I'd like to give a special shout-out to Kina De Grasse, who in addition to having provided all the "commemorative" series of drawings that have adorned Technique, also went out of her way to find and return all the materials to me when my hard drive crash last year lost all the originals that had been sent. Thanks so much, Kina! Now, as a special project, I CGed all the pictures for this last Technique, but you can see Kina's lovely originals (plus a few that didn't make it in due to not matching the "groups") over on the fanart page. And please, do go check out Kina's other work at KiNA*iNK!
Epsilon: This chapter was also delayed. Unlike Chapter 28, it wasn't because of its gargantuan size per se.
Blade: Instead, the problem came after we were plotting out everything in the chapter after having finished 28, and I, innocent as a babe, asked "So, what are they gonna do with the planet hanging ten miles in the air above Tokyo?" And Aaron said "...".
Epsilon: And then we realised that we had to do something about that, because we realised there would be some repurcussions about having a planet ten miles above Tokyo (see: "Physics, Laws Of").
Blade: And from that two weeks we came up with the notion of using the most gratuitously stupid/insane anime cliche this side of surfboarding mecha and have Momiji lead all the people of the world in song to make a big... eh, basically it was a Dragonball Spirit Bomb.
Epsilon: Amazingly enough, the audience loved it. Or at least didn't object too loudly.
Blade: Yep. In our defence, this is also what Momiji did at the end of Blue Seed to get the writers out of a similarly painted-in-corner-type-position. So there was precedent! Good thing we'd reintroduced Momiji last chapter in a scene that made us look like we'd had this planned, but actually only existed because we thought it was funny.
Epsilon: Fortunately, the "Japan's Got Talent!" competition allowed us to throw in yet another awesome Nabiki scene, which preceded a string of them throughout the chapter because true to form, Nabiki is greedy and wasn't satisfied with all the awesome scenes she'd had since Book III started.
Blade: So, basically, once we dealt with the whole "giant planet" issue, this chapter revolved around resolving every plotline other than Ukyou's. Chris, Akane, Ranma, Tethys, Link, Nabiki, Ryouga, Akira, Kalia, Angel and pretty much everyone else had their plots wrapped up here.
Epsilon: As we noted in her spotlight, Nabiki's ending was definitely on the "bittersweet" side, which is good, since it struck a compromise between the fans who were cheering for her by this point, and those that still wanted her to be fed through a cheese grater.
Blade: It also put the image of Sailor Iron Mouse having drunken debauched sex in my mind, for which someday Aaron too may have to get uncomfortably familiar with a cheese grater.
Epsilon: Amazingly enough, Nabiki's selfless final wish of bringing everyone in Japan back to life also turned out to be bittersweet in and of itself, since it greatly hastened Hotaru's plan to destroy all life.
Blade: But then, anybody who thought there was something good and pure enough that we couldn't ruin it has obviously not been paying attention to the fanfic. Unless Ranma does it.
Epsilon: On that note, in the last scenes of the first half of the chapter is actually what would turn out to be the final "Ranma" scene, which came in a flurry of character's final scenes (not counting the epilogues) which really rammed home to us how close we were to the end of the series, a goal which had seemed impossibly far away not that long before. This chapter said our goodbyes to the majority of our vast cast; Ranma was rare in going out on something of a high note (poor Minako, and even poorer Artemis, couldn't say the same).
Blade: I find it extremely bemusing that two of the saddest scenes in the fanfic involve a talking cat. And it's not even the serious talking cat. We also handle Tethys talking down the two biggest badass-villains-who-never-really-did-much in the series, namely Galaxia and Arkanphel.
Epsilon: The decision to make Arkanphel a coward was something of our own spin on the character, as it is not explicitly supported by the Guyver manga (to date), though it could certainly be read into some of his decisions. But it worked out well to allow us to neatly write him out of the story without yet another fight scene, which provided a suitable close on the other half of Tethys' ambitions (the diplomatic half), as well as bring up that it is not absolutely necessary to punch all the world's problems in the face.
Blade: Contrasting Arkanphel, our interpretation of Galaxia was pretty much completely out of whole cloth, up to and including us retconning a Third Circle event into her backstory. But it fits, damnit. She also got arguably the best character description in the entire fanfic. "Armour and glory" indeed!
Epsilon: Annoyingly, we had actually planned on the order of those confrontations being reversed, so that Chris could, you know, actually do something when Galaxia showed up. But the flow of events forced the Galaxia confrontation so early in the chapter that Chris was still busy playing with his Pink Realdolls, and thus we had to reason why he would completely ignore her after going on and on about how undefeatable she was. Like several other such screwups in the fanfic, this actually turned out way better than our original plan, since it fits beautifully into the Chris arc that he wasn't paying enough attention to act because he was waiting for Galaxia to, you know, blow up the Earth or something.
