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takerfoxx · 7 years

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“Fires of the Sun, Part 6″ Thoughts

I know this is coming late, but i had a busy weekend. Stupid million sport games and most of my coworkers calling out.

I'm going to skim over most of the opening scene, as there's little to add, and just comment on the bit where the Dragons accidentally barbecue the mob. I went back and forth on whether or not to go through with that, as I've been trying to pull away from grimdark plot twists. One possibility was to have them break up out of the ground when Yukari was exploring the ruins of Mugenkan and unknowingly attack her, and have Yuuka reform and go after her with the mordite blade when she was distracted. But in the end, I went with this direction because A, I needed to keep Yukari and co. busy for a little while longer so Rin could wrap things up with Sakuya, and B, Mima's plan needed to succeed in a major way. Thus far, only Patchouli ended up falling victim to her revenge scheme, and with Satori's rescue her dupes actually ended up netting something of a profit. So having her successfully rack up a huge amount of collateral damage and put it on Yukari's shoulders helped cement her as a dangerous antagonist and set up Yukari's attempts to take her down in the future.

Rin and Flandre's cute little celebration helped establish a few points. First, in a callback to her misunderstanding how handshakes work during her meeting with Utsuho, Flandre not getting high fives really is clueless about how to interact with people. Even going beyond her fits of destructive rage, she doesn't know about handshakes, doesn't know how high fives work, and just doesn't get how to function as a normal person. She's never had the opportunity to learn. I personally feel that, once you get past her psychotic episodes, she really is a sweet girl at heart. This is further emphasized by her and Rin's reactions to Yuuka's "death." Rin didn't feel bad one little bit, while Flandre immediately was hit by guilt. Not to say that Rin should have felt bad. Hell, I don't think anyone would claim that Yuuka was someone worth shedding tears over. Still, it does sort of show that, despite their similarities, they're sort of developing in opposite directions. Rin started off as meek and scared and really hesitant to hurt anyone, and now she's finally run out of fucks to give and gladly dishes out beatdowns when the situation calls for it. Flandre was violently unpredictable at best, far more prone to berserker rages before Rin unlocked the Adult personality, but now feels terrible for contributing to anyone's death, even a monster like Yuuka. I don't know if that's going to lead anywhere, but it's interesting to note.

Now, I'm not going to say all of Wriggle and Kogasa's frequent interactions are necessarily leading anywhere, but…well, okay. So maybe I'm just sort of testing the water with that one. Romance is something I've mostly avoided until now, and do sort of want to expand things in the future and try out different things, so…it's a possibility, let's just keep it at that.

Rumia's insomnia problems are interesting on a meta level. I introduced them mainly because of my own time with having chronic insomnia and how much that ended up affecting me. Now I've long gotten over them while Rumia still has them, poor kid. Obviously her problems are way greater than mine. I just messed myself up with unhealthy habits. With her, I think something is definitely screwed up in her brain. I was actually going to take it even further with her frequently hallucinating that she was still in Rin's mind like that one time by the river. This didn't end up happening mainly because when you got a lot of plotlines running around, sometimes interesting ideas just have to get cut.

Smug, incompetent Yukari got a lot of flak early on in this story's run, and admittedly deservingly so. I still feel she got a harsher rap than she should have, but that's just my opinion. I worked pretty hard to soften her up somewhere around the mid-point, and may have overcompensated at points, but here at the end I do feel she's finally settled into a nice groove as a take-charge commander. Hey, I like strong authority figures in my stories. Just don't insinuate anything of my sexual preferences from that.

And I don't know if Kotohime was taking a dump or not, I just hope she found time to wipe if she did.

In other news, I really should have paid more attention to Doremy Sweet's design, as I kept describing her as having a puffball tails instead of a cow tail until the very end. Another reason to go back and just fix all the mistakes. Though interesting to note, I was thinking of including Wriggle in that final climax with Yuuka, to have her attack her from behind with an army of insects and just call her out on all the shit Yuuka had done to her while kicking her in the head over and over. Unfortunately this got cut for the same reason everything else did: no room for it. Which is a shame, because she did deserve that closure. Rin apologizing to her for it was sort of to make up for not including it.

I do like Wriggle's constant concern for Elly, even after everything that had happened. I think the flashbacks to when they were friends were a major part of the decision to start portraying Elly in a more sympathetic light. I was actually kind of tempted to have Rin successfully kidnap Elly and bring her along for a sort of weird forced face turn. Alas, I needed her elsewhere, so instead she got paired off with Yuuka's super-burnt body instead.

