Epsilon: It's probably worth mentioning that I spent way too much time reading up on tarot for the Rose scene in this chapter.
Blade: In fact, this chapter marks the beginning of us doing extensive research for the fic, which probably reached its most ludicrous height in chapter 26 when I used Google Maps to meticulously map out where super-martial-artists and Nazi vampires were fighting in Paris.
Epsilon: Or the research we did on Luxembourg! But we digress. We started to do a lot of research here because we were beginning to see this as more professional a work. Hybrid Theory started out as just a fun project, something to kill time. But around here things started to fall together and we began to see Hybrid Theory as something worth doing really right, really thoroughly. We had locked in our 30 chapter limit, locked in the major storyarcs. Heck, until this chapter I didn't even know how we were going to defeat the Nameless. No, this is pretty much the point were Hybrid Theory went from a lark to a project.
Blade: As such, this is an appropriate point to acknowledge some of the major stylistic and thematic influences that went into the story.
Epsilon: Two of the major influences were the roleplaying games Aberrant and Exalted (both from White Wolf). Both games dealt with the "real" implications of people with superpowers.
Blade: More specifically, Aberrant was a game about "What would realistically happen if people in the real world developed inhuman powers?", whereas Exalted was a setting and society (many societies, in fact) built around the concept of how the world would develop if people had always (for all intents and purposes) had to deal with the supernatural, as well as certain humans having immense power.
Epsilon: While they themselves were building on other influences, they were what pushed me to think of how the world would "really" react to people like Ranma and Bison and Reichmann Gyro. The inclusion of "super-social" powers among them also heavily influenced how we would view the world of Hybrid Theory evolving. Sadly, we never really got to use the "mega-charisma" type of play we wanted (except with Akio).
Blade: We did some references back to both games, acknowledging their influence. The name "Lotus Infinite", appropriate as it turned out to be to Ukyou, was originally from Aberrant; the term "baselines" for non-super-powered individuals (used a couple of times) was also from that. As well, Hotaru's book 3 "dark messiah" thematics were inspired very heavily by Exalted: The Abyssals, especially her bleeding forehead mark.
Epsilon: As well, other fanfics formed a large part of the influence here. I won't speak ill of them, but a lot of fanfics have elments or plot devices that struck me as wrong, so I did a lot of reading to organize many of the more famous cliches out of them. For example, one thing that always bugged me is how often Sailor Pluto was a villain. In nearly every Ranma/Sailor Moon crossover she's at best an emotionless bitch and at worst an actual supervillain. Her casual use of time manipulation in these fics also pissed me off. So I played both to and against type in this fanfic. For example, she mentions in her appearance that she doesn't casually abuse the time gates. Similar lines of thought went into the characterisation of Nabiki and Cologne and a lot of others.
Blade: We also played type against ourselves. I was rather pleased when it turned out Pantyhose Tarou never actually showed up as a major character in the fic. And we actually used Tsubasa in-character! Speaking of which, his last scene (amazingly, he doesn't show up to fight Gyro in chapter 28) was this chapter, and was actually a very nice bit, I thought.
Epsilon: Yeah, Tsubasa starts the long tradition of people telling Ukyou to take her head out of her ass. By chapter 27 or so, she starts to listen to them.
Blade: At least she doesn't get blatently symbolically emasculated, as Pink does to Chris in this chapter. Yes, that was totally deliberate.
Epsilon: Also deliberate was the fact that this is basically the moment Chris becomes an irredeemable supervillian. Everything after this chapter is a direct result of him surrendering to Pink. Ironically (and deliberately) he did it by choosing NOT to kill someone.
Blade: Although I'm not sure what point that proves, seeing as how he solves pretty much every other problem by killing people. Oh well. Irony is its own reward!
