Epsilon: The first sign things were going wrong was how long Link's recap was. Oh, it was informative and neccessary. It was also designed to deliberately mirror Akira's from earlier. But it was really long compared to almost all the others.
Blade: In my defence, my story's really complicated! Especially since we were trying to subtly hint to the reader how completely unimportant I was despite the fact I was leading an army of four to devastate an entire nation and the second-most powerful being on the planet.
Epsilon: Which was doubly annoying since we needed to build up Tethys so she could have enough heat to lead the big fight against Gyro next chapter. In fact, this entire chapter was basically a long convoluted attempt to balance things so that everyone could have heat. We had more arguments over this one chapter then the rest of Hybrid Theory combined.
Blade: Well, everyone except me, since I get my ass kicked. By Sailor-Fucking-Moon! But for the moment, let's head back to the beginning of this long, long chapter, where as early as the second scene we're using Akane's awe of her to build up said Sailor-Fucking-Moon to be a Big Hairy Deal. This is where we could sort of cheat due to HT being a fanfic. Despite her impressive feat of defeating Gyro and resurrecting Akane in Book II, I doubt we could have so successfully built up Sailor Moon to seemingly be all-powerful if she didn't have a preexisting reputation. At least not without a lot more screentime.
Epsilon: Indeed. We were playing to the audience's expectations as much as the characters. The scene also serves to reestablish Akane's direct connection to the Nameless. The way Rei and Minako also feel the pull of the Nameless's future was something we built up as well, so that we could have Link do the big reveal regarding the Sailor Moon character's connection to the Nameless.
Blade: Then comes the meat of this chapter. This chapter is actually very special, since it's the only chapter where the Big Five (Ukyou, Chris, Akane, Tethys, Hotaru) and their cadres all clash. Basically, in a sense, this was our tournament arc, our chance to set up the big climactic fights between people who'd been important to the story but not interacted until now. Even the Amazoness Quartet show up to give the Chronos contingent some representation.
Epsilon: We even managed to put a Ranma and Ryouga rematch in there. It was complete pandering to the fans, but I liked writing it. It did serve the purpose of getting Ranma and Ryouga away from Nabiki so she could confront Link. Ultimately it was useless, since it didn't resolve anything. It got mixed reaction as well. Perhaps, like the Ukyou/Yosho fight, we should have just left it out.
Blade: Poor Yosho. We skip his fights with Ukyou and Red Cyclone, and then Kalia rips his heart out for spite. I actually wish we'd had more time to do stuff with him and Washuu, because they actually had their own vibe as characters which was quite interesting (regardless of our opinion of their source material). Ultimately, however, there's just not room for everyone, so they too had to skim by on reputation.
Epsilon: Frankly, we had a hard enough time building up Washuu as being in the wrong here. Her entire plan was morally questionable - not just in the amount of damage it might cause, but in the fact that it relied on lying to Akane and Rei and virtually everyone else, the way it manipulated people and played to their emotional weaknesses. In many ways Washuu's role in the story was to be the anti-Akane, to show that having a lot of power and ability and a first-rate plan and the will to do whatever was necessary isn't enough. In the end, Washu was in it for revenge, and so she had to fail utterly.
Blade: But more on that next (gargantuan) chapter. When they arrive at the pyramid this chapter is the last time Chris and friends are ever together. It's also the last time they all seem unbeatable, as each of them is defeated in turn. I really loved most of the writing for them this chapter, starting with the introductory scene where we get a great look at all their differing personalities and response to problems (well, Kalia just giggles and disappears to go cause trouble, but that IS her response to many things). In a sense, they're all at their "height" in this chapter (although Chris will go on to have a lot more power, he spends the rest of his storyline mooning over Akane). Angel defeats Ranma, Link launches an assault on an entire city single-handed and still has time to effortlessly outwit and overpower Nabiki and Ryouga, Chris defeats the Messiah of Silence and makes his case for being outside the sway of Destiny, and we finally get to see what Kalia can really do. Then it all goes south.
Epsilon: The fight's between Angel and Ranma and Angel and Akira worked out especially well. I'll admit to being more than a bit inspired by just having watched Advent Children for the Angel/Ranma fight. However we had spent six chapters building up Angel as a master of her environment JUST so that she could win this fight. That was really important considering that we basically had her beat up Ranma so that she would have a lot of heat running into Angel vs Akira.
