Blade: So yeah, I'm not even in this chapter. Take it away, Aaron!
Epsilon: Coincidentally, or perhaps not, this was probably my favourite chapter to write. Also coincidentally, or perhaps not, it was arguably the most successful chapter in terms to eliciting the desired viewer response.
Blade: In the sense of "Yay Ukyou! Break that guy's neck!" Woo-hoo!
Epsilon: Well, it is the most... uh... quintessentially heroic chapter of the series, and the good guys beat up the bad guys and there's no real grey moral area in that the bad guys should have been beaten up. Jadeite deserved to die and so they killed him.
Blade: Unless you think you shouldn't kill people for being objectively evil, like Ukyou decided she did after some deliberation.
Epsilon: But mostly this chapter was successful because it featured our greatest strength: elaborate fight scenes!
Blade: To be more specific, elaborate fight scenes where everybody plays an important role. Except Ryouga, but meh. The people who actually won the fight were the two weakest combatants participating.
Epsilon: So take note, people in the fanfiction community-
Blade: And, you know, ACTUAL ANIME COMMUNITY...
Epsilon: -all you have to do is set up extremely complex multilayered fight sequences so that weak people can have a decisive impact on fights involving stronger people! Simple!
Blade: Yeah yeah, we're brilliant. Which is why we have a brilliant explanation for why Tethys doesn't die here despite the fact we imply she's going to and we were about to establish that youma do not fight for their lives. So... Aaron? Brilliant explanation?
Epsilon: Uh... she got washed out with the tide. That's my story and we're sticking to it. See, that's why we find her in a storm drain later. Because that's where tides at the body of water near Narita airport go to: Nerima's storm drains. That's why they have those canals, you see.
Blade: Of course! Moving on. Hey, Pluto actually shows us her vision! Where Ukyou fights "a force without a face or a name"! Look, look, there is actually something where we knew where we were going with that! And where we were going was not "Ukyou and Chris fight for great justice!"
Epsilon: Thank god. Can you just imagine the amount of first-year-university-student philosophising that would go on between Third-Circle Ukyou and Chris in a dramatic final battle for the fate of reality? It would put the end of Death Note to shame.
Blade: At least half again as much as happened in the actual final battle!
Epsilon: Given the general upbeat nature of this and the introduction of Pluto's motivations and the fact we end with the obvious clue that the world was about to implode, it's too bad this wasn't the actual end of Book 1.
Blade: Also this chapter introduced Ran! And shows us all how awesome she is, something you the reader should not forget just because we did and she sort of did nothing for a few chapters before we hastily reintroduced her and made her significant so it would matter when we killed her. But, uh, we'll cover that later!
Epsilon: In more of the surprisingly-rare "We actually knew what we were doing here" moments, it was deliberate that Pluto destroyed Ukyou's spatula during this fight. We never intended to replace it, it was a symbolic... symbolism thingie showing that Ukyou was losing her identity as "Ukyou". Also the spatula had made it much harder to take her really seriously, even though she had a trenchcoat and everything.
Blade: Poor Ukyou. Forced to actually become a more nuanced character, rather than relying on being an over-the-top caricature of an okonomiyaki chef. No wonder she flips out later.
Epsilon: Uh... so that's pretty much it. What else can we say about a 100k fight scene?
Blade: I suppose we could point out that this is actually Akane's big moment to shine in Book 1, and set that she was going to be a major character and not a background one. Except few people actually got that. Whoops. Poor Akane.
Epsilon: On the bright side, I think we can all agree on two great things about this chapter:
1) We finally killed off Jadeite.
2) The Disco Ball Of Evil.
Blade: Pretty much.
Blade: I actually rather like this chapter, it's got a lot of interesting stuff. It's repeating the above, but bears repeating: too bad it wasn't the start of Book 2, because this was the start of Book 2.
Epsilon: Yep, this chapter marks the beginning of Ukyou's serious attempts to manipulate plotlines using her knowledge, both Ranma 1/2's and Sailor Moon's.
Blade: And also Chris's attempts to impress Akane, which would have bounded nicely all the way to chapter 20.
Epsilon: AND Tethys setting out on her on to hunt Ukyou, ALSO a plot going all the way to chapter 20.
Blade: AND the Blue Seed plot entering the fray, and the first hint of Chronos (via the underground spy that later would turn out to be the zoanoid Dyme)...
Epsilon: Yup. This really is the start of Book 2.
