Blade: So this chapter opens up with yet more gender confusion. We must have thought that stuff was hilarious.
Epsilon: Anyway, that little bit leads directly into Ukyou's brief introspection scene about her and Aaron's merging. In retrospect, I wish I'd not made this scene lead directly into the battle upcoming. It's actually a fairly major moment. Basically this says to the readers "they've given up trying to be seperate people now", and is a major milestone in her characterisation. Granted, I also point out that the process of integration between the two is going to be long and painful... which is part of the reason for the timeskip and Bison's brainwashing. Basically it allows us to get past all the integration anxiety that would have occurred naturally over the next few years and get straight to who Ukyou was going to turn out to be in the end: one being with two unique perspectives.
Blade: Some people didn't like this, but with the way the plot went, it was actually all but unavoidable. Ukyou/Aaron were self-destructing, and left to their own devices would likely not have made it even another year. They needed to be presented with their merger as a fait accompli and just have to deal with it, which is what the Nameless intended.
Epsilon: Of course, the Nameless couldn't let the Orochi kill its pet; which is why it ensures Leona notices Ukyou's Paradox when she arrives, despite the fact that Orochi-vampire-Leona could have easily beaten her (seeing as how Ranma, Minako and Yomiko were losing to it).
Blade: At least for the few minutes necessary for Bison to make the point moot. Bison pwning Leona and Rip for free was a pretty blatent heat-building manoeuvre - we knew he was going to be a much more significant villain going forward than Millennium, so we demonstrated quite clearly that he was an order of magnitude greater threat than any Millennium had put forward.
Epsilon: The fact that this conveniently fed into Rip's inferiority complex and her hatred of Ukyou was something we exploited only after we realised the implications.
Blade: All the last interactions between Ukyou and Hotaru are in this chapter, setting up what is to become. I found it particularly significant and moving when Hotaru, even after everything, literally begs Ukyou not to sacrifice herself for her and is ignored.
Epsilon: I think a part of that has to do with the fact Hotaru was there for Pluto's speech to Ukyou, about Fate and inevitability and how, damnit, even if Ukyou won't admit it she's a hero. I think that speech probably affected Pluto far more than Ukyou, considering Pluto's abrupt face turn in just a few scenes. But it probably also affected Hotaru as well.
Blade: Nonwithstanding all the badness, though, Ukyou does make the one vow she does keep fervently when she swears never to kill Hotaru no matter what. In the end, that saves both of them, in part because that is the right thing to do (not the smart thing to do), and Ukyou always knows it, and even Hotaru knows it (even if she doesn't want it and doesn't think it means anything).
Epsilon: Yeah, that entire scene was basically supposed to be Ukyou's ultimate heroic moment. That she can basically defy the impossible to save someone other than herself. In the end, we turn that against her by having her fail, but by having her failure be the only way to save the world. It goes straight into my own personal theory on heroism, which is something I try to instill into the fanfic at various points. It's very simple: Heroism is trying to do something not because it is easy but because it is hard. Fighting against the impossible is the ultimate in heroism. It doesn't matter if you succeed, in fact many times failure is more heroic than success. In the end, the fact that Ukyou would never give up on Hotaru, no matter what, even when she lost everything, when there was literally no chance to succeed, was what led her to the victory of the world over the Nameless.
Blade: This chapter is hardly all doom and gloom, though - to the joy of apparently just about everybody, Pink finally buys it!
Epsilon: Unsurprisingly this chapter is also Chris' final perspective scene. Up until this point he was a villain, but had a sort of twisted nobility to him and he could be understood. Right after his failure to save Pink and ripping out his own eye... from that point forward, Chris is utterly insane. For obvious reasons, this scene (where Chris fails to save Pink) is placed directly after Ukyou's heroic scene. It's a deliberate contrast between the two.
Blade: I actually did the eye thing as an (unsubtly) symbolic representation of that, as well as symbolising that he has moved "beyond" human limits. Plus, the fact he continues to ensure he has no eye for years afterwards is a subtle reminder that he remains completely hung up over Pink, even though he virtually never mentions or refers to her until late in Book III. That way, it was hopefully not a huge shock when we find out he keeps Pink Realdolls in his basement.