Blade: The fact Angel beat Ranma and then lost to Akira drew a few complaints, despite the fact that Akira knew how Angel fought a lot better than Ranma did, the fact Angel kept hesitating and holding back during the fight with Akira, the fact Akira had a better battlefield (limiting movement) to fight her with, and the fact that we'd pointed out several times in the fic that Akira and Ranma were basically on the same level. I should be annoyed for poor Akira's sake, but instead I'll just take it as a pleasing reminder of just how over Ranma was with our audience.
Epsilon: Also note, Chris actually wrote the second fight all by himself. (sniff) I'm so proud.
Blade: Me too! I really liked that fight, actually. But alas, we must move on from Angel's travails and onto more important things... Link. No, wait, not Link. Kalia. That's who I meant! This is actually the first chapter we actually get to see what she does; though we know she defeated Agito and Purgstall, it was off-screen. Fighting Tethys and later Akane, Rei and Katsuhito, we finally get to see on-screen how horribly unfair she is. Akane's perspective was absolutely essential to this, as she was the only person who could get a confused sense of what Kalia was doing - namely, sorting through parallel universes and picking the one she liked the most.
Epsilon: And then just to point out that she's still dangerous even when unable to do that, we have Ukyou's dramatic heroic entrance... and Kalia beats her in one exchange. Ukyou doesn't get much love in this chapter (she's too busy running around) but she does get some good scenes. I especially like her interactions with Akira. We spent so much time building up Tethys' relationship with Akira, and many readers thought it was just an affair. Then we drop the "killed one thousand people" bombshell. It turns out, after all that buildup, that Ukyou was able to easily forgive Akira for her misdeeds. Ukyou also manages to easily disarm Tethys' attempt to confuse her. So we prove that for once Ukyou wasn't just blowing smoke, she actually has changed and matured over the last few chapters.
Blade: Yeah. Despite the problems with the Akira/Tethys subplot we've already mentioned, I thought that part actually went quite well. And, of course, this chapter finally drops the anvil we'd been shocked nobody had caught in the last four chapters - that Akira is now suffering the Paradox backlash instead of Ukyou. I suppose it's okay that nobody picks up on our hints with poor Akira when we get suitably gratifying reactions of shock.
Epsilon: We even almost had Nabiki figure out the whole thing here, thankfully Link arrived in time to be amazingly fucking creepy and distract her. Seriously, we must have been playing too much Resident Evil when we came up with that entrance.
Blade: Obligatory we-stole-this-idea admission - her also-creepy entrance later, when Nabiki finds Ryouga, was inspired directly from the climactic scene from the Silent Hill movie. This is not in any way an endorsement of said movie.
Epsilon: Amazingly enough, I think most of the readers actually bought Nabiki's redemption in this chapter. After what we had her do to Ryouga, she was seen as a worse villain then many dedicated villains. However, even her biggest hater actually had a (partial) turn of heart after this chapter. It was a very long and uphill battle and Nabiki still has a way to go, but from this point forward I don't think anybody ever doubted she was on the side of the angels.
Blade: Yep. But, if you have to pick one confrontation for this chapter for import, it's Chris versus Hotaru. Though not because of Chris. My favourite subtle hint about Chris's irrelevence is the fact that upon arriving, we spend several paragraphs describing the thoughts, feelings, revelations and expressions that play in the first second that Pluto and Hotaru make eye contact, then Chris has to go "Hey, pay attention to me!" before Hotaru even bothers to notice he's there.
Epsilon: Also, the series of increasingly unlikely events that prevents Chris from actually winning. Up to and including Sailor Moon showing up to kill him, but failing to actually take out Hotaru.
Blade: Yes, which stems back from Kairos' grand reentrance immediately beforehand. Kairos is, needless to say, completely full of win and awesome. It was based on her "fight" with Rei and Akane that we basically decided she had to feature prominently in the third sidestory. Although it wasn't nearly as obvious as we wanted it to be, if you observe the scenes after she unleashes her "Highly Improbable Field", every single one features unlikely coincidences such as Ryouga suddenly finding Nabiki, Angel and Ranma literally running face-first into each other, and so forth. Everything that happens in the second half of the chapter is set up by Kairos, of all people.
Epsilon: In other words, it was the Nameless interfering again. Remember, Sailor Moon Character = Nameless Pawn. Kairos is a Sailor Moon character (convienently made up with powers that could cause unlikely coincidences that could just happen to benefit the Nameless' plan), thus...
