Epsilon: Chapter three here serves as the 'origin story' for the fanfic. In this chapter, we find out where Aaron and Chris came from, and we discover exactly what their relationships to their various hosts are. Thus this chapter opens, appropriately enough, with Aaron and Ukyou's "origin" in the form of a dream. Considering the conflict between the perception and acceptance of reality that occurs as a major subtheme throughout the entire fanfic, I thinks it's very telling that the only exposure we get to the "real" world is in the form of a wispy dream-world.
Blade: Which, of course, in Hybrid Theory cosmology it might very well have been. But we won't go there.
Epsilon: Then immediately following that. we get a view of what this is doing to Aaron and Ukyou. The violent merging of personalities was done in deliberate contrast to some of the other fanfics out there with a similar premise. In conception I wanted the Aaron/Ukyou duology to come across as somewhat horrific. This was partially to justify Ukyou's later actions and partially just to make the self-insert itself seem nasty on its base.
Blade: On a lighter note, rereading we discovered an absolutely hilarious (and unintentional) bit of ironic foreshadowing as Chris-in-the-real-world mentions having bugged Rob Kelk to name his new car "Kalia-chan". Man, I wish that had been deliberate.
Epsilon: In fact, rereading there is a lot of stuff that we wish had been deliberate.
Blade: I guess that's our intentional genius, so sublime we don't even know when we're doing it!
Epsilon: Back on topic... what was the main deliberate thing in there was the flashback of the truck. The truck death was the first clue to the readers that none of this was accidental. It was framed so that it could have been a dream-logic thing, but it was the first direct reference to the actions of the Nameless. If you saw that, you would have been able to guess that both Aaron and Chris were murdered to bring them here. Then, once you realised some being murdered them to bring them here you would have known what kind of entity you were dealing with, at least in terms of morals.
Blade: As well, the fact that Chris dies instantly without knowing what happened while Aaron sees what happened and lingers long enough to realise is also a subtle hint that what happened to Aaron was planned, and what happened with Chris was accidental.
Epsilon: Which brings us to Chris. Rereading his origin story, I keep being surprised how people thought he was the hero at several points. We cut into him contemplating the murder of another human being, and the audience cheers for this guy?
Blade: Well, that's where self-justification comes in, not to mention the fact that his legitimately horrific circumstances do make him seem somewhat sympathetic. That being said, what we consistantly get as a pattern for Chris throughout this chapter is that killing is increasingly becoming his solution to every problem (a mindset which will continue to grow as the series goes along). When he kills Sheila, it's an act of passion. But then he deliberately murders two other people, not because he needs to at that moment, but because it is the most convienent way for him to get to Japan, a solution he prefers to turning himself over to the American government. (sarcasm) Because they're evil. (/sarcasm) And why does he want to get to Japan? He rationalises that killing a martial artist there will get him breathing room to deal with his situation, but he also at the same time reveals an underlying motivation - fascination and obvious envy for superpowered beings. From the very beginning, Chris craves more power, even though he already has the power to kill multiple innocent people. I'm honestly pretty pleased that I could do this with what at the time were relatively limited tweaks from the "real me" (obviously the main one being the willingness to kill), and have him come off as calm, reasonable, and not nearly as sociopathic and self-serving as it sounds in summary. Everyone thinks they're the good guy, or as in Chris's case, the "real victim".
Epsilon: Which is a deliberate difference between Ukyou/Aaron and Chris. Chris craves power, or more generously, to "fix things" and "make a difference", whereas what both Ukyou and Aaron crave is normalcy. It comes up often in Ukyou/Aaron's character that, in the end, they don't want to have anything to do with this craziness, and just want a "normal" life. It even develops into their entire philosophy later, where every normal moment, every insignificant bit of happiness is something precious and beautiful that needs to be protected. Mainly because it's what they very, very rarely get to experience. The evolution of that philosophy was actually very organic, since I wasn't planning on going that route at first. My first conception of Ukyou/Aaron was much more traditionally heroic than they ever turned out being.
Blade: Which probably means we actually could have gotten some thematic use out of Kasumi in the story. Instead, we merely get my fond memory of bopping her on the head with a baton to knock her out. Hee hee he... uh, well, hey. Nobody's perfect.