Epsilon: The decision to parallel this scene later only came mid-way through Book III's writing. Plus, hey, horrific living hell for Pink for all eternity.
Blade: I'd almost feel sorry for her if it weren't for all her torturing and murdering. I do think there was one flaw in what I actually considered the very neat death-of-Pink-and-aftermath arc, though, which was the usage of Batsu as a tool to kill her. Like Chizuru, he fit into the plot very neatly and logically (though unlike Chizuru, he wasn't terribly interesting in and of himself), but while I think the Hybrid Theory concept spoke a lot for the "random character out of nowhere changes the equation" gimmick, at this point it was a weakness. There were too many characters to keep track of already, and we already had a character introduced and useable in Kyosuke. How to square that with Kyosuke being the one to reveal Akira's lesbian-ness is something that would have been tricky, but still would've worked better, I think.
Epsilon: Speaking of, this chapter also contained the Big Reveal, as it were. Granted the first few scenes with Akane contained a lot of major hints, but no more than all the dozens of other hints in her appearances up until then. I'm still amazed that seemingly nobody picked up on Akira's closeted homosexuality until the scene where we spelled it out. Frankly, I was constantly worried that the hints I kept drawing were too blatent. Granted this was before the whole Lesbian Schoolgirl anime genre became big here in North America, but still...
Blade: It's probably because Akira doesn't blush enough, judging from what I've seen of that genre. Speaking of people with confused sexuality, Tethys gets to beat Metallia here! Off-screen. We did it off-screen due to a theory we had that foregone conclusion fights were boring, and nobody in their right mind could have actually thought that personality void Metallia was going to defeat a character we'd been building up since like chapter 3. But people complained anyway, so I guess we were wrong.
Epsilon: And speaking of parts of the Sailor Moon plotline... this chapter featured the first appearance of the Dead Moon Circus.
Blade: Okay, we've been building up to this rant for awhile. But like two years have passed, so we're (slightly) less enraged. The Sailor Moon Super S plot in Hybrid Theory is an excellent example of why fanfic writers should only ever use primary sources. What happened was that, at the time, we had not yet watched the plotline because we didn't expect it to be relevent (since it would, on schedule, happen during the seven years "downtime" and the Dead Moon Circus would undoubtedly be smushed by Chronos). Therefore, we relied on synopsis' (as we had, at the time, for Sailor Stars) online and what we knew of the manga, which I'd read several volumes of. The problem came about when I realised that Ukyou, by obliterating Mamoru's Destiny (when she removed his link to Sailor Moon and gave it to the Dolls back in Chapter 14), should also have removed his connection to the Golden Crystal. Now, do you see the problem with this scenario? Right. In the Sailor Moon anime (unlike the manga), there is no fricking canonical link between tux-boy and the Golden Crystal. But every synopsis of Sailor Moon Super S we'd seen said there was, just like there had been in the manga.
Epsilon: Thus we figured we were forced to write them into the plotline, having them appear before the timeskip and sort of kludging the Nanami plotline into the Ohtori stuff (taking away from the time to dedicate to poor, poor Rei). Then, after we had already spent like four chapters building up the Dead Moon Circus plotline buildup (and the first part had been released, locking us into it) we had a chance to actually watch through the Super S anime. ... I won't say that it was the worst experience I'd ever had (though Tiger's Eye will remain our hated nemesis for all time); however, getting to the end and realising that we had been utterly misled was the single most annoying point in the entire writing process for Hybrid Theory.
Blade: Yep. There was absolutely no reason to use the Sailor Moon Super S plotline. At all. We didn't need to use Helios, or the Dead Moon Circus, or Neherenia, or even touch on them. We certainly didn't have to watch all the way through a show that was almost as bad as Read or Die TV in the space of about two weeks just so we could write everyone properly. But we did, thanks to shitty Internet synopsis'. And then, worst of all, once we did know the truth, we were left with the huge problem that instead of having kludged in the Super S plotline because we had to, we had kludged in the plotline and abruptly found out it had no raison d'etre. We not only had to keep writing it, we now had to come up with a compelling reason why it had ever been written. And that's why we hate Sailor Moon Super S so, so much. Of course, the somewhat awkward part about this is that absolutely everything we included from Super S in Hybrid Theory inexplicably turned out to be totally awesome and way better than what we'd had planned before.
