Epsilon: And we start out this chapter with what is basically the Cliche Hero Badass Walk. Though we get the deliciously meta commentary from Ranma here.
Blade: The beginning of this chapter actually gave us a bit of trouble. We wanted to do a "back and forth" thing to highlight each character and break up what would otherwise be a monotonous series of fight scenes, but we didn't want to use the "Date and time at the beginning of each scene" shtick we'd used in Chapter 21 since we wanted to keep that unique. Luckily, we were able to make everything clear enough in the writing that apparently noone had trouble catching on.
Epsilon: In fact the first half of this chapter was just amazingly successful all around. For example, the goodbye scene with Ranma and Minako finally successfully sold the audience on the relationship between the two of them.
Blade: Our reasoning for why Ranma and Minako got together was sound enough, but knowing why people fell in love and believing in it are two different things. That scene made people believe. And just in time too, since they wouldn't see each other again after this chapter until the series was virtually over.
Epsilon: The scene between Nabiki and Ranma (I'm noticing a trend here) was not quite as successful as selling Nabiki as a hero, but it was certainly an awesome scene. It finally got around to fully explaining what Nabiki's motives were, for one thing. It also played up on the fact that they were, technically, still engaged - which a lot of readers had probably forgotten. The sudden chemistry between the two in this scene came out of nowhere. It's too bad we didn't end up doing much with it - it could have aided in bringing more pathos to the Ryouga/Ranma fight at the City of Black Ice, for example.
Blade: Ironically, the only Ranma scene that was truly planned to turn out the way it did in this chapter? Fighting the monkey. Seriously, Aaron had "AAH! AAH! SHE'S ATTACKING ME WITH HER MONKEY!" planned since about chapter 18.
Epsilon: Best line of the chapter, by the way.
Blade: Even Ranma's defeat of Bison wasn't precisely planned, but we'll get back to that. Speaking of awesome, though, this chapter kicks off the Amazoness Quartet plotline as they fall backwards into relevence because, of all things, Skullomania. It actually took a bit of work to figure out how the Quartet were going to be important to what was going on, but it was all worth it because it meant we got to write them more.
Epsilon: This chapter also really begins to play into the Gyro plotline. I love how we have Gyro get physically uncomfortable at the idea of not just demanding everything he wants and threatening people into subservience.
Blade: Yes. It's cheesy, but in a way I'll miss not having villains like Gyro and Yan Valentine to write. Pure puppy-kicking evil is just hilarious at times. Speaking of villains, the Chris plotline also really kicks back into the forefront here and leads smoothly into the next chapter. This is really the first time we see Chris at any length since Book II, and his god complex is finally made manifest as he pitilessly manipulates and kills people to ensure the outcome he wants and considers himself completely above any concerns that lesser people might have. The fact he seems to be right, given how Nabiki's wish fails to work on him, even gives the readers pause to doubt. Most still probably expected Ukyou and Chris to be the ones fighting at the end, but in fact, we had always intended this to be their last meeting. "Aaron Peori" and "Chris McNeil" no longer exist by this point in the story, something we tried to bring through in their encounter. Ukyou and Chris are now both products of the Hybrid Theory world, with only remnants left of their original personalities.
Epsilon: It's neatly mirrors Ukyou's development in this chapter. A big part of Ukyou's badassness from here forward is her ability to stop questioning all her choices. However, the purpose of Chris here is to point out that even though Ukyou talks about no longer questioning herself, she is really only talking about not questioning yourself too much. Chris serves as an object lesson as to what happens when you get rid of all doubts as to the rightness of your cause. Washu's plan is, after all, entirely based on him believing himself so invincible that one moment of doubt will be enough to kill him.
Blade: Some people were upset when Angel betrayed the group and killed Rose. This was when we knew we'd succeeded brilliantly with her character. Honestly, there was no way she was going to turn on Chris and this was quite clear. She'd already killed an innocent friend in her first chapter for him. She specifically said in the first half of this chapter she'd kill Akira if he told her to. But many readers still hoped against hope that she wouldn't. That was the emotional investment we'd hoped to build into her character to begin with and make her entire fall and redemption work when Ukyou's hadn't. Thus, we were overjoyed when people were upset about this.