Blade: On that note, people called Pluto dumb for never considering who the opponent Ukyou was going to fight was. Which is more fair than previous criticisms of her. But... Sailor Moon character. Also, the Nameless didn't want her to think about it.
Epsilon: Which pretty much draws this chapter to a close. The last time all the major characters will be in the same area together. From this point forward their plots move apart. Also... next chapter... yeah. It's next "chapter". Haha.
Blade: So, to put Chapter 28 in perspective... Chapter 27 was the longest chapter in the fanfic when we published it, by almost 50k. The second half of Chapter 28 is 100k longer than Chapter 27. So... yeah.
Epsilon: It really should have been two chapters, maybe even three. But we had this insane need to stick to our ten chapter layout, especially since at this point we were running low on Linkin Park song titles (curse you bastards and releasing your next album like a month before we finished).
Blade: And yet for all of that, 90% of the chapter is actually centred on the fight of the second-stringer heroes versus the second-stringer villains. But there's a reason for that, because this chapter is the answer to Chapter 26's "little people don't matter" theme. Despite the insane size bloat caused by every nobody from the series getting their own spotlight scene, it played into the real theme of the chapter: the little guys can win. Nobody gave Tethys and her army a chance to beat Gyro, and if the readers thought they would, it would've been by Tethy s herself doing it. But in fact, all those minor characters turn out to be crucial to defeating Gyro, and then they drive off Galaxia, Arkanphel and an entire goddamn planet-corpse without Chris or Ukyou intervening at all.
Epsilon: Basically, this chapter is all about the plan of the Nameless unraveling in increasingly obvious ways. Kalia's plans, Akio's plans, Gyro's plans, Tethys' plans... they were all pulling at the carefully constructed series of events the Nameless had set up, each coming closer and closer to pushing it that one proverbial camel-back-breaking-straw too far. Even the reintroduction of Nanami was a desperate attempt by the Nameless to get things back on track. It was important for us to create a sense that everything the little people were doing here mattered, and I think we succeeded.
Blade: Unlike several other chapters where the "big wins" went to secondary characters, however, we spent a good deal of time in chapter 28 giving Ukyou heat in various ways. We start off immediately by having her use her awesome senses to find the survivors of Link's attack on the Dark Kingdom. This is good on two levels, since it gives sympathy points for Ukyou (and Tethys), and also reminds the readers just how awesome her ability is by this point.
Epsilon: We also spent a lot of time playing up just how much Ukyou has matured here. Her willingness to put aside her quest for Hotaru to help the innocent, her rejection of Tethys' philosophy, her interaction with Link, her relationship with Akira, her acceptance of and subsequent rejection of her Destiny, and her final battle with Alucard. We really wanted Ukyou to come across as more than your typical shounen protagonist and one who had really thought through her philosophy and was not just reacting in a knee-jerk or shallow fashion. Towards this end, the chapter is filled with scenes where Ukyou gets a chance to interact with a lot of people. The scene with Tethys plays up how she is rejecting Tethys' ultimately pessimistic view of the universe. The scene with Link (and props to Chris for convincing me to play it this way) shows that she has moved beyond a desire for revenge or pointless conflict: she wants to make things better, not punish people who made it worse. Her scenes with Akira were a neccessary set up for her "find a third option" belief that allowed her to actually win in the end against Hotaru by going Third Circle, as well as developing that she was willing to let Akira make her own choices. Her interaction with Nanami allowed us to establish that she was both afraid of the Nameless and willing to fight it anyway, even though she knew in her heart she couldn't win. Finally, the fight with Alucard was an excuse to give Ukyou a definitive victory, not just of her power but also of her philosophy. In the end, she doesn't defeat Alucard by just powering up (though by the end of this chapter she is probably as strong as nearly anyone else in the fanfic short of Chris or Galaxia), but by refusing to allow him to hide behind his delusions of monsterhood and lack of free will. She disassembled his entire world by understanding it, which was effectively what Ukyou's big power was in the end.