Blade: In retrospect, we could have added two or three more chapters worth of material to book 1 and made Ukyou more cheer-for-able, rearranged and shortened some parts in chapter 2 (probably having the Ukyou/Tethys fight in 15, maybe simultaneous to the Ranma/Vega fight), and solved pretty much most of the problems in the first half of the series.
Epsilon: Unfortunately, we just didn't have a good overall storyarc plan for a few more chapters yet.
Blade: And were rushing too hard to Ukyou's breakdown.
Epsilon: But... but angst! Sweet, delicious angst!
Blade: Thankfully, it is pretty much uphill from here on. This is one of the better chapters and the story continues to grow more complex and engaging from this point forward.
Epsilon: And enough with the bad things. Let's get to specific good stuff!
Blade: Like SHAMPOO! Actually, her scene wasn't originally in this chapter - initially, her first appearance was in Chapter 10. It was after writing that that I realised she was perhaps the most fun character to write ever, and decided she needed more introduction back here. This actually was a good thing aside from Shampoo's general awesomeness, since it dovetails nicely with Chris's activities with Pink and Link and foreshadows the confrontation to come.
Epsilon: We also had this opportunity to take some liberties with the entire tribal laws thing. Also, setting up our characterization of Cologne as basically an overly manipulative idiot. Frankly a lot of her problems can be traced back to how much of a bitch she is to Shampoo in this scene; her life would have been immeasurably easier if she hadn't decided Shampoo needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into maturity.
Blade: Also yay for the Tethys plotline beginning as she strikes out on her solo quest for revenge on Ukyou. Her ruminations on the pointlessness of sex-not-for-establishing-dominance are kind of ironic, actually, given her later relationships with Akira and Seras.
Epsilon: There was also the beginning of the backstory regarding the youma that we never managed to actually get into in the fanfic. Basically we noticed while watching the series that the only people who were fighting in Beryl's army were human men (clearly seen in the anime) with no actual Youma. But we mention that Tethys was around BEFORE they were sealed away. So we came up with this backstory where all the Youma were created from humans locked away and altered by Metallia and Beryl. Ironically, this meant that Tethys was probably a man before she was converted... so yay, more blatent transgenderism!
Blade: Another plotline really kicking off in chapter 8 that would have huge consequences is Nabiki's discovery of the contents of Ukyou's journals, letting her realise that Ukyou apparently knows the future and that she now has the secrets of dozens of people she's never even met. Nabiki is actually pretty interesting here, I think. Ukyou treats her with such withering condescension that Nabiki's resentment towards her is almost sympathetic, but at the same time, Nabiki's over-the-top desire for revenge and overblown sense of self-importance could very easily have led her to become an actual villain (some would say it did, in fact) had she not used the Wishing Sword in a way perhaps too clever for her own good... er, bad?
Epsilon: I'd say that Nabiki was an actual villain, even if we planned to redeem her. Certainly our Super Swedish Prereader reacted especially strongly to her. So much did she react to her actions over the next few chapters, in fact, that we spent a long time furiously thinking about how to make her sympathetic again.
Blade: A daunting task, as shown by the fact that unlike all the other Book 2 plotlines kicking off here, Nabiki's fall and redemption would go all the way to the very end of the series. But more on that another time.
Epsilon: This chapter also contains more Tsubasa. Unfortunately, it shows that while we liked to use Tsubasa, we had no clear plan for him. For one thing, we forget to have Tsubasa react to Ranma's curse when he actually saw it happen in front of him. We even went into a whole thing using Tsubasa's disguise skill to try and start explaining that chi can be used for a lot more than just martial arts. This was hinted at further along in the story, but we never actually managed to develop it as much as we wanted to.
Blade: On the note of the Fungus, the reason Tsubasa is called "the Fungus", for the approximately everybody who doesn't know, is that basically a long time ago on rec.arts.anime and related groups, he had some fans, and somebody (I honestly have no idea who anymore) started referring to him as that, since he "grows on you". The joke being it isn't very flattering-sounding despite the erstwhile meaning. So, uh, now you know!
Epsilon: Also speaking of chi, we started to introduce the five element theory of chi usage in this. Despite how often this system is referenced and used for the purpose of flavour-text, it's actually more of a red herring then anything else. The real important metaphysics here are the Circles. The fivefold chi theory was introduced solely because we wanted to create something that was unique and thus that Ukyou alone would be truly familiar with. The inclusion was Ukyou's (and the readers) first major clue that this was all about Ukyou, and that Chris was superfluous.
