Epsilon: This entire chapter is nothing but a set up for next chapter, and for the storyarcs that follow it. It exists as an elaborate magic show, an act of misdirection across the entire length of it. There are a few incidental scenes, but this entire chapter is a set up for Ran's death.
Blade: And it worked perfectly.
Epsilon: Tricking the readers into believing that we were setting up Ran for a lasting plotline made what happened next chapter work really well. Granted, we only ever get to use that bullet once, but I think we used it well.
Blade: In fact, I'm very glad of that not just because it fooled many readers, and not just because it led directly into Sailor Pluto character development, but because having Ran get into a plotline with Pluto and her gang and then die before it could be resolved helped make her death seem that much more real. People don't always get to wrap up their lives before they end. Sometimes there are unanswered questions and unresolved issues.
Epsilon: This chapter also reminds readers of the Wishing Sword, a plot point mentioned briefly near the beginning of the fanfic and becoming very important from here on forward. We actually had to work really hard to make the Wishing Sword a major part of the story without having it become the only part. If you ever have the desire to put wishes in your story, don't. They are hard to incorporate into a story unless it is about wishes.
Blade: Here, however, we couldn't avoid it; we'd discussed it before we even started writing. The Wishing Sword existed in Ranma 1/2 and we both knew about it. One of us was going to get a hold of it eventually.
Epsilon: So we thought a great deal about it and finally decided to give the sword to Nabiki. She was greedy and shortsighted enough not to use it to fix a lot of the problems, but smart enough to have it be a major plot element when we needed it to be. This turned out quite well, surprisingly.
Blade: Another very important plot point here occurs in the scene where Tethys takes over the Dark Kingdom. Interestingly, it wasn't that she took it over, which is why the scene wasn't from her perspective. Rather, it's Zoicite grasping at what she brings that's different - no fatal Chaos flaw, or in laymen's terms, not being forced to act stupid - that would become the defining point of her character, far more than what she happened to rule.
Epsilon: Unfortunately, Tethys wouldn't have much to do the next few chapters. In retrospect I think delaying this scene until a later chapter would have worked better.
Blade: Eh, I don't know about that. She needed to be comfortably in control for awhile for her grand entrance in Chapter 20, I think. But hindsight, et cetera. Speaking of hindsight, I wish we'd realised earlier how static Ryouga would be, because the best chance to change him from that was here, ironically because of his saving Hotaru.
Epsilon: On a completely unrelated note, we spent far too much time laughing at the perfect-housewife zoanoid joke. We came up with it months before using it. I still laugh at it. It's a piece of fanart that I would really like to have, however, since it would work ten times better as a comic strip.
Blade: There's a neat little low-key scene in this chapter where Nabiki tries to confront Ukyou in Matsudaira's lab. Matsudaira actually appeared quite a bit in the fic before this, but this is easily her best scene, as she rather effortlessly shuts down Nabiki and makes her seem like a squalling four-year-old. I liked this because it did remind the reader that, after all, most of the main cast are still KIDS, no matter their power.
Epsilon: And showed how far Nabiki had to go before she would become the manipulative person she dreamed of being. I actually really enjoyed Matsudaira, even before we decided to turn her into an evil witch.
Blade: And even more after! But that's us.
Epsilon: Despite whatever issues it entails, we have to admit we love the hell out of Vega and believe he should be in every crossover fic ever, if only so you can have good excuses to set fight scenes on the glass ceilings of shopping malls.
Blade: Also so you have a good excuse to have some hero drive a motorcycle through said glass ceiling.
Epsilon: Every fight scene with Vega was a spectacle, by design. It's a part of his character. Also note how Vega and Ranma instantly understand each other in this confrontation. Vega is delighted by Ranma and Ranma recognizes a fighter like himself, one driven by being the best. Vega is the closest thing the fanfic has to an evil Ranma.
