Epsilon: Amazingly enough, we wrote a version of Dr. Tofu we actually like. One that manages to both not be evil, and not be a badass at the same time.
Blade: Granted, that doesn't sound horribly impressive. But that's what we liked about him. He developed a pretty strong, if very low-key personality in the fic - of someone well-meaning, but afraid of commitment and complicated entanglements. Which fits pretty well with the manga, too.
Epsilon: And of course, we handle the question of what happened to Dr. Tofu in an unusual way. Good old-fashioned bankruptcy!
Blade: It doesn't quite have the panache of falling down an open sewer and dying, I'll admit, though. So, uh, that's all to say about Tofu. Guess he wasn't so awesome after all? Onto something far more important to the fanfic that reared its ugly head in this chapter: PRONOUNS.
Epsilon: We will never write another story with a gender-bender character. Ever.
Blade: Chris is a guy in a girl's body, Ukyou is a girl with a guy inside her who sometimes thinks she's a guy and sometimes a girl and sometimes dresses like a boy, Ranma's a guy or a girl at various times, and then later there would be Tethys and Zoicite and Bison and AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH
Epsilon: In conclusion, to hell with English and its gender-specific pronouns. All of you, please learn a better language. Thank you.
Blade: Speaking of Chris, he also gives us our first firm confirmations of a few series' that exist in the Hybrid Theory universe in this chapter - including poor Phantom Quest Corp, never to appear on-screen. There actually was a philosophy that went into what we included beyond "We know and at least at one point sort of liked it".
Epsilon: The idea was that we would only include series that, that for starters, at least one of us had seen the majority of.
Blade: This later turned out to be unattainable.
Epsilon: Uh, yes, but more on that in a later chapter. Other criteria was that the series had to take place on Earth, in the late twentieth century, with no obviously un-Earthlike qualities. So no Dragonball or Slayers or what have you. Also, the majority of the storyline had to occur on Earth as well, so that ruled out series such as Rayearth, El Hazard and Escaflowne which technically occur on "Earth" but really centre around other worlds entirely.
Blade: This probably should have ruled out Darkstalkers, but eh, we decided to use it anyway.
Epsilon: For an extremely loose definition of 'use'.
Blade: So much for Chekhov's Gun.
Epsilon: Speaking of unplanned setups... For some reason we decided to use Rei as our viewpoint Senshi, rather than Ami (who we liked more, at the time). This would turn out to have significant consequences. If you're looking for a why here... I honestly can't answer it. I just decided to write the senshi scene from Rei's perspective on a whim. Later, we decided not to pollute the Senshi plotlines by having too many viewpoint characters, and that ensured Rei would remain spotlighted for a long while.
Blade: Unplanned setups aren't always a great idea, though. There were two of them here that just got sort of dropped despite being ridiculously awesome, namely the Tsubasa/Usagi/Ukyou love triangle and Akane scaring Ryouga spitless.
Epsilon: At this point we were still going for a very organic feel to the plot and thus let the story develop naturally. Unfortunately naturally meant these plotlines fell by the wayside very quickly. Which is a damn shame. They both would have been pricelessly amusing if we'd played them better.
Blade: Live and learn. That being said, I did find something fairly heartening, which was Ukyou's resolution to be proactive and (for lack of a better word) heroic again after being inspired by Ranma to fight the Dark Kingdom rather than hide from it. I felt this really worked well and showed that the problem with the Ukyou/Aaron protagonist dynamic was not intrinsic to the character, but rather just some missteps in our handling of them. For this moment, they shine.
Epsilon: And continue to for the better part of the next two chapters, in fact. We got our most positive reactions to Ukyou during this three chapter arc.
Blade: So yay for Ukyou, we aren't bitching about you this time! Although it's kind of appropriate when the authors bitch about her, really.
Epsilon: Chris also begins his steady ascent in the reader's opinion in this chapter. In this chapter Chris really begins to become THE archetypal SI character. The kind of person who does what we would want to do if we were in his place. Minus the murder, of course, but we downplay that in this chapter.
Blade: Yay for being away from the real heroes and able to justify yourself without anyone calling bullshit! But seriously, here is where some of what I think was the appeal of the Chris character became apparent - unlike Ukyou, he really enjoys the world and all the possibilities it offers. He's driven and purposeful and explains away or just ignores the bad things he 'has' to do, and he also has a tendency to win most of the time. He's much more archetypically heroic... y'know, aside from all the murder.
Epsilon: We also get to see the very beginning of Nabiki's character development in this chapter. Her desire to "know" what's going on and Ukyou's almost childish desire to keep her out of the loop. Plus, hilarity!
Blade: Not to mention Jadeite! Can't forget Jadeite! He hits a mirror and scratches his hand and everything!
Epsilon: That's deep character development, for him.
Blade: Too bad it all goes away next chapter when Ukyou takes away the scratches on his hand via an uncomfortably direct method. Luckily, then Tethys will show up and we can all go back to not caring about Jadeite, like God and L intended. But I get ahead of myself...