Epsilon: Indeed. In fact, we could have gotten a lot of use out of a lot of things if we'd known then what we know now. For instance, the evolution of Chris' "power" in his flashbacks can be seen in a very new light once you realise that Chris is using raw Second Circle to do everything. He accesses the "memories" of his hosts when he isn't thinking about it directly. He learns how to avoid cops and where to buy shoes (and how to inhabit a corpse) because he needs to, not because he thinks how to. Later, when he wants to learn the date he either can't or doesn't just access his host's memories, he has to puzzle it out through various clues. In the original version of this scene, that's actually a bit of a plot hole. There is no reason, in our original conception of his powers, that he would need to puzzle it out like that. Once we've defined his Paradox-fuelled powers as coming from his perception of reality, rather than how it actually works, these become more obvious. Chris isn't able to just intuit the date from his hosts because he has no reason to suspect the date is different than the one he remembers until faced with evidence that brings it directly to mind, and once brought directly to mind he can't intuit it because that would involve using his powers directly, something he never learns to do.
Blade: This is our favourite kind of mistake: the mistake that proves We Knew What We Were Doing All Along.
Epsilon: You'll see that a lot.
Blade: Another bit of unintentionally-foresightful humour is Chris being a bit bitchy about being god-blessed by a cashier, when he'd later go on to basically set himself up in his own mind and to others as God, and even have apostles.
Epsilon: Speaking of Christ figures, this chapter formally introduces Sailor Moon.
Blade: Awesome segue. So, since Ranma 1/2 had not "started" yet when the series did, we decided to also make Sailor Moon, and by extension every other series in Hybrid Theory, have basically started when the story did. We had some vague notions of the sort of megacrossovery explosions we wanted for book 2, and this gave them a goodly long time to start warming up. But there were some negative side-effects! For instance, we had to use Jadeite. Oh well.
Epsilon: Then again, Jadeite led to Tethys, but more on that in later chapters.
Blade: We used the specific shrine-evil-bus episode for a number of reasons, the primary one being that it fit about where we expected the series to be at this point. It was also helpful in that Kigaan, the monster of the episode, was an unusually powerful hand to hand combatant (in the series, she catches Sailor Moon's Moon Tiara attack rather than being destroyed by it), which allowed her to be a reasonable match for a weakened Ukyou. This, too, of course, was a useful coincidence by the Nameless, forcing Ukyou to use her "Third Circle" power, which led directly to Pluto losing her initial doubts about trying to kill Ukyou.
Epsilon: This chapter also contains more of that stellar Ukyou battle-awareness. Not only does she fail to notice Jadeite until he spots her, but she then wanders onto a bus with a crowd of hypnotised dupes... despite the fact that Aaron has seen this episode multiple times and knows what is going on. Ukyou really does start off sub-par.
Blade: And yeah, "moon-dusted" is dub-only, but eh, we don't care. Sailor Moon would totally say that if the same pun existed in Japanese and y'all know it.
Epsilon: Back to the plot, and you, you sociopath you.
Blade: Right. Hey, Kodachi! It was inquired by a couple of people why I killed Kodachi rather than, say, Kunou. Simply, it was easier, since I figured I could lure her into the water more easily to use the Midorigame collar trick. Her skill with poisons and such was also far more useful for what I had in mind. Somewhat tragironically, Kodachi notes she's dripped a drug in Kunou's ear as he slept - if she hadn't, he might have awoken when she screamed, possibly saving her.
Epsilon: And that's it for this chapter. Lots and lots of exposition in this one; almost too much, we felt.
Blade: Yeah, this chapter actually made us the most nervous about losing our fledgling readership, both due to the focus on us rather than established characters and due to the darkness of Chris murdering a bunch of people. And, in truth, a lot of people did get turned off realising this was pretty dark. But to be fair, it was gonna get a lot darker later. Still, in retrospect, putting a bit more humour in the midst of the seriousness (as we often did later) might have been a helpful spoonful of sugar here. But hey, lesson learned, and it's all uphill from here except for the things we totally screwed up!
Epsilon: Well, this chapter really kicks off the long and proud tradition of having Ukyou get the living shit kicked out of her and spending most of the chapter bleeding to death and in agony.
Blade: It's almost like you have a thing for hot young women getting beaten to death.
Epsilon: Har. But seriously, perhaps my efforts to have Ukyou come across as a less traditional hero backfired here. I consciously made her lose, and lose badly many times. I also wanted her "self-insert power" to come with a fairly serious drawback so it would come across as less of what it was: a blatent plot device to power up Ukyou and Aaron.
Blade: Whereas I have the self-insert power of brains! Well come on, it often is a self-insert power. Although in my case it's both literal and figurative.