Epsilon: I think there is an important lesson in that, one that all writers (but especially fanfic writers) could stand to learn. Even if you hate something, especially if you hate something, sometimes it can turn out to be a vital and interesting part of your story, one that is much more fun to write and explore than some idea you do like. Witness the influence of Super S (which we hate) versus that of Ryouga (who we like). Super S leads directly into some compelling characterisation and set piece battles and epic events. Ryouga... basically gets to be there. Even his fight in this chapter is more about Nabiki and HER choices than about Ryouga.
Blade: Or, to use an even better example of something we like but meant nothing in the series, Darkstalkers. Fun fact - before the idea of Queen Pharoah Ninetyherenia X, we were going to have Pyron attack the Earth in late Book III. This would have sucked horribly.
Epsilon: Because, seriously, Pyron.
Blade: The only way that could have been cool is if Cologne and Tethys had collaborated on tricking him into getting the crowbar-stuck-through-his-head trapped in a narrow passageway so everyone could drop rocks on him to defeat him.
Epsilon: ...
Blade: By the way, that's my segue to Cologne.
Epsilon: Looking back, I think we played Cologne just right. She came off with the right mix of badass, smart, stupid and vulnerable. Even when she was constantly overshadowed she managed to come across as cool and competent. Plus, this chapter was the beginning of the awesome Purgstall/Cologne romance. Which is good, because until this scene we had no idea what to do with either of them in Book III.
Blade: Yup. We wanted Purgstall to begin showing how he did things differently than Gyro (beyond not killing everyone in his way), and reaching out to an enemy of Chronos was an obvious tactic. Cologne made sense for him to pick, because he guessed she wouldn't have any really strong ideological opposition to Chronos (and they hadn't killed anyone close to her), and her martial arts skills made her an obvious asset, whereas her age meant Chronos had something equally obvious to offer her. Out of character, this was immensely useful in getting Cologne out of the way, which let Shampoo put her plan into action without interference.
Epsilon: And hey, at least Shampoo is one person in Hybrid Theory who can claim her scheme went off exactly as it was planned. To the bitter end.
Blade: No Zen pun intended.
Epsilon: Finally, this chapter featured an invisible zoanoid. Which was actually in the Guyver manga.
Blade: Shampoo gets to kill it as her last token gesture of badassery, although it's notable she also decapitated Link's dragonfly earlier, so I guess she was just practicing on guillotining monsters. Of course, using the invisible zoanoid was kind of pointless, since a regular spy zoanoid would have worked just as well and not necessitated the question of why Chronos was wasting a valuable singular asset on some completely random martial artists. Although I guess it beats the "lost-number-zoanoid-Gelpess-who-can-look-exactly-like-anybody", which we were sure for about ten chapters was going to be used in a brilliantly clever Chronos gambit and then never actually appeared.
Epsilon: Yeah, too bad that, but probably best in the long run. Oh well, next chapter, the climactic battles and a downer ending!
Blade: No, that does not describe every chapter!
Epsilon: This chapter is really Akane's chapter. While it features very important events for everyone (as the biggest climax of the entire story to date should), it is really Akane's story. We could have titled it "Akane Versus The Nameless", since that is what this chapter is.
Blade: To be accurate, it's "Akane versus the Nameless and Everything Else is Horrible And Broken And Wrong".
Epsilon: Well, yes. But damn if the story isn't depressing enough by this point. Akane singlehandedly drags it away from being all downer, all the time.
Blade: So fittingly, the chapter pretty much starts with Akane (okay, it starts with George Herbert Walker Bush, who we didn't name because otherwise we would have felt uncomfortably obliged to do a character guide for him). In some ways, the death of Shampoo scene is absolutely excellent, but in some ways it could have been better, which is unfortunate since it was so pivotal for everybody involved. Primarily the main problem is Link and Akane are too coy about what they're really thinking - there's a time to be subtle, but here I think things needed to come out.
Epsilon: Still, it contains a great speech by Link here as she rants about the broken nature of the world. One that is even referred to in the tvtropes wiki as a primary example of the issues that crop up writing megacrossovers.
Blade: Believe it or not, we didn't put it there. Thanks, anonymous ego-expanding fan!
