Identity 6.5 - "Converging Points of Compass Rose"

Chapter six, act five on FFN

Saw Eva 2.0 at the theater yesterday (it was the last night they were showing it, and I'd almost missed it). I will say it was fun watching with a selection of other Eva fans and that Funimation came out pretty decently quickly with a subtitled release (even if it made me cringe in spots--not seriously so, only because I dislike some of their conventions).

Anyway, that's part of why this act is late.

So we start off this installment with Tilaka and Kohl. Wow, how long has it been? Probably not since the end of "Ashes" have we had a passage from their perspective. This, to me, is part of what I've tried to accomplish with Identity, actually. It's a big story. There are lots of pieces in motion. You can leave a couple characters aside for the better part of four or five installments and then come back to them. While some characters may have a little bit more of the spotlight than others, they all have a piece and a role to play.

Of course, it's not like Kohl's been doing nothing. Here, we have to play a little catch-up with what his thought process is. We can see the Sorcerers are starting to really respect and fear Ranma, something Kohl is surely fighting against. And once again, his priority in protecting Tilaka overrides his ability to consider Tilaka's suggestion. Irony, of course, will have it that that's exactly what Tilaka ends up doing.

Probably the meat of this installment is the confrontation, the exposition, with Keema. Let it be known: Keema is more dangerous than a simple liar. She tries to weave the truth with fiction, making them impossible to disentangle. What do you think is true about her story? Anything? Nothing?

What's probably the most surprising about this passage is how Akane is, ostensibly, still under Keema's control. It isn't readily apparent how that could've happened, though I do try to give some hints. How Keema pulled this off will be explained--it has a very concrete explanation--but the nature of the story precludes that explanation from being revealed just this second.

On the ensemble nature of the cast, it's time we got back to Ranma, too, after he'd been missing for a couple acts. I know I've received some comments about the reactions and thought processes of characters exhibiting some measure of wangst--or that is, a particular, irritating type of whining angst that seems overdone or unjustified. To that extent, I don't agree. I put the characters through a lot, yet seldom do they whine to others or try to evoke pity. Ranma particularly is the kind of person who holds things in that really bother him (he can whine when he thinks he's getting a raw deal, but that's a different matter). I'm sure wangst can happen in internal monologue, but I think, as a rule, it's generally less irritating because the character can prove they're dealing with it with actions that are less, well, whiny. Can one really be blamed for their thoughts?

But I digress. When I received said comments, I immediately thought of how this scene with Ranma would, well, compound that notion. But again, the difference I see is that, while Ranma gives in for a moment to anguish, it's only for a moment, and he's back to business, knowing what he must do.

I had some level of cleanup to do with this installment. Kohl's scene at the beginning I tweaked to have Tilaka seem to sense the impending trouble. Ranma's scene with Surma is fixed to make the distance between the ground and the rocky obstruction in the tunnels more consistent with earlier. Overall, though, I think we're well setup for Ranma to exact payback on Keema--at least, once he can extricate himself from Cologne, Shampoo, and Mousse's combined assault. And, naturally, one knows now not to mess with Tilaka. She's very bad news for your sanity.

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Identity 6.4 - "Substances Immiscible"

Chapter six, act four on FFN

I want to thank all those who reviewed or gave criticism on the last installment. If you are willing to read possibly spoilery material, I discuss to some detail how the remarks and criticism drove the editing process for this installment.

Weekly commentary below.

I received quite a bit of feedback between reviews and here on the last installment, and that some measure of editing and fixing to try to make more clear what I intended to impart.

I don't go into a whole lot of details about Keema's plan, mostly because I wanted to keep focus on what our party from Nerima had to deal with. What I envisioned was more like there would be several access points to any given level of the mountain, to tunnels that, quite frankly, shouldn't have been used very much because the Phoenix people would generally prefer flight anyway (if you go back to volume 37, you see that Korma and Masala are kind of surprised at the tunnels in the mountain, whether because Ryoga just dug them or something else is hard to say; in retrospect, this is kind of an oops on my part). So, Korma's force on the platform here, itself somewhat a contrivance to give the Sorcerer who breaks through a reasonable chance of escape, is rather small. Keema's forces are divided, you see.

The Sorcerer who broke through, of course, is just one Sorcerer, and some seemed to think he might be special or even might be Wuya (which I wouldn't have done; if it were Wuya, I would've just said it's Wuya--as much as I preferred not to spend time describing grunts in a lot of detail, you can't just say after the fact, "oh, hey, it's Wuya" unless there's a reason people wouldn't recognize her or something). In hindsight, I recognize now that the damage he did could be considered rather exceptional for one man against quite a few potent fighters. In the end here, while he puts up a fight, I tried to back off the idea that he's exceptional. Maybe he's lucky. Maybe he just had a little more determination than most. It's not like any of the survivors know. To them, the damage is the same.

