v. tr. To furnish (a literary work) with critical commentary or explanatory notes; gloss.
v. intr.
To gloss a text.
- The American Heritage Dictionary
Hey there, and welcome to Technique. What is Technique? It's another Linkin Park reference, of course! And for everyone who hated those, we made sure the first lyric above was an Eminem one just for you!
Ha ha, we only say this because we figure if you're here by now, you must be hard to drive away. One-point-two-million words (or one-point-three-million with sidestories) clearly couldn't do it, neither could self-insertion or multicrossovering or endless angsting or death or horror or us killing off Yomiko Readman ingloriously. So hey, assuming you've finished all of that, we hope you might be interested in this.
So what is Technique? Well, it's our annotated reminiscing about the series. What we had planned, what we thought about certain things, how some things went unexpectedly, and how some (many) things you probably thought we had in mind all along were actually made up at the last minute. Hopefully you'll find some of it fun, or at least funny. If not, at least there's pretty pictures!
These commemorative pictures, fifteen in all, were commissioned from Kina de Grasse, who did a wonderful job. If you like them - and you should! - you should check out her site. Now, on with the show!
Epsilon: I know this scripty back-and-forth has become something of a running gag as the series went on, but since this is basically us reminiscing about the series it just felt right that we do it the way we started of. Even so, this is less our... personas then normal.
Blade: Yup. Less digressions and wackiness in these than in our end-of-chapter author's notes. Hopefully.
Epsilon: That being said, I still get to start because I wrote this entire chapter by myself except for the last scene.
Blade: It shows.
Epsilon: Quiet, you.
Blade: Notice it was the second paragraph where 'we' made our first capitalisation error. Something that would come to haunt 'us' as we continued.
Epsilon: Yes, but this isn't about grammar problems. We're here to talk about the fact that we had no idea what the fuck we were doing half the time.
Blade: There was a plan going into Hybrid Theory. Themes and ideas we wanted to explore. But in the beginning there was no structure to it. It wasn't until about chapter 8 or so that we realised we were going to break it up into three books/arcs. Even then that decision was mainly forced on us by our lack of chapter titles going in.
Epsilon: Indeed. This first chapter really shows how the first act of Hybrid Theory is the weakest for lacking any form of cohesion in its storytelling. We'll get into that more in later chapters, but you can see signs of it right away.
Blade: For example, this first chapter has a far more... whimsical quality than will be present in later chapters.
Epsilon: To a certain extent this was deliberate. Hybrid Theory was always planned to deal with mature themes such as identity, the cycle of violence, religion and philosophy, but these were't really touched upon in the first chapter. It was more the wacky adventures of the Nerima characters. Even the writing reflects this, with the use of a more "fanficy" style of writing, including underscore emphasis and paranthetical asides.
Blade: But then at this point we hadn't finished any fanfics in... a long time. So we had no idea that this was going to go anywhere in the long term. Even if we began preproduction in December of 2003.
Epsilon: Looking back at this chapter, I find it strange how much it foreshadows some of the things that will happen later, especially since a lot of the later stuff was taken out of our asses at the last minute to patch up plot holes.
Blade: Yeah. I found it amusing, for instance, when we find out that Ukyou, who will later go onto be a super ninja with stealth and awareness all over the place, is first seen utterly failing at not being noticed by everyone and then utterly fails to notice that she is being followed around in turn by Nabiki, who was taking pictures of her and Akane's first meeting.
Epsilon: That had honestly slipped both our minds by later in the fanfic. It makes it seem like we had her power progression planned out from the start. HAH! My original plan for Ukyou was to have her learn some sort of super-genius kung fu, literally a chi technique to make her smarter. I'm very glad I didn't go that route. Very glad.
Blade: Yup. It's a cool idea, but man is it such a bad idea to do with a protagonist.
Epsilon: The other major surprise to us upon rereading was Nabiki. We had always planned on doing a sort of "Nabiki redeems" character arc with her, but I was surprised with how "fanfic standard" Nabiki starts off here.
Blade: And then, of course, there's the Ranma/Nabiki engagement. It was never intended to be anything more than the set-up for a few punchlines in the first half-dozen chapters. Yet somewhere in book three the relationship between Nabiki and Ranma suddenly matured into something we had never even imagined.
Epsilon: Speaking of Nabiki, if you're interested take a look at the second scene where Aaron is talking about the Tendo family and how they are all pictured and introduced. We start with Akane, who gets a full description, then Nabiki who gets a less specific one and then on to Soun who we don't even see the face of and finally Kasumi, who is barely even in the scene at all. It was actually done deliberately as a note of the importance of each character to the overall storyline, running from most important to least important.
Blade: Though if we'd know more about what we were doing in Book 1 we would have played up Akane's character (and specifically the importance of the Ukyou/Akane relationship) far more than we ended up doing. It was one of the defining relationships of the entire story yet it didn't get nearly enough emphasis in the first arc.