Epsilon: Speaking of Chris: this chapter contains one of, if not the, most fun scenes in the fic (at least before the Amazoness Quartet show up). The "Compound of Evil" bit was a joy to write, and it all flowed naturally. It feels very Takahashi-like to me. Little bits of pure comedy joy like this were very important to lighten the (often grim) mood of the story. Not just for the readers, but also for us the writers. It may not look like it given how dark the story turned out, but even we can be drained by the relentless pace of the story. Bits like that lighten our mood as much as we hoped they did the readers.
Blade: There's also a few random cameos to note. Ukyou mentions a man she met that produces flame from his fingers and is destined to save the world - that being Kyo Kusanagi from King of Fighters, although as it turned out, he never did have to save the world since Chris stole the power of his arch-enemy. Yay? As well, Ukyou checks out Tomobiki high school, and is relieved to find out it's not the same one as from the Takahashi series Urusei Yatsura.
Epsilon: Because, seriously, we were not having Lum show up. Zoicite also makes reference to a large number of other cameos. All except the Darkstalkers one turn out to be important. To be fair to us, we DID intend to use Hsien-ko (and her sister) in book 3. We also intended to use Lillith and Morrigan as well (in fact, we were planning on having Lilith possess Hinata from Rival Schools, when she never recovered from Pink's ambrosial musk). We later cut both the plotlines we developed for the Darkstalkers characters out of the fanfic for space concerns.
Blade: Which leads to our obligatory mea culpa: there's a bit of a confusing scene where Ran tells Ranma about her cell phone. That was intended (as was a similar bit with Soun and Genma that's around somewhere) to hint at another disconnect between the worlds that made up the Hybrid Theory one - Rival Schools is more modern series than Ranma, and has things like cell phones being more plentiful and well-known than Ranma did. Ultimately, that went nowhere since none of the characters who could really have noticed picked up on it, and we ended up using the fact there were at least three different Yamato-no-Orochis to make the same point. Oh well!
Epsilon: On the topic of changing plans... Alucard.
Blade: Yeah. Alucard.
Epsilon: Let me just say that we had intended this to be the last of Alucard. Originally, the plan was that their meeting in fact served no higher purpose, and that Minako manages to put him down because she wields holy sunlight-aspected magic and he was too arrogant to bother defending himself until it was too late. That allowed us to do some "fun" things in England and also avoid having to deal with Alucard before the Hellsing manga was finished.
Blade: This, we thought (and still think) was pretty plausible. However, the, erm, let's say "spirited" and "persistent" complaints of his apparently large fanbase made us change his role and bring him back later in the fanfic. So yes, we bowed to public pressure and changed our storyline. Although I'll frankly admit it was better for it in the long run.
Epsilon: On the other hand, we did have a purpose to Rose showing up and attacking Ukyou. If she hadn't, Hayato/Tethys would have almost certainly killed her. Hey, the Nameless wants to save her life, not protect her from pain.
Blade: And that's about it for this chapter. But read on to the next for probably the most embarassing admission of the entire fanfic!
Epsilon: Heh... he.. yeah.
Epsilon: It was actually due to a certain person's reaction to the opening Vega scene that we coopted the term "Capital V-Villian" to distinguish between the "misguided, complex nuanced people who you fight because of a terrible clash of ideals" and "people who are evil because they think kicking puppies is rad, aka Reichmann Gyro".
Blade: Both are extremely well-represented in Hybrid Theory!
Epsilon: We might as well get the mea culpa out of the way off the bat, since we've kept dropping hints about it. It's... uh... yeah. Chris?
Blade: Basically, it's Akira. Our foreplanning for Akira, when it comes right down to it, started something like two hours before we started writing the scene where she appears. We realised that Ukyou had to figure out that using what she thought of as "the Third Circle" was partially behind her descent into extreme angriness and spine-snapping and what-not. The problem is, no extant character could do that for her, since she'd alienated Tofu, Ranma was too unobservant, she wouldn't confide in Ran, and that dickhead Chris (wait...) had absconded with Akane.