Blade: One little bit early on I quite liked was Ukyou observing Tethys creating a chair, thinking about how someone could do the same thing in a very convoluted and labour-intensive fashion with chi, and then realising that by contrast, for Tethys' Second Circle power, creating a chair amounted to thinking "chair". It really got across the meaning of the First and Second Circle and how much more profound the Second Circle was, in a way previous metaphysical explanations couldn't match. As well, later in the chapter Kalia uses allegory to finally make it absolutely clear to Akane (and the readers) that nobody in the fanfic uses the "Third Circle". We'd deliberately let people believe Sailor Moon doing stuff like ressurecting a bunch of people, or Chris stealing bodies, was the "Third Circle", but Kalia instantly punctures everyone else's pretensions about it by revealing that controlling the Third Circle isn't some awesome power that lets you win fights, but instead lets you change the definition of what a fight is. Or anything else, for that matter.
Epsilon: Kalia actually was a very valuable exposition box in this chapter. She even calls herself one. We could sneak a lot of blatant exposition into her dialogue because of how strange and wacky we made her. She even outright reveals exactly what her plans are on several occasions, but because she's all "weird" it tended to fly under the reader's radar, so to speak. Take how she outright says she's going to kill Cologne, or basically anyone else who has ever annoyed Chris. The only person who escapes this threat is Ryouga, but I guess even Kalia couldn't think of a way to make his life suck worse than it already did.
Blade: And on that note, the first half of the chapter contains the death of Washuu and Chris's subsequent ascension to what seems to be near-omnipotence. We held our breaths on this one, because Washuu enjoys a somewhat inflated reputation in fandom. Despite the fact she was beaten and outwitted in her own series by foes who were far from omniscient and omnipotent, and despite the fact we used several of the most potent characters in the series setting up an insane Xanatos Roulette whose entire point was just to get Washuu so angry that it was possible for her not to notice that the Golden Crystal was still attached to Angel, we still figured we'd get a lot of rage. As it turned out, only a couple of readers were really irate about this, which we attributed to our awesome writing, but then found out a month or two later with the third sidestory was really because all the Tenchi fans hadn't been reading Hybrid Theory anyway.
Epsilon: ... yeah. (shrug) And this chapter is basically the one were Chris comes closest to "winning". He gets to accomplish all his goals, he makes a very nice argument to Akane, he gets virtual omnipotence. He also plays into reader expectations because his plan is basically to solve the entire problem the way a shounen anime would... have all the secondary characters job to the villain, then have the hero show up and blow said villain away with superpowers. Chris's major mistake here is that he does not really believe that the people in Tokyo CAN win, largely because he knows Ukyou and cadre will be occupied elsewhere. He thinks that they will end up in an untenable situation and just keeps waiting for that to happen... until eventually Akane sees through his motivations.
Blade: In a somewhat unexpected development, this chapter contains what are probably Ryouga's best scenes in the fanfic. The scene where he tries to use the Wishing Sword to undo the horrible acts that were done to Hotaru, and the scene where we find out what Hotaru really meant by him "leading her" to where she was going were absolutely wonderful stuff. I guess nobody can do pathos like ol' pig-boy.
Epsilon: We've complained a lot about Ryouga's one-note character, but it's a very GOOD note. On that musical metaphor we should probably explain why Hotaru was willing to help Kalia. We sort of hint it's to get Seras to open the portal, but that wasn't needed. The real reason is to prevent Washuu from killing Chris or Hotaru, something she very well might have been able to do. This may seem strange since the Nameless clearly wants Chris dead, but you have to understand that the Nameless is not afraid of Chris, it's afraid of Kalia. If Washuu killed Chris before Kalia died... the Nameless has no idea what would happen. Kalia is basically pure Paradox and the Nameless fears Paradox more than it could ever explain, and the idea of a Paradox being that can think and PLAN probably has it scared shitless. So destroying Chris is only incidental to the Nameless' plan to eliminate Kalia (and eliminate Chris so he can't make another Kalia in the process).
Blade: The other significant side-plot is the finale of the Sailor Senshi/Utena plotline, which culminates in the second Third Circle event of the fanfic (not counting how it begun). Despite how haphazardly the whole thing was put together, and the Poor Rei thing we've beaten to death, ultimately I think that went off really well, and the final Sailor Moon scene is just utterly awesome. Kudos to Aaron for getting it to play out in such a mythic fashion.
Epsilon: I thought it was important to have Sailor Moon live up to her ideals in the end, but still be unwilling to destroy Akio. Basically Usagi had to do the impossible: she had to save Anthy, without just rewriting her. It was really funny how well that whole subplot came together, even if we had Minako running around like a ping-pong ball and stretching crediblity with how fast she traveled between the various locations. After all, she had to hitch a ride with the Dolls and Mamoru to get to Tokyo in time for the fight but ran back to Ohtori carrying Sailor Moon the whole way... I think it would have been better handled if Sailor Moon and Gyro had confronted each other closer to Ohtori. Still, it needed the mythic overtones.