Blade: Yes, so the Chris arc is obviously one of the main foci of the chapter. Ironically, his big finale is really kind of pathetic, starting with him being completely verbally emasculated by figment-Link early in the second half of the chapter. It was a very good idea to use Elysium as an excuse to break up Link's "this-is-how-the-world-works" rant, for several reasons. First, it considerably shortened what would otherwise have been a staggeringly huge scene of a second-tier villain talking. And talking. And talking some more. Second, it allowed us to throw humour into the scene, like skipping Ukyou and Link "having words" about Link trying to kill Hotaru. Third, it kept us from completely destroying Chris's heat until the second half of chapter 29, wherein we have revealed that the real danger is Kalia anyway. By the end of Chris's arc, the readers have realised that ultimately, his fate is of no consequence to the main plot, as had been our plan all along (as we've related ad nauseum throughout Technique). What it is important about it is Akane's character arc coming to a close, and also coming full-circle: Chris entered the main plot as he tried to kill Akane to take possession of her body, and leaves it as he dies because she won't let him take possession of her soul.
Epsilon: We were also pleased that the Chris's-Private-Room-Full-Of-Pink-Realdolls scene came out pretty much as creepy as when we first envisioned it back when Pink and Akane were chatting in the bath in Book II. Even more so was that Chris pulled off perhaps his best spiel of bullshit in the entire fanfic, making it sound completely reasonable and sane that he hung around in a room constantly resurrecting and then rekilling his dead girlfriend.
Blade: But it was totally okay, because he was just going to erase her memory of her mind being ripped from the point of her soul's dissolution into the future, lingering in a soulless shell until it ran out of steam, and then murdered again thousands of times. It's what she would have wanted. And if wasn't, it would've been when I was through with her. And on that note, if Akane doesn't want to be mindraped, she should stop being so stubborn, amirite?
Epsilon: It turns out that Akane's real superpower was just the ability to say "no". Which bit the Nameless in the ass since it's why she was able to keep going off-script in Chapters 20 and 27, but finally serves its original purpose here as she resists Chris's attempts first to dominate her mind, and then to turn her into a new fetich soul for him.
Blade: I have to give you kudos, by the way, for the "mindrape" scene, which turned out very different than every other such scene I've read due to it being written from the perspective of Akane's altered mind, rather than her original mind trying to resist the mental domination.
Epsilon: That was a last-minute decision because the typical "struggle against the power" scene wasn't really working for me. This format, aside from novelty and creepy value, also allowed us to get across just how effective it was. It's quite clear that virtually anybody else would have succumbed and become Chris's ally.
Blade: But yes, as I said, by this point, you know Chris isn't going to do anything significant. All that's left for him to do is get eaten by Paradox, a process we tried to make as disturbing as humanly possible. The real struggle is in Akane's character, wherein she has to first reject the temptation of godlike power (by proxy), and then force herself to watch Chris die when at any point she could have saved him (which, for Akane, is by far the harder choice). Ultimately I felt this was a great ending for her character arc.
Epsilon: Despite what many people - including me - might have believed, the final Link scene in the middle of the chapter is actually not just for Chris to give one more sloppy kiss to his beloved messed-up minor character. In fact, it turned out to be necessary foreshadowing, as Link's speech to the Juraian tree explains in detail exactly how Chris switching bodies had allowed him to temporarily escape the Paradox (by shifting his "identity" to someone else's, he confused the Paradox for awhile, and stronger "identities" like manga characters worked even better), and thus also explained why this tactic wouldn't help him at the end (because he had completely subsumed any other possible identity in his overwhelming ego). This is symbolised by the fact that when he took over Washuu's body, he just transformed into "his" body (which, at this point, really had nothing to do with Chris the KoF character).
Blade: Plus, it meant no more damn gender-benders. Which was important. After all, I was trying to seduce Akane and it would have been just weird if it had had yet more lesbian overtones.
Epsilon: And "lesbian overtones" leads us to the Akira/Angel/Kalia plot, the other main plot arc that wrapped up this chapter, and which we actually liked a bit more than the Akane/Chris stuff, mainly because it had more fighting and cthulhoid monstrosities.
Blade: And plot advancement.
Epsilon: Oh yeah, and that. And kudos to anyone who caught the exact moment near the end of the first half of the chapter when Angel's faith in Chris as a divine saviour finally breaks down, represented by her no longer referring to him in capitalised pronouns. This leads directly into her scene which kicks off the second half of the chapter, where it rapidly becomes clear that Angel really has no idea what to do anymore and is just sort of hoping that somebody will convienently kill her. But then runs into a snag when she finds she doesn't want to kill Cologne, the main way to guarantee that happening.