Epsilon: Also another note: no more transgender characters in our work. God damn pronouns.
Blade: Yeah. We ranted about this in our end notes, but it bears repeating. Editing the fight scene with Bison was physically painful. Bison was a girl that used to be a boy. Ukyou refused to refer to Bison as "she", but everyone else did. Ranma turned into a girl for half the fight, but only refers to himself as "he" while other people refer to him based on his current gender. Plus, Ukyou changes how she refers to her own gender. It was.... gaaah. It was awful. The only way it could've been worse is if Zoicite had shown up.
Epsilon: ...which brings us to the fight with Bison. Which I will let Chris rant about first before giving my opinion.
Blade: Okay. First off, let me say what is good about the fight. The action is good. It has great flow, suitable hope spots, and nearly everyone gets to do something cool. The finale with Ranma is cheering-worthy and the cheesy dialogue is perfect. Also, I really like our conception of Bison and how he fell into basically being an animate force of rage and hate and lust. So did a lot of other people, clearly, since this chapter received nothing but praise. Which surprised me at first, because frankly I didn't like it much. Ultimately, the reason is Bison. Bison is a nothing. Bison is a nobody. We know basically nothing about Bison before this chapter. His motivations, plans, personality (such as it is), and the extent of his power were all only revealed in the same chapter the heroes fought him - indeed, directly before they do so. Up until now he's just been a bogeyman. There was no personal connection or insight or reason to care about him as a person, like there was with all our other major villains. There was absolutely no doubt the heroes would defeat him, that in fact they would kill him, because he basically was just a wall to be overcome. The entire first half of Book III leads up to a fight with a guy with less personality than his throwaway perspective minion, and that irritates me because it interferes with my ability to care about the fight. It didn't seem to bother anyone else, and I'll attribute that to the strength of our heroic cast, but ultimately I felt something built up as much as the fight with Bison should've been more. More emotionally meaningful, instead of just 'visually' spectacular.
Epsilon: The reason I like it, by contrast, is that Bison is a cipher. To me the Bison fight is not about fighting Bison, it's about an internal struggle within the heroes. Ukyou isn't fighting to kill Bison, she's fighting to save her child. Nabiki isn't fighting to defeat Bison, she's fighting to make herself a hero. Ranma isn't fighting to defeat Bison, he's fighting to redeem himself. Pluto is fighting to become a hero, instead of continung down the path the Nameless has made for her. Bison is a force of nature, a hurricane, a storm in which the characters find themselves drawn. He serves as the reflection of everything that could have gone wrong in their life. For everyone in the fight Bison represents the persistent damning urge to surrender; surrender to hatred, surrender to fear, surrender to the darker parts of their own nature. While the fight is well crafted from a visual standpoint, I feel it works far better from a character standpoint. Nabiki is forced to confront her own weakness, forced to come out of the shadows and fight. Ukyou is forced to fully embrace her destiny in order to save her child. Ranma is forced... well, Ranma isn't forced to do anything he doesn't want to, but the fight does require him to decide to accept who he is rather than who he wants to be (Ranma just discovers that these are one and the same, really). The reason I think the audience was able to understand and enjoy the fight is because we didn't need to build up Bison. Bison represented the dark side of all the people in the fight and since we had spent the first half of Book III dealing with that dark side and having the characters work towards overcoming it, the audience got that easily. Bison's motivation? His plans? That was window dressing. I introduced his plan in the scene before the fight because I was required to actually have him HAVE a plan for the heroes to foil for the story to make sense from an in-character perspective rather than just a meta-textual one.
Blade: Right, gotta remember next time to let you go first. It sucks letting someone else respond to your argument. Anyway, I acknowledge that and think it was indeed a good chapter for the heroes, but ultimately feel it would've been better with an antagonist who wasn't just a projection screen for the characters. So we'll just have to disagree! ;p
Epsilon: Well, that's what Chris was for!