While I'm pretty happy with how FotS came out as a whole, there are three parts that stand out in my mind as personal highlights. The first is Utsuho's speech to Rin from earlier. The second is that final mental confrontation between Rin, Flandre, and Yuuka. And the third is the faceoff between Sakuya and Rin, with Rumia's life and Flandre's freedom on the line. Something I've learned from wrestling and various other action-heavy series is that you don't need a bunch of flashy moves and big explosions to craft a memorable showdown. You just need two people with clear motivations who really don't like each other stuck in the same room with something very important on the line that neither of them can afford to lose. Though I actually had to rewrite a couple parts in post, as originally Rin was going to go straight from saving Rumia to threatening Sakuya with the knife without so much as checking up in Rumia. I've mentioned being on the autistic spectrum a couple times, and unfortunately that does mean I often overlook those sort of empathetic details. And no, that doesn't mean I don't have empathy; far from it. It just means that my way of expressing it is often a bit…off from everyone else, and I sometimes have to remember how most people express emotion when writing. So that whole bit had to get changed to have Rin express the emotions she ought be expressing, as well as that short confrontation between Rin and Flandre over Patchouli's death to make Rin more panicky over Rumia's peril. I like the way I am and wouldn't change it even if I could, but it does mean that I sometimes have to consciously remember to do things that most people just do naturally.

Anyway, this scene was also another example of foreseeing logical problems and countering them ahead of time to avoid fridge logic. Why wouldn't Sakuya just stop time to begin with? Well, she needed to force Rin to give up Flandre. Why wouldn't she do it when Flandre was released? Her hands were full and Rin would have killed her the second the pocketwatch appeared. The tricky one was why she wouldn't just stop time after Flandre was out and Rin was otherwise distracted. Thinking of this problem actually led to a pretty cool bit where she tried doing just that and Flandre seeing it and screaming out a warning. I was stumped at how Rin would get to her in time before she pressed down. I mean, she's really fast and all, but she's not that fast. Then I remembered that Flandre's power is instantaneous, and it would be a great symbolic moment to have her be the one to destroy the pocketwatch, followed be her getting defenestrated. Hey, I like Sakuya as much as the next guy, and totally get where she was coming from. But come on. From Rin's point of view, she totally deserved that.

Which was then followed by Mima trying to squish her with rocks (and boy, was it tough to arrange things so that would end up happening after all!) and Meiling comes in with the save! Nothing much to say about that except I thought it was rad. Yeah, I really liked these last couple of chapters.

Now, if anyone is curious, Yuuka's odd look and bizarre babbling are a parody of Broken Matt Hardy, a pro wrestler (and yes, my life does in fact revolve around pro wrestling. Deal with it), whose…unusual reinvention of himself was one of the most talked about stories in 2016. Suffice to say, it's weird, it's indescribable, and it's very, very entertaining. I love the character, and couldn't resist sticking in a little shoutout, mainly to see if anyone would notice. And someone actually did!

Though, on a side note, it was actually originally Sunshu that was supposed to take the hit from the mordite blade. That's why she showed up in that scene where Yukari slapped her and Orin down. I had an idea where she'd break free, storm into the mansion, and go after Yukari again only to get killed by Yuuka. But that was scrapped because I figured that the GPF knew their stuff and would be able to restrain even an oni, especially one that Yukari had already put down. Besides, Shinki taking the hit instead opens things up for some interesting future developments.

Other things that I got a kick out included the fact that the Dragon King's name is Frank. Okay, Francioux, whatever. It made me giggle. As did Rin pretty much lighting Sariel up like a Looney Tunes bomb explosion. BECAUSE I'M AN ADULT!

Another thing I haven't talked much about: Mima and Seiga's role in FotS. Here, they pretty much were the Greek chorus, watching and commenting on the action. With so many moving parts, it was useful to have a sort of outside perspective explaining the various characters motivations and why they would do some things, as well as set up the couple of times Mima interfered. In things like The Storm and The Curious Case of Rin Satsuki, Yuuka filled that role, but since Lady Meika already said that she was going to refrain from doing commentary that role was instead filled by a different set of assholes.

And no, I have no idea how Seiga and Futo got down there so quickly. Use your imaginations. Though I can already tell that Futo's speech patterns are going to be a pain in the ass until I get the hang of this old-timey talk.

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