#but I spent waaaaaaaay more time on Crystal

[hishap]

my question is who doesn't try to speedrun all the gyms and the elite four with just their starter alone, type weaknesses be damned

Dude that’s how I would beat Crystal like all the time

My starter was so overpowered with all the grinding and “I don’t remember what this enemy’s weak against so I’ll just bruteforce it and use my high-level starter again” stuff I’ve never realised that one gym leader with the Miltank was supposed to be challenging until years later when I saw other players recall their frustration

Even now, I recently got the Crystal re-release on my 3DS and Killer the Feraligatr just took down the Elite 4 on his own

[takerfoxx]

Notes on Restless

A day overdue, but here it is! My thoughts on writing Restless.

Restless is, in many ways, the most important arc in the story, not because it is the most plot or character significant (though it definitely is very important to both), but because it was one of the first, if not the first story arc I planned out, and have been cooking up in the back of my mind and working toward ever since this story started. And, as indicated by the title, it is one big reference to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Restless, which is my favorite episode and also featured all of the main characters trapped in their little dream worlds.

What can I say; I like dream sequences!

In fact, and I know I have mentioned this a few times already, but it bears repeating the first chapter of this arc was literally the very first scene I thought up for this story, back when I was still in post-episode 9 depression and wanted nothing more for Kyoko and Oktavia to reunite somewhere and be happy together (well, the story definitely gives us the former, but, um, not really the latter, because I am still a sadist). If memory serves, my original vision had the two of them and Mami relaxing in a fantasy-world hot spring that had a bunch of big crystals everywhere (because I like crystals), only for them to be interrupted by the sound of something moving nearby, and, upon inspection, they would find the doll version of Charlotte watching them.

Obviously that scenario’s gone through a lot of fine-tuning, especially when it comes to Charlotte. And the crystals got moved to the end of the story after the hot spring had been removed, but hey, they still made the final cut. Regardless, I did settle on a finalized version some years ago, and the final cut came out more-or-less exactly as I envisioned, down to Mami and Charlotte going off alone for some, ah, quality time.

The only new addition was Jerky’s little scene and the Sayaka/Oktavia flirting sequence, and, well, that happened. I honestly don’t know if I’m even allowed to say much about it without getting into trouble with someone, even though I wrote it, but let’s just say the time has come to finally kick things into high gear on that end.

Okay, so onto the dreams!

Kyoko’s dream was of course the one I came up with first, and yet ended up being the shortest. I guess it’s because while she’s white-hot mess of issues, she’s at least a straightforward white-hot mess of issues, and honestly, it came out more-or-less how I initially planned years ago, with very little addition.

Now, Mephisto gave us a pretty clear breakdown of what the individual girls’ dreams meant thematically when she started torturing them directly, but it bears repeating that Kyoko’s dream was mainly dealing with her poor reaction to loss (the concept, not the meme), specifically the loss of Sayaka to Oktavia, and her stubborn and yet misguided quest to bring Sayaka back at any cost.

We start with a perfect repeat of her dream from waaaaaaaay back from chapter five, when she was first waking up from being drugged. I was originally just going to begin with the continuation, but it had been so long since that chapter that I just copied and pasted the original dream so we can have it in its entirety, which included the all-important image of Sayaka dissolving into silver fishes.

From there it’s mainly Kyoko’s singleminded quest to find Sayaka at any cost. And from there, we see her think that she’s found her time after time, only to be disappointed, from thinking that Madoka was Sayaka (and it’s a shame that they never interacted more beyond that single episode, as they had a good dynamic), to nearly catching the silver-fish Sayaka only to have her torn away, to finally finding the fake fish-faced conductor Sayaka, further establishing her inability to accept Oktavia as not being Sayaka. The hole that her father left in her heart and how deeply she misses him even with what he did does come up, but she abandons catching him once Kyubey makes it clear that doing so is impossible, as well as showing that while she still loves her father, part of her still does not forgive him and she truly believes that he went to Hell.

Also, was that the first time I’ve had Kyubey show up and have original dialogue? Because it might be!

Mephisto’s first appearance has her occupying the same role that she would in everyone’s dreams, that of a surly gatekeeper. She’s a bouncer in Kyoko’s dream, a ticket-taker/ride operator in Sayaka’s, a hostess in Mami’s, and a receptionist in Charlotte’s. And in each one, she lets the dreamer pass while making it clear that doing so is probably a bad idea. Her design was a lot of fun, though there truly is no significance to her rainbow dreadlocks, punk-rock aesthetic, or denim outfit, other than I liked the way they looked. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Annabelle Lee and the dockengauts have very short appearances in the nightclub, as despite all the pain they’ve put Kyoko through, she is still so singleminded in her pursuit that she considers them nothing more than obstacles to be overcome, which Annabelle Lee would probably be annoyed to hear.