Blade: Yep. And that's why he gets to basically look awesome and get everything he wants and be really mean to Cologne... next chapter!
Epsilon: We begin this chapter with a call back to how it all began. It serves as a reminder to the reader about what is going on, and the dream plays into the underlying message of this chapter - important people are important, and no matter how powerful you are, if you aren't important you lose.
Blade: It was also nice to remind people how sudden and inglorious Chris' death was. It was a subtle note that Chris was not really important to the story, in a chapter filled with such hints. Of course they are far overshadowed by the big honking red herring "Chris is important" France scenes. Which I wrote most of! Go me!
Epsilon: Interestingly enough, we actually got complaints about how integrated Ukyou and Aaron had become by this point in the story. It turns out the "at each others throats" nature of their relationship was actually popular to some people. Thus, when we brushed it aside for Book III (since it was necessary to move past it so we could get on with the larger story) people complained a bit. Understandable I suppose, though the entire purpose of the time skip and brainwashing was to remove that aspect of their characters.
Blade: It surprisingly almost overshadowed what we expected to be the controversial part of the chapter - namely, Ukyou and Akira getting together. Well, in a sense. As we see in subsequent chapters, it's a while before they really "get together" in any meaningful way. But Ukyou's impulsive "You know what? I like you, and I don't really care that it's only because of Bison. Let's give this a try." is very true to her recently redeveloped character, and that makes the scene work. Also that totally awesome "I am Akira's heart. I will beat forever." line.
Epsilon: That scene was fucking brutally hard to write. Not so much that it took a long time, but that I was trying to dredge up romantic... anything, really. Its not my forte. It turned out well, and flowed as I wrote, but was emotionally draining in a way not many other scenes I've written have ever been.
Blade: It seems this chapter was just awash with controversial moments. Another one that drew a strong reader reaction was Akane's decision to smash Akio's illusion projector. We were actually very pleased at the polarised reaction to that.
Epsilon: It was meant to be a polarising moment. After the sheer no-doubt-about-it villainy of the first half of the book, this chapter throws the reader into the abyss of moral relativity. Rip Van Winkle and Bison are villains you can just smash and feel good about, but we had a different thing in mind for Akane's challenges. Akane's challenge wasn't to outfight a villain (she really isn't equipped for that) but to choose a moral path, no matter how hard. This was preparing her for her designated role as Chris-killer later in the story. Towards that end we spent a lot of time building up to the smashing of the illusion projector, making certain we pointed out the moral grey areas of the people at Ohtori.
Blade: What is important to bear in mind is that Akane was not our mouthpiece. What she didn't isn't necessarily what we think is right, but what she thought was, and that goes for destroying the projector, and for saving Chris, and for killing him, all of which earned her detraction. But, I like to think, making the opposite decisions would have garnered just as much doubt. They just weren't easy decisions to make, and Akane rarely had a surfeit of time and information to mull over them. Ultimately she found herself in situations where she had to follow her moral compass, and sometimes that had bad consequences. For that reason, I liked her moral dilemnas far more than those of most of the characters - much like real life, there were few simple, easy answers to be found.
Epsilon: The important thing with Akane's decisions is we went back to her base character for them. In Chapter 7, Akane is forced to keep her anger in check and begins to control it quite well as the series goes on from there. But in her heart, when faced with doubt, she goes back to her core character trait: sheer bloody-minded stubborn defiance. Akane does what she does here (and back in chapter 20) because she knows it's what other people don't want her to do. That's part of the reason Washuu never lets Akane in on her plans - because she knows that Akane is defiant of being told what to do by people who "know what's best". This leads to her making some painful (and perhaps wrong) decisions. However, in the end, it's that core of defiance that has been tested again and again that makes her the only person who could kill Chris. She was the only person he would make himself vulnerable to and who would be able to say no to him.