Blade: This is actually pretty interesting, inasmuch as it leads to by far the biggest paradigm shift in Ranma's character. Here he abandons Ukyou and chases after Vega because he's hungry for that big, glorious, RANMA WINS moment that's eluded him in the story so far. He fails utterly, Ran dies for it, and while Ranma defeats Vega next chapter, even there Ukyou takes the final moment away (though Ranma will probably never decide if he's angry or grateful for that). He then desperately goes to England searching for a way to be the man, to be the big hero, to save everyone. He fails miserably again, losing Ukyou and accomplishing nothing to save the land from the vampires, all the while never getting any big one-on-one fight of any consequence. He finally faces Bison mano a mano and is owned like a chump.
Epsilon: This makes him a better person.
Blade: We work in mysterious ways.
Epsilon: Also, I use the same "I bet you're all wondering why I called you here" joke like three times for mysterious reasons. Mysterious "I had forgotten I used the joke already" reasons. Chris did not, and forced me to put in Ukyou's reaction here.
Blade: A big heavy hint about how Akira was actually as good as Ranma (shown when she performs just as well as Ranma did against Vega) got missed by several readers who would later complain that she beat Angel after Ranma couldn't. Not a single person publically guessed about the whole "suffering from Ukyou's paradox" thing, or even wondered why it was happening. Apparently Akira just wasn't a character we could drop hints about.
Epsilon: I also like the way Eudial managed to defeat Ryouga by working around his strengths rather than just blasting him. Her sound-based powers that allowed her to negate all Ryouga's advantages is one of the more subtle clues about how the Second Circle trumps the First Circle. Not in terms of making bigger explosions, but by letting those who use it just ignore or exploit rules the First Circle people like Ryouga can't.
Blade: On a final note of interest, in retrospect I almost wish we'd let Agito find Sailor Moon to use as a weapon against Chronos. Wouldn't that have been interesting?
Epsilon: It certainly would have changed the third book.
Blade: It's kind of sad how little we got a chance to do with Agito; he's such a great character. Ah well, c'est la vie...
Epsilon: Next up... we kill people! Lots of 'em!
Blade: So, that first scene. Awesome. Take a bow, Aaron.
Epsilon: So yeah. That first scene. It worked really well. I also managed to create a theme regarding heat that followed through the rest of the chapter that I think was both subtle and poignant. Writing it wasn't hard, per se, or easy. It was, in fact, the single most crassly emotionally manipulative scene of the entire fanfic. I used every technique of storywriting I could think of to drag along the reader. There was no real passion involved. I enjoyed it, after I was finished, but it wasn't much of a challenge.
Blade: Ahahahahaha. How inspiring! You've sounded more enthusiastic about it in the past, actually.
Epsilon: I am, just not in the way readers might think. I liked the scene, but more for the reaction it got than for what it was like to write it. It was a triumph of craft, a point where I proved to myself: "I can write really well, not just when inspired, but on demand. I have developed skill."
Blade: The scene is also important because it's basically the midway point of the fanfic and represents a major change in the tone of the story. Up until this point we hadn't killed a single hero (well, permanently). This changed that and gave the readers the impression we were willing to kill off anyone.
Epsilon: Ironically enough, we killed off very few heroes of consequence; Shampoo, Cologne, and Kunikida are the most major hero deaths that follow. Akane, Akira, Ranma, Ukyou... almost all the heroes actually live through the series. When you look at the actual bodycount of dead heroes in Hybrid Theory, it is much smaller than our readers seem to think.
Blade: But the impression that there were a lot of dead heroes was important to our readers. It created a sense of tension throughout the rest of the story that would serve us well.
Epsilon: One problem this scene did pose was that while it virtually had to begin the chapter, it seriously messed up our plan for the "story" of the chapter.
Blade: Our general philosophy is that each chapter should be a story unto itself, with a beginning, climax, and denoument, and usually we stuck with that. The obvious story of this chapter is the Vega fight, but the problem is, the Vega fight simply didn't take that long, and many other things were happening that would outlast it. Thus, we ended up killing Vega midway through the chapter rather than as the last scene. That being said, I think how the latter part of the chapter ended up being organised (ending with Ukyou and Ranma planning to leave Japan, Akira staying behind, and Ranma talking with Ran's parents) was also quite poignant, and it still was directly connected to and galvanised by Ran's death.