Blade: The scene with Angel and Cologne talking is the last one in the series (before the epilogues) where we wrote it as a back and forth conversation with each of us talking "in-character". And finally, after all this time, it actually worked, and turned out awesome, as opposed to all those painful Chris/Ukyou conversations back in Book 1. We actually have Cologne refer to this obliquely. The funny thing was, by this point we were extremely reluctant to kill Cologne, because she was so cool. But we'd foreshadowed Kalia taking vengeance on her so much that we pretty much found it necessary to do.
Epsilon: The scenes immediately before and after Kalia showing up were the hardest to write in the chapter, and we both took several shots at it before we came up with scenes we liked, which both for some reason included JunJun giving a big speech. Which had the bonus benefit of justifying the Amazoness Quartet's character arc, given that Akira had stolen the climax of it last chapter. A lot of readers unfortunately had a hard time buying the transition between the extreme angst of those two scenes, then leading into Akira and Angel being buddy-buddy and joking back and forth in the following scene. That was our fault, we admit it. We knew it was a problem and that was a good chunk of the reason the scenes prior had been rewritten so many times, but it still wasn't as smooth as it should have been. In our defence, however, it's important to keep in mind that both of those characters have a habit of hiding their serious emotions, and also that, uh, quite frankly, neither of them know Cologne from a hole in the ground besides "some chick who tried to kidnap us for Chronos in Chapter 22".
Blade: That being said, the banter between them was useful and fun as a way to catch up Angel (and thus the readers) on a express version of what the hell had gone on to lead Akira to this point. Also allowed me to point out what I thought was the fairly hysterical fact that, in all of Book III, Angel had never clued in that Ukyou was anything other than Akira's "old friend".
Epsilon: Which brings us to Akira's development in this chapter. All I can say is that despite the flaws and negative reaction to the third sidestory, I am profoundly glad that we wrote it. It gave a basis for me to write Akira's slow descent into transcendent madness, which without the point of reference granted by the sidestory, would have been... tricky, to say the least.
Blade: Perhaps my favourite scene in the first half of the chapter that doesn't involve Link is the start of this, where Akira is all too aware that she is slowly becoming like Kalia (aided by Kalia helpfully showing up, telling her this is so, revealing her entire plan, saying "nyah nyah, you're going to help me and you can't do anything about it", making yet more obscure references to Zoroastrianism, quoting her El Hazard self and a few other people, and then throwing Akira off a planet), is terrified of this beyond measure, but cannot stop it. Thus culminates (perhaps predictably, yet probably still to the surprise of many) when she, in fact, cannot stop it.
Epsilon: What I love is that Akira's arc plays right back into the conversation she had with Ukyou in an earlier chapter where she advised Ukyou not to worry about what would happen to Akira when Ukyou used her powers, and instead just focus on the situation before her. Akira then becomes the first character in the entire fanfic to give good advice, and then actually take it herself. She knows she cannot defeat the Paradox, and therefore the only option open to her to avoid becoming just like Kalia is to give it all back to Ukyou and hope that Ukyou can deal with it despite the fact it has been a given that if that happened, Ukyou would die. And so that's what she does.
Blade: So, in her grand finale, I just want to note something very important, which is that Kalia as we made her in Hybrid Theory was COMPLETELY FUCKING AWESOME. Everything she does in this chapter is just filled to the brim with yummy creepyness like a jelly doughnut stuffed with Cthulhu. I was especially proud of the scene where we see the "real" Kalia, a skin stretched over the mouth of the Void. And then she gets one of the best deaths in the series, which is also one of the most horrific next to Chris's, if you realise that having a soul suddenly forced her to experience everything she'd ever done or had done to her, which was basically every conceivable and unconceivable thing. Oh, and uh, it happens to Sailor Uranus too. Sucks to be her.
Epsilon: The only real problem I had was that unless you read the scene very carefully, it was extremely easy to miss that Angel had stolen the Star Seed from Kalia and gave it to Akira. We knew how this had happened (Kalia had forced Angel to use her Void Chakra, which aside from heightening her pain experiences also made her preternaturally stealthy so that she could steal it without even Kalia noticing), but there was simply no room at any point to explain this so it happened completely by inference.
Blade: Now that we'd wrapped up the plotlines for every important character other than Ukyou, Hotaru and Pluto, we moved towards the climax that had pretty much been coming for the entire fanfic: Ukyou actually achieving the Third Circle.
Epsilon: It took a long time, well into Book II, before we knew how this was going to play out, though we knew how it was going to end by the time we introduced Hotaru. This actually allowed her to have the most cohesive character arc of any main character other than maybe Nabiki. It was also, I hoped, a suitably shocking revelation at the end of the chapter when you realise the truth about Hotaru's motivations. We had built her up be a tragic, somewhat sympathetic character who sincerely believed that they were being merciful by bringing the end to the universe. Then we reveal she is a complete hypocrite. Hotaru should have died when Anthy's Paradox hit her all at once (which is what really upset the Nameless into blowing up Akio in retaliation), but struggles to live on (in complete contrast to her own philosophy), and why? Not to bring on her plan. Not to fulfill the wishes of the Nameless, who she hates. No, everything Hotaru has done is completely out of spite. Ukyou is the source of everything horrible that happened to Hotaru (and it's a long list), and Hotaru refuses to die until she's made her absolute best effort to make Ukyou suffer as much as she has.