Epsilon: This chapter also features some jabs at self-inserts. For instance, this chapter features the appearance of Ukyou's trenchcoat. Of course, this was a not-so-subtle snipe at self-inserts. Yes, she bought it solely because Aaron thinks it looks cool and Matrix-kung-fu awesome. I think they even admit to this at one point.
Blade: It's one of those "use gratuitous nudity to show up how exploitative and crass gratuitous nudity is and also maybe increase sales" things.
Epsilon: One interesting part about this chapter is that it is our first (and thankfully last) attempt at writing our fight scenes in a sort of competitive mode. Chris secretly made all the preperations for Kodachi's deathtraps and I secretly had Ukyou make her preparations and we played them against each other. This resulted in some stuff which never really went anywhere happening; or wasn't going to until we integrated it later, like Ukyou's emergency air supply tank. The confrontation ended up not being as good as we'd hoped, and Chris and I just ended up yelling at each other a lot when we were supposed to be writing.
Blade: Later, we would come up with the much more efficient method of yelling at each other a lot two or three months before a scene was to be written, then forgetting entirely about the compromises we had come up with, then yelling at each other for two or three nights before writing.
Epsilon: But we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit...
Blade: This is also the chapter that, in retrospect, launches Nabiki into being a major character in the fanfic. This was completely unplanned - I chose to kidnap Nabiki on a whim (both personally and in-character), simply because I felt she might know something useful and I didn't mind being mean to her. Before this, we had no plans for her whatsoever, but by the next chapter it was obvious she was going to become a significant player in the events of the series.
Epsilon: The fact that she turned out to know nothing and ended up crying at the end was a deliberate attempt on our part to distance this version of Nabiki from the popular fanon version of Nabiki in most fanfics. Ironically, this anti-foreshadowing would show up in a lot of characters as the series went along.
Blade: That being said, I'm glad she's so vulnerable here. Nabiki will go on to terrible things, and eventually to heroic things and seeking redemption, but in this chapter is the moment which shows she's still very young, and very human. Which is important to understanding her character.
Epsilon: Trying to humanise people like Nabiki wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Once you start thinking of characters as human beings rather than a collection of stereotypes, it's easy to make them more sympathetic.
Blade: But more on that when we reach my favourite example - Shampoo.
Epsilon: Looking back, it's again surprising we didn't realise immediately how closely linked Chris' character would end up to Akane. He spends a lot of his character development and emotional revelation in this and chapter two dealing with her.
Blade: And by the same token, we should have taken what happened with Ukyou as more of a warning sign. Fighting Chris was a great opportunity to make Ukyou look very heroic, because her opponent is, frankly, a mass-murdering undead monster. Instead she rants about breaking Kodachi's legs and burning down her house and how much she hates everyone in general and Aaron in particular and how much she hates fanfiction and buys gunpowder from the Yakuza. Not quite as cheer-for-able as she could have been, for all the bleeding and getting tossed through walls and what-not.
Epsilon: Um... well, on the plus side, Ukyou ranting to Chris and Aaron about how much she hates them putting her in fanfics and doing terrible things to her might just be the pinnacle of "meta" for the entire series.
Blade: And not for lack of competition!
Epsilon: Despite everything, by and large the readers still cheered for Ukyou at this point. Though this is the chapter that is sort of the make-or-break point for many people. It's pretty dark in both tone and text, and thus if people don't like that this chapter generally seemed to be the point that turned them away from the series.
Blade: And despite missing the boat on the Chris/Akane relationship, this chapter actually very clearly sets up the Chris character to follow. For one, his focusing of all his rage on Ukyou as a scapegoat for his problems (including his self-inflicted ones), and for two, the small but notable moment where he prissily goes "I never threatened to kill you" to Ukyou (ignoring that he did threaten to torture her and then Akane and Ranma and take undisclosed further measures to make her talk) both are startlingly fully-revealed manifestations of some of Chris's most prominent character traits throughout the later series.
Epsilon: So while this chapter was one of the weakest ones in the fanfic, due to us working at cross-purposes it turned out to be really important in the long run, since it set so much of the rest of the fanfic in motion and established so much about all the characters.
Blade: And I hit Kasumi in the head.
Epsilon: Yes you did. And we don't at all feel bad about that.
Blade: Not one bit.
Epsilon: So join us next time, for even more Jadeite! ...which probably isn't really that much of a draw, granted. But on the bright side, we'll only be able to say that once more!