Epsilon: Speaking of other plotlines, Valkyrie is awesome. She should be, considering the amount of thought we put into her design and character. We even commissioned an artist to draw her before we started writing about her.
Blade: It's oddly appealing to design one-shot Sailor Moon villains... we later fell in love with Kairos just as easily. At first, I'd actually been really hoping to use actual Sailor Moon one-off villain Doorknobder, but sadly the disheartening fact that that would have made absolutely no sense at all forced a rethinking of the plan.
Epsilon: Yes, occasionally we restrain our impulses away from 'that's awesome!' with a 'but it doesn't make sense.' reaction. It actually happened quite a bit. If we had used every single awesome thing we wanted to in this story, it would have been much more like FLCL then Evangelion.
Blade: Basically, when you consider that we were by this point deliberately driving towards a world that was utterly full of awesome... but more on that in Chapter 21. Speaking of the Witches Three (and we sort of were a moment ago), it's worth noting where "Azuma" came from... for those who didn't notice, it's from AZUsa MAtsudaira, much like Telulu's name was LULU TEluno.
Epsilon: This is, of course, based on our assumption that the Witches from Sailor Moon S were human beings who got turned into daimon and not daimon who assumed human identities (an admittedly equally plausible scenario given the evidence of the series). That assumption made for a better story for us, however, so we went with it.
Blade: Seguing from that onto the continued travails of Hotaru... this chapter is interesting in that it's probably the closest Ukyou gets to being able to have an actual emotional connection with Hotaru.
Epsilon: Specifically the way Ukyou could have done that was to give up Hotaru. After the death of Hotaru's father Ukyou chooses not to consider Hotaru's feelings first. She chooses to go with Ranma on his martyr's crusade, instead of taking Hotaru to safety. Granted, as Hotaru later points out, Ukyou had no real reason to love Hotaru and did love Ranma; her choice was less anti-Hotaru and more pro-Ranma. However she did choose to take Hotaru with her rather than leave Hotaru with somebody who might protect her (like Ryouga, for example). Unfortunately Hotaru was ultimately important to Ukyou at this point for what she represented rather than who she was. It was the decision at the end of this chapter, more than any other, which led to the final confrontation between the two at the end of the series and Hotaru's justifiable anger with Ukyou.
Blade: This is sad, but understandable, and shows that Ukyou still ultimately considers herself the final arbiter on what should happen; the situation isn't and can't be "in control" unless she's there. This is the sort of arrogance that is almost inherent to a self-insert and the power they bring to any series. You just know better than people, and it's so seductive and natural that no reader ever questioned when Ukyou did it, despite the fact that Ukyou's life was anything but safe or controlled and her judgement was hardly unassailably sound. However, where Ukyou eventually gets over that through hard experience, Chris goes to its ultimate expression - without the omniscient self-insert, literally everything is unavoidably doomed. People can only be trusted to handle their own problems if Chris, the self-insert, has properly prepped them first.
Epsilon: And this is demonstrated, though subtly, in the Keiko scene with Chris in this chapter.
Blade: Though it might have seemed as such to those who knew me, that scene was anything but just throwing my favourite Utena character into Hybrid Theory. Chris comes in and asks Touga for where Keiko's room is as a way to manipulate him into paying her more attention, then hangs around outside her window dissecting her life and problems and ultimately dismissing them as meaningless. He's not wrong, exactly (a phrase that can be used many, many times when talking about Chris's mindset and philosophy), but the way he expresses this shows how close he already is to the messiah complex he fully develops in book 3. Unlike Ukyou (and unlike what Ukyou believes of him), Chris never thinks of the people of this world as anything but real. He accepts the reality of it implicitly. He never questions that Keiko is a real person with real hopes and thoughts and character traits and ambitions beyond the Utena series, nor would such things surprise him. For Chris just to consider everybody to be shallow cartoon characters and manipulate them accordingly would have made Chris a stock-standard sort of villain, and I neither intended that nor thought it was realistic for me. Ultimately, Chris considers everyone in the Hybrid Theory universe to be completely real and just as important as any "real" person he had known; instead, the difference in Chris is that he increasingly considers himself to be different than they are, to exist on another level. This is a mindset that develops naturally, almost unavoidably, from the fact that Chris is dead yet alive, that he doesn't eat or breathe or feel or taste or touch like a real person would. He can't live with the concept that he is a monster or a pitiful remnant of a human; the natural belief, instead, becomes that he has transcended.