As for Mami’s weird striptease, well, Kyoko is just now having to grapple with her own budding sexuality, and it stands to reason that Mami would have been an early crush for her. The “ending” though shows that while she’s more-or-less okay with Charlotte, she is still very aware of how Mami died.

Like Annabelle Lee, Elsa Maria would have the same role in everyone’s dream, the same role she had in Annabelle Lee’s feverish dream during the Help arc, that of the person who points the way to what the dreamer is seeking while still advising against it, which is always ignored. Though don’t read too much into her working with Mephisto in the end, as it’s not the real Elsa Maria and Mephisto is still the one in control.

And what better place for Kyoko, now Ophelia, to start her quest to find Sayaka for real than the same train station that she originally lost Sayaka in?

Anyway, while this chapter came out basically as originally envisioned, there are a couple things that I wish I had included, firstly a scene where Kyoko loses her necklace while being swept along by the current for Sayaka to find it later, and to have the sound of the crying child from the beginning to continue throughout the whole chapter, showing that she still hadn’t forgotten her quest to find her sister, as impossible as it might seem now.

Sayaka’s dream had largely to do with her and Oktavia’s issues with personal identity, and the dichotomy that Oktavia feels at all times, but translated through Sayaka’s eyes. In fact, bits and pieces of both their personalities are present through the circus (and given that Rumia’s dream took place in a circus in Imperfect Metamorphosis, it does just seem to be a recurring theme with me). The whole knight in shining armor for Sayaka is obvious, as is her sense of righteous justice as what Lily did. But her dynamics with the various characters that she comes across, her memories in general, her growing attraction to Kyoko, and her annoyance at being addressed incorrectly is all Oktavia.

It’s the two Kyoko encounters I want the highlight. The first at the shooting gallery shows that while Oktavia does love Kyoko, she is getting quite fed up with the constant nicknames in place of her actual name, while the second in the dunking tank shows her growing concern that Kyoko’s dogheaded persistence is only going to keep getting her hurt until there’s nothing left, as well as show her growing sexual attraction to Kyoko as she is progressively more stripped.

Mami and Charlotte’s brief appearance was in part to get them on the dream, and so show that that while Oktavia cares for them deeply, she’s not nearly as worried about them as she is Kyoko, hence why they’re here so briefly. Also, them pushing Ticky Nikki around in a stroller, aside from being Nikki’s only appearance this whole arc, was also a tip of the hat to the original Restless episode from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as Giles’s dream had him and his girlfriend pushing a stroller around through a carnival in the middle of a graveyard.

The Freakshow was a mixture of the traumatic monsters both Sayaka and Oktavia had to encounter, from the various witch familiars and to Gertrud, the first witch Sayaka ever saw, to the witch form of Charlotte, who traumatized Sayaka deeply, to Brooklyn, who briefly showed up earlier and was sort of Oktavia’s nemesis in The Heist and targeted her specifically, which left a mark.

And that whole business with Annabelle Lee “pouring” Kyoko into the tank was to lean more into dream logic, where deeply personal fears tend to be translated through nonsensical imagery. I’ve had plenty of dreams where I’d “lose” a close friend or family member because they got turned into a jar of dried corn or something and I’d just be so devastated and obsessed with turning said corn back into my loved one, and it’d be very serious and emotional, and it wouldn’t be until I had woken up that I’d realize, “Dude, dried corn?” Plus, her guilt about stabbing Annabelle Lee was a reference to Sayaka’s own increasing guilt when she realized that she wasn’t the shining hero she had wanted to be.

The clown dance is pretty self-explanatory, in that Sayaka spent so much time killing witches and treating them like monsters only to become a witch herself. Plus, given how quick her downfall was, it serves to reason that she would think of herself as a clown. Plus, I just like Lily as a character, and wanted any excuse to use her as much as possible.

The whole bit with the train station acting as the loading gate for the roller-coaster is also fairly obvious. That’s where Sayaka became Oktavia, hence the cart turning into the wheelchair, or the coaster track leading into Oktavia’s barrier. I’m honestly not too thrilled about the coaster going through Genocide City, because while having it make an appearance makes sense, since it’s literally Oktavia’s first memory, but if I recall, I had the hardest time settling on a location for the rollercoaster to ride through before heading into the castle. I tried Freehaven, the outside of the high school, and returning to the circus itself before just settling with Genocide City, which honestly was chosen mainly because the deadline was coming up and I had to go with something. I guess it works though.

There really isn’t much to say about the reversed Kyoko/Oktavia fight, as it’s literally just a perspective flip of their final battle. Incredibly important and significant as it embodies the entirety of Sayaka’s aspect as the “Monster” of her dream and hammered in her connection to Kyoko? Absolutely. Has much that I can explain that isn’t literally sitting right on the surface? Nope.

