Quote:Oh yes. And I very much appreciate it. About the worst reaction an author can ever get to a story is apathy. This is why Chris and I have co-opted a term from professional wrestling for most of our fanfics called "heat". In essence a character has "heat" if the audience cares about what happens to them. Characters can generally have "good guy heat" or "bad guy heat". Good guy heat is when the audience wants the character to succeed. Bad guy heat is when the audience wants horrible things to happen to the character, to see their dreams and plans foiled.
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.
One of my favorite examples of this from actually pretty early in our career was a character from The Kyoto Chronicles called Chagi. Chagi was a despicable little villain in the series and the audience HATED him so much they frequently wrote and asked us to have him horribly murdered. He was one of our most successful villians ever.
Quote:Not neccesarily. You can view the careful balance of powers in a crossover fanfic as a rock/paper/scissors style effect. Just because Character X can beat Character Y and Character Z can beat Character X it does not neccesarily follow that Character Z can beat Character Y.
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.
One of my favorite examples of this was somethign I pointed out in a recent discussion of Harry Potter versus Ranma (the series in both respect). Generally speaking Ranma could cream a Harry Potter style wizard in a straight fight. He moves too fast for them to target spells at him and most of their combat spells require obvious aiming with their wands and a ray attack. Plus Ranma could hit them hard enough to put them down easily.
But a Harry Potter style wizard with a little time coud easily defeat Ranma. How? Portkey spell cast on Ranma's desk with the effect of teleporting him into the center of the sun. In Ranma the characters have the "no saving throw" against magic. That is, if you get hit by a magical effect you are effected. There is no Will Save to rsist falling in love with Cologne or hugging the nearest person when they sneeze and so on. So if you used a spell like that on Ranma he would have no defence.
This is reflected in Hybrid Theory by the fact that power level (in the collateral property damage sense) isn't as important as it is in, say, Dragonball Z. It is totally possible for Akane to defeat people much above her power level by being clever and using resources she can steal from other series, for instance.
Quote:An interesting observation. ^^;;;
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.
---------------
Epsilon