Epsilon: Since this chapter is about Akane, we find out a lot about her if you read between the lines. For instance, the fact that she doesn't doubt, for a second, that Chris will kill Shampoo shows she knew what she was dealing with all along but (as Pink pointed out) chose to ignore it.
Blade: A big theme in this chapter is how much of it ties back to chapter 7 and the battle at Narita Airport. Kunikida refers to it, Nabiki was changed by it, Tethys began her journey from it, it put Ukyou in the spotlight, it revealed to all and sundry there were superhumans, it lits the spark to the flame that engulfs Tokyo. Akane's connection is perhaps the most personal, as she reflects upon how it was due to needing to control her volcanic temper to save her sister than she has held it until now.
Epsilon: Appropriately enough, after Akane finally loses her temper it's Nabiki that saves her from the consequences. Of course, if you read between the lines (you can do that a lot in this chapter) you'll see that this is the culimination of the Nameless's plan. It finally steps out of the shadows here and we find our true antagonist revealed at last. It starts with Link's speech pointing out to Akane (and the readers) explicitly what has been going on, various characters refer subtly and openly to its influence throughout the chapter, and in the final scene, Hotaru communicates directly with it.
Blade: And then there's Ukyou. Hard to believe that snapping Hayato's spine isn't the nadir of her character arc, but here she is, driving off Ranma, abandoning Hotaru, and scurrying off to commit suicide. The funny thing is, despite how disastrous the decisions she makes in this chapter are, they are absolutely essential to her arc in Book III and eventually defeating the Nameless. But then, so was snapping Hayato's spine. Not that that excuses them.
Epsilon: Even then you can see the Nameless in play, as it influences Minako to hold Ranma back just long enough to overhear the damning words. While we'll cover it more explicitly in Book III, following the people that work in the interests of the Nameless and connecting them to Sailor Moon (and its reliance on Destiny to resolve its plot) is not too hard to do in this chapter, and thus in retrospect back all the way to Narita. For example: If Jadeite had never captured Nabiki, she would have never become obsessed with power, never gotten the wishing sword, never wished for telepathy, never been targeted by Aptom, survived and learned about Telulu's plot and given Akane the star seeds to go save the world. The Nameless makes Akio look like a chump in the "manipulating people without them being aware of it" game.
Blade: Ukyou's confrontation with Ranma finally puts paid to any chance the two would ever get together, and also is very neat in and of itself. Though both have kind of adolescent philosophies ("If I do this, how can I say no to the next little thing I could just do?" versus "Why the hell is it somehow wrong to do something right?"), they are both very comprehensible and defensible and hopefully, to the readers, offer no clear "right answer". From this point forward, not offering clear right answers became one of our primary watchwords in writing.
Epsilon: Though Chris comes close to offering clear wrong ones this chapter. Hilariously, even Vice calls him out on his equivocating bullshit.
Blade: Yup. For all I noted issues with it before, killing Chizuru did work for what it was intended to - leaving absolutely no doubt that Chris was a monster who had to be stopped. Killing Shampoo, horrible as it was, could be excused by grief and rage over her killing of Pink (ignoring that Pink herself was a psychotic monster). Chris himself attributes his arranging the murder of Chizuru to be a matter of convienence rather than survival. Hard to defend that, morally.
Epsilon: Not to mention standing back and doing nothing while Tokyo burns down. But for something that is once again morally ambigious, I really like the scene between Akane and Nabiki. Akane is right that Nabiki could have solved a lot of problems with her third wish, but Nabiki is also right that she needs to conserve it (even if she does also want to conserve the wish for selfish reasons). Considering what happens in chapters 28-29, having that wish handy turned out to be important. You'd almost think we planned it that way. (We didn't.)
Blade: However, despite the great contrast between the three main characters, they weren't the only people on-stage for this chapter. Notably, the Senshi at Ohtori (as well as Akio and Anthy) get a few good scenes here that basically set their future arcs into motion.
Epsilon: Like poor, poor Rei. This chapter, of course, featured her final symbolic act of going against Sailor Moon (in her own head anyway) when she hits her. After that, she wanders off to become irrelevant to the plot.
Blade: Which was more of a shame as usual, since every one of the Elite Five except Derzerb got big showcase scenes in this chapter. Somehow Elegen turned out to be totally badass and threatening!