Epsilon: So, you'll never believe this, but originally Chapter 6 and 7 were written as one chapter and we broke it in two because it was too long.
Blade: Seriously. That's the actual reason there's no Chris scenes in Chapter 7 - normally Aaron would have ensured I wrote something for the chapter or he'd bitch.
Epsilon: Though there is a lot of him in this chapter. This chapter is actually rather important to Chris; he encounters a lot of new stuff here, not the least of which is the introduction of Pink and Link.
Blade: We actually had no idea how important they would turn out to be to Chris or the story as a whole; then again, at this point we weren't sure how major Chris himself would be later.
Epsilon: Not that we had no plans at all for Chris and his motley crew. We actually went out of our way to come up with something new and interesting for the characterisation for Pink and Link (and in fact, all the Chinese characters).
Blade: This is primarily because we wanted to make the point, as part of our critique of the self-insert genre, that just because you know everything a series says about a character, does not mean you know that character. Especially secondary characters. So I wanted to surprise Chris with something significantly different about Pink and Link than he was expecting of them. It was actually Aaron who suggested that instead of being identical twins, they were actually a Jyusenkyou-cursed duplicated person. Thinking what that would do to someone's psyche, and putting it in context with how they acted in the manga, I wove my entire theory of their characterisation and massive psychological problems that I would later have such enormous fun in exploring.
Epsilon: We also went out of our way to try and give the Chinese area a feel of greater size than you usually get. For example, the strange dome (whose purpose wasn't explained) that Chris encounters, as well as the windmill later in the chapter. The decision to give the Nyuuchezu electricity was partially to distance them from the common fanfic characterization of the villagers as backwoods primitives, and partially because the manga had them with access to telephone and newspapers and other modern conveniences.
Blade: In an amusing note, Aaron's description of the herbalist's village of Pink and Link in the fanfic was actually damn near perfect to the glimpse of it we got in the manga, so much so that I asked him if he'd referenced it, but it was just a coincidence.
Epsilon: This chapter is also the first time we begin to learn anything about the Three Circles. In a bit of irony, Chris is at first disturbed by the notion he comes from something beyond the universe, which would go on to serve as the foundation of his megalomania.
Blade: But lest you think we were doing good planning or anything, this chapter on "Dropped Plot Point Theatre": Ukyou being weirded out by Ryouga-as-a-pig being able to make expressions pigs can't actually make. She also got a bit of vertigo later from Luna for the same reason. Then we, uh, never bring it up again.
Epsilon: Similarly with Ryu's appearance. Orginally he was planned to show up again in conjunction with Sakura Kusagano when we still had her pegged as Ranma's potential mate (an idea we had from very early on). That was... yeah.
Blade: That still served a purpose, though. It was the first clue that things were starting to mix, and the self-inserts had nothing to do with it. Ryu in Street Fighter would never have visited Ranma 1/2's herbalist's village, and nothing Ukyou/Aaron or Chris did made him. The fact there was no artificial barrier keeping series' apart would both call into question the validity of the past, and have major consequences in the future. Chris isn't smart enough to think about this at the time, though. Ha ha! Wait, that's me. Uh... moving on.
Epsilon: Yes, speaking of crass manipulations of knowledge, this chapter is weird, in that it is Ukyou that uses her manga knowledge to coldly manipulate Ryouga. This is in stark contrast to Chris' humbly begging for Cologne's help and telling her most of the truth to get her to trust him. Really, reviewing these early chapters it not hard to see why some people began to see Chris as a hero and Ukyou as a villain. To some extent this was intentional, but perhaps a mistake to do this early.
Blade: Still, we've harped on poor Ukyou not being likable enough before. At least people were still sort of on her side as she fought Jadeite. On that note, one missed opportunity here was that Jadeite refers to Tethys having a close relationship with Queen Beryl. If we'd had any idea how important Tethys would become, we might have seized the opportunity to flesh that out a bit, which may even have led to Beryl having some depth! God knows. I can at least say with probable certainty that we wouldn't have made them lesbian lovers, no matter what you might think from the rest of the fic.
Epsilon: Also, fuck Zoicite and fuck the English dub for making us think of him as a woman.
Blade: You have NO IDEA how much trouble we had keeping that fricking bastard's pronouns straight. You have no idea thanks to our Super Swedish Prereader. Thank you, SSP!
Epsilon: Jadeite was easier to keep straight and, in hindsight, is a lot more important then we gave him credit at the time. It was his skywriting insanity that actually kicked of the... what do you call it... oh yeah, the actual PLOT.
Blade: Funny, that. It turns out in the end he was important after all! That won't stop us from killing him and trying our best to forget he ever existed next chapter, though. His ghost doesn't even show up to bug Ukyou in chapter 30. Oh well, Tethys remembers him! At least until she gets a better character motivation.
Epsilon: He also served the purpose of giving Ukyou one of her few complete and total wins in the entire fanfic. Seriously, the first fight with Jadeite is one of the few times that Ukyou wins a fight without being beaten to a bloody pulp in the process.
