frice2000 wrote:I'd bring up the possible love bit here. Makes it more powerful, but it's already pretty strong in that way too just another added spice. Something physical she does to the body before she moves on, like closing his eyes or something might add to it too.
Hmm, I'll play around with it, see what I can work in. The tricky bit is that in the state of mind I have her in, any more subdued kind of action like that would have to wait until she'd calmed down a bit more, and "calmer" was a point which I didn't feel I could realistically get her to without spending a disproportionate amount of time there. That was why I went with Tofu having to pull her away, and having her calm down off-screen.
Define way. Say human maybe? Make it about her growing humanity or growing mortality and morality? Just leave that part less up to question make us feel her psyche in that fashion.
The idea I was trying for was basically the way of healing (i.e. what she was doing to the wounded guy) vs. destruction (what Metallia was about to do). I'll try to find a way to associate the ideas more clearly, maybe change up the order to link them tighter. Thanks for pointing that out!
Very nice additions. Definitely adds to the piece. Do wish maybe you put one in after the reset too though.
I know, sorry, it is a nasty place to leave it. But unfortunately just one more scene wouldn't really get us to the point where we'd get the real answers anyway, and it'd open up a can of worms that I think'd feel even more awkward as an ending.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Cheb wrote:The SM line of events going exactly as it did in canon feels demeaning to the sacrifice made by the the martial artists army. Not that, but ridiculous. Didn't wounding Beryl change anything?
Oh, it definitely changed something. It reduced her from the holy-crap-army-obliteration-level magic she was using against the Musk in that fight to being only able to manage the single-crystal-attack-from-a-backstab that we see in canon.
In short... Well... I'd
really hoped to make this become clear to the readers in-story... to have the plot events themselves reveal it rather than just calling it out on a meta-level... but I guess I wasn't a good enough writer to pull that off in the end. And after this chapter I've pretty much blown my last chance at revealing it anyway... so I'll just say it flat-out: this fic was, from the very beginning, never intended as an AU. The idea was never "Ranma does a bunch of stuff, but somehow, despite that, everything in canon goes exactly as it did before", but rather "Ranma does a bunch of stuff, which is, in fact, the
reason everything in canon ends up going the way it does."
Part One and the interlude are, essentially,
interquels. Well, from the Sailor Moon side, anyway. The interlude is, of course, a continuation-fic from the perspective of the Ranmaverse.
Heck (though it wasn't obvious back then) I'd locked myself in as early as chapter
seven of the previous fic, when I introduced the Darkmistress as possessing the magical headpiece that we'd expect her
subordinate to have... and which she only receives as a result of Mousse killing the previous owner during the events of the fic itself. The scene in chapter 22, where Modra takes the headpiece from the Darkmistress's remains, was my first real attempt at making this all explicit.
When that didn't really work, I tried to throw in another hint in the subsequent chapter: the scene where it's actually Modra who suggests the love-boat plot to Thetis as an oblique way of disgracing Jadeite, to kill him for what he knows about her failure in Nerima. But what I was
really pinning my hopes on was the epilogue: having the airport scene play out exactly, word-for-word according to canon... with Ranma's behind-the-scenes intervention being the reason for Tuxedo Kamen's never-quite-explained survival.
And actually, I did get a few "
Aha! Now I see how this all fits together!"-type reviews in response to that--which was the exact response I'd been hoping for. So, at the time, I thought I'd pulled it off. At least to an extent. But reaction to the interlude quickly disabused me of any notion I might've had on whether I'd done a good job of communicating the interquel-ness to most people. But I still had one last chance to have it come out in the text itself... which was this chapter.
The martial artists' attack being the reason Beryl only sent five youma after the Senshi, instead of sending the entirety of her army. And also their attack being the reason all those youma we see in her throne room have suddenly vanished by the time Sailor Moon actually makes it there. And Beryl's injury being the reason she just basically sits out the entire fight--except for her one crystal attack--and then gets one-hit-killed by a single rose. And Ranma's intervention being the reason Sailor Moon is able to not quite die, when everything canon had ever said to that point indicated that it would be "final curtains" for her to do that, like it was for her mother.
Anyway, yeah, as I said, my hope was to have this revealed in-story, but looks like I wasn't able to really pull it off very well. That's the gist, though.
Man, it's a relief to finally have that off my chest...
I believe in the canon SM made her wish when she was dead. Not dying, but already dead, departing this world. GInzuisho was later shown as a metaphysical object interacting with ghosts with the same ease as it does with living persons.
Well, just from looking there's no way to canonically say for certain whether she'd
completely died at a given point. And while the Ginzuisho is shown as able to bring people back to life, it's clear that while she could send her subjects forward to be reborn, Queen Serenity
wasn't able to do so for herself when she gave her life to the Ginzuisho to do so. And it's repeated over and over again as the ending approaches that the same thing will happen to Usagi if she does it.
Having things play out the way they did bought me two things with respect to this story. First, it provides an explanation for why it
didn't go the same way as before, namely that Usagi never
quite died. And second, it provides something for Ranma to do in the actual endgame, rather than just being a spectator, which just felt a bit awkward to me.
Fellow Sufferer wrote:But there very well could be another explanation for this: that exactly thanks to these sacrifices the SM canon was as it was. If there was no martial artists army attacking, Beryl would've sent her own forces to utterly crush the Senshi at the North Pole, and that would be that. Game over.
Serenity even said so to Ranma - that it was only due to him and his allies' efforts Sailor Moon was able to even face Mettalia.
Yep, that's exactly what I was shooting for.