Epsilon: Thus, Chris spends a scene hovering over a human being like a God, deciding the course of her life and whether he should elevate her. The actual decisions he makes regarding her don't matter, so much as the fact that Chris immediately thinks that he has the right, nay, the responsibility to make these decisions for her.
Blade: This is, of course, what virtually every self-insert does (to an extent, what every person in real life does!), which is why it so easily passed under the radar. That Chris is doing it pretty much consciously is the difference, and the warning about the direction he is heading.
Epsilon: Whereas Ukyou spends the second book trying to run away from that responsibility. She thinks that her unique nature actually disqualifies her from making the kinds of decisions Chris does because she cannot resist using her "perspective" to be godlike. Later, she will decide that this is insulting to people and that her perspective gives her a unique insight, but no more unique than anyone else's. She has exactly the same rights and responsbilities as every other human being.
Blade: And you thought we were just being pretentious when we said we were trying to deconstruct the genre.
Epsilon: On a less pretentious note: Nabiki is about to gain infinite power from a magical wishing sword, yet still tries to earn pocket change from her scheme. That says so much about her here, I think.
Blade: Pretty much. One thing I found surprising rereading this chapter was that Hayato was still an active and vocal presence in Tethys, as I'd had a sort of notion he'd vanished by this point.
Epsilon: We did that for a few reasons: because she was the stronger personality and took what she wanted from him, to more closely mirror Ukyou/Aaron, as a tacit reaction to reader apathy towards Hayato's character...
Blade: ...and of course, because Hybrid Theory is Girl's Club and we can't have any more icky guys around than necessary.
Epsilon: Actually, it was more because of the actual story point later where they do this deliberately.
Blade: ?
Epsilon: To beat Metallia?
Blade: Oh! Uh, yeah, I remembered that! Of course! We'll talk more about it then, naturally! Hahahahahaha!
Epsilon: Other characters that get a lot of miscellaneous scenes in this Chapter include Rei and Akane. Rei gets a bit of a scene here in the restaurant, but that scene serves more as a reminder about what Ukyou did a few chapters back then anything to do with Rei. The bit about Usagi not having dreams of her prince was directly related to the golden crystal/dolls/Tuxedo Mask subplot that (as of this point) we still had no idea was going against the canon. On the other hand, the vanishing of her one dream did lead easily into the Akio/Usagi relationship.
Blade: And of course, this is where Shampoo and Akane's relationship deepens some more, and involves more of Shampoo being awesome in that way which was so amazingly effortless for her in Hybrid Theory.
Epsilon: I especially like the way Shampoo's dialogue shifts back and forth depending on who is around. The level of deviousness she develops during book II is really understated but quite profound.
Blade: Akane's naiveté here also underscores the problems she is going to run into. We got some comments like "Akane has finally grown up" later in the story, and sadly, I get the impression a lot of them are derogatory. But she really does have a lot of growing to do, and it's shown why in this scene, as she proves completely uncomprehending of mindsets that are alien to hers. She thinks Chris is genuinely trying to be a good person because he's holding to his promise of not killing people, she thinks Shampoo's admiration of what she did at Mount Minakami is flattering and embarassing but doesn't even suspect Shampoo was referring mostly to how Akane sacrificed her life, and she just can't make heads or tails of Pink. Akane is still an idealist in Book 3 - how she has changed and grown is primarily in coming to understand that that doesn't mean she can just assume people think in any way like she does.
Epsilon: What we consider the last major event of this chapter may surprise you.