We do get Mephisto basically spelling out Sayaka’s contradictory identity in her final days though, in which she was the valiant knight she always wanted to be, she was the damsel in distress that Madoka and Kyoko tried and failed to rescue, and she was the monster holding that damsel captive. No doubt that part was inspired by the meme of the Dragonborn princess paladin who was hired to rescue herself from herself.

From there, the “Monster” is slain, and the cute mermaid Oktavia von Seckendorff is born, the only time during her own dream that she makes a full appearance. She then is treated to a montage of Sayaka’s memories, but of course, they mean nothing to her.

However, I would like to point out what amounted to the payoff of a joke I had set up literally years ago. Readers of all my stuff might remember that way back in Rhapsody of Subconscious Desire, another story that took place in a dream world, Kaguya Houraisan was split into two identical copies of herself, called Head and Body, who encountered Oktavia swimming around in a large aquarium, who in turn shot them a rude gesture and swam off. Here, we finally see the inverse of that scene, which is why a couple of previously unseen twin girls showed up with no explanation.

Next is where the dreams start to converge. Oktavia finds Kyoko’s necklace (which, again, I wish I had included in Kyoko’s dream. Maybe in time I’ll go back and edit it in) and meets the silver fish’s from Kyoko’s dream, absorbing them and turning fully into the princess and, as a result, Sayaka Miki finally returns in full.

Funny thing about that.

At this point, I didn’t know how much the whole Sayaka thing would play out, and originally she would just be Oktavia in a dress. But after having Sayaka’s memories intrude again and again, I thought, “Huh, wouldn’t it be fun if she just became Sayaka again for a short time? Have a weird inverse of the Oktavia situation?” and went ahead and did it.

This choice led to…major consequences.

Mami’s dream is next, and despite being the one that I literally had planned out the least ahead of time, ended up being the most fun to write. Naturally, her dream dreams with her immense guilt over having been Kyubey’s poster girl for so long, helping him ensnare several innocent girls into his scheme as well as kill them off herself when they became witches. Also, it served as a little nod to Candeloro’s job as a baker in WN. Anyway, the whole thing was heavily influenced by Sweeney Todd, in that victims are misled into doing something they think is innocent, only for them to be gruesomely murdered and sent off to be turned into food.

The world of candles is just something I thought would be neat imagery, so infer from it what you wish. However, it is interesting to note that Mami is the only one to have a dream that features Annabelle Lee as the persistent antagonist that she is, showing up over and over to antagonize her. There wasn’t an intended reason for this, but come to think of it, with Kyoko focused on her endgame, Oktavia just wanting her friends to be safe, and Charlotte obsessed with what was lost, Mami would be the one most living in the nowness of their situation, convinced that she is finally in Hell for her sins.

In the restaurant, Mami is indirectly guilt-tripped by Shizuku for essentially abandoning all of her responsibilities to help Kyoko, and is then given a choice: abandon her quest and stay with her loved ones, or continue on with her “duty” despite all warning signs, thereby sealing her own destruction. Charlotte even goes so far as to beg her directly to not go on, but Mami refuses, saying over and over again that she is, “On the clock,” signifying how being a magical girl essentially took over her entire life after her parents’ death, and how full she threw herself into it to shield herself from her own loneliness.

And from then on, her fate is sealed.

While descending the long staircase, the father of Mami’s occasionally mentioned former crush Ryu Hagane shows up to chastise her for throwing her life way in making her contract, and then Mami’s actual love Charlotte shows up on the big TV to remind Mami of what she was now throwing away, and curiously, when she brings out the doll version of herself, it’s not to remind her of how Charlotte kill Mami (though the worms coming out of the doll’s mouth shows that Mami still hasn’t forgotten), but to remind her of how Mami had tried to kill Charlotte upon their first meeting, as her own guilt is more powerful than even the trauma from having her own head bitten off. Annabelle Lee emerges again, and in the process, the staircase is destroyed. Mami’s choice was made. There is going back.

Sure enough, when she enters the classroom, the marionette corpse of Kazuko Saotome (a reference to how she was killed and eaten in the Oriko timeline, in addition to just being very creepy) spells out to Mami’s face what an idiot she was for trusting Kyubey, how many lives she had ruined by doing so, finishing with Homura showing up to basically say, “I told you so.”

Annabelle Lee attacks again, and Mami is sent into a montage of battles she has fought since their disastrous adventure begun, but with each of her assailants being replaced at the last second by one of her friends, showing that even after forgiveness, she still feels like she’s their murderer, as well as driving home the point that in all of her battles to defend herself over the course of this story, she was still just fighting and hurting other magical girls, and regardless of which side they were on, they were all still victims of the same scam.

Annabelle Lee is finally defeated and put down, but there is no victory, only horror at what Mami had done. She flees, but finally finds herself in the Hell she always felt that she deserved, pursued by the zombified corpses of all the monsters that had defeated her, from Lily, who had stolen her mind and made her commit atrocities, to the wild girls, whom she had slaughtered, to the Worm, whom had killed her in her arrogance.