Epsilon: Quick! Deus ex lesbian! Okay, it wasn't that bad at first. In fact my first idea was to introduce her and kill her off by the end of Book II. Chris convinced me to make her a major part of Ukyou's entourage, and after some brainstorming we came up with making her Ukyou's love interest, which would later be justified by Bison's psychobrainwashing dealie so we could ramp up the angst in the relationship, which appealed to me far too much. In fact it was the angst of the relationship (first on Akira's end as she comes to accept her sexuality then on Ukyou's for the same reason) that sold me on the relationship. Everything else developed later. So no, we didn't introduce a lesbian just to be puerile. It certainly HELPED, but it wasn't our only motivation.
Blade: Of course, there was also a bit of our usual ego there - one thing we did as much as we could shove in throughout Hybrid Theory was introduce commonly accepted bad fanfic cliches and try to make them work. Our biggest success on that front was making Nabiki believably both a "really nice person" and the "queen of the criminal underworld", but taking a non-canonically homosexual character and making them homosexual is definitely up there.
Epsilon: As for what happened to Akira's boyfriend from the radio dramas... uhh... the Nameless retroactively annihilated him and rewrote Akira's entire personal history. Yeah, it has nothing to do with the fact we didn't KNOW about him when writing this part...
Blade: Eh, the radio drama's non-canon anyway. Though on that note, I can salvage some pride from the fact that from the first scene we started immediately dropping hints about Akira being a lesbian (her reaction to some of Ukyou's lines, especially "I could kiss you!") and nobody caught on. Yay for non-bludgeoningly-obvious foreshadowing?
Epsilon: This scene also features another of Ukyou's epiphany/psychology speeches, where she makes a vow to be a better person. Of course, we got a lot of flak in the series because of Ukyou's constant backsliding. That is, she'd have these moments where it seemed she'd come to some sort of understanding about herself, and then continue to do stupid, hurtful stuff.
Blade: Readers understandably got annoyed, which is fair. But this time we stand by how we did that.
Epsilon: Part of the point of Ukyou's character development was to rigorously avoid "single issue psychology": that is, the tendency for people in anime to have psychological problems that can all be traced to one thing, and then when that thing is solved they stop being assholes and become good guys. You see this trope all the time in shounen anime, usually solved by the hero pointing out to his rival how much of a dick he's being, why he's being a dick, and then telling him to stop being a dick while punching him until he's not a dick. Ukyou avoids this cliche; her problems are not solved by a single "eureka" moment or by a single speech or vow or fight. She doesn't "get it out of her system" in some manner. The main flaws in Ukyou's character remains the same flaws right up until the end of the series in many cases. But every one of those moments is a small step on the journey. For example, Ukyou mentions in this chapter how trying to be someone you're not can be personally harmful to you and your friends. And, from this point forward, she pretty much does stop trying to be someone she's not (it just takes a while to convince her that the person she is isn't that bad). If you look at all of Ukyou's revelation moments you can see that she does evolve from each of them, but usually not in the obvious way. For instance, here you would think the revelation is "stop using the evil power, Ukyou" but it turns out the important one is "stop lying to yourself, Ukyou".
Blade: On another Ukyou-centric note, this is the point where the duality between Ukyou/Aaron and Hayato/Tethys becomes most apparent, as Ukyou deliberately compares the choice she's making with the one Hayato made, and refuses to make the same choice of corrupting power for short-term gain.
Epsilon: And it turns out that Hayato's choice wasn't that "wrong" in the long run, which plays into the theme above. A big recurring motif in Hybrid Theory is that "Power doesn't corrupt, power is just power. What you do with it is what matters." Of course, this still is a major victory for Ukyou (and one I wish we had emphasised more). The fact is that this is not a victory over Hayato/Tethys, but over the Nameless. Sparing their life has major consequences on Ukyou's life later during Book III, especially in the form of Akira and Tethys' relationship. But more on that when we get to it.
Blade: On to other plotlines! It was this chapter where we decided just where in the Hellsing series Minako had offed Alucard, and settled on "right before the Valentine Brothers attack" in order to both have an immediate plot impact as they attack the Hellsing house, but also to leave Millennium's invasion of England until the world was too distracted to effectively deal with it. Since this is what let us use Yan Valentine, we were quite pleased with our decision.
