Epsilon: So, to explain for the like, one person reading this... Chris' hard drive died and the previous Technique entries for this chapter vanished. That explains half of why this is so late going up.
Blade: The other half is that we suck and are too busy and have massive writer's block and it was cold and the dog ate our homework.
Epsilon: So, enough of that then! This chapter, of course, serves to actually introduce Ukyou back into the story. The point, therefore, is that now that Ukyou has appeared in the story again everything starts happening. This all starts with the very first scene, where we get the news talking about how tensions across the world are rising.
Blade: It's not just the world Ukyou is reintroduced to, however, but the readers. We've gone over some of the mistakes we made in the first two books with her, so that's old hat. As we noted before, by the time we wrote Chapter 23, we knew we had to make Ukyou's reintroduction a smashing success to make the readers not only care, but end up cheering for her again. That becomes the theme for this and chapter 24, and I think it actually worked quite well. In this chapter, the main thrust is to build up how important Ukyou is, not via herself (since she is absent for most of it) but by how she is seen in the eyes of others.
Epsilon: Indeed. Notice that pretty much everyone in this chapter treats Ukyou like an object (often a dangerous one). Even Akira has some impure thoughts about doll-Ukyou. Though she stands out in that, while she has some impure thoughts and admits this to herself, she still refuses to see Ukyou as anything other than a person.
Blade: I quite liked that, actually - it shows up that Akira isn't the inhumanly dedicated martyr archetype she could easily have fallen into being. Angel also served unintentionally in those role, as she questions throughout the chapter: just who is Ukyou, and why do so many powerful and important people, including the closest thing Angel has to God, have such interest in her whereabouts?
Epsilon: Using Angel as our "let's reintroduce and clarify things to our readers" viewpoint worked out very well, especially since she was only half-planned for that purpose. Originally, we envisioned having her around solely to fulfill the role of "Chris's inside man, to make the readers aware of what he is doing". That is why every one of the first few chapters of Book III ends with a scene of her reporting to Chris in some way. However as her role evolved and the neccessity of having a viewpoint character like her vanished, those "end each chapter with Angel" scenes stopped.
Blade: Probably the second most important plot bit in chapter 23 is the first real on-screen introduction of Kalia. While I had planned for Chris to create an automaton using El Hazard character Kalia's name and face (because it would amuse me, and also him) for awhile, and had twigged upon her being the recepticle for his Paradox awhile ago as well, it took a lot of thought and discussion before we settled on what she would be like, and how on earth we were supposed to write something like her.
Epsilon: The scene worked out really well. Our idea was that we had to play up Kalia's otherworldliness, her entire nature as something utterly inhuman. The best way I could come up with to do that was to have her exist outside of our normal perceptions of reality (i.e., one reality at a time, always moving forward). This also served the purpose of reemphasising the whole "three circles" concept. The relationship she had with Akira only came after a lot of thought, but basically all of it sprang from this scene. We had some idea that they would be rivals, especially since we had planned Akira's "third circle event" later this chapter to intrigue Kalia, but this first scene really defines how they interact with each other from this point forward and made us decide it was even more important than we'd planned.
Blade: Her personality as it shaped was inspired by a lot of things - sort of a mix of El Hazard's Kalia with Chris's knowledge and memories and her own personality with a large dash of crazy. One particularly inspired touch was using the Persian religion Zoroastrianism as her preferred source of metaphor, using its dualistic mythology (well, that was just under the Sassanids, but blah blah, look it up yourself) to contrast herself and Akira as two sides of the same coin. Zoroastrianism is also big on free will and the destiny of each individual to choose what path they will walk, which was also implicit in Kalia's interactions with most people and Akira especially, as well as, of course, highlighting her own lack of need to make choices and stick with them.
Epsilon: Really, the whole Kalia thing worked out better than we had ever hoped. Even fan reaction was positive, in the sense that she confused and freaked out people a lot.
Blade: And then the third major plot point was Akane's struggle, near death, and joining up with Washuu. Sadly, this didn't go as well. I was particularly displeased with rereading the Fevrier viewpoint scene that covers most of the scene in the Chronos facility. Although I like Fevrier quite a bit, we had not given the character and future plans for the Tux-boy Dolls as much thought as many other cast members, and I felt that showed as her perspective was rather bland and lacked a lot of personality. This was especially true at the death of Koume scene, where I didn't feel any of the emotion that should have been there; her grief is very perfunctory and then dismissed. As well, I think the death of Koume was also a mistake on our part. We decided it was necessary for the Elite Five to kill somebody to get some heat, and because we thought future Kunou/Skullomania interaction would be awesome. But aside from being the only remnant of Blue Seed left in the narrative, Koume was a "normal person" who could have fulfilled a very useful role later in the story in kicking Akane's ass into action.