Blade: This is why only Hotaru could be the final villain, because nobody else could actually say they've had an even worse life than Ukyou.
Epsilon: The scenes where Hotaru summons up the ghosts of everyone Ukyou has killed or led to the deaths of to fight her (other than Yan Valentine, who got Oblivionised) was one I pretty much had planned from midway through Book II, when Ran died. And on that note, I'll give Chris credit for coming up with the notion of blatantly ripping off the Utena ending when Ran stabs Ukyou from behind.
Blade: It's really funny how Utena inspired so many of the themes and symbology used in the last couple of chapters, considering its fairly minor role within the series itself.
Epsilon: Ultimately it's important because it is the series that most directly matches the cosmology of the Hybrid Theory universe, in the sense of the Three Circles, what they represent, Paradox, et cetera. Many other series' had events you could shoehorn in there (Sailor Moon's Third Circle events, the Counterreactor in Tenchi being a fetich soul, et cetera), but it required squinting and a bit of massaging to do so. Utena matched everything we did pretty much exactly, and was very useful for that reason. However, that was only something we realised in retrospect. We threw it in because it matched our series criteria and Chris loves the series, and it was only much later that we made it an integral part of the underlying thematics. Specifically, this happened when Hotaru explains about how Anthy had been holding all the Paradox from seven years ago when the Nameless created the universe. I literally decided that as I was writing it, which made us look brilliant and justified the whole Utena subplot as being integral to the fic, but in fact had not been planned at all and we had never even taken ten seconds to think about the problem arising from Akio not actually having been a former Third Circle being.
Blade: Yep. Nobody pulls stuff out their ass that makes them look like they knew what they were doing all along quite as well as we do! Or maybe they do, and just no other author is silly enough to admit it.
Epsilon: This chapter, of course, ends on the cliffhanger of Ukyou going Third Circle and the readers not knowing what happens. This was planned basically from chapter 1.
Blade: Although what wasn't planned was the great dichotomy between how Chris and Ukyou deal with a huge burst of Paradox showing up to eat their souls. Chris tries to destroy it with his power; Ukyou tries to heal it. Although not planned, this provided a really great final word on who was the hero and who was the villain in this piece, despite everything.
Epsilon: The next chapter preview was also pretty much in my mind since before I wrote the first line of chapter 1 - it was the speech that was always intended to be the culmination of Ukyou and Aaron's journey to fight the Nameless. And then we start the next chapter and it's the biggest bait and switch in the entire series! Fun!
Epsilon: So, we come to the end of Hybrid Theory. You know, I don't actually remember much about writing the ending itself. I was sort of in a daze at the time, perhaps not realising I was about to actually finish. All I can really remember is that as I opened the document and placed "Chapter 30" at the top and wrote "In The End" after it, I was thinking to myself: "Damn, if we got through Chapter 28, this is nothing."
Blade: For what it's worth, I remember the whole "alternate universe" part of the ending as being added in part just so the end wouldn't be two scenes long. Since Aaron can't remember, he may have been joking when he said that.
Epsilon: I actually really like the way they worked out in practice, however. Basically, it showed two major things: just how much things had gone wrong throughout the story, and just how much of a dick the Nameless was (as if we needed more proof). It also allowed me to homage the final episode of Evangelion, and play once again with a few self-insert cliches.
Blade: What I think was really crucial to the series of scenes in the Nameless' "perfect world" was that most of them were from the perspective of characters other than Ukyou. It would have been too easy, otherwise, to dismiss them as "not real", as often happens when the villain offers the hero their heart's desire. But that was not true. The people in that happy, wonderful universe were every bit as real as those in the rest of Hybrid Theory, as could only be the case, since they were created the very same way. That was important in leading up to the climax, where Ukyou commits the unthinkable sin of destroying them all.
Epsilon: Yup. We told you way back that Ukyou was going to destroy the universe, and she actually did it. We do not bluff.
Blade: Well, except when we do. This event, however, brought Ukyou's character arc full circle. Her lashing out and destroying everything could be considered an extension of all the other times she was pushed and acted rashly, and this is true. It could also be considered true that this removed the last real moral high ground she had over the Nameless. But where the Ukyou from the first 24 chapters of the story would have broken (as the Nameless wished) and given in, Ukyou/Aaron, in the end, does not. Faced with an insurmountable obstacle, she finds a way around it rather than breaking against it. That's basically what the entire fanfic built up to her doing, so I'm very pleased (to say the least!) that it flowed logically.