Blade: What else... oh, geez, where to start. Despite the focus of the overall narrative (the only thing that gives this pretensions to being "a chapter"), this chapter is so huge we could go on forever talking about all the little things in it. But won't. I will say, however, that I was absolutely tickled pink that the entrance of Pantyhose Tarou (and entourage) into the fray was a cameo not dictated by my well-known love for the character, but instead by fan demand. We'd never had any intention of putting them into the fanfic proper (and said so), but after they still managed to tie for first place in voting for the subject of the third sidestory, we decided "What the hell" and threw them in along with nearly everyone else.
Epsilon: The chapter also contained a lot of callbacks to previous Hybrid Theory work aside from the Tarou/Sakura/Athena appearance. In effect, you can say it's sort of us giving the "old world" a proper send off. We had cameos from nearly all the previous characters to show they still existed. We resolved the Mamoru/Dolls love... polyhedron thingy with an endorsement of polyamoury (hey, we had to get THAT cliche in the fanfic as well, after all). We had an awesomely entertaining Momiji scene (to the point where some people thought Momiji's Fullmetal Alchemist shoutout actually had it as part of the HT-verse despite its obvious joke nature). The manga artist chick that falls for Daigo is actually the artist of the Haruhi Suzumiya light novels (and a really obscure in-joke to her background of hentai game contributions). Nanami's reappearence, which worked really well since she was essentially a new character. We even had Shiori show up again (with a blatant continuity violation! See if you can spot it!). Even the way Tethys wins the fight with Gyro is a shout back to Ukyou's victory over her way back when (and her survival of it is symbolic of her growth into somebody who now has a real, albeit twisted, reason to live).
Blade: This chapter also had the death of ZX-Tole, who had become something of a favourite with many readers as he embodied the "honourable foe" archetype and viewpoint character into the darker sides of Chronos. The scene with him and Ikazuchi at the end of 27 had actually been added at the last minute by me to give this a bit better set-up (and we really, really didn't need or want to add more scenes to 28). It worked out really well, except for the fact we only realised afterwards that Nabiki's wish would end up bringing him back to life as well. He was probably quite put out since he'd really worked up to that whole "honourable sacrifice" thing. On the flipside, by the end of this chapter we'd actually started regretting our decision to kill off Cologne, and did so even more next chapter since she was just so cool. Alas, by this point we'd foreshadowed Kalia's intent to kill her several times going back to chapter 26, so we felt our hands were tied in the matter and she died on schedule in Chapter 29. However, in a sense the pointlessness of it all actually added to that scene, but more on that next time.
Epsilon: The finale of this chapter worked out really well. I was surprised how much the audience bought the stereotypical "lose heroes one by one" nature of the fight into Superneherepharoinia X. By the way, Shingo is blatently ripping off the infamous Japanese Xbox game Metal Wolf Chaos with his big entrance speech, but that's okay because it's awesome. The thing that really made the ending work is how heavily we had been playing up the Amazoness Quartet to their (manga-only, but not contradicting anything in the anime) Asteroid Senshi transformation for this (and last) chapter. So it made it all the more shocking, when Akira almost literally changed the script and pulled out the Kalia-fu to punk Superneherepharoinia X. It worked as a great setup for giving Kalia and Akira heat for their fight in Chapter 29.
Blade: And on that note, the biggest thing I took away from reading this 142,065-word chapter is this: we use the word "literally" way too damn much.
Epsilon: Seriously.
Blade: Despite the fact our Super Swedish Prereader could be reliably counted on to bitch us out every time we used it, it seems every third sentence in the thing had "literally" in it. Holy crap. I declare a moritorium on that word in future writing.
Now that the series is over, how to talk about Hotaru and her role? What is there to say that hasn't already been said in our retrospection?
To start, looking back at the fan response, Hotaru got a very mixed reaction. The audience never really "got" her. I think the use of Hotaru, in that respect, might have been a mistake. On the other hand, I think Hotaru served a valuable role in the story. She basically needed to exist so that we could have a final villain worth fighting. Therefore, it's really impossible to discuss Hotaru without discussing the Nameless.