Epsilon: This was primarily since we weren't thinking in terms of arcs or books yet.
Blade: In retrospect, we would have definitely changed things a bit, really pushed that more into the spotlight, and also made Ukyou more sympathetic and cheer-forable right from the get-go, so she wouldn't have lost all her fans instantly later. But more on that as we hit some specific later events.
Epsilon: That being said, chapter one actually isn't bad. But then how could it be?
Blade: Yeah, it's only a lousy 100k. Not even 18,000 words! Barely a few paragraphs strung together! Man, what were we thinking!?
Epsilon: I was thinking that I was going by my first impression that 100k is a good size for a first chapter, and 100-200k is the perfect size for any subsequent chapters. It's the sort of thing that a regular reader can go through in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half.
Blade: More importantly, it's the size necessary to make every chapter a "mini- story" in and of itself, with a theme and a beginning and end. This chapter, for instance, starts with Ukyou coming to look for Ranma, and then ending when she finds out he has arrived. So it works in that sense.
Epsilon: Anyway, one thing we did get right for structure here was how we started. Some people were puzzled at first that we didn't start with when Ukyou and Aaron merged; however, that was very deliberate.
Blade: And not just because, as we find out later, that the moment before they merged Ukyou (and the world) didn't exist!
Epsilon: Here's a good chance to pimp Orson Scott Card's excellent book "How To Write Science Fiction And Fantasy". Even if you don't like him as an author, this book is brilliant and will likely change the way you look at writing. It did for us. Without cribbing from it too much, one lesson from it is to start a story with what the story is going to be about. Even from the beginning, the story was not about Aaron and Ukyou merging nearly as much as it was about them coming to Nerima, which represents them entering the world that has been prepared for them by the Nameless. Aaron and Ukyou merging may be where the world begins, but the story doesn't begin until she decides to come to Nerima looking for Ranma.
Blade: And that's about it for this chapter. Man, so short!
Blade: Now, I look at this chapter again, and I am struck by one primary thought: "Man, Ukyou is such a condescending bitch". Of course, I may be biased.
Epsilon: Nah. She really was a condescending bitch. Looking back I'm amazed it took people so long to dislike her.
Blade: Well, she wasn't depressed all the time then. And she beat up Kunou a lot, which is good for the self-esteem and for making readers like you!
Epsilon: I think there is a direct correlation between Ukyou beating up Kunou and lack of darkness in the fanfic. The moment she stopped beating up Kunou for the sheer joy of it, the series got dark.
Blade: Well, that and the living corpse showing up and murdering people. So speaking of, it's time to talk about me a bit! Well, after some background, anyway. Now, this was not actually our first foray into self-insertion. Aaron?
Epsilon: We did two different projects before this, one a storytelling RPG called 'Rumik World', and one a fanfic called Fate and Destiny, both of which played with the concept in different ways. F&D, specifically, used a similar concept (Aaron placed into the mind of a character, only that time it was Akane). There were a few reasons you ended up reading Hybrid Theory rather than F&D, one notably being that Akane was too understanding of Aaron's situation and not enough conflict was generated - we wanted somebody who was a tad more selfish and, for lack of a better word, 'bitchy'. Hence, Ukyou!
Blade: And you thought it was because we liked her. Now, when we did start the new project, I wanted to be involved, and Aaron wanted something to keep his interest more in the long term, which is why we decided I would be an antagonist in the story with his own agenda. Antagonist, because frankly I'm more assertive and (though many people might argue differently, heh) charismatic a personality than he is. If I worked WITH Aaron/Ukyou, I'd have overshadowed them. Thus, we determined right from the get-go that for some reason, the Chris and Aaron characters must never be friendly.
Epsilon: In fact, in the beginning we didn't even really coordinate. Chris was going to write his scenes without any input from me and vice versa, unless we had characters from both "stables" in the same scene. It was designed to keep us on our toes as I would be creating the meat of the story and Chris would be playing the role of spoiler and agent of chaos, stirring up and disrupting my plans. Later this was abandoned, but at least for the first four or so chapters that was how everything was done.
Blade: Ha, which led to our famous back and forth duelling conversations that took way too freaking long. Although they did lead directly to the running gag that Chris never can just spit out what he wants to say, which I liked. Anyway, I forget precisely what made me decide to do the body-hopping, and at that point our conception of what the Third Circle was was actually quite different (something to explain in another Technique, perhaps). I wanted him to be, as much as possible, similar to myself, with the exceptions of being antagonistic and without dwelling on things that would likely be boring to readers, such as my relationships with people back in the 'real world'. Being dead and forced to kill people to sustain my existence nicely did that. However, we still had no real conception of the plot arc that Chris was going to take, due to the spontaneity of what we had planned. In fact, early on I expected Chris to become more "capital-V villainous" very early on, clashing repeatedly with Ukyou and threatening Ranma, and so forth. Instead, he and Ukyou rapidly drew apart after their clash in Chapter 4... but that's something to cover later too.
