Blade: So we start out this chapter with the second and last fight Chris and Ukyou will have. Believe it or not, this was actually planned.
Epsilon: Since Chris was ultimately a red herring, he could never have a climactic resolution scene with Ukyou. Ultimately, Chris is not important to Ukyou's story. He impacts it, but only in the same way people like Gyro and The Major do.
Blade: Accordingly, after this we rapidly diverge Chris's story from Ukyou, while tying him far more closely with Akane, hinting at what is to come. We figured they'd meet again in Book 3, both radically different; in a sense, we planned for this to be the last time that "Chris" and "Aaron" would ever meet. When they next speak, Chris has gone insane and Aaron has largely merged with Ukyou; neither are recognisable as the people they were when the story began.
Epsilon: We also hoped that this was the chapter where people would finally pick up and run with the Chris Is A Villain thing. The entire first half here is basically about how fucked up and ruined Chris has become by the Third Circle. For example, the casual destruction and mayhem that Chris inflicts with his MADM level kung fu is very explicit and horrific in Ukyou's viewpoint. Compare and contrast that with Chris, who only sees what he wants to see.
Blade: Unfortunately, the whole dual viewpoint thing apparently didn't work out as well as we wanted. C'est la vie. Next time we'll use another cheap writing trick!
Epsilon: We also hooked Chris up with Akane at this point because his storyarc would need a hero and Chris would very much be unable to fulfill that role from here on forward. It also served to point out, in the scene where he begs for her help, just how tragic the character was supposed to be. The idea was that this could happen to anybody, that anybody could "fall" as far as Chris and, while they realise it, be unable to do anything about it. But I'm jumping ahead. I believe Blade wants to brag about Ryouga...
Blade: Yeah, basically, it was completely my idea to have Ryouga kick my ass. We needed something to stop me from killing Ukyou, and it was about time somebody took me down a notch since I win all the time. It was, uh, not planned for this also to prove that my much-later-used "outside Destiny" line was pure malarkey, but it sure turned out to be convienent!
Epsilon: This fight scene was also the cause of one of our... vigorous discussions, by which I mean five-hour-long shouting matches and mutual hissyfits. We couldn't figure out how Ryouga could win with his obvious weaknesses known to Chris. Then we remembered the waterproof soap and handwaved some stuff in our not-included-in-text-but-implied events about Chris being more able to use the Paradox/Third Circle while he was berserking; once he started having to focus and fight smart, that actually made him less powerful. It worked out well, I think.
Blade: This leads into some absolutely wonderful Pink stuff, some of my favourite of her entire run. It is perhaps her single most characteristic moment that she almost got shot down by a cordon of police (before being rescued by Shampoo), all the while indignantly yelling that it was none of their damn business why and whose body she was dragging through the middle of Tokyo.
Epsilon: We never really planned on having Ukyou's words of advice to Pink about Chris killing her come back to haunt Pink. She was going to be Quite Certainly Dead by the time (or more accurately be the cause of him going) he went off the deep end. The fact that Pink's life ended as she was brought back to life and killed again hundreds or thousands of times by Chris and then he accidentally destroyed her soul was only... icing on the cake for the character.
Blade: Obligatory mea culpa - yes, we did mess up Ukyou's eye colour by originally describing them as brown and then saying they were grey before Pink rendered the point moot. In our defence, Ukyou's eye colour is completely inconsistent. In coloured manga illustrations, they've been brown, black, green, grey, red, and possibly other colours I've forgotten. The anime also switched them several times. Perhaps she just has mysterious eye-colour-changing powers.
Epsilon: Or she was Polgara.
Blade: (thwack)
Epsilon: (rubs head) Moving on... I was actually quite surprised when I managed to come up with a justification for all the dolls being nymphomaniac lesbians. It fell together so neatly it was almost disturbing. I literally just wrote that stuff into the scene on a whim. It actually ended up factoring into the characterisation of Bison, Rose and the entire plotline surrounding them. And no, we didn't go into Hybrid Theory expecting it to become so Sapphic in its relationships. Really, all this stuff sort of fell in our laps...
Blade: So to speak.
Epsilon: No, seriously. It was only around halfway through Book 3 that it really hit me how "lesbians, yay!" the story could seem to the audience. I mean, I think we have a total of one, monogamous, healthy hetero relationship in the entire fanfic...
Blade: But that's what we get for including Street Fighter and Sailor Moon. At least we managed to get two gay guys in there! One of which, Kyosuke, was being really awesome in this chapter! How's that for a segue, huh? Huh?