Blade: This leads into the Chris/France section of the plot which takes up much of the second half of the chapter. This was a little risky, because due to lack of foresight on our part we had to spend our time using the perspectives of characters the audience barely knew and had little reason to be emotionally invested in. Luckily, we were able to use the characters involved that the audience did care about (chiefly Cologne and Angel) as fulcrums of much of the plot so as to keep reader interest. Since we had few complaints, it didn't seem to turn out too badly.
Epsilon: The real focus of this half of the chapter was what seemed like almost a throwaway scene: Link's confrontation with Alexia Ashford. She spells out exactly what is happening. It doesn't matter that Alexia is probably more brilliant, more powerful and has more resources than Link does. Link has Chris on her side and that means Link is important: Alexia is a bit character in the story and thus cannon fodder. Everyone in the France section (and the Ohtori section before it) is caught up in capital-D Destiny, and nothing they can do can protect them when it decides it's done with them. This is sharply contrasted by Ukyou's final speech where she explodes at "god" for doing this to her and her friends.
Blade: The other key reference is when Kalia appears during the confrontation between Chris and Purgstall, juggling Agito's severed head and then speaking to it in a very uncharacteristically serious and mournful fashion. As far as was possible with just half a chapter, we built up Agito Makashima as brilliant, cunning, powerful and ambitious, as he is in the Guyver series. He actually comes within a hair's breadth of killing Chris (not to mention Cologne and the Amazoness Quartet), something which Washuu has spent years trying to do. He is the power behind the throne in France, and he's cooordinated the building of a nearly unstoppable army loyal only to him. It isn't a stretch to say he had all the pieces in place to make a serious bid at world domination. And yet it meant nothing, as Kalia mournfully relates to his severed head, because he wasn't important to the overall plot as defined by the Nameless. And similarly - Chris is immensely powerful, ambitious, clever and ruthless. He seems like a terrifying threat to everything. But Kalia knows the truth - he is nothing but a glitch in the plans of a being that could obliterate him with less effort than it would take to snap one's fingers. The one thing Kalia actually cares about in anything resembling a human fashion is Chris, and therefore she pities Agito because he and Chris are symbolically twins.
Epsilon: Of course, Chris makes a very convincing argument for himself when given a chance. The way he manipulates Cologne in this chapter is perhaps the best example of Chris' ability to rationalise anything into fitting into his worldview and making himself seem the hero. Like we mentioned before, we are very proud of how well Chris does it, but also surprised that it didn't just work on the characters in the story but a lot of readers as well.
Blade: Of course, judging from reader reaction, the most memorable thing to come away from that entire subarc was Chris's bemused disbelief at being attacked by, of all things, Sailor Moon villains.
Epsilon: One of the better comedic moments in the middle of this. After all, Chris didn't have Ranma running around being awesomely comedic like Ukyou did during her part of this chapter.
Blade: Or Kunou/Ikazuchi, quoting one of his more memorable Ranma manga lines. Or a giant mutated hairy homosexual Russian using a penis-shaped tower as a bludgeoning weapon against women in catsuits and miniskirts.
Epsilon: Really this chapter had quite a few bits of comedy, for a chapter that was so depressing.
Blade: Yep. Unlike in book 1, we were actually very successful throughout Book III in strategically using comic elements and characters to keep the plot from being as unrelentingly dark as a straightforward synopsis of events might suggest it would be. As a final note of moral ambiguity, we have the chain-smoking cranky doctor Ami Mizuno rejecting superheroics in favour of finding a mass-producible cure for cancer that would save millions. I actually really liked this version of Ami and wish we'd had more time with her, because I think she did raise some interesting moral issues. Of course, her assumption that she couldn't be both was her blind spot, but I do wish we'd had the time to do a bit more with her.
Epsilon: Considering what happened with the next two chapters... taking more time to develop side characters was the last thing we could afford to do.