Back when we were first outlining Hybrid Theory in random notes and chatlogs, the Nameless was a very fluid idea. The first thing I needed to do when creating Hybrid Theory was to justify the "multicrossover" element of the series. I came up with the Three Circles analogy and the use of branching timelines to do so. Using those branching timelines and classifying all supernormal powers to somewhere in the Three Circles paradigm allowed us to create a coherent (in its innate incoherency) world: one where we could easily compare and contrast two characters from wildly different source materials and tell who would be stronger, in what ways and how the other could deal with that.
The Nameless came about as a logical consequence of the way the story had to be developed once we had created the Three Circles mythos. The obvious way to make the primary hero special was to give them Third Circle powers, which was easy to justify by making the primary hero exist from Outside all the universes mashed together to create Hybrid Theory (thus virtually requiring a self-insert, fulfilling our condition of setting up a story that was both a self-insert and a multicrossover, and needing to be both of those to be told). The problem was we needed a kickstart. So I created the Nameless. An unnamed and (at first) motiveless Third Circle entity to serve as the start of the entire series.
The only thing we defined about the Nameless at first was that it was NOT an anime character (or at least, not one that anybody would ever be able to identify). As the series progressed and the overall structure of the story began to finalise (around about chapter 4 or so), we also began to finalise the Nameless. We decided that it was a former Third Circle user who had unfortunately gone too far and wiped out its entire universe (and his/her very identity) from existence, and that its entire goal was to push Ukyou/Aaron into going Third Circle at the same time so it could merge with them and be Human and God at the same time.
However once I realised that our final villain was, by neccessity of the mythos we had created, a being with no name, no personality and no face to confront, I realised we needed an avatar.
So, Hotaru.
It probably won't surprise anyone that when we first started writing Hybrid Theory, I (Aaron) liked Hotaru the character quite a bit. I had recently finished watching Sailor Moon S and I quite liked her character arc. It also helped that I had read several stories featuring Hotaru as a main character in Ranma/Sailor Moon crossovers and had grown enamoured of her. So I wanted to include her in some aspect of the story. Up until we decided to turn her into the Nameless' avatar, however, I had no idea how.
Once that decision was made, I had to take what I knew was an inherently heroic and good character and turn her into a villain. This required me to basically belabour how much her life sucked. I was also attempting to make the audience sympathise with her. It was a delicate balancing act to inflict just enough suffering to keep her interesting without turning the audience against her. To some, we failed.
Hotaru's relationship with Ukyou was another important aspect of her villainhood. Hotaru existed to contrast Ukyou's speeches with her deeds. She was there to point out the hypocrisy of Ukyou's "inaction" policy. In this respect she succeeded marvelously, perhaps too well. Ukyou's love for Hotaru had to be constructed carefully, so that the audience would believe that Ukyou could genuinely love her. Looking back over Book II I realised several flaws in this, so I decided to take their relationship in a different direction in Book III.
Book III Hotaru was always going to be the main villain, even more than the Nameless (who was more a force of nature than a character to challenge). Once I realised how poor a job I had done creating a genuine bond between Ukyou and Hotaru in Book II, it became obvious I needed a different take on them. Thus Hotaru existed as a overtly hostile force to Ukyou, a person who had been genuinely wronged by Ukyou and wanted revenge. In retrospect I made Ukyou's concern for Hotaru more for Hotaru-the-symbol, rather than Hotaru-the-person. Even after the fight with Bison, when Hotaru's ultimate fate was revealed to Ukyou (who had been studiously avoiding thinking about it) Hotaru still remained a symbol to Ukyou. She was a way for Ukyou to get a "redo" on screwing up with saving her daughter.
This information did not come out until their confrontation, though it should be obvious in retrospect. Once we realised that nobody was going to take Hotaru's cribbed-from-Exalted-the-Abyssals violent-Buddhist philosophy seriously, we decided to make it openly hypocritical at the end. Hotaru's attempt to break Ukyou's spirit when she first enters Elysium by presenting her with the "reality" of her situation is just a hint towards this. Though at the very least, that failed philosophy led us to the "Paradox as Oblivion" change to the mythos that worked so well in the final three chapters.
Ultimately, I view Hotaru as an experiment, one that produced interesting if mixed results. One thing I can say for certain is that it has led to me getting my "creepy little girl" quota for my writing over and done with. I highly suspect I won't use that villain archetype again anytime soon.
No promises from Chris, though!