Epsilon: That was why it was so important to balance their first encounter in this fanfic so that they would end up being enemies. The fact is that with Ukyou/Aaron and Chris working together, the series would have had a far different tone. It was necessary for Chris, if he existed, to be an enemy. So we had to go out of our way to make certain that he and Ukyou got off on the wrong foot. This is why Ukyou is so bitchy to Chris in this conversation. Her first attempt to interact with somebody is to intimidate them into leaving her alone, a trait which she will retain throughout most of the fanfic and which will never fail to lead her into more trouble than it gets her out of. Of course, being a good writer I didn't just want Ukyou to be bitchy for no reason. So I had to come up with a reason why she hated Chris on sight. This is explained more in depth during Chapter 4.
Blade: Another thing of interest in this chapter is so more examples of what I guess I should call "early Hybrid Theory" characterisation for people. One endearing character trait played up with Akane, I thought, was her jumping to a conclusion on little or no evidence and then sticking stubbornly to it for no really good reason, which happens a few times in the series but comes up very notably here in her interaction with Ranma and Ukyou. Speaking of which...
" Ranma leaned against the cherry tree, looking up at the star-speckled sky. It was so much more... empty here in the city. On the road, the stars had been everywhere. Too many to count, but they were always the same. They were always there, guiding, illuminating... But here, in the city, the stars were lost."
...so much for our brilliant characterisation of Ranma. Holy crap, pretentiousness ahoy. Then again, we sort of made up for it with:
" Ranma wasn't sure how to react when Ukyou opened his mouth and promptly vomited into his face. On the one hand, he was now covered in vomit. On the other, Ukyou was obviously sick. Pride or concern? Ranma debated the concepts briefly, but decided it was best to go with his instincts. And his instincts were saying: "GAH! I'M COVERED IN VOMIT!""
Epsilon: This chapter also features the first of many examples of the Nameless interfering with the world. Think about it for a second: Ukyou comes home to discover that Akane has wandered off with a police officer in some random direction. She has no idea where they are. So she runs off in some random direction in one of the most massive cities on Earth in the hopes that she will just happen to run across the two of them in the knick of time.... and she does.
Blade: Such things do not happen. As was proven in chapter 1 and earlier in this chapter, Ukyou just is not good at tracking and is not that sensitive. The fact she showed up at just the right time to receive just the wrong impression of Chris is a little bit too coincidental.
Epsilon: And that was deliberate. It was a hint that, when looked at retrospectively, shows that someone is messing with events. Someone who wants things to go badly. It is quite arguable that this chapter did, in fact, introduce the major antagonist of Hybrid Theory, but nobody noticed it because it was too subtle.
Blade: That's us! SUPER-SUBTLE! Just don't think we're too clever, you haven't started hearing about how much we pull out of our ass later because we screwed up.
Epsilon: So join us again next time, when we hit everyone's backstory, AND Jadeite! Whee!
A reader once noted that Hybrid Theory was the only fanfic they'd ever read where Akane was an important character, but not romantically linked with anyone.
While I don't mention it nearly as often as the time when a drunk and stoned Mexican called Hybrid Theory the best fanfic ever written, that is arguably my favourite compliment I've received about the fanfic. Alas, I only wish it was more deserved... but more on that later.
Akane is the third - or fourth, depending on how you count Aaron and Ukyou - main character of Hybrid Theory (the other being Chris). She's the only character with strong ties to both Ukyou/Aaron and Chris, the first "series" character we meet in the first chapter, as well as the first we get a perspective scene from. In all three books she plays a prominent role, including saving the world, defying the Nameless (on several occasions), returning from the dead, and destroying Chris (albeit by not saving him). She's really the lynchpin that holds the story together in Book 2, which is also what I thought was her finest series of moments.
So, given all that, it's interesting that one of the most crushing things that I remember a reader saying was also about her, when a commenter noted that they "wouldn't have minded" if Akane had been permanently killed by Gyro. That really irritated me at the time for a few reasons, one being the simple fact that it's almost certainly shit writing for a villain introduced in the very same scene to kill a major character and thus we wouldn't ever have considered doing that. I also suspected the inexplicably vicious anti-Akane sentiment that permeates Ranma fanficdom (and other anti-character movements that permeate fanficdom) had a role in that. However, rather than blame the poor reader for giving their honest opinion, I settled on putting the blame where it belongs: ourselves.