Blade: Well yes, but with a better setup and just having Minako there we would've had the room to do it. But c'est la vie. And on that note! Quite a bit of research went into the France portion of the Hybrid Theoryverse, in details great and small. For instance, the entire running fight with Area and the Gendarmes versus Millennium was meticulously plotted out on Google Maps. As well, original character badass Natalie Clement's last name comes from that of a significant French military figure (possibly Brigadier General Bertrand Clément-Bollée of the French Foreign Legion, though the loss of my notes in the hard drive crash makes it impossible to remember for sure). The great Field of Mars that Agito, Cologne, and Chris have their confrontation in does exist, and the late lamented (um, by some) French President Le Pen is indeed Jean-Marie Le Pen, a real-world notorious right-wing nationalist political figure in France. In real life his best presidential showing was getting crushed by Jacques Chirac in the second round of voting in 2002; however, in the xenophobic environment created by Millennium, and with the aid of a masterful strategist like Agito Makashima, we postulated he could have risen into prominence significantly earlier (also before most of his notable political scandals with holocaust-denying and the like). Finally, the term "Gendarme" used for France's superpowered soldiers is one with a fair bit of history going back to medieval times; in the modern real world, the term refers to what would be (very) roughly equivalent to "military police" in English.
Epsilon: Yes, we are the kings of obscure references for unimportant details we spent far too much time writing up! For instance, Shizu the vampire bodyguard from the Guyver manga (as Agito's childhood friend that he later turned into... well, never mind), and another amusing-only-to-us effort to make Utena's Juri Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Fanfic. Kalia references such luminaries as the American comic character Deadpool ("Now is fighty time, fighty time, blood blood blood!") and the band Queen ("March to the Black Queen"). Chris makes a shout out to another comic villain (the Magus) with his "Even the most wondrous vipers make poor pets" line, and Ukyou makes yet another call back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer as she quotes its titular character's opinion on parties.
Blade: Finally, in a continuation of a theme: Nabiki remains completely awesome and arguably the best character. No further comments. Mostly because she's getting a character spotlight next and we need to save some material.
Epsilon: So, now we're heading into the endgame. I wonder if our comments will bloat as much as the chapters themselves.
Blade: Oh god, I hope not. I'm not looking forward to trying to hastily reread "chapter" 28.
Epsilon: If we start now, we migt be finished by next month!
Blade: I guess you'll just have to see!
The key to understanding our portrayal of Nabiki is that it was almost entirely driven by the fans. Not just the fans of Hybrid Theory, but the fans of Ranma 1/2 and anime in general. Nabiki Tendo has formed a lot of fanon around her over the years. It's understandable: she's a cute girl, after all, and even the most evil cute girl has fans willing to overlook their flaws. However, Nabiki was especially prone to becoming a sort of superwoman in the fanfiction community. It was often the case that she was secretly financing the Tendo Dojo (despite driving it into bankruptcy at one point), that she was secretly a nice person (despite being one of two or three characters in the series that never has a redeeming moment), that everyone is afraid of her (despite her pathetic 'revenge' on Ranma in the manga) or that she ran the world like a little yakuza (despite... you get the picture). Of course, exactly what Nabiki is like is up to some interpretation, but it's fair to say that "fanfic Nabiki" often bears little resemblence to "real Nabiki".
The moment we realised Nabiki would be a major character in Hybrid Theory (which happened around chapter 3 or 4), we knew that our plot arc for her had to start with what we considered the 'real' Nabiki, and end with the combination of every Fanfic Nabiki: a clever, influential, rich, underworld-running string-puller who really was one of the good guys. Towards this end we knew that we would have to give her a long arc that we hadn't entirely planned out. We had to raise her up as a villain, have it all come crashing down on her and have her climb out of the pit again.
The funny, funny thing is that despite the fact she's pretty much our most obvious "Take that" at other fanfic writers in a story that's packed with them, Nabiki ended up having perhaps the most complex character arc in the entire fanfic, arguably even more complex than Ukyou and Chris. Right from chapter one we start setting up Nabiki's antagonism and pettiness, a process that expands significantly when we decide to have her cry 'rape' and virtually enslave Ryouga as a way to give her protection and the power to play in the "big leagues".