Blade: Ukyou has Shounen Hero syndrome. I mean, she loses more blood than Ichigo. That takes talent.
Epsilon: At least she does better than Tofu. He gets taken out without even getting to throw a punch. We certainly didn't do that just to avoid having to decide how good in a fight Tofu was. Certainly not.
Blade: In finale, Tsubasa's recap was by far the best of them, and it's totally hilarious that Chris ended up using Spring of Octopus more than any of the other water he took. I think that's it for the meaningless trivia this time.
Epsilon: Next time, 100k of non-stop fighting. Weeeee!
The great thing about Tethys is her appearence in the story was an absolute fluke. When Jadeite was introduced, we wanted him to have a minion youma to even the odds a bit when he confronted Ukyou and friends. Aaron happened to remember that a youma worked for Jadeite that controlled water, which we figured would allow him to easily eliminate Ryouga from contention and annoy Ranma. So, then I found out who this youma was and looked her up. And discovered, to my surprise and delight, that Tethys not only had a wide variety of surprisingly potent abilities, but also some actual backstory and motivation, as well as a quite above-average degree of intelligence for a Sailor Moon villain.
We promptly rewatched the episode, and from that significantly expanded Tethys' role from our original conception of her as a minor threat to get killed in Ukyou's first clash from Jadeite. Instead, she would be the key to the entire Jadeite miniarc, allowing him to be a much greater challenge in the end than he would otherwise have been. But still, we had no initial plans for her beyond the fight in chapter six. It was essentially stubbornness that let us to decide not to kill her at that point - all monsters of the week die in Sailor Moon past their single appearance (except Senishenta, yes yes), and since there was no reason she had to die, it was more fun to leave her as a loose end. We didn't know what Tethys would do, exactly, but the story was still quite free-wheeling at that point, and we just figured we'd have a use for her as an irritant to Ukyou, if nothing else.
But then there was Hayato. Like Tsubasa, Hayato showed up primarily because Jadeite's extremely public challenge made his appearence unavoidable and we were obliged to find something to do with him since he was going to show up anyway. After his confrontation with Ukyou, he too became a loose end and we quickly decided to have Tethys make use of him as a vehicle for her own revenge. At that point, our conception of her was a character grasping in the dark - the defeat of Jadeite had confused her, and she knew she was looking for an edge beyond pure power, but didn't understand exactly what that was. Ultimately, while she was competent, powerful and intelligent by Sailor Moon standards, she was limited... by being a youma, destined always to fall just short, to make some mistake that allowed her defeat. Moreover, despite her intelligence, she never thought outside her limited worldview. Merging with Hayato, however, changed all that. And so two completely minor, obscure, rather unimportantant characters vaulted unexpectedly to become one of the most important and powerful characters in the story.
What we realised after Tethys merged with Hayato was that together they were the anti-Ukyou; another dual-soulled being with starkly opposing motivations, beliefs, and attitude to Ukyou. For that reason, we knew she was destined to greater things than just dying at Ukyou's hands at the end of chapter 12, aided by Ukyou at that point striving desperately to cling to virtue by not killing anyone. Denied her chance at revenge or death, and abruptly uncomfortably aware that she'd actually been striving for the latter, she was forced to reexamine her thought processes and worldview. And once she did, she could never go back, and events naturally evolved from there - her defeat and supplanting of Beryl and Metallia were essentially ensured by the fact they were destined to lose and Tethys refused to.
Ironically, in book 3 we actually didn't have much idea at all of what Tethys was going to do beyond a vague notion that she'd move towards controlling the world more-or-less peacefully as part of her overarching plan to destroy her ultimate creator, Chaos. Tying her into Akira happened very late in the creation of the book III plotline, and what actually happened was something we developed as we wrote - unfortunately, by the time Book III came around we were so behind we no longer had the luxury of reediting older chapters to make the story fit better. This caused the whole thing to be a bit unsatisfying, since Tethys doesn't really come to the forefront until Chapter 26 and that left too little spotlight time to really give the whole situation proper gravitas. On the other hand, the "everything not really revealed" facet of that was also kind of interesting, in that in some ways it's more intruiging not to really know everything that happened.
Ultimately Tethys is a complex character who still has a strong streak of nihilism, given that her entire master plan is to take over the world and use it to make war on the very incarnation of war, and finally to kill herself at the end of it all. Despite that, she remains terrified of Ukyou killing her, simultaneously also wanting to use Ukyou, being contemptuous of Ukyou, and in some ways admiring her. Her relationship with Seras Victoria exemplified her neurotic personality - after deliberately driving Akira away, she only dares to become close to someone she keeps hidden in a block of ice at the bottom of the sea, someone nobody else can know about. Had Ukyou not undoubtedly mucked that up by removing the concept of vampires from the universe - and isn't it ironic that in a way, Ukyou took away all three of Tethys' possible lovers - perhaps Tethys would have had to drive off Seras too, lest she become too attached to her. Ultimately, the fate of Tethys, neither purely human nor demon anymore, remains to be seen.