Wow, we're famous! This is Blade/Chris, dusting off his almost-forgotten EZboard account. Rob told me about the thread as he said; I just needed to wait until I had time to post, primarily because what time I had has been sucked up like a vacuum by Civilization.
I must admit, I'm totally tickled pink that you read the fanfic, Bob, as all the members of my gaming group read yours. Now I can tell them: "the Drunkard's Walk guy reads Hybrid Theory: clearly you all should too!". In response to your question, I believe Aaron's read DW, but I must confess I haven't, mostly because I rarely read fanfiction except as favors these days, and while I've heard much about DW, from my understanding it's a pretty massive undertaking to start reading at this point.
Of course, uh, so is Hybrid Theory. ^^;; So now I feel bad and may try to take time out to read it! In either case, thanks very much for reading it, and I'm thrilled you enjoyed it.
Insofar as some of the other comments go...
In response to your comment, Bob, that you're aghast at what's actually happening, I'll merely say only that Hybrid Theory is a trilogy, and the darkest part of a trilogy is always the middle book/movie/story. Thus, while I'm not saying everything is sweetness and light from here on in, I will say that Chapter 20 was deliberately the nadir of events, and for many people the only way to go from there is up. That being said, yeah, Hybrid Theory has dark themes and events, and people who can't stand that sort of thing probably wouldn't like it. It's not all dark - even the darkest chapters have humour and light points. We very much wanted to avoid the trap some dark/serious fics have fallen into of becoming so dark and serious that the cast of an originally-humorous series like Ranma no longer really resemble themselves. Events can change your outlook, but rarely are going to alter the core of your being: that's the watchword we went by. Ranma's been through a lot, and it has changed him, but he's still instantly recognisable as Ranma, we think, and that's what we tried to keep with many characters. Of course, some people are more altered than others because a lot of what is familiar to us about them stemmed from events that never happened (the most recent and obvious example being Angel in Chapter 21), but even there we tried to isolate the core of what they were as a person and work from that.
In response to Necratoid, I'm going to couch my reply carefully. ;p It was the plan all along to include a lot of deconstructionist themes and metatextual commentary on fanfiction in HT, based on our ten years of writing and reading it. It was also the plan all along not to make a big deal about this until the fanfic was over, because the primary purpose of the fanfic is to be a good story first, and our commentary decidedly second. Not to say that we won't eventually get around to pointing out "We did THIS as a take on common fanfic cliche X", but we don't plan to do so until the story proper is complete.
That being said, our issue with crossovers in the "shared world" vein that Hybrid Theory occupies is primarily, yes, that they sometimes do not make sense and are ill-thought out. To wit, many authors (and I will SO not name names, because that's not the point) take only the parts from each series they want, and as you say, hammer the square peg of the rest into the round hole of what they want to deal with. For example, take that most common of crossovers, the Ranma/Sailor Moon crossover. Even something as simple as the answer to "What was the entire martial artist population of Tokyo doing when Jadeite appeared in the sky to the entire city and threatened to destroy it and told everybody exactly where he was?" is often not given if the setting is post-series (as it frequently is). Nor is there any reason beyond "coincidence" that there's never a martial artist around when weird stuff happens, despite the fact that in the Ranmaverse superhuman martial arts death machines seem to average one per high school. For the former, the explanation could be as simple as "a bunch of them showed up, but were knocked unconscious like the police were", but this leads to the ramification: Ranma and friends are completely helpless against even the weakest (comparatively) sort of magics that the Dark Generals wield, which then probably needs to be reflected in the fanfic proper, and so on. The suspension of disbelief in the fanfic and that the two series' can share a world is strained by people ignoring these kind of things for the story to want to tell, and the problem is, there's stuff like this that needs to be explained away in most crossovers. When it becomes a multicrossover like Hybrid Theory, the suspension of disbelief becomes hard to support with a serious look at everything involved.
"Just how many Orochis were there in your myth, anyway?"
So that was one of the things we had in mind from the beginning, and of course is intimately tied up with the world as it is. This is not to say the Hybrid Theory way is the only way to do a multicrossover that's supposed to make sense! Obviously, it isn't. For our own part, we had two unreleased precursors to Hybrid Theory where we examined multicrossovers and self-inserts and developed the ideas that eventually coalesced into Hybrid Theory; one of which, Rumik World, had a completely different take on how a multicrossover could work utilising the Oh My Goddess cast as a fulcrum. I'm sure there's a thousand other ways to do it: one of course is simply not for it to be a shared universe ala Hybrid Theory, but a multiverse setup (as I believe Drunkard's Walk has) where the universes all exist simultaneously but separately.