For all of the above, except for the run from her ressurection to the end of chapter 20 - a run that I'm admittedly fairly pleased with - I felt Akane often didn't quite get the prominence in the story that she should have. In truth, the simple reason is that how important she was going to be, and her unique ties to the other two main characters, were not planned but spontaneously fallen into in the end of Book 1 and the beginning of Book 2. Thus, while Akane had her shining moments - like in the final battle with Jadeite and Tethys - they hadn't occured with a consistant, organised plan to where the character was going. It is thus excusable that a reader, seeing Akane die and then be reborn at Mount Minakami, would not realise how profoundly important this event was supposed to be, in good part because they did not realise that Akane was by far the most important character in that scene. Unfortunate, but that's the way it sometimes goes when you improvise. Lesson learned.
However, what happened in Book 3 was less excusable, since it was more foreseeable. Akane joining up with Washuu made sense... it also, alas, rendered her invisible and impotent for a good portion of the time she should have been front and centre, since it was not necessary for Washuu to appear often, and when she did, her power and intellect effectively neutered everyone else there. Thus, both Rei and Akane suffered a loss of relevence in Book 3 that was not planned and in the end is one of the things I regret most in that book. Akane regained at least some of her gravitas in the second half of the book, but Rei remained very secondary, so I suppose she suffered more for it overall.
All that being said, I think the themes that run through Akane's character are very strong and fairly consistant. Her contrast with Ranma is fairly interesting. Ranma, despite everything that occurs to him and the changes his character is roughly forced into, always returns to being himself, which is the very key to his character's popularity in the fic. He changed, but found a way to always remain Ranma. Akane, on the other hand, in similar circumstances rolls with the changes to become someone very different. In some ways better, in some ways not necessarily so, but she far more clearly changes than Ranma does. The reasons is simply that Akane lacks that essential confidence Ranma does, that being Ranma is a good thing. Ranma envies Ukyou's capability early in the fic, and wants to find out how it works so he can incorporate it into himself. Akane, in contrast, looks at Ukyou and Ranma and her subconscious (and sometimes conscious) thought inevitably turns to "What's wrong with me, then?"
Of course, there is nothing wrong with Akane that is more wrong with any other flawed but essentially good person (including Ranma). So it is that while Akane learns discipline, self-control, measured thinking and other things over the course of the fic, aqnd these serve her well, her greatest triumphs come from her inner core, her inner self. Bluntly, when Akane saves the world, when she defies God, when she rejects Chris utterly, she does all this from sheer bloody-minded stubbornness. And that is the true growth in her character over the series - where she begins by doubting herself, by obediently following along and waiting for other people to save her, she eventually reaches the point where she has come to believe so firmly in the things which matter to her that even God himself cannot beat her will into submission.
In an interesting bit of irony, while that journey began because Ukyou believed in Akane, and because Akane succeeded in defeating the youma at Narita Airport where more powerful and skilled people had failed, it took Chris to completely destroy Akane's desire to unquestioningly follow along in the shadow of people 'who know better'. By destroying Akane's faith in Ukyou, and by eventually proving that Akane was totally helpless to stop him from doing whatever he pleased, Chris forced Akane to stop believing in him or anyone else and rely on herself instead. She does not grow up over the seven years of chapter 21... she is an adult in that awful moment where Chris murders Shampoo while still keeping to the letter of the meaningless vow Akane had been proud of having him make. Even more ironically, it was what Chris did there - unforeseen by the Nameless due to Chris's unplanned 'spoiler' status - that led to Akane not becoming the Nameless' puppet later the same chapter, and eventually to her first saving and then destroying Chris in Book 3. Initially, it seems likely that Akane was intended to become Ukyou's fetich soul, with Akira being a hasty replacement (that too is ironic, as it turns out) when the Nameless realised Akane was deviating so far from the plan thanks to Chris's interference that she could no longer be completely relied on. Thus, by disrupting his plan from very early on - even if completely unwittingly - it could be said that Akane is directly responsible for the events of Hybrid Theory turning out as well as they did in the end.
But Akane, in Hybrid Theory, doesn't really need could-haves or should-haves to defend her role. Her most characteristic action, I think, is her smashing of Akio's illusion projector. Some commenters were very dubious or outright disapproving of the morality of this. It is in fact very arguable that Akane did the wrong thing; certainly she would agree she bears the responsibility for everything that happened as a direct result of that. But that is why it is symbolic of her - Akane was always, at crucial moments, making choices that there was no clear moral path to follow. Whether it was to do what a God she instinctively distrusted said, or risk the destruction of the world, or whether it was weighing the balance between a life and what evil saving that life might do, Akane was always, at crucial moments, forced to make the sort of choices that she (understandably irritably) accuses Ranma of effortlessly avoiding. Messy, complicated choices. In the end, all she could do was trust what was true to herself - and in Akio's case, that meant not doing the will of a vile and evil man. Whether that was the 'right' choice is probably unanswerable even for the author.
But I think she made out all right, overall.