Epsilon: Ah, regrets. Still, killing somebody and then regretting it is sometimes better than the Tite Kubo approach. And it turned out that Skullomania was indeed awesome and great fun to write. Too bad we didn't get to use him more. Though from the perspective of the story, it's probably just as well. Skullo served as comic relief, which was important, but would have been overwhelming in larger doses.
Blade: Then, everything all culminates in the big scene that takes up the last third of the chapter, and which I felt was absolutely superb. Gets across Ukyou's potential power, explains what happened in seven years believably and without keeping Ukyou absent for half of Book III, and it's just really well-written in all respects.
Epsilon: I was actually somewhat disappointed in the Angel scenes in between the Akira-Lotus Infinite stuff, however. The fight scene works well, but lacks some of the heart we get in Angel's later fights. Though for those who complained about her beating Ranma, we set up the "why" and "how" here. More than any other fighter in the series, Angel is a "situational awareness" type who uses the environment and her opponent's weaknesses against them. It works a lot better in later chapters.
Blade: Really, that covers most of the chapter except for a few little bits. It was very focused, as actually all the first chapters in Book III were (what happened!?). One little bit that amused me was Zoicite getting away with his attempted treason with little more than singed pride. Zoicite is the fricking Gladstone Gander of Hybrid Theory. It was not just there - he is directly responsible for everything that happened in England at the end of Book II, alerting both Bison and Millennium to their enemy's location, all out of pique because Ukyou cut his ear. The death of the English resistance, Ukyou's seven years of horror, the unspeakable torments Hotaru suffered - all his fault. And he not only isn't punished, he gets almost everything he ever wanted and lives a life of luxury and influence.
Epsilon: The other important bits were Link and Nabiki's talk, and Nabiki and Akira's first talk. The two really lead into each other. The first mainly serves to make it so that we can believe that Nabiki is so filled with antagonism and fear towards Chris/Link that she is willing to arrange to kill Ukyou just to find a way to kill him. Only afterward do we discover her real objectives; that they actually surprised some of our readers, yet were still quite believable, is a trick for which we were quite proud of. And yes, Akira does a little Third Circling in their confrontation. In reality, the Third Circle isn't as rare as it's made out to be. Its the explanation for all those "but that's impossible!" moments that happen in climaxes of anime/manga all the time. However, while it's possible for certain people to tap Third Circle at very finite moments to achieve something beyond their limits, the actual goal of the Nameless was somebody who wanted to change the universe so badly, even though it was impossible, that they had to become God.
Blade: And as a final note in the obligatory Semi-Obscure Reference Theatre, the Konatsu that Akane refers to is of course none other than everyone's favourite kunoichi trap from the late Ranma manga.
Epsilon: Now this finishes the preliminary to Book III. From this point forward the story picks up speed... and wordcount. Lots and lots of wordcount.
Blade: Or, in the words of my favourite fanfiction.net reviewer that hates us: "Endless senseless oh-so-witty dialogs. Man, all this babble is only good to inflate lines count, as if you were paid for it. No sense, no purpose, no emotional deliciousness, just hollow wits, wits, wits and more wits till your head splits. Very american-esque I'd say. Just that woodpecker style which makes comics and literature hardly readable." Th-th-th-th-that's all, folks!
Epsilon: So, uh, Chris did a lot of research to come up with an interesting and meaningful term for Link's creepy little plant-bug things. Too bad he forgot it after losing all his notes.
Blade: But boy, they're creepy, huh? And Link is cool. That's pretty much what the first scene is all about: Link is cool, and she will be a major character whether you or Aaron or God like it or not!
Epsilon: It also introduces Petra, although she isn't named in the scene. She won't ever be a major character, but we did a lot of work on her motives, backstory and so on. (And by "we", I mean "Chris") That way the world seems a little bit larger than our main characters.
