Epsilon: So it only took 17 chapters to get Chris to do at least half the writing.
Blade: That's because you and your elitist cadre of (finger-quotes) "good guys" were hogging all the spotlight until now. But now the world's falling to bits and the readers need to be thoroughly depressed, and that's where I (and Pink) come in!
Epsilon: Yeah, holy fuck this chapter is sick when you read it after a long break between chapters. Well written, but contains some of the cruellest, most disturbing stuff in the entire fanfic. There is stuff that exceeds it, but most of that happens off-screen and is only vaguely alluded to. This chapter contains a lot of stuff that basically hits the squick button pretty hard.
Blade: But enough about the fact we had to include the Sailor Moon Super S plotline. How about that Pink whacking children and torturing evil secretaries to death, eh?
Epsilon: Jokes aside, the scene with "little Chris" is probably the single most horrific scene in the fanfic. Pink finds herself alone with an emotionally and sexually abused young boy who she threatens and drugs into making him kill himself and LIKE it, and we see all of it from his perspective. It's seriously fucked up when I reread it. Not in a bad way, because it fits what we were trying to get across (this is fucked up and broken and oh by the way when Chris takes over little Chris he will be able to remember all of this and choose not to).
Blade: As well, what Pink does to Mature is one of the most gory scenes in the fanfic (second only to Akane getting sliced in two, I think) and the absolute height of spiteful, sadistic, petty cruelty. It inspires pity for someone who was themself a psychotic killer. Really, the Chris scenes dotting this chapter were Pink's finest moment. And also her last real triumph, because having reached the apex of her character and committed unforgivable crimes, her doom was pretty much sealed after this.
Epsilon: Originally the menace they were going to fight in Ryugenzawa was going to be Akuma (Gouki) from Street Fighter... which was a stupid idea and we are glad we didn't go with it.
Blade: He was actually originally going to be the source of Angel's powers, back when her role was far more nebulous. All apologies to the one really big Akuma fan who's taken us to task a few times, but the Orochi crew fit the plotline much better and were more fun to write than Akuma likely would have been. But hey, it does leave his status a big question mark.
Epsilon: And on the up side, this means he didn't end up getting short-shifted as much as the Orochi crew, who were originally going to be a much more important set of villians (witness how much time we spent building up Goenitz in this chapter). We just didn't have the time to give them the same treatment as Vega like we wanted because they came in during the final stages of Book II. As a result, the Orochi and crew are more useful for what they represent in the plot rather than what they do. They are plot points against which others bounce off, rather than driving forces in their own right.
Blade: Vice was definitely fun while she lasted, though. Speaking of fun characters, none other than BISON makes his long-awaited debut in this chapter.
Epsilon: I think this was his only perspective scene, which is good even if he is fun as all hell to write. Bison's scene really serves as a valuable info dump than anything else, despite being amusingly laden with Bison's usual bombasity. We learn that he defeated King of Fighter's Rugal (why? Because he's BISON, damnit), that he took out the I-Jin and eradicated the Read or Die plotline (in retrospect I am so grateful we didn't have to deal with the ROD TV "plotline") and that he can capture and brainwash people into being his loyal sex slaves (technically we knew this but it hadn't happened to anyone that the readers were aware had a past before this point).
Blade: I have no good segue to another topic, so, uh, I'll just switch topics. We screwed up. Major Krieg is not a vampire. It was our assumption he was because, you know, he was surrounded by vampires and hadn't aged since World War II. As it turned out in the Hellsing manga, he wasn't. This is why we tried to avoid using unfinished series' in Hybrid Theory.
Epsilon: I'm certain our information on Guyver will prove to be similarly out-of-date in many cases.
Blade: Assuming he ever finishes it. The damn series has fights whose length put Dragonball to shame. Oh well. On to a character I have some mixed feelings about, namely, Chizuru. Despite what some might think, we didn't have any intention of killing her when she was introduced; she was, like Akira, a character we put in because they made sense and were helpful at dealing with another character's intractable problem - in this case, Pluto's despondence over Ran's death.
Epsilon: I'm of two minds about her, because I think we wrote her very well and she was actually a good character during her stint, but on the other hand I also think we could have probably had Rose/Pluto/Neptune do what we wanted if we'd really thought about it, and that would have benefitted their long-term meaningfulness in the story.