She escapes, but that just leads her back to the bakery, signifying that no matter what, the second she had made that contract she had been doomed. It didn’t matter if she was leaping through the sky in an extravagant outfit, effortlessly defeating monsters with her magic, or if she was sinking into her own despair with a darkening soul gem, it was all the same. She was just food for the Incubators, to be chewed up and discarded, thrown into the mouth of the Worm and run down by the same vehicle that had killed her parents.

She then wakes up in the hospital, reliving a twisted version of when she had been recovered from the car wreck that had taken her parents, taking her back to her first sin that still haunted her: only saving her own life with her wish and letting her parents die. And thus, she is turned into the same monster she had spent the last few years fighting: the witch, Candeloro.

The whole bit in the hospital was a twisted version of what it must have been like for the original Mami to wake up in the hospital and learn that her parents had died. No doubt Mephisto’s dream doctors would have continued to further twist the knife had Ophelia and Sayaka not violently intervened (which gives us a rare case of blood instead of mist). And Candeloro is brought into the party, and with a Cyberpunk reference no less!

Charlotte’s dream comes last, and in my opinion, is the most multi-layered. The bulk is focused on how bitter she is at having her perfect life with her wife stolen away and how many people she resents for it, her own feelings of helplessness at being unable to prevent it, and also it addresses her own guilt at having killed Mami to begin with and how much she fears the return of the Worm that did it, but also she seems to be the only person that has some subconscious awareness of how Homura is timelooping them over and over again, forcing them to relive the same torturous sequence of events (probably has something to do with Homura being the one who killed her after she ate Mami).

In the first loop, Mami is taken by Annabelle Lee, and Charlotte is totally helpless to stop her. This is pretty obvious: Annabelle Lee has been a thorn in her side since day one. It was because of her that they were ambushed in Cloudbreak and forced into their horrible adventure. And more directly, it was because of Annabelle Lee that they fell into the Etherdale to begin with, leading to them all being enslaved by Lily and Charlotte and Mami being forced to commit atrocities.

Also, it’s hinted that the city that Charlotte is forced to march through is the same one Kyoko had been following her father through in her dream, indicating that their minds are already crossing over.

The second is a little more complicated. Yes, Charlotte and Kyoko are on better terms. Yes, they’re getting along. Yes, Kyoko apologized and they bonded. But if it weren’t for Kyoko, then none of this would have ever happened. If it weren’t for Kyoko, Charlotte wouldn’t have lost her home, wouldn’t have been targeted by Reibey, and wouldn’t have to suffer being pursued by dockengauts and valks, two creatures that she has an acute phobia of. So there is still some hard feelings there.

The third is when Charlotte is forced to confront something about herself, that no matter how many people she blames, her own actions still played a part as well. Now she is the one riding the Worm. She is the one who cost Mami her life. And in the hospital, it was her misguided wish that cost her her mother, whether she knows it or not, as well as why she became a witch in the first place.

Couple notes about the hospital: first, the cheese slices do signify how Charlotte threw her wish away for something as stupid as cheesecake, but are also another reference to the original Restless, in which a man carrying cheese slices shows up in each of the characters dreams, just to be weird.

Also, Charlotte’s magical girl outfit was in part inspired by a 4koma MamiLotte doujin from before The Rebellion Story, in which Charlotte becomes human again and crushes on Mami big time. And her outfit consists of a double-breasted coat and skirt. Also there were parts taken from the character notes from Walpurgisnacht, in which one of her familiars is an early draft of Human!Charlotte, before Nagisa had been designed, and she’s depicted holding a staff topped with the wrapped candy charm.

The final loop is where Charlotte fully becomes Nozomi (a name I think I just took from another fanfic that gave her that name) and finally defeats the Worm, this time ridden by Homura Akemi. After all, Homura Akemi is the one resetting things over and over again, forcing Charlotte to relive the same terrible events over and over. And as for that rooftop meeting…well, explaining that would be telling, so infer what you will.

The next chapter is mainly spent playing catch-up, gathering all the characters together and pushing toward the final battle with Mephisto. Here, things get less symbolic and more character based, so there’s a lot less to explain. Ophelia’s path of destruction through Sayaka’s carnival and Mami’s school are basically in line with lucid dreaming, in that once you know that you’re in a dream, everything just feels so much less solid, leading Ophelia to take down the ravaged versions of Brooklyn and Annabelle Lee with ease. Also, that scene with her talking to the dying Lily was an American Gods reference, which featured a similar scene.

So let’s talk about the big thing with this chapter. Let’s talk about Sayaka.

Originally the plan was to go straight from Charlotte’s dream to the fight with Mephisto, but then I realized what a bad idea that is. I mean, Sayaka was back! It’s something that’s been hinted and talked about all through the story’s run, but now it’s actually a thing. The original Sayaka Miki, the one that fell into despair and became a witch, is now back, and without having merged with Oktavia and gaining her memories. She’s thrown literally into the middle of things, during the gang’s weirdest adventure yet. And, it should be noted, her most recent memory is literally sitting with Kyoko in the train station, right before she became Oktavia. That is one hell of a bad day.