From the beginning, we knew above all what we did not want to do with Sailor Pluto - namely, to write her as the cold, obsessed-with-preserving-the-timestream bitch she is in so many other fanfics. It is certainly possible to argue with her methods in the original series, of course, but she is unquestionably a hero who would - and did - gladly sacrifice her life for her friends, or to save the world. Though she would unavoidably be Ukyou's nemesis through much of the story, it was not a role she chose or would relish.
That being said, I feel she was somewhat neglected in the early portions of the story. Though prominently appearing, in retrospect I feel she was more used as a plot device than a character - she was the personification of Destiny, the goad that ensured Ukyou could never relax, hide, or sink into obscurity. She served well in that role, but we hadn't found a hook to make her compelling in and of herself.
This all changed in Book 2, for a number of reasons. First, Ukyou's discovery (and the reader's) of precisely why she was targetted for destruction, which stripped the mystery from the Sailor Pluto character. Second, at the same time Ukyou finally and thoroughly defeated Pluto, which would obviously force her to find a new tactic beyond "wait for a clear shot". Thirdly, and oddly most important, was the fact that on a whim I was making up a soundtrack for HT with specific character themes. Some I already had in mind, but I went scanning around randomly looking for one for Pluto. Finally I hit upon Evanescence's "Where Will You Go", which struck me as appropriate all of a sudden. It was only a bit later, when Aaron and I listened to it again, that we suddenly realised how tragic Pluto's situation was - she was fighting a hopeless battle that had alienated her from her life's mission and friends, and it was in pursuit of a goal she herself believed to be evil. Moreover, not only was she doomed to fail, she was doomed to be the last person in the universe, witnessing the enormity of her failure to protect everything - or, indeed, anything - that she cared about. And she had absolutely no choice in any of this. Both Aaron and I were taken back at not only how rich was the well of tragedy surrounding the character, but that we had somehow missed it up until then. So a song - a pretentious gothy song! - chosen on a whim abruptly completely redefined how we saw the character and her role in the story. Instead of Nemesis, she became Cassandra.
It was not deliberately planned to kill all, or indeed any, of Pluto's companions. Rose, Haruka, Michiru, and Chizuru all joined her because it was logical that they do so. And yet, at the same time, their deaths (or at least estrangement) were inevitable. Pluto's prophecy was clear - at the end of the universe, she would be alone. She was doomed to lose all her companions sooner or later. Pluto, though, with all-too-human optimism, does not confront this fact until the death of Ran. Whether or not the murder was actually arranged by the Nameless to derail Pluto's plan, her cold certainty that it was, and that a similar fate would befall any of Pluto's allies that posed an otherwise unavoidable threat to Ukyou, is what causes her to give into despair and nearly give up. She can't go on by herself, but also cannot bear to lead those she is closest to to their deaths. But ultimately, she is shown by Chizuru that she did not force anyone into following her - they chose to do so, and they need her to continue the fight.
Pluto does, but is now tempered by caution and reluctance she didn't have before. Of course, in bitter irony, her leaving behind of Haruka, Michiru and Chizuru - obstensibly to watch the situation in Tokyo but also to shield them from the risks of following Ukyou to England - leads directly to all of their deaths. None even leave bodies for Pluto to mourn. Worse yet, much of Pluto's power is destroyed by Ukyou, who then goes on to take the Silence Glaive in fulillment of the prophecy, and promptly vanishes from the world. Only Pluto knows for certain Ukyou is not dead, and in the seven years that follow, she understandably comes to rely more and more on Rose, both physically due to her now greatly-reduced power, and mentally as Rose is tireless, undespairing, and the only companion Pluto has left.
Her alliance with Tethys during this time period, while at the Dark Queen's "request", suits Pluto well. Aside from Tethys' obvious power and hostility to Ukyou, the alliance is a very pragmatic one: Pluto, though she eventually develops a certain respect for Tethys, certainly wouldn't shed any tears if the youma queen were to meet her end. Such are the compromises she's been driven to make. In a way, though, she's fooling herself. When Ukyou reappears, rather than fruitlessly attacking, Pluto instead decides to do what many readers (rather vocally!) thought she should have done in the first place - travel with her, learn more about her, and then decide what to do. Ukyou's saving Rose's soul in the fight with Bison, and the appearence of Chris, ensure the temporary alliance becomes permanent, and Pluto becomes the staunch ally of her sworn enemy until the very end of the series. Indeed, along with Ukyou, she is the only survivor of the cataclysm at the end of the series, thus becoming the only one who remembers the world as it was before Ukyou destroyed and remade it.