Blade: But I won't pat myself on the back for my awesome first scene too much, since there was that whole stupid "Chris's personality was dripping into the world via the Third Circle and brainwashing people" thing. Actually, it wasn't a stupid idea per se in theory, but in execution it never got mentioned again and in fact sort of worked at cross purposes with how things went. Ultimately, we didn't really need magic to explain why people would fanatically follow Chris. Hell, there were lots of readers who thought Chris was right and they knew he was a mass-murdering zombie of dubious sanity, something his followers didn't. Chris's plan was very attractive to certain people and he was good at presenting it - that is reason enough for him to amass followers.
Epsilon: Really, we kept being surprised that people liked Chris so much, among the readers. We felt after he killed Shampoo that would be it. No, there were a few people calling for his blood but not nearly as many as we expected. I guess not having a decent central hero until this chapter helped with that.
Blade: In fact, the central theme of this chapter is basically the Grand Ukyou Reclamation Project. By the end, we aimed to have firmly reestablished her as a hero readers could cheer for in a way they hadn't since, mm, around chapter 8. And it worked!
Epsilon: It does take awhile, and it requires... well, pretty much everything that happened in this chapter that wasn't Link or Hotaru. So... let's talk about them first!
Blade: I'm actually quite proud of the confrontation between Link and Hotaru/Ryouga. Despite taking only two scenes, it gave both of them a prominent and memorable spot in the first half of Book III (where they were otherwise largely dormant), and ended up with both of them coming away with increased villain heat. As well, it set in motion the Hotaru plotline that would continue to the very end, in a fashion that left no doubt to the reader that what Hotaru was doing was Very Important.
Epsilon: It also cemented in our reader's minds that while Link was creepy (as established in the first scene) Hotaru was by far creepier. In fact, we did such a good job of playing up Hotaru as the villain that we had a hard time getting readers to empathise with her later. Which was... exactly as planned. The idea was to make it so that no one (not even the readers) but Ukyou/Aaron really wanted to redeem her. It filled in the pathos for later. Then... well, we'll talk about that later.
Blade: Too bad we can never take the scene seriously, since we made the mistake of using an "all" playlist while writing the chapter. This led to the hilarity of the Swedish Chef Song playing over the part where we were writing Link vivisecting Ryouga, which caused a pausing of some ten minutes while we recovered and has been permanently associated with it in our brains.
Epsilon: Yeah, not even Hotaru's random quote from Revelations could save the serious tone after that.
Blade: In contradiction to what we said before, there is indeed another point to this chapter beyond Ukyou's redemption. And that point is: SHINGO IS AWESOME.
Epsilon: Yes. Let me tell you about the origin of Shingo: Shingo came about because of a scene way the hell back in like early Book 2. We get to see Shingo hanging around with Usagi and talking about how awesome a "manly badass" hero Ukyou is. We found this so utterly hilarious we decided that Shingo had to grow up to be exactly the kind of manly badass that would be idolised by a thirteen year old, just so that he could meet his (lesbian stripper ninja) hero later and they could both have a freak out over this. We created Shingo as basically the most stereotypical American action movie/comic book hero we could think of, complete with a magic katana and super strength and twin chrome desert eagles. We then obsessed about him for, like, a year before he appeared. We created him as a create-a-character in every wrestling game we could get our hands on, with the most over the top opening we could do each time. It was wonderful. Then we were left with the chapter with his actual introduction to the story proper (he had made a cameo in earlier chapters but they don't count). We were then left with "how can we possibly live up to his over-the-top ridiculous bullshitness?" The only answer was: Drive a motorcycle through the stained glass window of a church to kill a bunch of vampires in the most Xtreme manner possible in the most "useless" rescue of all time (because seriously, a half dozen goober vampires versus Akira, Angel and Ukyou?). Thus was born Shingo.
Blade: The fact that scene was duplicated almost exactly in Resident Evil: Apocalypse by Lesbian Stripper Ninja Badass Alice is, of course, a complete coincidence.
Epsilon: Though really, the importance of Shingo is a subset of what is important to the chapter. Yes, even Shingo's awesomeness is just setting up for Ukyou's epiphany at the end of the chapter (which we will get to later).
Blade: A low-key but important bit is the continuing development of Nabiki into a very strong character. Rereading this chapter, I found myself profoundly grateful she was there. Her interjections, attitude and comments continuously added spice into scene that otherwise could have been quite dreary, and she enriched Ukyou and Akira's characters (and later Ranma's as well) immensely through her interactions with them. Ultimately, her relationship with them that's one part camraderie, one part condescension at their heroic naiveite and one part furious envy of that selfsame heroic naiveite, made her an absolutely indispensable part of "the party" from a writing standpoint.