Epsilon: Also, just so that you don't think we are geniuses... the "three rotating rings of information" thing that Setsuna notices in the end and saves Ukyou's proverbial bacon? Yeah, we realised we had entirely forgotten about them when writing the prelude. Hahah.
Blade: Yep. Our fault for forgetting our checklist. Probably they were supposed to come from the circuitry Bison left in her, which she'd use at a moment of great peril except Minako beat Rip, Ranma beat Bison, Tethys beat Gyro, Akira beat Pharoah Ninetyherenia X, and philosophy beat Alucard. In a way, though, it kind of works. We'd been running on the Nameless losing control of things since Book II, so it did make sense that at the end some minor detail of its plan would have slipped through the cracks.
Epsilon: And it made Pluto relevant to the outcome. She even gets a nice bit of last-minute subtle character development when we see her alternate universe self and realise that she refers to herself as Setsuna, which the "real" Pluto had never done. I personally like Ukyou's reaction to that; as if she knows that THIS Pluto has had a far better life, and Ukyou is about to ruin it.
Blade: And so she actually gets to live through the entire fanfic! Putting her in a class of two or three, depending on how you count it, with Ukyou/Aaron. Take that, DBZ!
Epsilon: Also in this chapter, we finally get to "meet" the Nameless. I had actually spent a great deal of time worrying about presenting it successfully when it appeared. Building up suitable villain heat for a character who never once appears on screen is really, really hard. Finally I decided to cop out and just go with having the Nameless exist as a pure nothing. Its existence as a non-entity had been discussed, but until around Chapter 27 I hadn't thought what that actually meant. Finally I came up with the "The Nameless needs a third party to perceive it and thus give it identity" shtick. This worked really well for a number of reasons. First, it let me sidestep the Nameless' backstory completely. Second, it allowed the existence of a "time loop" story here where the Nameless could lose (kill Ukyou even if she defies it) and yet still win. It's clear that if Ukyou doesn't stop it here, now, it may never be stopped. It also let me basically use all the characterisation I had built up for Hotaru until this point.
Blade: This all led very nicely to the Nameless' eventual demise, in a suitably ironic fashion. The Nameless set up Hotaru to be an implacable opponent to Ukyou that Ukyou nonetheless couldn't bring herself to kill. It also inhabited her as its voice and body in the world. But this was its undoing, because by inhabiting Hotaru, it became Hotaru. The Nameless only wanted to kill Ukyou because Hotaru did. And as that seemed more and more inevitable, it greedily sunk itself deeper and deeper into her, trying to get close to actually experiencing the moment where Hotaru would kill her, which would be profoundly emotional. Its greed to have that emotional experience, that reality, that being, was the entire reason the story existed... and is also why it got so deep it couldn't escape when Hotaru decided to kill it instead of Ukyou, and was so engrossed in the experience it had no backup plan because Ukyou had already destroyed everything else it could have hidden in.
Epsilon: It was actually an amazingly suitable ending, considering we had no idea how to do it for like 23 chapters. I also like that we managed to make the victory Pyrrhic to the end (because we are bastards). Despite Ukyou's (and Akira's and a few others') hopeful message that "you can always go back", Ukyou did not get to save Hotaru. In the end, Hotaru was just too consumed by hate to ever forgive Ukyou or live in the same universe as her. What Ukyou managed to do was convince Hotaru that no matter how much Hotaru may have hated Ukyou, that Hotaru was still a hero somewhere inside and that it was more important to kill the Nameless than to satisfy her own thirst for revenge. I had to make certain that Ukyou didn't do this through fighting or speech-making. In fact, I long ago (like back at chapter 15) resolved that Ukyou was going to defeat Hotaru in the simplest way possible ("a single word" was my ideal, but it didn't quite work out that cleanly).
Blade: And so after the big finale, then what? Well, a new beginning. Especially since Ukyou remade the world, we wanted to do a series of scenes to show that, even though Hybrid Theory was ending, the world didn't. Moreover, the world would keep growing, getting further and further from its anime/manga/video game roots. So, every epilogue scene was designed with the notion that "this is the first scene in someone else's story". As well, every scene starred an original character rather than a fanfic one. All but one of them turned out to be girls due to circumstances (Anthy's ward and Sailor Moon's heir could hardly be male, and it wouldn't suit a Nyuuchezu prodigy either) and us using a few preexisting original characters like Natalie and Petra, but meh, that's just sort of how Hybrid Theory was anyway. ;p
Epsilon: One thing that was touched upon both in the "perfect world" and epilogue scenarios was the fact that Ukyou had erased the concept of vampires from the universe. It was her actual Third Circle event that happened at the end of Book III. She was basically trying to make Hotaru's life better without changing Hotaru, and she was probably thinking "if Hotaru wasn't a vampire, she might be okay!" and went a little overboard. In the perfect world scenario it served as a nice WTF moment for the readers, sort of an example of what the Third Circle allows. Which is, basically, story control. Ukyou edited the world's story and removed Vampire from it in every way, shape or form. It's entirely likely Ukyou removed ALL forms of malevolent undead from the universe, with Umbrella-style mutants moving in to fill the gap. And yes, she could certainly have recreated them when she remade the universe... but she didn't want to. Vampires represented a lot of personal pain to Ukyou and basically everyone else, so she couldn't remake them and thus just jury-rigged the universe around their absence. If we had had more time to explore the ramifications, the idea that the zombie menace were actually still alive (if horribly mutated) would probably have been a plot point, but it was a little late to do so.