Epsilon: I'll be honest: Hellsing was in this fanfic solely so we could write Yan Valentine. This becomes clear once you see the way it works; once Yan is dead we stop caring about Hellsing villians and kill the vast majority off them off-screen with no fanfare. We make a HUGE deal about the Major... and then have the French vapourise him as a footnote. And Link figures out this was a footnote, and explains it to the readers... but I'm getting ahead of ourselves.
Blade: Hey, you forgot Rip Van. She got spotlight too.
Epsilon: Okay, Yan and Rip Van Winkle.
Blade: Poor Zorin Blitz. Nobody loves her.
Epsilon: At least she's not Gaster-pus.
Blade: Or Aptom, making his big first appearence this chapter... along with Shingo, not that we had any plans for him at this point. Actually, we had originally intended Aptom to become a significant character in much the same way he did in Guyver (by being gradually humanised by the minds of the people he devoured), but that got cut since there was no obvious role for him to play. In a similar vein, we had intended Agito Makashima to be Nabiki's aide and confidant - and possibly a romantic interest? - post-Hiatus (which we were starting to plan at this point) but ended up dropping that idea too, once we'd studied Guyver more and realised that Agito was just way too ruthless, cunning and vicious for Nabiki to stand being around in the long-term.
Epsilon: Also on a Guyver note, why oh why didn't we learn that the name of the Hyper Zoanoid 5 could be translated as "Elite 5" rather than "Team 5" earlier?
Blade: And seguing from there... the scene where Rei is forced to abandon her grandfather to Chronos is actually really powerful (much more so than the cheap murders at the school to show how eviiiiiiil they were, which I sort of regret now), and kickstarts her plotline very strongly. More than ever, I regret how Rei got shafted in Book III, though she at least finally did get her showdown with Derzerb.
Epsilon: The entire sequence also plays really well into the messianic qualities we began to impart on Sailor Moon. One of the things we decided to do in this series was to treat Sailor Moon with respect, which is really, really hard. Especially when it features things like giant cathedrals built in the middle of Tokyo Harbour for no good reason (which we couldn't resist using in this chapter). But the character of Sailor Moon was one we really wanted to get right. So we decided to essentially make her the Messiah, and have her basically be a Big Damn Hero whenever she gets a chance. I feel it worked rather well in building her up over the course of this book.
Blade: Of course, this all serves as a contrast to Ukyou. Sailor Moon, Chris, and Tethys are all in their own way counterparts and "mirrors" of Ukyou in the story - they all are different sorts of "messiahs", while Ukyou is the one the world truly revolves around (despite her own wishes). It's also worth noting that while many people support the sort of messiahs/saviours they are over the kind Ukyou turns out to be, that they all have very deep faults of their own. But there's also validity in their approaches as well, and what is fault and what is validity is largely left up to the readers to decide.
Epsilon: Part of that whole "no easy answers" groundrule we developed. Which meant no easy wrong answers either. Well, okay, Vega, Bison, the Major and Gyro are pretty easy wrong answers...
Blade: But more on that later, especially Book III. Finally, there is one point of note, which is the awesome, awesome bit where Ryouga is mowing down the zoanoids and Akane tries desperately to stop him without even knowing herself what she wants to happen. I thought this was a great scene for both characters, and was an important moment for Akane - her inability to control events is a good part of why she agrees to accompany Chris afterwards, having temporarily lost the confidence in herself she gained after Narita.
Epsilon: Also, the cliffhanger at the end of this chapter was the second most complained about in the entire series.
Blade: Then again, it is one of the few actual cliffhangers - we tended to end chapters on definitive notes, in accordance with our "each chapter is a mini-story in and of itself" philosophy.
Epsilon: Till next time, wherein we will totally cop out on killing a major character!
