Hybrid Theory

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, it's taken me 11 days, six nasty headaches and several hundred thousand XP on CoH, but I'm finally going to get at least one reply off today.

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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!".

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You make me sound like some kind of oracle. I'm pleased that they've read it.

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(from another message)
I can report Aaron's read through the first few chapters of DW... it's nice that he can do this at work. ;p

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It's nice that I can write it at work (most of the time); there's an appealing symmetry there. I'm looking forward to his opinions (and yours, when/if you get a chance).

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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.

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Oh, certainly. And the fact that I was aghast at everything that was happening -- including the deaths, which is not something that normally happens in the wake of an SI -- is in fact a tribute to how well you made it all work. I don't have familiarity with at least a third of the series you're incorporating, or only minimal familiarity -- but you made me feel for these characters, even some of the villains, and worry about them, and mourn for them. And that is high praise indeed.

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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.

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And you may well be doing a far better job at a far more ambitious task than I dared try in Drunkard's Walk II.

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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).

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Hell, it's not explained in Sailor Moon what the rest of the damned city was doing. It's things like that which made me write up the Invisible To Normals entry over on the TVTropes Wiki.

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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.

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And if we're talking post-Jusendo Ranma, then that means the Generals are an order of magnitude or greater more powerful than Saffron, so why are the Senshi so successful when they're so weak? It turns into a nasty loopback.

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When it becomes a multicrossover like Hybrid Theory, the suspension of disbelief becomes hard to support with a serious look at everything involved.

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Which does appear to me at least to be one of the core themes which you're exploring -- the crossover itself revealing the fundamentally fictional (and arbitrary) nature of the world to its own inhabitants, and how they deal with that. And I might be grasping at straws, but it seems to me that the Senshi hiding in Ohtori, dealing with its fundamentally illusionary nature and slowly going mad as a result, is the entire thing in microcosm.

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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.

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DW does have a multiverse setup, but it doesn't exclude self-contained crossover worlds. DW5, which Chris and I are writing right now, is a hybrid world, albeit two settings which are at least theoretically compatible (O!MG and the game "In Nomine"); and I've made no secret of the fact that Doug is travelling through the same multiverse as Ed Becerra's "Legion" and Twister's SI avatar do -- and Legion's hit a couple crossover worlds already. Doug is not likely to do so, but they're theoretically out there.

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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

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"Better"? I dunno, guys, I don't think your goal was "better". I think it was "different", with a side of "surprise!" Either way, though, I think it works.
And that's all I have time for today.

-- Bob
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For Jor-El so loved the Earth, he sent his only begotten son...