Blade: It did lead directly into the first epilogue scene, though! I basically jumped at the chance to write Natalie again, and decided to use the "no-vampires" thing to start a story about her backstory. For a very quick breakdown, the character Ciel that appears in that backstory is from a Japanese game called Tsukihime (you can find a translation online pretty easily) which I had become a fan of at the time. There was nothing stopping it from being in Hybrid Theory aside from no character from it appearing, and it tickled me to have an epilogue revealing "this entire story and all its characters were around, but the HT world was big enough that we never caught a hint of it". Now, Tsukihime had a whole bunch of vampires, including one that was integral to Ciel's original backstory. Those of course would have been wiped out, and the world would have papered over the gaps like it did by turning Millennium/Umbrella into just Umbrella. But Ciel's a little tricky, because she is, herself, a time paradox. So with that, and Ukyou not knowing she existed when she recreated the universe, I figured her backstory in the HT universe might well have gotten mucked up in the "reboot". Thus Natalie remembers Ciel saving her from the undead of Millennium, but in Ciel's new vampire-less backhistory, her circumstances were changed enough that that didn't happen. Her anomalous status also neatly explains Link's keen interest in her by inference.
Epsilon: We, of course, cheated by having these "new beginnings" include a lot of old characters. Natalie gets to show us what has happened to Link. Blade had vague plans that at some point Link will turn all of England into a giant spaceship and fly off to do... something. Maybe go petition for a chairman's seat at the Jurai Academy now that Washuu is dead, who knows? ;p It also points out that Link is still far from overcoming her basic problems. She handily disarms Ranma and Minako, but has no plan for (and thus can't deal with) this nobody out of nowhere who decides to not go along with her script. This, of course, starts the theme that runs through all the epilogues. Essentially, after this point the story is no longer Ukyou's, nor is it the story of the people important to Ukyou. Since Link has to take Natalie's threats seriously, it points out that even powerful individuals are going to start being surprised as more and more people begin to exploit exactly what is possible in the Hybrid Theory universe.
Blade: Which leads nicely into the Hamadi El-Sayed epilogue. We deliberately had a "hero/villain" switch of perspective for each of these (at least by most people's definitions, yadda yadda). Hamadi is, first and foremost, a blatant ripoff of Aberrant's Count Raoul Orzaiz, another articulate defender of metahuman supremacy. He is advocating a philosophy on different grounds and has different powers, however, so it's all cool. The second point was to get something in from Africa, which had been neglected in Hybrid Theory as it sadly is in too many world-spanning stories, and more specifically to touch on Anakaris' kingdom, which had been referenced a few times but was in the same Irrelevence Pit as the rest of Darkstalkers. Thirdly, it allowed us to catch up with Angel and reinforce the point that her moral journey is far from over. Is she about to be used by Hamadi? Or is he the one that really ought to be careful of her? We left that point deliberately vague.
Epsilon: In case you're wondering, the things that show up are demon-zoanoid hybrids created by Zoalord Khan from Russia (where he has access to both in great numbers). Basically, for those unfamiliar with the Guyver manga, there is a trio of zoalords in the latter half that are basically really evil dicks and are obviously Up To No Good even compared to the rest of the zoalords (they are even extremely strongly implied to have killed Purgstall). Khan is the Chinese one, who ends up controlling Russia in Hybrid Theory world. In the new world we set up, we speculated that he and his two co-conspirators were going to remain behind on Earth when Arkanphel leaves and basically try their hands at being evil overlords for a while. Khan's plan was to start genetically modifying darkstalkers to create neo-dark-zoanoids! Yes, we put FAR too much thought into the epilogue stories, why do you ask?
Blade: For instance, that giant dome Yao Shui was guarding in the next one? It was actually seen first in chapter 6 when Chris first visited the Nyuuchezu village. I remembered it (somehow) and we then used it as the focal point for the scene. Apropos of nothing, while I really like all the "new" characters, Yao Shui was probably the most popular, and it's easy to see why: she's freaking awesome.
Epsilon: I'll admit, I stole a lot of her character from Shikamaru in Naruto, who was basically the only character I liked from the series. Still, even more than anyone else, Yao Shui points out that while the titles of "greatest this" or "best that" have been held by preexisting characters until now, the world is beginning to move on and other super-prodigies will soon be emerging. Also, the use of the dome gave us an excuse to do the "amazon village" joke we had been planning to use since the Quartet had met Cologne and which we thought was hilarious. As for what was in the dome? We don't know. It was put there by the Nameless for some reason... whatever it is, it's obvious Yao Shui's quiet life of slacking is over.