Obviously she reacts poorly, and who can blame her? And give her credit, she pulled herself together pretty quickly. However, she did pick up very quickly on Kyoko’s feelings for her. And why shouldn’t we just start saying it? It’s obvious to everyone! But obviously, as short as it was, Sayaka’s brief return will have major consequences that will play out over time.

Anyway, obviously everyone else has their own identity crisis. Mami turns fully into Candeloro, which provides a measure of relief from her own shame, while Kyoko as Ophelia is the rare witch that remembers everything while still sticking fully to her witch identity.

As for Charlotte, her case as Charzomi is easily the weirdest, with her constantly shifting back and forth between Charlotte and Nozomi, and her own memories fading in and out, forcing her to work extra hard to stay focused. It’s been suggested that this might serve as a metaphor for gender fluidity, and while this wasn’t the intention and thus I can’t speak to its accuracy, I can see and support the applicability. Still haven’t worked out what the long-term consequences of that will be, but I do want this to play into her future character development.

The walk up the tongue was mainly me realizing that the fighting was going to start soon, and Sayaka was going away right after, so I had one last opportunity to make the most out of her presence and I was determined not to waste it.

So we ticked off the boxes on everything we ought to address with her. She cleared the air with Charlotte over having to watch Mami get eaten. She finally got to hug Mami (well, Candeloro anyway) and got everything she wanted to say off her chest. And with Ophelia, she naturally wants to know more about exactly what Kyoko has been getting up to with Sayaka’s other self.

Sayaka again confronts Ophelia about how she feels about her (or, well, Oktavia, or maybe Sayaka? It’s weird), and naturally she is kind of freaked out by it. Remember, from her point of view, her relationship with Kyoko had been nothing but antagonistic. Whether Kyoko had been attacking her or trying to help her, Sayaka always resented her presence, so now suddenly being dropped into the middle of things and learning that her one-time rival now has a thing for her? Well, can you blame her for getting a little freaked out?

Also, it’s worth pointing out how the script had been flipped with everyone’s new identities. Now it’s Ophelia and Candeloro with the witch names, while Sayaka still thinks of them using their old names, causing them discomfort, but she has no problem calling Charzomi whatever because they had just met and she didn’t care.

And then we get to the fight, and of course it has to be a pro wrestling match. I’d also like to point out that there were a lot of songs I wanted to use for this chapter but was unsure of where to put each one. Originally the climb up the tongue was just going to have generic thrash metal playing the background, while Mephisto’s entrance theme was going to start with Mr. Sandman, only to transition into Bad Reputation (which is Ronda Rousey’s RL entrance theme), but then I was like, I should put Welcome to My Nightmare in there somewhere. And then I remembered that Cult of Personality is a thing, which is also CM Punk’s entrance theme, so I finally decided to move the first three songs to the tongue scene and have CoP as Mephisto’s entrance music.

And finally, we come to the last chapter. The magical girl fight scene was another one of those checklist things I wanted to have so long as I had Sayaka around. That way, I could actually build some real KyoSaya moments to make the KyoTavi angst all the more potent, as Sayaka realizes that she is developing an attraction to Kyoko as they fight side-by-side, letting me recreate that magical little moment from The Rebellion Story in which Sayaka basically confesses in the middle of the battle, complete with Charlotte ruining the mood.

I’ll admit, I kind of skimped out on Mephisto’s witch design and didn’t give it as much thought as I could have, but that part was never important. The important part was to recreate a classic witch fight and let the girls interact during it. I am proud of the Charlotte’s Web joke though.

What happens next is to establish that it doesn’t matter how hard they fight or how smart they are, they simply cannot beat Mephisto now. She’s taken complete control, enough to flick them through their various personas on a whim turning them into Puella Magi, then to human!witches (basically the Walpurgis Nights girls), then to full witches, then to the classic squad from the bulk of the story (bringing Oktavia back briefly), then to vanilla humans. It doesn’t matter. Mephisto has them, and can do whatever she wants.

From there, she separates them again and subjects them to a condensed version of their previous dreams, with the same themes but different imagery. Kyoko is subjected to a sermon about her poor responses to loss from her dead father, as he really lays into her over how much damage she had done. And I gotta admit, even I felt pretty bad just for writing that scene. Because I know torturing Kyoko is kind of this story’s MO, but damn.

Sayaka is a little more nuanced. Yes, the identity issues from her own dream are brought up, but it’s more focused on a new issues: mainly, now that Sayaka is back, she not only has to grapple with all the weirdness that she’s been thrust into, but also with essentially having been replaced. We see the vision of her friends getting along happily without her, the friends she had pushed away and alienated having moved on without her, Madoka basically having replaced her entirely with Homura. Of course this is not reflected in reality, as by this point in the world of the living they probably haven’t even found Sayaka’s body yet due to the time difference, but it is definitely that Sayaka would easily believe.

