treasure hunt.
On that note, tell us about your first contact with the Cthulhu Mythos.
Meteo: It were the TRPGs for me. They were trending in my middle school days, and I got as addicted to them as any otaku my age was. The first one I played was Dungeons & Dragons, and right when I was feeling ready to try out another one, Hobby Japan released Call of Cthulhu. I spent my whole time there as a regular player, with a friend being the game master, but with how different its lore felt from D&D, I never felt like the world and its systems made sense. Why didn't my character ever get stronger? Why was it mandatory to be afraid? But with enough time, I realized that role-playing wasn't just about rolling dice and beating monsters, it was about enjoying an ongoing situation in a different world and with different status. That was around when Yuuentai released Arisaka Jun's Twilight Angel campaign scenario. The one that came in a hidden link on Net Game 88. That game hooked me good. I consider it my biggest gateway. That was around the time the sci-fi and fantasy fandoms finally accepted the Cthulhu Mythos as mainstay genre of the otakusphere, and that also got me reading the novels published by Seishinsha and Kokushokankokai to catch up with the times.
Which would be your favorite titles?
Meteo: If anything, I tend to like the works of the adjacent writers more than anything written by Lovecraft himself. Stuff like Robert Bloch's Strange Eons or, getting even more distant from the source, Clark Ashton Smith's The Enchantress of Sylaire. As for Lovecraft… his prose wasn't the smoothest, so I found myself frequently losing the battle against sleep, only persevering in my readthroughs for the reward of making the TRPGs more enjoyable. Despite everything, some of the novels featuring Randolph Carter still managed to be memorable. That'd be The Silver Key and Through the Gates of the Silver Key. Really impressed me with the crazy twists he could pull off with a pair of interconnected stories. Another favorite of mine is Gotou Juan's ALICIA.Y. This one is an erotic manga rather than a novel, but it's as authentic Cthulhu Mythos as it gets. Seeing the old ingredients I knew being cooked up with such a different recipe really appealed to my glorification of freedom.
Did any of your previous works before Heretical Salem contain elements from the Cthulhu Mythos?
Meteo: Never as directly as this, but I wrote Kusarihime back in my Liar-Soft days, and I believe the reading experience had some impact there. We have that fear of the unknown going on there, which major spoilers, also turned out to be a cosmic entity.
Lastly, tell us what you believe to be the appeal of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Meteo: My favorite self-identified sci-fi writer is Philip K. Dick. I love the way he takes his time to build his worlds in the first half of the book, only to make it collapse under itself in the second half. Everything we believed about the world and its scope falls apart, completely shifting our perspective and leaving us lost, unsure of what will happen… There's something like that in the Cthulhu Mythos. The experience of losing track of reality and watching everything blur before your eyes is a huge element of it, in my opinion. The word madness doesn't do it justice. What was supposed to be frightening becomes enticing, and what was supposed to be horrifying starts looking beautiful. The stories change you on the inside, and that's their most powerful appeal. Another one is how they keep its relatable elements despite the cosmic scale. Be it in the fear of the unknown inherited from youkai tales, weird fantasy, and urban legends; or in the deeper exploration through sub-creation enabled by the shared universe. The TRPGs also enable you to experience these steps into the unknown firsthand. I consider that their main selling points.