Blade: Then comes another preexisting character's scene, namely Sailor Sabre. Ironically, she took more work to develop the character for than probably every other epilogue viewpoint character combined. From the sidestory, we didn't know much aside from her bloodlust, crush on Z, and being a bit easily led. I struggled for quite awhile to come up with someone I considered compelling enough to star in their own story based on those ingredients. Then inspiration struck (in the form of my girlfriend), when she suggested that maybe I should reverse her crush on Z to make her more interesting. As soon as I thought "So why would it now be that Z loves her and she doesn't love him?", her entire character jumped into my head, and I ended up liking her very much indeed.
Epsilon: It also allowed us to showcase a lot of off-Earth stuff that had happened. We only realised later that, given the backstory we had created for her, all of the phages that Galaxia was using in her war would have vanished when Ukyou healed the Paradox. In case you were wondering, the reason Galaxia is moping around isn't exactly boredom or ennui. She is genuinely worried about Ukyou, who as far as she is concerned did the impossible. While she "knows" Ukyou gave up her powers, she can't really believe it, so she figures that she is doomed to lose the inevitable battle with Ukyou, which leaves her feeling unmotivated. On top of that, losing all the Paradox that had been eating away at her for eons also has left her a little off-kilter, resulting in her following very random whims. We got to introduce Schrodinger back into the story here, since as he wasn't a vampire, he wasn't wiped out by Ukyou. He manages to reinvigorate Galaxia, and explain why Earth isn't suddenly pulled into a celestial war. We are certain the amazing adventures of Schrodinger, Sailor Saber and (a very reluctant) Iron Mouse on Earth will be quite amusing. And bloody.
Blade: Next up was the epilogue dedicated to our Super Swedish Prereader, who had been quite interested in seeing more of Anthy after the finale of the Ohtori arc. We decided to oblige her, and the "shepherding the heir of Sailor Moon" plotline almost suggested itself.
Epsilon: We had to create a character that would serve as a suitable heir, of course. The kind of person who would leave a prayer for Gyro. I also decided to add in a bit of Utena to the character as well. This suggests that perhaps Anthy's interest in Yuzuki maybe isn't entirely based on her potential for heroism. I admit that I am a bit of an rpg player at heart, and the idea of the shards of the Silver Crystal incarnating in people across Japan after Nabiki's wish was just too good a plot hook to pass up. It also allowed us to use Twelve and Urien from Street Fighter III. As for what Urien wants with the Silver Crystal shards... probably bad things, all told. Which leads into the Petra scene.
Blade: At the risk of being self-aggrandising, I felt the question of what happened to Chris's followers, floating above the world in their Doom Fortress with their god very suddenly no longer with them, was one of the principal question marks left over from the HT plotline. Petra was the obvious viewpoint character, and I had decided well before I started that I did not want to write a small cabal of regular people trying to follow in Chris's footsteps and control the world from on high - because without a god helping, the notion was inherently ridiculous (no matter how often it gets used in fiction). So instead I wrote the scene around rejecting that notion, and it turned out that Petra's backstory lent itself well to the tale I was telling with her. She, like Chris before her, takes a little bit of inspiration from Watchmen's Ozymandias; her plan to throw the world into eternal chaos has a similar sort of Gordian-Knot-cutting vibe to it.
Epsilon: And also allows us to play a bit more with the Darkstalker mythos. Which is obviously going to be important post-Hybrid Theory, I guess. The card game at the beginning allowed us to sneak in some exposition about the world in general, as well. I think another key thing to note here is that we aren't using this story as an indictment of religion. Certainly as we point out it can be manipulated to damning ends, but basically Hybrid Theory points out how everything can be manipulated to damning ends. Religion is just another thing we were cynically showing the dark side of through the fanfic.
Blade: Besides, it'd be hard for Ukyou/Aaron to be an atheist when they literally met God and then got someone to kill him. I'm pretty sure that's heretical, but not atheistic. Anyway, one more note on the Petra scene is that the end of it revealed a bunch more of those great little ironies we love so much. Namely, that Chris could have easily saved himself. He had an entire floating mountain full of loyal followers, Petra included, who would have jumped at the chance to become his fetich and have their souls slowly eaten to save his. His obsession with Akane blinded him to this; perhaps even more so, the fact they weren't "real" characters blinded him. In the end, maybe he really did suffer from the same flaw of thinking that Ukyou did back in Book I. On Petra's end, the irony comes in that she was a hard-nosed cynic of Chris even before he died, that she ruthlessly erased the evidence of how he died in order to keep the band together, that she dismisses the starry-eyed notion of continuing Chris's plan and in fact thinks his plan was wrong from the start... and yet she's still so enraptured by him she nearly kills herself just trying to feel close to him again, and literally cannot bring herself to verbally deny his divinity. She's a believer, and truth can't sway her so easily.