Blade: Speaking of things that didn't get developed as much as we planned: in this chapter we get our only real look into Tethys past, which we had actually thought out quite a bit. In the Sailor Moon series we see that Beryl's invasion force is composed entirely of a regular male human army with absolutely no indication of where her later hordes of all-female demons come from. We would later state outright that all the various Sailor Moon monsters-of-the-week are humans with parts of their souls removed (which was canonically already the case with some of the minions in later seasons). Putting two and two together, we concluded that Tethys was, before the fall of the Silver Millennium, a gay male subordinate of Jadeite. So now you know what we only hinted at obliquely: Tethys in Book III is a fusion of one part gay man and one part straight man and this equals... hot bisexual dominatrix chick.
Epsilon: We have issues.
Blade: In this chapter, there is actually one of the huge clues as to how "big" what's going on really is; namely, that Chris first uses the Orochi's power after inhabiting Chris's body, and that we later find out that this absolutely terrified the Orochi (via Chizuru's connection to it).
Epsilon: At the time, this seems to be an ominous sign of Chris's power, but of course, later in the story you know that isn't so. What it really is is the Paradox. The dead body of the Orochi's avatar doesn't have any real connection to it, certainly not one that Chris could exploit, but (as Link intuits) when backed into a corner, Chris just does the impossible anyway and rationalises it afterwards. This experience of being touched by the Paradox is what terrifies the Orochi; when the Orochi-tainted Leona meets Ukyou a few chapters later, she senses the same power within her and is accordingly scared.
Blade: Considering how much Chris twisted the Orochi's power to his own ends over the next seven years (all of which required yet more Paradox, of course), the poor chaos god was probably grateful when Sailor Moon finally put it out of its misery.
Epsilon: And then there was the ending! As a cliffhanger, it pretty much wasn't like any of the other chapter endings. Which is good, because it falls kind of flat, really.
Blade: Yeah, we couldn't come up with a good ending that made it seem like a self-contained story, as is our usual practice. Unfortunate, but oh well. And hey, Nanami gets her big entrance in this chapter! But we'll do the long-awaited Sailor Moon Super S rant later. Trust us, it'll be worth it!
Blade: There's a number of interesting things in this chapter. Perhaps most worth mentioning (considering long-term importance) is that Hotaru's character is really established here.
Epsilon: Some complained that the whole "hatred of Ukyou" thing came out of nowhere for them, and that might well be a flaw in how we built it up, but in this chapter the beginnings of it are on full display. Resentment of Ukyou is practically coming off her in waves.
Blade: The important thing is that is all she can do. Pre-timeskip, there is nothing Hotaru can DO. Nothing, that is, except be dragged along by her. To be treated like something precious not because of who she is, but what she is.
Epsilon: It's notable that perhaps her single purest happy moment is in Chapter 20, healing Integra's resistance members; this is one of the precious few times she can indulge her true nature as a kind, generous person to people who are honestly grateful and don't think of her as anything dangerous.
Blade: The other very important theme introduced this chapter (much less subtly), is contained in Ukyou's grand speech to Minako about how the world is falling apart.
Epsilon: "Things fall apart" is a big deal throughout this entire chapter. All the important scenes here are, frankly, about the good guys losing. This chapter opens with Minako getting her ass handed to her by Rip Van Winkle (and I spent three days tracking down that damn German war song she was singing, even making certain it had appropriate lyrics to the scene at hand and do I get any praise, no.... not that I'm bitter). Ukyou speech is about how hopeless the situation is. Minako can't help Hotaru. Akio and Sailor Moon, the scene between Pink and Akane...
Blade: Even the fight in the Hellsing mansion works towards that end, even if not quite like we had planned. Our decision to cut Luke's fight with Ranma (for space reasons), despite being unpopular with Aaron, gives the fight a desperate quality. Even at his worst Ranma's fights always have a sense of heroism to them, whereas Minako's fight with Yan and Ukyou's desperate battle with Rip Van come across as much more grim.
Epsilon: In fact, I'm struggling to think of any real 'bright spots' in this chapter.