Epsilon: Too bad Nabiki had to suffer from a horrible case of I-Win-Button-itis. Nabiki's mental abilities were so powerful that either they served as an instant victory button for the heroes or had to be shut down. We had to keep coming up with ways to negate her power, which sometimes came off as forced. Still, Rip's method was at least somewhat clever and original (and would be stolen partially by Alucard later).
Blade: This chapter also serves as the grand reintroduction of Ranma to the story, whereupon he made himself our most popular main character with so little effort that it's hard to believe he actually hadn't been important for about five chapters at this point. Much credit has to go the awesomeness of his returning scene. "Oh hey, Ucchan, you're not dead! Let's go kick ass!" Ranma is Ranma is Ranma.
Epsilon: What's really great about that entire fight with Rip Van Winkle is that it's Minako who kills her. Not Ukyou, with all her Third Circle power, or Ranma with all his awesomeness. Not Shingo, nor Akira or Angel. It plays back to the introduction of Rip Van Winkle all the way back in Book II, where Minako was her first opponent. Instead of cementing someone else's awesomeness, we used the battle as a vehicle to build up Minako. This becomes important later in the chapter, and actually gives Minako much-needed heat to help her carry the Ohtori scenes later this book. Without a significant victory to her credit, it would have been more difficult to successfully carry off Minako as the strong character she needed to be then.
Blade: And on that note - poor Rei. Heh. This is the chapter where we really screwed up; the source of all our complaints about her character's ultimate irrelevence. In this chapter is where things go completely wrong for her and Akane, who doesn't recover the spotlight until Chapter 28 (and Rei never really takes the spotlight again). The pity of it all is that it didn't need to be that way, because the tool we needed to send them into action was dangling right before us: the antipathy between Rei and Angel over Angel's killing of Mihoshi. Using that as a hook, we could have justified sending them into Europe in time to be far more significant viewpoint characters in the French subarc in Chapter 26, and we also could have deepened the pathos of Angel's character arc at the time. Ultimately, the Ohtori arc didn't need Akane, and it surely didn't need Rei - that's what we were already setting up Minako for, and it simply wasn't important enough to handle three major characters interfering with it. They would have been much better served staying close to Angel, and therefore to Chris.
Epsilon: Yup. This is our biggest failure in the Book; arguably in the entire story. If I had Book III to rewrite, it would have started with that scene. But c'est la vie. I also really liked the scene where Aaron goes to look for his family in Nova Scotia only to find they never existed. It really gives a moment of pathos to the charater that she hasn't had in, well, forever. All of the other stuff is kind of forced. While being brainwashed and getting in soul-rending fights are probably bigger, the idea that your family is just... gone, probably resonates with more readers.
Blade: And that moves us onto the main event. But first: cheesy reference theatre! There's several Watchmen references in this chapter for the sharp-eyed to spot, and the kid who was a strategic genius and is rumoured to be training in space is a nod to Ender's Game, a novel we still like even if Orson Scott Card went loopy after 9/11. Also, the Carl Vinson is indeed a real U.S. Navy aircraft carrier - ph33r our ability to conduct basic Wikipedia research! Finally, the reference to ditzy blonde girls becoming vampire slayers and snowfalls in California are both from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series.
Epsilon: That brings us into how we find out that Shingo, who we had been building up to have some sort of sinister origin with large implications, turned out to just have been empowered by Happousai and magic noodles. This lead to Ukyou's reaction, which leads into her decision to actually think about the world. Then come the final epiphany. Once again, its delivered through a Speech, but this time it actually works. That's because this time Ukyou means it. All the event till this point - Nabiki's character development, Ranma's arrival, Minako's victory, Shingo and Happousai, it all plays into how Ukyou decides in the end that what she does doesn't really matter. That the universe is bigger than her and will go on without her. That there are people in the world who have nothing to do with her and never will. In other words, she should stop trying to act like a Main Character and start acting like a human fucking being.
Blade: Of course, as Angel points out, she's wrong. But the beauty of it is is that it doesn't matter if Ukyou is wrong, because she's being wrong for the right reasons. And at the very end of the story, she's eventually proven right despite all the evidence - the world is bigger than her, even if she had to remake it to make it so.
Epsilon: Finally, we end with the most effective cliffhanger in the entire series. Because we had successfully convinced our readers in Book II that no character aside from Ukyou was sacrosanct from being killed, readers had to consider Angel's orders as something that could conceivably be carried out, only hoping she would fail or turn on him.