The next part is basically the whole reason for bringing Sayaka back in this manner. Mephisto then shows Sayaka a real memory that of Oktavia spending time with Kyoko, Mami, and Charlotte and being loved and accepted by them.

Sayaka’s character arc in the original series was driven by her letting her insecurities cause her to overcompensate and destroy herself, and Oktavia has largely been characterized as what Sayaka would be like if she didn’t have those insecurities. Sure, she’s had the shadow of the original Sayaka hanging over her, but for the most part this hasn’t seemed to bother her much, aside from getting annoyed at being called the wrong name, but it’s been taken for granted that sooner or later being thought of as Sayaka instead of herself by Kyoko was going to come to a head.

But here we have one of those happy unplanned gold veins, something I hadn’t planned on doing but am thrilled gets to happen now: we have Sayaka being forced to come to terms with living in Oktavia’s shadow.

Yes, they’re the same person. Yes, Oktavia is just Sayaka with her memory wiped and many of her self-destructive issues cleared away. But as WN demonstrated, it’s not as clear cut as that, and there is still some degree of separation between the two. And the infamously self-loathing Sayaka would most certainly be messed up by being confronted by a version of herself that people like and enjoy being around, that doesn’t feel the need to prove anything. And this is coming right off the heels of her realizing that she might have feelings for Kyoko after all (even if that is in part because of her empathetic connection to Oktavia), only to have it thrown in her face that it was Oktavia that Kyoko really loved, when she herself never did anything other than push Kyoko away. Granted, she had good reason for doing so, given that the first thing Kyoko did was try to kill her, but the point stands.

The Kyoko/Oktavia dynamic has always been messy due to Sayaka’s constant presence, but I kind of feel that that was unfair to Sayaka herself, as she deserves better than just being a memory, and I wanted her to have an actual voice in the whole deal, to be able to express her own feelings about it, even if it does complicate an already incredibly complicated situation.

Anyway, the next bit is pretty self-explanatory, with Mephisto further twisting the knife by replaying Sayaka’s last conversation with Madoka and really driving home what a wreck Sayaka had been at the time. Remember, from Sayaka’s point of view, that whole moment was only a few hours ago, at most!

Mami’s was very interesting, because the whole trial bit is self-explanatory, but it’s actually a reference to the bizarre trial that made up the final episode of the classic mindscrew TV show The Prisoner, which featured a jury wearing masks, the plaintiff sitting on an ornate chair on a raised platform, witnesses being pulled out of steam-filled holes, and an extended singalong of Dry Bones. Granted, I mainly knew about it because Reboot, one of my favorite shows, also referenced it in a dream episode of their own, but I liked that episode, and wanted to rip it off.

For the witnesses, we first get the expected faces from the show itself, but we also get a few new ones. Brooke Alexander was already named once before when Mami was reflecting on the various girls she had trained, Janice Goldberg was made up specifically for this scene, but we also get Michiru Kazusa, from the really weird spin-off manga Kazumi Magica, who was established as having a past with Mami. Kazumi Magica had its problems, but I did like a lot of the characters (i.e. The Twins), so this seemed like a good time to bring in another one.

Charlotte’s dream is the most straightforward, as it’s basically just her first dream condensed into a claw machine. What I wanted to put focus on was that Charlotte is the one character that knows who Mephisto is, as her role as the team scholar who does the most reading, she would actually have heard of the Ideal Witches, and thus would really understand just how much trouble they were all in.

And at the end of each segment, Mephisto gives each of them the same offer: submit willingly and be given a pleasant fantasy while Mephisto digests their souls, or continue to resist and get digested anyway, only in eternal torment. And her offer would give them each what they wanted the most. Kyoko wants her loved ones back, Sayaka wants to be loved and appreciated, Mami wants forgiveness, and Charlotte just wants to go home. And in light of what they were facing, can any of them be blamed for wanting to take Mephisto up on her offer?

Enter Jerky.

Jerky was a ton of fun to write for, and judging by the overwhelming positive response to his segments, bringing in the baby space raptor was a good idea. Like I’ve said before, his bits were one big love letter to Raptor Red, a novel by paleontologist Robert Bakker which tells of the life and times of a female Utahraptor from the Utahraptor’s point of view. And the nice thing about Jerky is that he’s smart enough to know the does and don’ts, but simple enough to be uncomplicated. He’s an animal. An exceptionally smart animal, but still an animal. He knows that he loves Kyoko and is loyal to her, he’s been made to understand that he can’t let Charlotte, Mami, and Oktavia see him, and he knows that Kyoko’s skin is softer than his and he needs to be careful, but beyond that he couldn’t care less of their various issues. It’s refreshingly simple.