Blade: It's not Ukyou killing Vega. Though the speed in which it happened may have surprised, we never had any inclination with Ukyou's promise not to kill except to break it harshly and show it up as the utterly empty and meaningless platitude it was. This is not because we were expressing a personal opinion on that moral stance, any more than we were when both Ukyou and Chris made their pledges not to kill. It is because we rejected the notion that clinging to one arbitrary point of morality can in any way truly affect your life and personality, that somehow holding onto that one reed can stop your life spinning out of control. Ukyou's promise was no less meaningless than Chris's; both even meant them more or less sincerely when they said them, and for much the same reasons. That's a deliberate parallel, of course.
Epsilon: As important as that seemed, the truly major thing was Ukyou giving up the Wishing Sword. Notice here that Ukyou doesn't just fail to get it before Nabiki; at first, Ukyou doesn't actually know who grabbed it first. If you read closely enough it's easy to intuit what actually happened. Regardless of who actually got the sword, Ukyou actually used the Third Circle to give it to Nabiki. This is, of course, the ultimate example of what we discussed earlier. Ukyou simply doesn't trust herself to make the big decisions that something like the Wishing Sword would have thrust upon her. She doesn't want responsibility. She gives the sword to Nabiki hoping that Nabiki, at least, wouldn't abuse it too badly. Ukyou's decision later to go along with Ranma is part of this as well; she would rather follow him on his crusade then choose her own destiny at this point.
Blade: And so ends one of the most important chapters; in events, character direction, and direction of the fic as a whole. From here on in, it starts to become quite the bumpy ride.
We were actually very worried about how we were going to write Anthy and Akio. They were very strong characters in the Revolutionary Girl Utena series, and it was important for them to be similarly strong in Hybrid Theory, despite lacking the context that Utena gave them as well as their singular importance in their original series.
They had to be creepy, mysterious, interesting, understandable, menacing, cool, and at the same time retaining the very-specific-to-the-Utena-series style of "fairytale" that was tricky to get across in text. Finally, at first we weren't even sure which one of them was going to get the viewpoint scenes. The last was solved first, because while Anthy's viewpoint presented problems, Akio's would inevitably end up revealing too much about the series and the metaphysics underlying it.
Once it was settled on Anthy, we worked on how to protray her constant torment; considering the Swords of Hate in Utena to be largely metaphorical, we decided to intersperse all her viewpoint scenes with a continual variety of horrible torments that she was very blase about. That worked well; more difficult was figuring out how to write her in a way that conveyed her deep-seated bitterness at, uh, pretty much everything and everyone, yet still make her at least somewhat sympathetic. We decided to go with her only referring to people by titles rather than names as one element of that, showing how detached Anthy was and that her bitterness and hatred was directed as much at herself as at anything else.
Then there was Akio. Akio was an even more difficult character to get across; Anthy had to be sympathetic, and that can be tricky, but Akio had to be powerful and impressive, and that was much harder. This was particularly true because in Hybrid Theory, he had very little actual physical power compared to virtually any villain elsewhere in the story. Moreover, a lot of Akio's impressiveness in the anime is visual, and we didn't have access to his stupendous sexiness to make him seem more important. So... don't ask where Akio-the-storyteller came from. It was just one of those inspired moments, and ended up basically making the character work. Having him refer to everything in story-telling metatextual means was just so awesome we decided it had to be his thing from his first scene on. Convienently, it also let us reveal a great deal of things, without being open about it. Rereading all of Akio's stories, you'll see that we hid a lot of the big revelations in plain sight within them.
Still, while all this worked to handle their first scenes, we at that point had little idea as to their long-term role in the story, beyond the fact that Chris leaving the Sailor Senshi with Akio was a Bad Idea. At that point, we still had the notion that Akio might very well have wielded the Third Circle; it was only later that we realised that didn't make sense at all, but what did make sense was for the Nameless to have created someone who "could" have wielded the Third Circle as a handy teaching tool for Ukyou. Except Chris mucked it all up by getting to Akio first and giving the game away.
At first, Anthy's torments were therefore just symbolic of Paradox. But when Paradox became more front and centre in Book III and we had to define it and its effects, we actually went with the Swords of Hate being its typical manifestation. That being the case, it begged the question: if Akio hadn't actually been God, where did Anthy's Paradox come from? The answer was both neat and simple, since we also had another problem: Where did all the Paradox go when the Nameless made the universe out of whole cloth (and for that matter, the Paradox preexisting the universe)?