Blade: It's almost sort of a pity we couldn't pay that off with a truly shocking turn of events like killing Ranma; instead, Angel kills the least important character present who doesn't even stay dead anyway. But eh, readers clearly didn't mind, since next chapter may be our most unanimously praised outing. Even if I hated it.
Epsilon: Oh well, everybody liked the end of the last chapter and I didn't, so now I guess we're even.
Angel was a unique character in the series, in several ways. One, how she was intended to be a "do-over" for Ukyou's fall from grace and redemption plotline, we've already covered. The picture to the left tells another of the reasons why. Many characters in Hybrid Theory were based heavily on their anime/manga/game counterparts with relatively smooth development (like Ranma). Many others started out similar to their original portrayal but diverged wildly as time went on (like Hotaru). Others had so little information in their original sources that they were ultimately original characters (like Fevrier). Angel, however, is unique. The picture is a poor representation - in the Hybrid Theory series, she never once looked like that. She was a character with significant canonical personality who had to be built from the ground up as a completely new personality. What's more, there is essentially no canonical information about her backstory to draw from. So we were left with a character that was, that we had to deconstruct back to an idea of their origins, and then build a completely new character around those presumed origins that would not make people who knew the original character go "Whahuh?". Perhaps shockingly, it seemed like we succeeded.
There's a bit of irony in the fact that Angel in Hybrid Theory, groomed by Chris to be his personal assassin and worshipper, is probably a better person than the Angel of King of Fighters. In the original series, Angel is an agent for NESTS, a revolutionary organisation with murky goals and even murkier methods. We know she has a softspot for unloved misfit/psychopath/Tetsuo-from-Akira-clone K'9999, that she is disarmingly cheerful and flirty but deadly competent, and that she would cheerfully murder traitors to the organisation. Working back from that, I decided that her family would be the fire-breathing revolutionary sort. Their actual politics weren't important, but what was important was the Angel was raised in an environment where she came to think of 'freedom' as the most important thing. Freedom means many things to many people, as evidenced by the way the word has been used on all sides of the political fence in the real world. Also in her nature from the beginning would be a belief in people, and a distrust of traditional authority. This fit in both with her original activies with NESTS and K'9999, and also the role I wanted her to play in Chris's cadre. I also kept a lot of her carefree nature and her flirtatiousness. Finally, of course, there's her willingness to believe so much in a cause she'd kill for it. Having established that as the core of the character, I then was ready to start rewriting how her life went in Chapter 21.
Some people would take objection to the first line of the above paragraph. Sure, the Angel in KoF is selfish, cares about few people, and is at least potentially a killer. But she's not a knowing, willing, mass murderer like Hybrid Theory Angel is. This strikes at the third, possibly most important theme of her character and storyarc - an exploration of what drives an otherwise decent person to kill for a cause, and what precisely is the nature of "heroism". Angel herself, not coincidentally, ponders and is driven by both of those same questions. I didn't want to get too topical with this; the fact Angel opposes the world's ruling order and seeks to overthrow it based on quasi-religious beliefs were already close enough to obvious real-world parallels, so I didn't pursue any similarity beyond that. Ultimately, I wasn't looking to explain, excuse, or condemn the real world behaviour of various movements, political factions and religious sects, but rather to examine the mindset of one person and why they might act this way.
In response, the only answer is that there is no easy answer. At first the situation was simple - Angel was essentially brainwashed at a young and vulnerable age, under extremely pressing circumstances, into thinking that the world was fundamentally broken, and that Chris was divine, which led naturally to her later conclusion that only Chris could save the world. But as the story went on, it also became clear there was more than that going on. Because I (and by extension, Chris) knew that refusing to expose your brainwashed follower to contrary opinions and inconvienent facts just led to inevitable crisis' of faith that end up in the death of many Evil Overlords in fiction, he deliberately eschewed that route. Angel grew up with people of all stripes and creeds, including absolutely undeniable heroes. She learned from them as well as from Chris. Yet she still chose Chris's path, despite the fact he asked the absolutely unthinkable of her - to murder a perfectly innocent and good person, just to advance his agenda a bit faster. Chris's plan revolved around the fact that if she would do that, she would do anything. Moreover, she could never be tempted to go back - by committing an unforgivable sin, she had closed the door behind her. Serving Chris's goals was the only way to justify what she had done, so she would do so no matter where that led her. Therefore, he never was concerned about Angel betraying him. And he was very, very nearly right. Angel never turns on Chris, even when he turns on her. Even when he orders her to kill someone she knows perfectly well is no threat to his perfect possible future, even when she eventually finally refuses to do his bidding, even when she finally stops thinking Chris is divine, it is never in Angel's mind to turn on Chris or reject his philosophy. Why?