Epsilon: And then the final new-character epilogue scene. We had remembered that we married off Tofu to some anonymous Chinese refugee, so we decided to run with her as the POV character. The goal here was to create a character who didn't really fit into the character types we had created before. Feng Xian was decided to be a compulsive thrill-seeker, easily bored with anything she had done before. Thus it made sense that she would run into Tofu. We actually created a whole backstory for her, including the fact that she had personally tested out each Jyusenkyo pool at least once, in order to get a better notion of her character. She turned out to be really loopy, so we made her smarter than she first appears; she easily grasps all the dynamics of the conversations between the main characters, despite knowing virtually nothing about them. The decision to make her Sailor Uranus also fit, though what many readers might forget is that the last incarnation of Uranus wasn't Haruka Tenoh, but Kalia. This may not mean anything... but she did have a strange reaction to Angel that wasn't explicable by her being Sailor Uranus. It's one of those plot hooks we just dangled out there to show that things were not yet finished, even for our heroes.
Blade: And just for old time's sake, we did the "I suppose you're wondering why I called you all here" gag again. It was deliberate this time, though. I think. It's also worth noting that this scene was the fulfillment of a promise from just a bit past the halfway point of the fanfic, in the conversation between Akane and Tofu at the not-Nekohanten. Akane said then that one day, all of them - all of them - would get together and laugh about all of this. This wasn't generally believed by the readers at the time, since the fic was heading dark places. But we'd always intended her prediction to come true. And so that is the penultimate scene, and Akane and Tofu (and almost every other hero of that time) are indeed both there.
Epsilon: And finally we end the whole shebang with a quiet little scene between Akira and Ukyou. Even the prereaders who had, to this point, remained unsold on their relationship were largely sold by this scene. I think it's because Ukyou finally truly opens up to Akira, telling her the one thing that she has never told anybody else. The full truth. Thus the story goes full circle and the entire thing actually ends on a high note.
Blade: Yeah, I really liked that scene myself. And so we were done, after almost four years of working on Hybrid Theory. Much like we're almost done this, after, uh, almost half that long working on an annotation of Hybrid Theory, which is kind of really, really sad. Before we hit our closing comments, as usual, it's time for Obscure Reference Theatre! The Musk rhinoceros-girl that Yao Shui fought was a reference to a sidestory/visual novel to Hybrid Theory I'd considered doing, where one such character was involved; the unfortunate Sailor Archer who got discombobulated by Galaxia was another reference to Fate/Stay Night, much like Sailor Sabre and Dragontail were; the Masstricht Treaty was the foundation of the European Union in the real world (okay, this is probably not obscure to Europeans); and the Idarat al-Mukhabarat is Syrian intelligence.
Epsilon: So... final thoughts about the whole shebang? Well, looking back, I'm glad we did it. It is the first major work I've ever finished and I think I learned a great deal from it. I never did it for the fans, so the tepid fan reaction never bothered me. As I've mentioned elsewhere, it's probably the end of my published fanfiction career (though that doesn't stop me from writing junk stories). In many places I can see where we went wrong, but when I read through it again, especially the last two chapters... well, I was genuinely caught up in it again. I really do like it, a lot. I'm glad it's out there. I would like to thank everyone who ever took the time to read it, double thank anyone who ever left a review and triple thank our great and hard-working prereaders.
Blade: With a quintuple thank you (yes, skipping a rank) for a certain prereader without whom the whole work would be immeasurably worse, and by now she'd better know who she is. As for me, I'm also glad we did it. My experience was different from Aaron's, as I was largely directing antagonists and side characters, but I still learned a huge amount in writing the story. Writing Chris and reacting to how fans reacted to him was extremely enlightening; even more so (but more personally) was writing Shampoo, a character I used to hate, and learning that not only could I love such a character, but that loving them made their character infinitely more interesting and compelling. In one sense, I'm almost glad Technique got delayed so many times, because it's only after so long that I could really read Book III especially again with fresh eyes. I was actually almost scared to go back to it after so long. But in the end, despite numerous flaws... it's good. In some places, it's really good. And there's definitely not anything else out there quite like it. I hope any of you still here enjoyed it, and I hope you also enjoyed us delving back in to give some insight into our thought processes, intentions, screw-ups and successes. But now, it's time to finally close the page on it and move onto something new. Hopefully it'll be just as much a step forward from Hybrid Theory as Hybrid Theory was from our previous work. But no matter what else it may be, one thing you can take to the bank:
IT WILL NOT HAVE ANY MORE GODDAMNED GENDER-CONFUSED CHARACTERS.
Or lesbians.
See you there!