Epsilon: Actually if I recall correctly, we actually did plan to have a Rei/Derzerb fight in this chapter as a milestone of her storyarc but couldn't work out how to get Rei from Ohtori to Tokyo in time for the big battle.
Blade: Duh, she should have gone with Nanami and her flying horse, and then they could have been a crime-fighting trio.
Epsilon: Okay, we couldn't think of a way that was serious. Though, really, this chapter could have used some hilarity.
Blade: It is one of the few exceptions to our rule of always having humour no matter how dark the overall tone. Though, in another secondary character milestone, Ranma's self-realisation and determination to leave England is basically the birth of the character he would be in Book III, who would quite often be the one providing humour at the darkest moments.
Epsilon: Though going back to Ohtori for a moment, we also get a nice Touga moment in this chapter. He almost becomes important to the plot! What's interesting is that (not for the first or last time) a cameo from Agito Makashima does the same thing. Both of them brush up against the edges of the plot here, but vanish into the backwoods. Given how often Agito does it (at least four times), there might have been something to Kalia's talk to his severed head later aside from her being, well, Kalia.
Blade: Until rereading, I'd forgotten that this chapter is where Tethys hung a lampshade on the mind-numbing stupidity of most Sailor Moon villains, and then smoothly explained it away in a logically consistent fashion. I'm still quite pleased with how we did that.
Epsilon: And in order to do that, we broke the fundamental rule of writing and told you how the battle with Metallia went, not showed it. But we covered that last chapter.
Blade: But breaking a fundamental rule of writing was more than worth it to show up what an enormous dumbass Kunzite was and then kill him ignominiously. Or two, since taking out your feelings on a character in a story is also breaking a fundamental rule. But they're called FUN-damental for a reason!
Epsilon: This chapter also features the end of Kusanagi's character arc. It really does end here, basically; he shows up later, but it's a cameo. Considering how hard it was for us to get people interested in his character, perhaps basing so much of the final confrontation on him was a mistake, but still... I kind of enjoyed Kusanagi in retrospect. He was just so powerful during Book II that it was hard to work him smoothly into the plot.
Blade: The self-destruction of the Witches Three (and Valkyrie) in a cascading series of knives-in-the-back was great, and actually smoothly came from the real Sailor Moon series (where virtually all of the Deathbusters hated and feared each other, with one notable exception). We also very deliberately humanised the three Witches at the point of their deaths - as we'd set things up, all three of them were innocent victims, not just Matsudaira. There was no time or in-character connection to save Eudial or Telulu, but that didn't mean they didn't deserve to be saved - it simply (and unfortunately) was impossible.
Epsilon: And Yan eats Yomiko Readman, ending her storyarc. So yeah.
Blade: That was a really vicious scene, actually, coming directly after a few of the scant hopeful and empowering scenes in the chapter. We maybe had just a little bit too much fun with enabling Yan's rampant psychoticness, but all the fun came to an end later in the chapter anyway. Really, as our wildly ranging topics for this Technique show, the really notable thing about Chapter 20 is how vast it was. Not just in size, though it was at the time unprecedentedly large, but in the sheer scope that it covered. It was the culmination of everything Book II was in a way nothing was for Book I, and the fact it covered so much and yet still kept a firm focus on comparing and contrasting Chris/Ukyou/Akane really made it work. It could very easily have been a confused mess, but instead I thought it turned out surprisingly powerful. It'll be interesting to see how the chapters in Book III measure up.
Epsilon: And that's it. Though perhaps we should mention that around the time we decided to chapterise this we had to come up with a gimmick. So we came up with theme songs for each book, with the lyrics listed at the final chapter. The three songs were all selected because they had one thing in common: Professional wrestling. No joke.
Blade: Yup, it was pretty much our little nod to how useful wrestling lingo turned out to be in our planning and conceptualising. Book 1's theme was from the Gamecube WWE: Day of Reckoning soundtrack, Book II's was Christian's theme song in WWE for a bit, and Book III's was used for a WWE tribute video to Bret Hart. On a similar note, the actual titles for the "books" were all taken from Chris de Burgh albums. So now you know!