Blade: What are you talking about, no bright spots? VALKYRIE got to narrate the opening!
Epsilon: Yes, and Valykrie is awesome. After all, she is made of space age materials. However even that can be overdosed, as the opening grows quickly... hard to read. Valkyrie was not designed to be a lead.
Blade: Okay, yeah, maybe Sailor Moon's policy of killing off all monsters-of-the-week in one episode (except Senishenta!) did make a certain amount of sense. But as for bright spots... well hey, Nanami is awesome. I can't believe we didn't do more with her. The strangest thing is she was still awesome coming back as practically a different character late in Book III.
Epsilon: So awesome she is almost the only character to inspire spontaneous fanart.
Blade: In fact, she's so awesome and her potential so unused that I will declare a one-chapter moritorium on bitching about how we should've used Rei better.
Epsilon: I was actually really pleased with how we dealt with all the Utena characters. Our scene with Usagi and Anthy a little after Nanami's was, perhaps, the most Utenaesque we would write in the series. Granted, I stole the "just kidding" joke from the anime dub, but the way it was worked together and the interplay between the characters managed to capture that "moving on many levels" feel that Utena was good at.
Blade: This also played into our deconstruction of Sailor Moon's character. It has become fashionable to paint Sailor Moon (and especially the regime in Crystal Tokyo) as some sort of fascism with a smiley face, which is supported more by people's political beliefs than anything in the series. While we knew by this point we were going to parlay Usagi into something of an antagonist, we felt that path to it was unbelievable and disrespectful to the character (who, no matter what her other flaws, always has the purest of moral instincts). Instead, we used Akio to hit her directly in what we considered her weak spot - her lack of equipment (mental or magical) to deal with a force of evil who decline to attack the earth with soul-eating demons. The scenario could really have been used with Superman just as easily, or any other godlike force of good, and I thought it went off rather well and believably, even though lots of the development was off-screen due to Usagi not really being a main character.
Epsilon: It actually parallels Akane's development in an interesting way as well. Look at the scene between Pink and Akane in the bath. Like Akio, Pink is admitting to Akane that she is evil. She is bragging about it, in fact. She is basically saying that she is unredeemable and is going to cause pain and suffering no matter what Akane says. Akio does the same thing to Usagi, utterly disarming her with the truth and, most importantly, not attacking her physically. Neither Pink nor Akio give the hero an excuse to fight them, and thus both heroes are utterly disarmed, rendered incapable of positive action through the simple fact of the villain refusing to act like Ming the Merciless.
Blade: Of course, Pink being Pink and most decidedly not Akio, she won't restrain her Ming the Merciless urges for very long.
Epsilon: Pretty much just until she has an army of brainwashed flunkies behind her. But that's next chapter.
Blade: The corallary to this is Chris's meeting with Chizuru, which goes almost the exact opposite way. Chris tries desperately to be inoffensive, reasonable, and (for lack of a better term) "non-evil" as possible, but Chizuru reacts with every bit as much visceral disgust as if he'd eaten a baby in front of her.
Epsilon: That entire scene was mostly ad-libbed, in that we had to plan for it basically two days before writing it. Like Akane's instinctive and visceral dislike of Chris earlier, this one proves important. It also shows a marked difference between Chris and Ukyou that should have (but somehow failed to) alert the readers as to who was the good guy and who wasn't. Ukyou's reaction to finding out people want to kill her? Run and hide. Chris' reaction to finding out someone may (potentially, maybe) be a threat or inconvenience to him? Pre-meditated murder.
Blade: Naturally, it was after this that we realised Chris would, after being pushed over the edge, kill Chizuru; something we hadn't planned before. I feel that was very useful for cementing his "heel turn", but also unfortunate on a number of levels. It made Chizuru seem almost like a sacrificial lamb character to some, which she deserved better than; also, in retrospect, it probably would have been better to use Sailor Neptune and/or Uranus in her role. As much as I actually quite liked Chizuru and our take on her and as smoothly as she fit into the plot, Neptune and Uranus were already there, hadn't been used to anywhere near their full potential, and their souls were going to be important in book III. More development for them would likely have strengthened the story as a whole more than Chizuru did.