It's a good thing Akira was Water-aspected, because it almost makes the completely unplanned nature of her character look... uh, planned. It wasn't merely the infamous story of her first appearance... nearly every major thing Akira did in the fanfic was planned, at most, by a chapter before. Many things came up just as we wrote her scenes. Her relationship with Tethys, her becoming the third book's "viewpoint character", even her final fight with Kalia were all very near to improvised on the spot.
The thing is, this was not a problem. Oh, there were some issues with how her relationship with Tethys was developed, but that wasn't due to its unplanned nature, but rather poor pacing on our part and how long it took Tethys to forcefully reenter the story. But by and large, Akira comes into her own as such a strong character that both we and (at least to all vocal response) the readers accepted her taking centre stage in Chapter 21 and beyond. She never seems lost or merely drifting with the plotline; she remains central to events in a way other characters (coughReicough) could only wish to.
There are two primary reasons for this, and they were important lessons to us. First is that, although we rarely knew what Akira would end up doing, we always knew who Akira was. From the shy and sullen girl in denial of her own sexuality and self-image that she was introduced as, to the quietly strong and confident yet conflicted (and sometimes afraid) character that she became, we always felt we had a very strong idea on what Akira would do in a given situation.
Second is the fact her unplanned nature was actually Akira's strength. We never HAD to do anything with her, like we did with many other characters. She was free to forge her own destiny. To a large extent, Akira drives the story after chapter 21. All those little choices and improvisations in her character ended up majorly altering the plot in a significant number of locations. She was very much like Link, in the sense of being a completely organically developed character we had fun playing with; both characters turned out to be remarkably strong, and our among our very favourites of the huge Hybrid Theory cast.
The defining characteristic of Akira in Book III, the underpinning that lets her carry the show (and let us think she could), is her confidence. Not arrogance, though she has some of that too (especially when Ranma's around), but confidence. Akira survived her own trial by fire in Book II. She confronted her fears and doubts about herself, and unlike many characters, she never lets them control her again. Akira doesn't feel the need to brag, but she never doubts her ability. She never doubts that things are going to work out okay. She never doubts that the good guys will win. She never doubts she is a good guy.
Akira cares, but not in an overbearing way. She cares about others and is comfortable around them, but doesn't feel the need to talk about it. She just assumes everyone will know. She speaks through action. She thinks talk is cheap, and that actions are all that matter. Thus she proves how much she cares about people by doing things for them, actively. Not just sitting around waiting to protect them, but going out of her way to find and help them with whatever crisis they have. She does this for Angel and Ukyou most directly, but ultimately, it's clear she'd do that for everyone in her circle. She even tried to do it for Tethys - the direct cause of Tethys fearing what Akira would do to her, and ultimately driving her away.
She's not perfect, of course. The above is a double-edged sword: she always expects that people will understand her actions. She has a pure heart, and just assumes that everyone else will sense this and her intentions and react accordingly. Thus she can't understand or really react to deception. nor does she know how to deal with people she can't confront openly. This leads her to refuse to try and deal with Angel despite a significant amount of evidence pointing at Angel's motives not being what they appeared to be; it also leads to her for all intents and purposes ignoring and dismissing Chris. It's not that she doesn't think Chris is a great threat to her and all she cares about, but she doesn't see anything she can do about it, so she ignores the problem. Angsting about the unchangeable is simply not Akira's style.
This openness also leads to part of her problems with Ukyou in Book III. Her decision to 'steal' Ukyou's memories goes against her basic nature, even if it was motivated by compassion; she is uncomfortable with this and therefore withdraws somewhat from Ukyou as a result. Similarly, her compassion leads her into a trap when she kills the doomed refugees who were fleeing Galaxia - she cannot reconcile the person she thinks she is with the decision she made, and therefore she runs away from the situation that caused it. But even in this, she stands in contrast to the other characters. Whatever personal doubts she has, she never lets them impede her. As Ukyou points out, the fact Akira was forced to kill a bunch of innocent people at one point and this hasn't broken her or even slowed down her quest for justice - only enhanced it - is genuinely heroic in a way that Ukyou's constant second-guessing never was.