Hoo boy. That had a lot of reaction. The audience turned on her quick. I don't think any single other act in the entire fanfic has been as instant a villain creator as that one; Nabiki was probably the most hated character in the story for some time after that. We were, perversely, thrilled. At least until we started realising how long and hard the road would be to turn her into the heroic figure we wanted her to be by the end of the fic.
The idea to give her the Wishing Sword and become a telepath was the key to her later importance, and we did a huge amount of discussion before deciding both that she would get it and what she would use it for. Ultimately, Nabiki got the Wishing Sword because we needed someone who would not waste the wishes on stupid things, but who also wouldn't derail the plot by wishing away certain problems. We needed someone stupid and greedy enough, but with enough cunning, to keep the Sword in play in case we needed a wish to get ourselves out of a corner later. Nabiki was perfect. On a personal level, the Wishing Sword kept her as one of the most significant wild cards in the series and ensured her importance as a character, as well as seriously restricting the actions of several villains to the benefit of the other heroes.
We knew Nabiki would use one of the wishes to save Ryouga (and we pretty much knew where he was going in the plot by Book II). We also knew the third wish would be reserved until Book III. Figuring out what she would use the first wish for, the wish that would make her the real power-player she'd desired to be since she'd been effortlessly shut out by Ukyou and used as a hostage by first Chris and then Jadeite, was trickier. Though she could conceivably make herself as powerful as Arkanphel, that was simply not the direction we wanted to take her. Moreover, we didn't want yet another badass hand to hand combatant. (As an interesting sidenote, Nabiki actually occupied a similar antagonistic role in the Hybrid Theory precursor Fate And Destiny, eventually ending up as a hyper-zoanoid.) Ultimately, the solution was found by looking at Nabiki's character. She, we realised, wouldn't want to be some insanely powerful combatant, given the choice. Ultimately, she's a coward, and perhaps more generously, she looks down on punching people to get what she wants. Nabiki can be a bully, but she likes bullying people through knowing and preying on their weaknesses. Given anything she wants, she would look for something along those lines, and something that not-incidentally would allow her to effortlessly stop someone trying to punch her. Once we realised that, her wish to become the world's most powerful telepath was intuitive.
Her telepathy led to what was the single defining moment for her character arc, which was when she mind-dived into Ryouga and realised what a horrible broken person she was. It doesn't excuse what she did to Ryouga, not one bit, but it's still important to realise that she honestly had no idea how much what she did was going to impact his psyche. She didn't know Ryouga. She read a bio on how gullible and vulnerable to women he was, came up with a plan that would make him feel guilty and attracted to her, and maneuvered him like a chess piece into where she wanted him. Her focus was on what she needed to avoid being made helpless again and to be able to get leverage to act. To her mind, there was essentially no difference between this and her routine scamming of boys attracted to her, cleaning out their bank accounts on a completely platonic date and then never calling them again. There is a very deliberate parallel here to Vega's concept of "The Game" (and we wove some subtle and obvious comparisons in the first half of Book II between the two). Nabiki doesn't murder people, but she doesn't get anything out of doing so; but both her and Vega consider the world a constant struggle for success where they both define success only on their own terms and assume everyone else is either playing the same game or is a ridiculous dupe to be used and abused. The real difference between them is that Vega is a real sociopath, and Nabiki is just a selfish, petty child who doesn't know better. At first, her power to see inside other people's minds just amuses Nabiki. The things they want, the reasons they want them, all make sense to her because they're either selfish (and she understands that) or "naive" (and she thinks that's silly and childish). They aren't connected to her; Nabiki would likely feel sad about finding out about someone's tragedy, but not feel guilty. But then she looks at Ryouga. And then she gets that chance that so many people in real life never do: the chance to see herself and what she has done from someone else's eyes.