Epsilon: He was actually just pretty awesome in general. I'm disappointed we barely got to use him. Though in hind-sight our plan to turn him into some sort of psychotic ex-junkie succubus' minion/boytoy was... perhaps not the best one.
Blade: What are you talking about? That would have been angst-a-riffic! Angst! The one thing Hybrid Theory was so short on!
Epsilon: We barely had enough angst left for Rei. So speaking of, the entire Mount Minakami incident...
Blade: Yeah, we actually wanted that to be confusing. The heroes (and note here that Chris's part in the heroic plan is essentially mass murder that has no positive impact on the outcome) had no idea what they were getting into. Agito and Gyro and the whole Guyver backstory was supposed to be mildly confusing to them.
Epsilon: Of course, you're not supposed to confuse the readers. When you get down to brass tacks we didn't have time for the exposition needed for that part. We were too busy moving into Akane's death and ressurection.
Blade: There's a few reasons we did that. Not least among them is the fact that, damn it, you simply can't deconstruct fanfic cliches without having a character get ressurected. Also because we wanted to have a life-changing event for both Akane and Shampoo, while pushing the Divine Usagi thing.
Epsilon: It's also notable it happens after Akane has joined Chris' team, so to speak. We didn't want the ressurection thing to go by without consequences and "becoming a pawn of the Nameless" was a pretty big one. This event pretty firmly entrenches Akane's character for the rest of the fanfic. It basically is the moment she stops being manga-Akane and becomes defined as something else.
Blade: Too bad it wasn't immediately obvious to anyone else how important that was, judging by reader feedback. Oh well, our own fault for only having a clear direction for Akane starting this chapter.
Epsilon: Or at all. Akane's character suffered a lot from being defined by her relationship to other people. Ah well.
Blade: On the other hand, something in this chapter also went a lot better than expected - namely the destruction of England/Minako's loss scene. I felt (and feel) that that actually was a very moving scene, more so than I would have expected from something narrated by Artemis. I instantly liked Artemis a lot more after this point.
Epsilon: Scenes like that are surprising. You don't quite realise what you've written until its finished. I spent the entire time thinking it was far too corny.
Blade: So, I'd wrap up here with one of the great and most memorable lines of the fanfic, but it turns out Aaron stole that from Exalted: The Abyssals. So. Uh. Well, hey, we coined "the perfect possible future" here! Unless he stole that too.
Blade: Ha ha ha. Suck it, Kaorinite, you boring bitch.
Epsilon: I wonder how many other characters in Hybrid Theory died in the same scene they were introduced in?
Blade: Uhh, lessee... Adon, Kodachi, Hideo, Sentarou...
Epsilon: Right.
Blade: A disturbingly high number of them are related to my characters.
Epsilon: Which is good, I suppose. Considering what happens to the survivors of this scene, maybe Kaorinite was better off.
Blade: Yeah, we do get Hotaru's plotline off to a crash hot start, what with the nursemaid she formerly hated dying trying to save her and her blood splattering on Hotaru's face and all. It really sets the tone of her storyarc.
Epsilon: Hotaru's arc was actually pretty much planned out by this point. Even back when this project was originally called Fate & Destiny and featured Akane in Ukyou's role, I had plans for Hotaru that greatly resembled those that occured in Hybrid Theory. Many of the details had to be improvised later, but for the most part her entire planned storyarc ran almost exactly like I had originally envisioned it.
Blade: Hey, look, there's Ami character development in this chapter! Blink and you'll miss it!
Epsilon: It's strange. Given how ultimately minor a character Ami was, she actually had a very well-developed character arc, better than many characters who get more screentime. Every time we actually bother to notice Ami, the scene includes a bit of character development for her arc of going from thinking she's useless, to accepting she's useless, to deciding not to be useless. It helped that I actually liked Ami, at least before I had seen enough of Sailor Moon to realise she was the least interesting Sailor Senshi.
Blade: Speaking of a small moments with great character import: In one line about how "manly Ukyou would break your spine just for looking at him funny", Shingo sprang into being full-formed as if from the head of Zeus.
Epsilon: It was, at times, almost physically painful waiting for chapter 24 to come around so that we could really introduce awesome Shingo. We spent months, almost a full year obsessing about and talking about and laughing about and creating-in-RPG-systems-and-wrestling-games-and-fricking-City-of-Heroes, Shingo's character. Ummm... we don't know why either.
Blade: Because Shingo is AWESOME. Also, watching Team America: World Police probably had something to do with it.
Epsilon: More neat character development moments (this chapter is oddly packed with them) included the great scene where Ranma and Shampoo are stuck having to sleep in the same bedroom.