As such, when confronted with a complete inexplicable threat such as Mephisto, something well beyond his ability to comprehend, he’s worried, he’s scared, he doesn’t know what to do, so he defaults to his predatory instincts.

When in doubt, start biting.

And it does the trick, because something that needs to be said is that while the Ideal Witches are powerful, they’re not omnipotent. Mephisto needed to lure the girls in and submerge them fully in her dream in order to control them the way that she did, but in the real world, she was vulnerable once she had manifested fully, allowing Kyoko to break free long enough to fire the final shot.

In the end, everyone escapes, but not unscathed. Kyoko especially had been scarred even further, in part from the dream of her father, but also from having to watch Sayaka basically die again, leading to her reaching what very well might be her breaking point. Mami’s slipping deeper into depression, having been forced to once again confront all the damage she unwittingly did as a magical girl, Charlotte is fully fed up with everything that had happened to them. And Oktavia? Well, now that it’s been shown that Sayaka Miki can and has come back, suddenly her own identity issues are going to become worse. She’s really going to have to grapple with Sayaka being an actual person with a legitimate claim to her body, especially since when Sayaka came back, she effectively traded places with Oktavia instead of merging with her. That’s gotta be scary.

At the very least, Kyoko did not reject Oktavia. In some way, she does understand that Oktavia is her own person, and she’s coming to respect that. But there are some deep wounds having to do with Oktavia’s creation, and they’re both going to have to come to terms with a great many things in the days to come.

And at the very end, it’s shown that Mephisto is weakened but still alive, and she’s pissed! We also learn that one of the girls did accept Mephisto’s offer before she was defeated, so that’s definitely going to come up later. And we meet the rest of the Ideal Witches. Obviously there is more to come with them, so I will say nothing further.

Anyway, I guess that’s it. Feel free to message me if you want anything explained further, or just make your own interpretations. Either is fine.

[takerfoxx]

“Fires of the Sun, Part 5″ Thoughts

It's a little hard to look back at these chapters months later and try to remember exactly when and why I made some of the decisions I made. However, for Utsuho, I'm pretty sure she got a major promotion from satellite character who'd show up maybe once an arc and be all nice and endearingly dumb to sort of the secondary hero of Fires of the Sun mainly because I loved her speech to Rin so much. Hell, depending on where you stand on Rin as an anti-hero, Utsuho really is the most classically heroic. Characters really can surprise you sometimes, and in this case she fully won me over just by being a genuinely good person who reached out to Rin when she had no good reason to. It sort of makes me want to have more interactions with those two in the future, though at this point I really have no idea how.

Another reason for her upgrade was me scrapping another, darker storyline. The original plan following The Storm was to have Yuuka release Satori from her crystal and then go on methodically torture her by forcing horrific images into her head over a course of several weeks, mostly for shits and giggles. I ended up not having room for that during this arc, and was going to just push it up to the next one, with Yuuka having managed to hang onto Satori's crystal after Elly rescued her, but in the end I just got rid of it entirely. I dunno, I know it's a dark fic and all that, but seriously, at what point do things just get cruel for the sake of it? I couldn't think of any of any real outcome for that sideplot other than to show how much of a monster Yuuka was, and we'd already had plenty of that. And with FotS ending on a bittersweet note, I wanted one unambiguously happy ending. So despite being betrayed and abandoned by Sakuya, she stepped up, took charge, fought her way through Yuuka's remaining plants (while dropping shoutouts to Wargames and The Last Starfighter along the way. Yay classic sci-fi!), stood her ground, and saved the day for her team, none of which lost any members and all of which came to finally respect her. So, yay Utsuho!

Rin's ongoing fight with Yuuka started with a scene that I almost scrapped as well but was able to use after all: albeit under somewhat different circumstances. Like I mentioned a few days ago, I had this one scene planned where Yuuka's just beating Rin to a pulp, Rin starts to feel that since she can't adapt she can't keep taking those blows, only for her to realize that she had at least built up an incredible tolerance for pain and managed to finally get up, stop Yuuka cold, and then pretty much start slamming her back and forth into the walls and floor like a Looney Tunes cartoon. Then I think the mob was supposed to break through the ground and send everything into chaos or something. Well, the whole fighting through the pain thing ended up happening way earlier when Yuuka was zapping her with the ring, and the mob thing ended up ending in a completely different manner due to reasons that I no longer remember (I think I wanted to avoid further distractions and just keep the final sequence between Rin, Yuuka, and Flandre). And as a result, I almost dropped Rin playing Whack-a-mole with Yuuka's body as well. But it snuck in, and Rin got to drive her through a bunch of pillars to boot. So, yay violence!

I got more of a kick out of Sir Fly than I expected. The dude is just so gentlemanly! And I got to wrap up the whole bug thing in a satisfactory manner. So yeah, always happy to see investments pay off. Though come to think of it, I could have given them a better exit. I just checked the next chapter, and there's like one sentence making mention of them leaving and that's it. Oh well.