Epsilon: And thus ends book III. Next, the best written chapter in the fanfic! (I throw best around a lot)
Telulu's role in the story is sort of a backlash against a common plot device, and Sailor Moon's overuse of it in general. Sailor Moon had villains so stupid and incompetent that we had to invent an entire backstory to explain it (see Tethys), but the problem is that even given their ridiculous stupidity, the Sailor Senshi rely almost completely on coincidence to defeat them. It's even worse when the occasional competent villain comes along, still to end up defeated more often by fluke and bad luck than any competence on the Senshi's part. This we accept (in-character) as a function of Destiny; but in Hybrid Theory, the Senshi's Destiny went badly awry very early on. Though they're hardly the only series that rewards heroes more for luck than skill, it's such a consistant example that it almost begged us to let a competent villain run rampant without capital-D destiny tripping them up. Enter Telulu.
Telulu was a useful character to slot in this role for a number of reasons, only one of which is that Blade loves her. In the series, her plan basically relied on originality, enormous scope, doing her research, and not advertising her location. Her main character flaws were overconfidence and the usual Deathbusters prospensity to infighting. Because she only appeared for a short time, she was not "forced" to repeat flawed plans (unlike the otherwise-competent Eudial), and thus believably could craft a scheme that took advantage of the vastly altered circumstances in the Hybrid Theory world; ultimately coming within a hair's-breadth of succeeding in bringing her master to Earth and endangering all life.
In Hybrid Theory, her role was largely that of a spoiler. It's actually fairly clear from her arc that if she had directly confronted any of the major heroes beyond the TAC, or the major villains for that matter, she would likely have been destroyed. Her genius was in quickly realising this, and coming up with a plan that took advantage of the fact she was surrounded by powers that vastly overshadowed her. What is remarkable is how incredibly important Telulu is to the plot, yet how few people ever realise she even exists. By using cat's-paws and goading the already edgy villain factions into open conflict, she very nearly brings about the end of the world before anyone even notices. This is actually important for our general theme of Hybrid Theory - Telulu wouldn't last five seconds in a fight with, say, Bison, but comes far closer to achieving her goals and defeating all the heroes without throwing a single punch. In other words, power is hardly everything, even with so much of it being thrown around. It is our response to what we consider the lazy writing of most shonen series', whereupon every villain must be an order of magnitude more powerful than the last, and those who don't fit into the new power bracket (like perfectly interesting characters from earlier arcs) don't have any significant role to play.
Despite these facts, we don't think we were guilty of overfavouring Telulu as a character. While she proved to be a clever strategist who could manipulate people brilliantly on the large scale (i.e., getting Chronos and the aragami to engage in a war in the streets of Tokyo while she put her plan into action), and she worked well at adjusting to circumstances, she tended to fail miserably at all attempts at manipulating people personally. Ultimately, she is forced to kill her boss, all her underlings either turn on her or she turns on them, and in the end she banks on Kusanagi not being willing to kill her, which turned out to be something of a mistake. Ultimately, while she kept the real powers (including Ukyou) from ever finding out about her, she proved ill-equipped to deal with the old-fashioned "rag-tag band of heroes show up at the last minute to foil my schemes" gambit, which of course Tethys would attribute to her Chaos programming.
Even in defeat, however, Telulu's legacy haunts the heroes without them ever knowing it, even ignoring how vastly she affected the world by forcing Chronos out into the public eye. Pharoah 90 was not destroyed, but instead driven into Elysium, where he would battle Sailor Moon and assist in the corruption of her soul, leading directly to a conflageration in Tokyo nine chapters later that dwarfed even the one Telulu masterminded. The battlefield where Ukyou meets Hotaru at the very end of the series was created by Telulu's legacy; in that sense, she worked just as well as a tool for the Nameless as she did for Chaos.
It's interesting that the two most prominent villains in Book II, Telulu and Vega, were both very meticulously planned characters who accomplished well-defined storyline goals and came within a hair's-breadth of getting everything they wanted. And then lose to Akane and Ranma, respectively (with assists from Akira). The villains in Book I and III were much more free-form and improvised in their roles, which led to a lot of interesting situations, but for my money I find those two were still the villains that worked best in their roles and left lasting (if very different) impressions.
And, of course, she gave us VALKYRIE! Who is made of space-age materials!