Blade: This scene was mainly intended to be funny, but there's also the rather important bit that Ranma has abruptly stopped being the bane of Shampoo's life, and has been relegated instead to minor annoyance. At this point, Shampoo is already starting to plot how she's going to save Akane from Chris, due to her epiphany last chapter during Akane's ressurection.
Epsilon: Pink's near-foot-stomping tantrum about how Akane was rude enough to come back alive from her suicide mission is also extremely revelatory of character. It's also a good thing that neither Pink nor Link actually know Akane was ressurected; or else Link at least might have started putting things together about Akane and the world much sooner than she did, with unpredictable results.
Blade: Also, Tethys! This chapter sets up her entire character arc as she realises the short-sighted and self-defeating nature of the Dark Kingdom's plans, and can not initially comprehend why that is. This leads directly to her coming up with a new reason for living, now that she has given up on getting revenge on Ukyou.
Epsilon: Akira also gains her cookie fetish here. It was just a thing I threw in on a whim because I decided that Akira was too serious and needed something silly about her character. This chapter also features a lot of subtle Akira development. For example, the point where she freaks out at seeing Momiji's panties, or the sudden 180 in her personality when interacting with Kusanagi when she takes off her helmet. This actually flew under a lot of the readers' radars, which I actually found surprising. I didn't think we were being particularly subtle, especially during Akira's two fights with the Dolls in this chapter and how without her helmet they beat her around and with it she single-handedly took out two of them at once.
Blade: Which segues nicely into the Dolls. The last, biggest piece of unexpected character development this chapter.
Epsilon: Which can entirely be summed up in "I didn't want them to be normal disposable minions". I was very much against just treating them the way that such things are normally protrayed in works like this.
Blade: Normally in a series, the mind-controlled minions are either cleanly killed off, or they are beaten until they either suddenly come to their senses or can be quietly shipped off somewhere where they will be healed.
Epsilon: But screw that. Hybrid Theory wasn't about easy answers. I got the idea for their character arcs from an old novel I once read by Dean Koontz called The Key To Midnight. The basic plot is that some woman gets her memory erased and a false identity created by Evil Organization. And when the (male, obviously) lead finally gets around to using the technique they have been looking for to restore her memory, they discover that her memory isn't sealed away, or overwritten or whatever. It was erased and utterly unretrieveable. That always stuck with me, the idea that you can't just deprogram certain people, that you can't just save them and you have to live with the consequences of this horrible thing that has happened to someone. Thus I wanted the Dolls to be characters, characters with full personalities and motivations and goals, even if they were twisted personalities and goals. I didn't want them to just die off, or have their brainwashing be magically cured the moment they were defeated. I wanted the question of what to do with these insane, psychopathic girls who are ultimately victims, and what do you do with this because there is no easy solution. Of course, I did write myself into a bit of a corner and had Ukyou use her deus ex machina to link Mamoru's lifeforce to theirs and then have Mamoru and the Dolls situation be a very grey moral area, one that would never have a neat answer even at the very end. The idea that the Dolls are forced to be who they are, and forced to be with Mamoru, and forced to feel the way they do is something that repeatedly touched on throughout the rest of the story, but ultimately we never come down on whether it is right or good or even acceptable. It just is, and people have to deal with it.
Blade: ... I, uh, came up with the harem comedy line.
Epsilon: Yes... of course I was using that set-up for other things as well. This was back when we still thought Mamoru's soul had the Golden Crystal in it and that what Ukyou would do here would lead directly into the Helios subplot in Ohtori and the Dead Moon Circus... and yeah. I don't want to talk about that now because my laptop is very expensive and throwing it against the wall will not actually make me feel better.
Blade: I guess we'll get back to that later, then!
Epsilon: So yeah, this chapter was very much filled with very subtle and very important character development.
Blade: And also Kaorinite dying. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Vega is unique in that he was the most purposefully planned villain in the entire series, perhaps even the most planned character. What we mean by that is that Vega's entire plot arc, his personality, his purpose in the story, even the "coincidence" of his arc ending at the midpoint of the series was all planned out deliberately and with great forethought before we wrote the first line of his first scene.
When we first came up with the idea of putting Vega in the story, he was just a stepping stone into the Bison plotline that would become important in Book III (originally Bison's presence in Book II was going to be much greater than it actually turned out being) and we needed a Shadowloo agent to do that who was a step above the Dolls. Vega was the obvious choice, as he was just more interesting than Balrog (and we hadn't thought of putting Cracker Jack in yet).