Blade: On the note of superfluous me, Chris's meeting with Akane is of course a very pivotal moment for both characters. Like much of the best stuff in the series, it came from us arguing for forty minutes straight over what would happen. I was initially of the opinion that Chris could win over Akane because Akane forgives everybody of everything if they need help; Aaron argued she wouldn't forgive Chris because he'd actually murdered someone and that was more serious than anything in Ranma. I eventually agreed that would be the case, but decided Chris-in-the-fic would be equally expecting a warmer reception than what he got, which I figured would eat at him and make him get rather depressed. And so we have it - if Aaron had agreed instead, god knows what would eventually have happened to Chris, as it certainly would have been extremely different.
Epsilon: That also led directly into him playing into Pink's hands. It's not a coicidence that this is the first chapter we get a Pink-perspective scene. It begins to show you were exactly Chris's storyline is heading, and it's not to good places.
Blade: Incidentally, for those curious, what Chris was attempting to do in the Akane scene was inform her of his plans to deal with Shampoo when she arrived and hopefully get her help in finding a way to fight Shampoo where Ukyou or Ranma wouldn't interfere.
Epsilon: Yeah, nobody's plan worked out well in this chapter. Here we also see Ukyou's plans beginning to backfire in her face quite spectacularly. The entire sequence with Ukyou and Ranma's mother was very very hard to write. I think I gave myself another ulcer over it. I kept trying to balance humour with the seriousness of the situation. Did I succeed? That's the reader's decision. But at least talks-constantly-girl was awesome.
Blade: Yes, the world needed more of talks-constantly-girl. And on a side note about random made-up characters, I kind of liked Nabiki's informant/translator Zaitochi. I kind of wonder what happened to him after this, suddenly realising they had an apparent Visitor From The Future and with all the same information Nabiki had. Could've been an origin story. Or maybe he just shut up and tried not to think about it and the world was lucky enough that he never got grabbed and brainwashed by Chronos.
Epsilon: Realistically he probably died during chapter 20, unless he was smart enough to get out of Japan.
Blade: Then again, maybe he was. I actually really like speculating on what happened to minor characters during and after the series; one of the things I think we did really well was creating a world that legitimately seemed somewhere about as huge as the world actually is, where you could tell a million stories and just scratch the surface of everything that happened during the seven years of Hybrid Theory and beyond. And to bring it all home, this is the chapter where the characters and readers both first start getting thrust into the reality of how big it is, how much bigger than the self-inserts or any other characters are.
Epsilon: On that note, we'll leave you for now, getting more into that as the series progresses further into that territory.
Blade: Next up, the actual rather than theoretical end of Book 1! And it's not so bad, plot-wise, even if everyone hates Ukyou. Including Ukyou.
The creation of the Pink/Link character essentially happened in two steps; the first being my thinking of what the psychological effects would be upon a person who lived their entire life with a) another "them" around that they couldn't get rid of, and b) not knowing which of them was real and which was the copy. Of course, it also had to fit with their manga characterisations, but that actually worked out quite nicely: the "overs" which they end their sentences with became their way of telling when they were finished so they wouldn't keep completing each other's thoughts, and their duality (LinkNice/PinkNasty, LinkFrown/PinkSmile) became a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from each other. In my thinking, Pink and Link spent their childhood "staking their claims" on personality traits that were actually natural to them, forcing their twin to act the complete opposite. Of course, that would over time force them to extremes of personality. However, the one thing they can't help but share is their affinity and love for plants.
By that point, both of their primary motivations became clear: Pink wanted to prove her existence via affecting the people around her, and since the easiest way to leave a memorable impression on most people is to hurt or scare them, she was sadistic to the point of recklessness. Link sought to achieve the same goal by understanding how the world worked so she could eventually prove she was a valid part of it, so her intellectual curiosity became her defining character point. At this point, we had not yet decided which of them was actually the real person.
Then the second stage of their development was, of course, when Pink read Chris's journals. Knowing that was going to happen, I'd given some thought to exactly how the same person/people would react to the discovery that absolutely nobody was real, that they were all fictional. And from there, they became instantly more important and complex than I'd ever imagined.