Though by the by, Yuuka's screechy flower minions (which were a callback to the flowers that taunted Team Nineball when they first arrived in Yuuka's mansion, waaaaaaaay back in God I don't even remember) are totally patterned after Mad Dummy from Undertale. Hey, I didn't get to include Undyne, so I had to make it up to myself somehow. Besides, Undertale was all the rage back then.

And yes, it made me giggle to smash Rin through the fountain and have it pour water on her butt. Because I'm an adult.

One recurring problem I did have through this whole thing was the fact that Flandre was sort of kept in the dark about Patchouli's death. Hell, I didn't get to fit in her finding out about the SDM gang even being there until the previous chapter, and that took some forcing (at least I got a Rin/Flandre hug out of it). Granted, Rin had a lot on her plate at the time and just didn't have time to break the news to her. Or rather, I didn't have the room for a fully emotional breakdown on Flandre's part. I made the time for her to react to Sakuya's supposed "death" here because, well, things were wrapping up and it needed to be dealt with. I eventually decided to tie that final bombshell with Sakuya's later attempt on Rumia's life, even though I knew Flandre's reaction would make the scene messy, but more on that later.

Rin's reaction to getting stabbed with the mordite knife took some work. RoSD already established that Hourai Immortal's freedom from death was absolute, so of course nobody was going to die, but I wanted to drive home just how incredibly potent even that small speck imbued into steel was. The little trip back into RoSD did that nicely, with the little monologue on pain and showing that not even Kaguya and Mokou could withstand the agony, even as deep down as they were. I think I wanted to also show Nue and Mamizou being affected as well, but cut that for being sort of redundant. Or something. However, looking back on these chapters, I did make sometime of a mistake. I wanted to have one last Kaguya and Mokou at the end, showing them waking up just fine on the beach, bitching at each other over what had happened, and Kaguya storming away in an angry huff. But…I seem to have forgot. So…whoops.

Anyway, I had to keep redoing Rin's own internal monologue so it wasn't a rehash of Kaguya's. In hindsight it was a little long, especially since Kaguya already covered the essentials. But that's all right, because right after that I got to do one of my favorite things: go into my Chekov's armory, grab some long-forgotten plot device, and bring it back in horrifying fashion! Here, it's Yuuka's ability to read souls through staring into people's eyes. Why she doesn't use it more often, I don't know, nor am I motivated enough to bullshit a reason. Regardless, the last (and only) time she used it was to fact check Rin's history and subject her to a bunch of painful flashbacks. Here it was a little more abstract. Instead of memories, she went for baggage. She essentially fused Rin and Flandre's minds together and put them through a series of…I dunno, hallucinations? Nightmares? Well, representations of what burdened them the most. The first, in which they're strapped down and unable to stop Eirin from experimenting on Rumia showed how helpless they often felt, despite their immense power. The second, in which they stood trial, was more on the guilt they carried for the many and many innocent people they had accidentally hurt or even killed, and their fear that everyone would eventually turn on them because of it. And the last was their fear of being alone, of being locked up and abandoned in the dark like they had been for so long, and how much they preferred death to such a fate. Damn, I am so glad I ended up pairing them off, because they really do have a LOT in common. Though on a side-note, I did have a scene in mind in which a gate to Hell would open up in the darkness and suck up that crystal coffin, leading to it to fall into a giant eye made of fire, which would then transition into the giant Yuuka that taunted them. Why didn't I go through with it? Because I was really tired and creatively spent and just wanted to get this chapter up already. Looking back, I now wish I had just gone through with it and made it work, because it would have been a cool way to bridge things.

Flandre's childish crush on Marisa harkens back to the single scene they shared, in which an over-enthusiastic Flandre almost glomps Marisa to death. At the time it was just a funny bit, but once again it ended up paying off as a long-term investment where I got to show why Flandre likes Marisa so much. It's because Marisa was nice to her, when no one else was. She showed her a small, kind gesture that the witch probably forgot about a moment later but ended up meaning the world to Flandre. And it gave her the will to push back against Yuuka, and force her into a tour of her own greatest failures: the moment she was initially ejected from Yidhra (which was a total BITCH to write), completely with Nyarly making a little cameo, followed by Yuuka's first failed attempt to fit in with humans, and then showed that initial fourth wall break from her POV and capping things off with the moment in which Marisa fully broke her spirit by simply refusing to give her the satisfaction. And on a meta sense, we then get to see the moment she's finally kicked off the center stage, with Rin and Flandre literally dragging her out of the spotlight. A quick montage of everyone else wiping out the rest of the Mykr's Sirens follows (and I never want to see those again, let me tell you), and Rin finally gets to deliver (for her at least) the final blow. By saying "kyuu."

Hey, it's a Touhou fic. You have to make some allowances.