Epsilon: It's not totally unexpected that Chizuru got this treatment, mainly because of how quickly we were introducing characters (and killing them off) at this point. England featured a few appearing mainly in flashback form (Birdie from Street Fighter and Billy Kane from King of Fighters/SNK for example). That did, however, allow us to have Zoicite show up among the resistance movement as a random weirdo and have no one bat an eye (including most readers). Since there were so many new faces appearing so quickly it took even Ukyou (who by this point was firmly carving out her "world's highest perception score" niche) a while to figure out that something was up.
Blade: It was interesting to see what new arrivals in the latter half of Book II became very important and memorable and which didn't. As we already noted, we expected both Chizuru and Goenitz to be much more significant than they ended up being; on the other hand, this chapter sees the introduction of Frederick von Purgstall, who went on to be far more central to Book III than we would ever have guessed.
Epsilon: Yeah, after this introduction we should have known immediately he was going to do a face turn. The man spent his introduction talking more about peace and understanding than most of the heroes ever do. Granted, his views are tainted somewhat by a large dose of elitism and plutocratic thought, but underneath you can already see he's a decent human being. We wanted to give Chronos a human face, a face that would suitably grey up their presentation to be something other than just black-hearted villians they had been up until now. Thankfully for our ability to use him, Purgstall from the manga gets to be basically just decent and dies long before he can be turned into some sort of dog-raping monster.
Blade: Speaking of rapist monsters: Zoicite. Oh, Zoicite. We already touched on how his disguise as "Crystal" was actually pretty clever, but what always gets me about this chapter is that absolutely everything that happens to Ukyou and those around her (including, notably, Hotaru) is all his fault. He calls in Millennium on the resistance, and Bison on them, just in a fit of petty spite because Ukyou cut his ear slightly. And he gets away with it. He's never punished in the slightest for this or any of his many other misdeeds, instead spending his days in luxury getting pretty much everything he wanted out of life. Nobody even really knows it was his fault. It's so unfair it's almost beautiful.
Epsilon: I officially nominate Zoicite for Magnificent Bastard of Hybrid Theory. Seriously, nobody else gets basically everything they want by being such a total ass to everyone.
Blade: Well, except maybe Link. But she gets beaten up a lot more.
Epsilon: Speaking of bastards, this chapter contains the scene where we caved to our fanboys. The stink that was raised about how Alucard was killed off made us rethink his role in the story. Originally Alucard was taken out by Minako merely so that we could get him out of the story. He was just too powerful, especially for Book II, and if he had been around a considerable amount of the story would have been about him. So we had Minako gank him with holy magic powers, which caused an uproar.
Blade: So yeah, we caved a little. In the end, I think the story was better for it. It is here, in this scene, that Ukyou is finally confronted with the reality she has been avoiding all this time. There is a God. He made the world. And he made it for HER. This is her story, her world, her universe and she is the most important thing in it. Someone comes in and points out, in no uncertain terms, that this world could only have been made for her. She, of course, can't really handle this. But the revelation does lead in large part to her complete breakdown over the next two chapters.
Epsilon: Writing this scene was a treat. It was very hard to keep Alucard in character while taking away his most defining characteristic: his total superiority to everyone he encounters. In this scene we see a beaten and brutalised Alucard, one who has been made a victim by the Nameless. It's entirely possible the Nameless might have fully intended Ukyou to become vampirised here by somehow merging with Alucard's powers, or maybe not. We do establish a few other important things, as well. First, Alucard places the idea in Ukyou's head that she can just TAKE powers from people (something Chris has done but so far Ukyou has not) which will be very important in a very short time. We also establish that Minako's anti-vampire powers are directly from the Nameless himself, which will prove to be an important plot point in several battles in Book III.
Blade: Finally, we sneak in yet another Exalted reference with the "mad green sun", a turn of phrase and image too cool to be left to supplements of a role-playing game!
Epsilon: Next time, on Hybrid Theory... holy fuck, we are cruel to our characters!