The scenes that follow are some of my absolute favourites in the second half of Book II, largely because I think they're very realistic. Nabiki vacillates wildly between fear ("How can you FEEL that much? Stop feeling so much about me!") and shock ("It was just a stupid game! It's not that important!") and anger ("I didn't force you to fall in love with me!") and guilt ("I did force you to fall in love with me."). At first she drives away Ryouga, anything to get away from the wholly unexpected dimension he's brought to her life. Then she brings him back because she's incredibly painfully aware of how much her rejection hurt him. Then she tries clumsily to repair the damage she's done by treating him well, alternately frustrated and feeling even more guilty as it completely fails to work. She spends the whole time being terrified of Ryouga, because she knows the only thing she can really do is tell him the truth. And she's scared of what he'll do when he does, because even though she could easily stop Ryouga from getting any revenge, she doesn't know if she could bring herself to. Underlying all this is that Nabiki doesn't want Ryouga to leave. Even before her telepathy, she had come to rely on him. Not just his physical protection, but his companionship and caring. Nabiki cut herself off from her friends and family, and Ryouga is the only person around her who isn't her enemy. Although it's probably not accurate to say she loves him at this point, she needs him a lot more than she cares to admit.
In Book III, the story of Nabiki is her very long and hard road to trying to be a hero. Over time, she underwent a gradual, honest change that ended up very compelling to us and to many of the audience. I think the reason it was compelling was because it took a long time, and it wasn't simple or easy. Nabiki doesn't just become a good guy because she looks in Ryouga's mind. Nabiki starts off Book III driven by fear, using people, invading their minds, lying to Akira and letting her walk into danger for Nabiki's sake. Her motives are murky, to others and to herself. And yet, there's something there. Something different than the Nabiki of Book II. And over time, that other side of Nabiki grows. Over time, she starts to shed the person she was, because over time she realises that isn't the person she wants to be. Eventually, she starts putting herself on the line, first to gain common goals, and finally just to save the people she cares about. Eventually, she stops lying to them. Eventually, she stops lying to herself. Every step of the way is hard for Nabiki, because the choices she makes are not the easy ones. Every time she sheds the "old Nabiki" and becomes a better person, it's by refusing to take the easy path. In that sense, she has interesting parallels to Akane's development and challenges, though that wasn't intentional on our part. Using Link as her nemesis up to Chapter 26 (which is really when Nabiki finally becomes "heroic" in our minds) is very useful, because they really are so similar in how their character arc was defined by a struggle for recognition in a world where other people had it handed to them, and in their complete apathy to the people they had to step over to get what they want. Nabiki recognises herself in Link, even though she won't admit it, and that's why Link can so easily get under her skin and why Link is the perfect vehicle to get Nabiki to reject her old persona once and for all.
Nabiki's journey, even at the end of the fanfic, isn't done. Originally, we had planned for her and Ryouga to get together. We decided against it for two reasons - one, the unexpected but interesting level of antipathy to Nabiki made us think we would have difficulty making people happy with it, and two, because her "getting" Ryouga in the end would raise the question of whether Nabiki only changed to make herself a person who could get what she wanted. Therefore, and aided by the fact Nabiki and Ryouga would only meet again over halfway through the book and thus lacked time to interact, we decided she would ultimately be rejected by Ryouga. We also specifically raised the question of whether Nabiki only reformed herself so Ryouga would love her. Nabiki can't answer it. The truth, as we see it, is that to an extent she did. But she also did because seeing into Ryouga mind's had broken her comfortable illusions and made her old motivations feel shallow and petty. And she also did because she came to care very deeply about Akira, and then Ukyou and Ranma. And she also did because she wasn't ultimately an evil person, even if she did some inexcusable things. Like real life, there is just no such thing as a single motivation or reason for the person Nabiki becomes. When asked who she really is and why, she can't answer in words, because that's a question only answered by her actions. And so it is that directly after that, after Ryouga has left, with no fanfare or publicity, she uses her last wish to restore Japan. Every other attempt to use the last wish was ultimately for her own self-preservation, but the wish at the end of Book III, like the wish at the end of Book II, is purely for the sake of others, making a fitting bookend for her character arc.
What happens next is really up to her.