In this way, Anthy became the very first (as far as the universe and story was concerned) fetich soul, storing all the Nameless' paradox until such time as a new host (Hotaru) could be created. In order to allow Anthy to handle the mind-numbing, soul-destroying, generally awfulness of that much Paradox, the Nameless undoubtedly created her as a recepticle that was especially well-suited to doing so without being destroyed. This makes more sense when you realise the Nameless has done this "prophecy" N times, with the amount of Paradox exponentially increasing with each new failed experiment.
This, however, would have an unexpected side-effect; by creating a creature at the dawn of the universe who was perfectly adapted to handling massive amounts of Paradox, the Nameless therefore made it one of the "laws" of the universe that such beings could exist... undoubtedly paving the way for Chris to unexpectly make his own such recepticle before he otherwise would have exploded. Perhaps the Paradox itself inspired Chris to do so, since he was all but swimming in it by that point. This is also likely the reason the Nameless had arranged for a seven year "hiatus" to begin with; in order to get rid of the annoying red herring in his pet project. Unfortunately, this backfired on him as Chris obstinately didn't cease to exist, but instead created Kalia, who recognised Akira as a future fetich soul and began mucking with the Nameless' playground for plans of her own.
As things continued to spiral out of control, this actually led to Akio having a very good chance of completing his plan to "return" to the mastery of the Third Circle he never actually had. So much Paradox is being thrown around by the latter part of Book III that the universe is in danger of breaking down on the fundamental level; Akio, being created to be as brilliant and knowledgeable as he is, makes use of the chaos and the gift of Sailor Moon (someone capable of reaching the Third Circle under the right circumstances, more of a factor of her personality than her power), very nearly comes up the middle and makes himself a wild-card God. Whether or not he could have actually succeeded is very much up in the air; however, the Nameless is scared witless by this and desperately throws its best remaining pawns (the Sailor Senshi) at him in an attempt to stop any chance he might have.
To understand this, it's important to realise the Nameless doesn't exist in linear time; it is aware all along the continuum, but can only act in a linear fashion as all of its actions (being Third Circle actions) thereby "collapse" the timeline into one true one. Therefore, it is aware that a Third Circle event will take place, but not what or how or what the consequence will be. Therefore, while it is aware that Akio's machinations have somehow led to a Third Circle event happening, it is unable to tell what will come of it and is tied by its overall schedule into only throwing the Sailor Senshi at him. Destroying him personally was possible, but would have likely scrapped the experiment (due to Anthy's presence at the same place and time) and it was so close. However, shunting nearly all its remaining pawns to deal with Akio's scheme thereby leaves the Nameless almost blind and crippled in terms of being able to deal with what is still going on in Tokyo, and thus both Ukyou and Chris (via Kalia) have a much freer hand to pursue their goals than the Nameless would have liked.
It is the Nameless' sheer irritation and fear over this development that leads to it stupidly deciding to annihilate Akio after Sailor Moon puts the kibosh on his scheme. Akio was no threat at all by that point, but the Nameless was at this point very close to Hotaru, and its petty, destructive, short-sighted reaction is influenced by the fact that she is herself a wounded, angry child. This mistake too ends up costing the Nameless dearly.
Anthy ends up unexpectedly surviving the ordeal, and in fact is the root cause of Sailor Moon's reaching the Third Circle, as Sailor Moon ultimately does so to save her, a person who cannot and does not want to be saved. Ironically, this basically mirrors the actual ending of Utena (as does Anthy's appearence in the epilogue scenes, where she has left Ohtori to search for Sailor Moon's heir). It is also a foreshadow of Ukyou's confrontation with the Nameless and a bit of a red herring; by having Sailor Moon be able to save Anthy, the readers are led to believe (erroneously) that at this point Ukyou can save Hotaru. But Ukyou is not Sailor Moon, and Hotaru is not Anthy.