But, our observation was that many multicrossovers do just jam all the series together and don't try too hard to explain away the inconsistancies - thus, we deliberately addressed that, particularly in Book II. I guess you can say it's our response to the classic criticism of bitching about a problem: "Well, I'd like to see you do better." Whether we did better isn't our place to decide, but we did try to do something. ;p
I must admit, I'm totally tickled pink that you read the fanfic, Bob, as all the members of my gaming group read yours. Now I can tell them: "the Drunkard's Walk guy reads Hybrid Theory: clearly you all should too!". In response to your question, I believe Aaron's read DW, but I must confess I haven't, mostly because I rarely read fanfiction except as favors these days, and while I've heard much about DW, from my understanding it's a pretty massive undertaking to start reading at this point.
Of course, uh, so is Hybrid Theory. ^^;; So now I feel bad and may try to take time out to read it! In either case, thanks very much for reading it, and I'm thrilled you enjoyed it.
Insofar as some of the other comments go...
In response to your comment, Bob, that you're aghast at what's actually happening, I'll merely say only that Hybrid Theory is a trilogy, and the darkest part of a trilogy is always the middle book/movie/story. Thus, while I'm not saying everything is sweetness and light from here on in, I will say that Chapter 20 was deliberately the nadir of events, and for many people the only way to go from there is up. That being said, yeah, Hybrid Theory has dark themes and events, and people who can't stand that sort of thing probably wouldn't like it. It's not all dark - even the darkest chapters have humour and light points. We very much wanted to avoid the trap some dark/serious fics have fallen into of becoming so dark and serious that the cast of an originally-humorous series like Ranma no longer really resemble themselves. Events can change your outlook, but rarely are going to alter the core of your being: that's the watchword we went by. Ranma's been through a lot, and it has changed him, but he's still instantly recognisable as Ranma, we think, and that's what we tried to keep with many characters. Of course, some people are more altered than others because a lot of what is familiar to us about them stemmed from events that never happened (the most recent and obvious example being Angel in Chapter 21), but even there we tried to isolate the core of what they were as a person and work from that.
In response to Necratoid, I'm going to couch my reply carefully. ;p It was the plan all along to include a lot of deconstructionist themes and metatextual commentary on fanfiction in HT, based on our ten years of writing and reading it. It was also the plan all along not to make a big deal about this until the fanfic was over, because the primary purpose of the fanfic is to be a good story first, and our commentary decidedly second. Not to say that we won't eventually get around to pointing out "We did THIS as a take on common fanfic cliche X", but we don't plan to do so until the story proper is complete.
That being said, our issue with crossovers in the "shared world" vein that Hybrid Theory occupies is primarily, yes, that they sometimes do not make sense and are ill-thought out. To wit, many authors (and I will SO not name names, because that's not the point) take only the parts from each series they want, and as you say, hammer the square peg of the rest into the round hole of what they want to deal with. For example, take that most common of crossovers, the Ranma/Sailor Moon crossover. Even something as simple as the answer to "What was the entire martial artist population of Tokyo doing when Jadeite appeared in the sky to the entire city and threatened to destroy it and told everybody exactly where he was?" is often not given if the setting is post-series (as it frequently is). Nor is there any reason beyond "coincidence" that there's never a martial artist around when weird stuff happens, despite the fact that in the Ranmaverse superhuman martial arts death machines seem to average one per high school. For the former, the explanation could be as simple as "a bunch of them showed up, but were knocked unconscious like the police were", but this leads to the ramification: Ranma and friends are completely helpless against even the weakest (comparatively) sort of magics that the Dark Generals wield, which then probably needs to be reflected in the fanfic proper, and so on. The suspension of disbelief in the fanfic and that the two series' can share a world is strained by people ignoring these kind of things for the story to want to tell, and the problem is, there's stuff like this that needs to be explained away in most crossovers. When it becomes a multicrossover like Hybrid Theory, the suspension of disbelief becomes hard to support with a serious look at everything involved.
"Just how many Orochis were there in your myth, anyway?"
So that was one of the things we had in mind from the beginning, and of course is intimately tied up with the world as it is. This is not to say the Hybrid Theory way is the only way to do a multicrossover that's supposed to make sense! Obviously, it isn't. For our own part, we had two unreleased precursors to Hybrid Theory where we examined multicrossovers and self-inserts and developed the ideas that eventually coalesced into Hybrid Theory; one of which, Rumik World, had a completely different take on how a multicrossover could work utilising the Oh My Goddess cast as a fulcrum. I'm sure there's a thousand other ways to do it: one of course is simply not for it to be a shared universe ala Hybrid Theory, but a multiverse setup (as I believe Drunkard's Walk has) where the universes all exist simultaneously but separately.
But, our observation was that many multicrossovers do just jam all the series together and don't try too hard to explain away the inconsistancies - thus, we deliberately addressed that, particularly in Book II. I guess you can say it's our response to the classic criticism of bitching about a problem: "Well, I'd like to see you do better." Whether we did better isn't our place to decide, but we did try to do something. ;p