Pink is really one of the main villains of Book 2; a feat she accomplishes despite letting her typical reckless stupidity cause her to fail in much of what she sets out to do. Where she shines is psychological manipulation, and her eager desire to seize every and all opportunities open to her regardless of the consequences. Ultimately, her character is defined by how much she doesn't give a damn about consequences. Despite every setback and painful experience, Pink's smile is permanent because she never sees failure, only opportunity to cause more havoc and ensure even more people are forced to remember her. Ultimately, she has no empathy for anyone else precisely because she has spent her whole life hating and resenting them for being more 'real' than her; it is ironic that she comes to love Chris, the only truly "real" person she has ever met. But as she says, he opened up the world to her, introducing the possibility of her being 'memorable' on a grander scale than she ever could have dreamed of before. Her attraction to Chris is because he opens up new and wider vistas of being "important" to her, and because she knows she can tie him to her permanently.
It was clear to us by about halfway through book II that Pink would have to be the copy, simply because she was rushing headlong towards the apex of her character arc and Link was only beginning hers. Past where Pink kills little-Chris to give big-Chris the power of a god and implants the mitamas in herself, she really had nowhere left to go except to do the same things, ever more excessive and grandiose. As fun as it would be to imagine where she continued to twist Chris around her finger and get him to make her Queen of the World, the story just wasn't going that way, so off into that good night she goes, clearing the way for Link to come to the fore.
Link is my favourite character in the series, bar none (whether you include Pink as the same character or not). The character she grew into in the latter half of the series was one I found endlessly fascinating to write and think about; it's worth noting that she is the only series character in the fic who is completely aware of their fictional status (except, arguably, Ukyou). Unlike Pink, whose philosophy of immediate gratification allows her to simply ignore that and take advantage of the opportunities it affords, Link obsesses about it. For someone compelled to chart the impact of their own existence upon the universe, finding out the universe is a wholly artificial construct only as old as the 'real' people are (as she finally realises at Ryugenzawa) is a near sanity-destroying revelation; one most characters (and people) would refuse to accept no matter what evidence they saw. But Link rigidly adheres herself to Sherlock Holmes' maxim: that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains - no matter how improbable - must be the truth.
It almost seems contradictory that Link - initially just as tactically inept as her twin - becomes such a cold and calculating character, but in fact that was a logical outgrowth of her personality as I saw it. Ultimately, while Link is just as uncaring as her twin about the needs of other people, she also deliberately eschewed being sadistic as a way to differentiate herself from Pink (or perhaps the reverse was true). When Shampoo's torment is removed from the equation, Link rapidly stops caring about her, instead becoming increasingly fascinated by the revelations of Chris's journals, the mitamas and other inexplicable features of the world she thought she knew. As well, she increasingly comes to think of herself more as a character than a person; by doing so, she begins identifying her 'character flaws' and working to correct them. Thus, as the series goes on, she goes from a reckless risk-taker to an obsessive over-planner who compulsively avoids any risk (because she doesn't trust her reactions to a crisis to be anything but stupid and counterproductive).
Link's peculiar psychological problems and outlook (one so rooted in the very concept of Hybrid Theory that I'd be hard-pressed to replicate it in any other story) make her rather uniquely contradictory, which is part of what I liked so much about the character. She is simultaneously overweeningly arrogant yet completely lacking in self-esteem, coldly logical yet childishly petty, brave enough to face down people like Hotaru singlehandedly and install a "kill-switch" in her own brain to prevent anyone from stealing her secrets, yet simultaneously cowardly and terrified of dying before she has fulfilled her self-appointed destiny of being relevent to the story the Nameless is telling. The apex of her storyarc, quite deliberately planned by her, is when she manages to get Ukyou's undivided attention long enough to exposit what she has deduced about the world, the Nameless, the Third Circle and Chris. And yet, though she has extracted Ukyou's promise of being treated like a 'friend', she then immediately flees, knowingly abandoning her relevence to the plot to avoid what she considered her likely death. This is really what I consider the essential core of her character: upon getting the thing she wants enough to die or kill for, she then almost immediately abandons it out of fear and greed. And the hell of it all is, she knows it.
Their faces tell the story of the twins from the very beginning; Pink, for all her failures, is never truly unhappy, because all she sees is opportunity, right until the moment of her death. Link, despite getting what she wanted, despite finding herself to be the real twin, despite seeing the destruction of Chris, despite gaining great knowledge and power, despite surviving everything and succeeding in her plan to be relevent to Ukyou, will never be happy. Nothing can satisfy her, nothing can make her be satisfied with the person she is. She has stuck herself in an endless cycle of always striving for the next piece of knowledge or power, knowing there is no end and that she will never be satisfied.
Unless something changes her...