Now, to us this presented a problem. The source material we were using for Bison all came from the Street Fighter Alpha 3 game, so that was basically our default "canon" for the Street Fighter characters. The problem was that taking the events in the game straight, Vega's storyarc is virtually that of an antihero: he turns on Bison over honour, saves Cammy's life and ends up giving her a new chance at life. It would have been simple to make him a borderline heroic character or at least the "noble foe", but for our purposes we much preferred a characterisation closer to the narcissistic sociopath he had been in earlier incarnations. So we had to figure out why Vega would do something so heroic while still being a thorough villain.
Thus was born The Game. We spent one or two nights just debating Vega's character back and forth, coming up with an elaborate (and strangely sympathetic) backstory for him and otherwise hammering out his personality and role in the story. Everything that happens with Vega throughout Hybrid Theory was actually decided on (except for a few details) on those two nights. It all flowed from the epiphany we had (and I can't tell you who had it anymore) that Vega's primary motivation was playing with people's lives, including his own.
To Vega, the entire world is a game. He is a true psychopath. To him, nothing is as real as he is. Other beings exist only for him to enjoy, or to annoy him. It is a completely self-centred world view, one which only grows more insular and insane once you realise that Vega has the power to treat people like non-beings and get away with it. After all, he is not merely physically powerful; he is wealthy, from aristocratic stock and has massive social connections both above and below the law. Vega can get away with murder (literally) whenever he feels like it; he also has virtually anything he could desire - money, pleasure, fame, sexual companionship - without effort.
Therefore the only thing that matters to Vega is pushing his limits. He wants to see how MUCH he can get away with before it's finally too much. He fondly envisions a thousand scenarios of his own fall from grace and inevitable death, each one more gloriously tragic and bloody than the last (with orchestral choir music in the background). In the fanfic, this reverberates through everything he does, from his overall plan to very minor details; he orders the robotically-obedient Dolls to never sleep with him and then tries to seduce them anyway; his excitement over killing Harold Kramer stems almost entirely from the off-chance he will be caught; he deliberately gives Kaorinite a chance to strike back at him after attacking her. He joined Shadowloo precisely because he knew Bison was totally out of his league and ultimately planned to fight him to the death. Bison knew this, of course, but because Bison is also utterly batshit insane (albeit in a far less fatalistic fashion), this didn't bother him much.
The actions that Vega took during the story were all planned out and executed by us with no real improvisation at all (though it had some surprises; Vega's almost complete indifference to Ukyou wasn't what we originally expected). Once we knew what kind of character he was, the kind of story that had to be told about him was obvious. For example, we knew that he would not get his glorious death at the hands of his chosen rival. The entire Vega plotline was a cunning plan to manipulate the emotions of the audience and characters and to set a deliberate tone for the second half of the fanfic and it worked exactly the way it was supposed to. It is perhaps the best-executed plot in the entire fanfic; certainly it is the one with the most focus.
Vega's purpose was multifold. First, he served as a significant example of one of the major themes running through Book II. While Book I was the part dedicated to the "self-insert" concept, it's not as if we decided to drop all those themes in Books II and III. Vega was one of the (in retrospect, several) characters who had a disjointed view of the world that treated everybody else but them as fictional characters that were less real than they were. This was deliberately done with these characters to point out that it isn't just the self-inserts who can have sociopathic views of other human beings, and to point out that having that kind of opinion of others is indeed sociopathic. Notice how everyone who holds such an opinion is a villain worthy of contempt (Vega, Pink, Akio, Nabiki up until chapter 17 and so on).
He also served the role of being the gateway for where the real dark parts of Hybrid Theory began. Up until this point we had been accused of creating a dark story, but it didn't become truly depressing until the Vega arc. The second half of Book II is the darkest, most angst-filled, highest (on screen) bodycount and so on. Vega and his storyarc served to ease the readers into this. If you follow his storyarc closely you can see how dark it is going to get. When he kills Ran, the hope was to shock the readers into being at least somewhat prepared for what was to come. It worked rather well. Of course, many of those it wouldn't have worked on had long since abandoned the story.
Did this deliberation mean that writing Vega was just mechanical, a matter of pushing certain buttons? Not in the slightest. We very much enjoyed writing Vega. He had a very strong personality; his narcissism and fatalism allowed him to stand out from the crowd of sociopaths that populate Hybrid Theory, and his viewpoint scenes were very distinct and enjoyable to write. Not everyone reacted well to Vega; but he had a habit of inspiring strong emotions.
Plus, he inspired awesome fight scenes basically just by being himself, and we can't help but appreciate someone who does that!