Here is where the definition of heroism becomes important. Many people define heroism as striving and sacrificing for something beyond yourself. For other people, for your religion, for your political cause, for your philosophy, for the betterment of mankind. Probably most people would agree that heroism is, above all, selfless. Heroes aren't doing it for themselves. They're doing it for something they think is more important than their own desires. The most common attack on someone else's "hero" you don't agree with is to point out how they benefit from what they're doing. Some people believe that there is in fact no such thing as heroic selflessness, that even people who devote their lives to charity do so for how good it makes them feel. We ourselves mentioned that the "struggling beyond yourself without thought of gain" definition is close to how we perceive heroism. And yet there is Angel. She does all of that. Her acts are not for herself, not for any gain, not for eventual recognition (even though she'd like it, as she reveals when she wistfully imagines getting her own Martial Artist Hunter Zoaman card), not even for Chris's approval. She kills people and hates it, and hates herself for it, because she is convinced completely that it is the right thing to do. She's given up her entire life for a cause. So did Ghandi. But so did Mohamed Atta. What definition of "hero" excludes Angel? Certainly some people would say "not killing". But the uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of people regarded as heroes did just that, if not personally than by their actions. Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln ensured the deaths of thousands of people for the "greater good", and they're two of the more universally beloved heroes of the western world. Is there a real line between someone who's a hero and someone who's just a murderer, beyond whether you support their cause? That was the question Angel's character arc raised for me.
Perhaps notably, Angel utterly rejects the title of hero, perhaps most notably by nearly bursting into tears when Remy calls her one just after she (unbeknownst to her "friend") slaughtered most of the government of his country. And yet she too would easily agree heroes sometimes have to kill for the greater good. She doesn't address this contradiction, hiding instead behind the notion that because she is beholden to Chris's philosophy, she can't be a hero: heroes aren't supposed to know about the god pulling their strings. Chris's other loyal followers don't share her misgivings about doing good and necessary work - but they're not the ones out in the field, feeling the jolt in their arms as their swords plunges through someone they knew.
Angel, however, also rejects the notion she was manipulated. Offered the easy way out by Akira - the idea that she was used, that she was brainwashed, that she was warped at an early age with no real choice in the matter, Angel completely and unhesitatingly rejects it. She takes full responsibility for everything she's done. Partly this is because of the very natural, common and human desire to not believe you were deluded, that you were simply wrong and living a lie. But she ultimately does decide she was wrong and living a lie. The real reason for her refusal to share culpability is her certain knowledge that she did have a choice. She chose, three times, to follow Chris. She chose to kill her friend. Every time after that when he gave her an order, it was "yes" and not "no" that passed her lips, and nobody forced her. She knew perfectly well (whether correct or not) that she had the right to stop any time, to refuse to kill any time, and that Chris would not force her or punish her. So, to her mind, everything she did was completely of her own free will. And thus, the enormity of her decision to turn away from Chris is that is requires her to believe that, instead of being a secret fighter for the world's future doing terrible but necessary work, she is instead basically Reichmann Gyro. A monster who slaughtered untold numbers of people for nothing. And then, to top it all off, it is her own sword that kills Kalia, and by extension kills Chris as well. She's not only a monster, she as good as murdered the person who was both father and god to her for almost ten years.
Because of all this, we refused to give Angel a simple, clean ending. In other stories, a character like her would likely have died in a "redeeming" act like stopping Kalia. In fact, we considered that. But ultimately that didn't seem true to the character. Dying is easy, living is hard. Of all the main cast, Angel is perhaps the one with the longest journey before her at the end of the series. Not even 20, the tattoos Chris gave her make her one of the most dangerous beings in the world, and we only see the barest hints of how she could use her unlimited energy in the series. In ten years she'll be one of the most formidible beings in the universe... if she survives. And for all that, she has no idea what to do. She has no idea how she could make up for what she's done. She could turn herself over for punishment... but to who? And for what end? She could devote herself to another cause... but will it be any better than the last? She believed and never rejected Chris's essential philosophy - but he's dead, wasn't divine anyway, and the only real divine being has abdicated their power and never accepted that philosophy. So what now? What is she, and what will she become?
There's no easy answer.