Minako almost fell backwards into her importance in the story. Not quite as literally falling backwards as Akira did, but ultimately her initial role began and ended with blowing a giant hole in Alucard's chest. Then, because the readers knew her, she was a logical choice to show the destruction of England, since Victoria Seras had already lost everybody important to her. This ended up being from Artemis' perspective because we figured words from Minako would be inadequate to convey the feelings one experiences when one's parents attempt to eat you and you must shoot them with holy light and turn them to dust, while everything you have ever known in your life is burning and dying all around you.
Thankfully, Artemis' perspective turned out rather nicely, and we thought the scene worked well enough to bring back Minako as "V" later, introducing Ukyou and friends to the situation in England. Originally, there was supposed to be a sideplot in the second part of Book II where Street Fighter's Ryu had come to England to face the horrors there, and Sakura had followed him. And then the heroes would find out Ryu had been turned into a vampire, and Ranma would have had a big giant fight with him, and Ranma and Sakura would end up a couple in Book III, because seriously, they make the perfect couple. However, we decided not to do this, on the list of things the second half of Book II needed, "yet more characters and dramatic bloody angst-filled subplots" was right below "Super Vegeta". So Sakura and Ryu's plotline went bye-bye, and we were left with no love interest for Ranma.
We didn't really have any plans beyond Book II for Minako, and had in fact been sort of flirting with killing her off as an object lesson of narrow-visioned vengeance and all that crap (we hadn't yet noticed that the Sailor Senshi were the Nameless' consistant minions, which would later be a major plot point). But since Ranma was sans love interest, and we wanted him to be hooked up with someone else to have one actual positive relationship (and to twist the knife in Ukyou), it eventually occured to us that Minako wasn't a bad choice; and so, their actions (in Chapter 20 especially) were written to provide the seeds of their future relationship. Integra ended up being the "narrow-visioned vengeance" object lesson instead, a role she fulfilled admirably.
Despite how ad hoc the relationship was, and despite the fact that it occurred basically off-screen, and that Ranma and Minako really only spend a couple of chapters in Book III anywhere around each other, their relationship is still one of our favourites. Both of them grew up and matured a bit, but didn't really change. They provided a bedrock of hopefulness and optimism that was much needed in Book III.
Minako remained something of a third wheel in Book III, but she managed to keep coming back and making her mark, most notably in taking out Rip Van Winkle by herself (making a nice bit of revenge for their first conflict in Book II) and her starring role in the Ohtori arc. That was also not entirely planned, but logical - at that point we needed something to jumpstart events with the Ohtori cast, and Minako worked in that role precisely because she had absolutely no experience with the rest of the Sailor Moon characters. She had no particular awe of Usagi, or Akio, or any preconceptions based on the events of the last seven years. Funnily enough, although she showed up almost exactly when Akane left and almost seemed to pick up her 'leftovers', she took control of the situation and directed it in a way Akane (or poor Rei) simply couldn't have.
It is unfortunate for Minako that her ending is bittersweet. Ultimately, she loses at the most important struggle. She couldn't save Usagi's soul - in fact, Usagi was consumed by Paradox, pretty much the worst possible fate in Hybrid Theory. Moreover, Artemis dies, and she didn't even really have the satisfaction of defeating Akio. This is sort of a repudiation of the entire Big Damn Hero concept the Sailor Senshi epitomise, and Minako almost unintentionally fulfilled her role there as the "leader of the Inner Senshi". Nonwithstanding all that, though, they did succeed in saving Anthy, and in preventing Akio from slipping between the cracks and becoming a wild card God - the Senshi's efforts were very important, even if they didn't "win".
In retrospect, Minako worked much better than Sakura would have as Ranma's love interest. What we thought made their relationship work so well was that both of them could and did function as independant characters. Despite the fact both frequently referred to and thought about each other, when their paths diverged, both operated effectively and carried their own plotlines. Minako was not "Ranma's love interest". She was her own character.
Ultimately, Minako's role in the story is greater than her deeds, however. It's introduced when we first meet her after the destruction of England, as "V" - she's more than just a hero. She's a symbol of hope, a golden champion that inspires hope to the downtrodden and fear to the darkness. She is crucial to keeping the resistance in England fighting, to keeping Ranma believing, to saving Integra's soldiers from charging to their dooms, to reminding the Sailor Senshi (not least Sailor Moon) that they are actually heroes. And hopefully, she also reminded the readers of the same things.