To clarify all of that, I rewrote the whole beginning scene of this installment. Originally, I had Cologne with Akane in the closet, so to speak, probing her mind, but I realized with so much confusion on what was happening, it would be wrong to try to resolve all that with passing statements. I needed to show, so to speak, instead of tell. Even though I didn't want the emphasis to be on resolving that conflict when I'd drawn out the act, it seemed reasonable now to do so. Hence, Mousse gets a nice scene to show off here and exact revenge for Shampoo.

Naturally, Shampoo's not dead or dying, but that's not to say this wound won't sting for a few days. She's a tough customer, and as typical in this series, she'll heal fast. Maybe not fast enough to be 100% by the end of the chapter, but don't be surprised if she's back on her feet in less than a reasonable timeframe for a normal human. After all, Ranma got every bone in his body broken by one of Akane's punches, right? And he's fine now. (Or was it the landing that did the damage?)

In a lot of ways, then, this act is a study in finding little details and trying to fix them up. I think I mentioned before how I neglected that we actually see the room where the eggs are kept in the manga, and when I rediscovered that, I had to go fixing. The result was that, while in the outline the crew spent a good bit of time in the aviary, here it was necessary to pare that down to the ending scene. This made me want to cut it altogether, but I had something happening in a later act that made it far, far too difficult to extricate without complications. That and, well, I really liked the aviary, even if it only gets a few seconds to enter the mind.

I'd had troubles figuring out where this act should be in ordering, too. Act one was initially going to end with Akane's inaction getting Shampoo stabbed as she was in three. Splitting that act into two and sandwiching Ranma's flight escapades worked out, but it left a gap here. I didn't want to follow act three up with more Akane-centric stuff. Going to a largely Cologne installment fixed that nicely. I like Cologne quite a bit, too, and being responsible, being in charge and motivated with the Sorcerer conflict makes her a more natural choice of point of view--a more compelling choice--than Ukyo, certainly, and probably than Shampoo except for when the latter's place in the tribe is questioned, as it was in chapter three.

So, we focus here on Cologne's decision-making and drives, and what we see is that she's very driven based on what affects her personally. She's not really convinced that crossing the Phoenix is a good idea until they cut her off from Surma, her friend. She beats and bashes in the Phoenix girl, Besan, because she's hyped up on how she needs to do right by Ceruse.

That scene was something I had to clean up a bit, too---originally originally, Cologne and company would find Ceruse in the aviary and interrogate her there (this was when much more time was spent there). Next originally, they do similar to in the final installment here, but they threaten her life before the refugees to get space. In the end, I was wrangling with the logic, and I decided that it just disrupted the story too much to threaten the supposed secrecy of Cologne's actions in a way that made it obvious they were crossing the Phoenix. That was the only way, really, Cologne would concoct a plan at all and avoid confronting the forces guarding the eggs: if she thought she could get one without betraying to Keema that they knew what she'd done. When Besan blows the lid on just who is guarding the birds, however, that all goes out the window. That, too, was logical--or at least, the logical progression from logic to emotion, to the need, in Cologne's eyes, to confirm her fears.

But now we see the truth of things, or at least the best glimpse we've had in a while. Was Keema so content to seal off part of the mountain because she knew she had an ace in the hole, a way to destroy the Sorcerers from within? If so, where does Akane come into play? Fortunately, there will be some answers in act five, some even from Keema's own mouth.

The question, then, is whether we trust what Keema has to say.

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Identity 6.3 - "What Waits in the Shadow of Madder"

Chapter six, act three on FFN

Commentary below.

For some time I've been talking about writing a story I call The Color Red. It's a story much like Identity in some ways, a trilogy, my next "big" project while I consider other smaller pieces like Before and After and, maybe later, a Haruhi piece I call The Coin. The Color Red would have three parts, each a different shade and corresponding to a different Japanese name: Sakura derives from the cherry blossom, a light shade of pink; from Tsubaki, we have camellia, which flowers in a variety of shades but all generally in the red end of the spectrum.

And the third part (though I've not decided on any particular order) would be after the word for the madder plant---that is, Akane.

At times, much is made about the symbolism of Akane and the meaning of her name as a shade of red. Perhaps it's overdone, as she doesn't write her given name in kanji at all. But it can definitely be a convenient symbolic shorthand, an easy association to make that lends atmosphere and style.

This installment is all about Akane coming to grips with the situation she's in. Some of that situation, of course, can't really be explored until later, when all this mess in China is dealt with and the kids can go back home. And the central fear that Akane has is the crux of the story itself: how much should one change oneself for love? Is Akane losing a part of herself to become more appealing to Ranma? Can she really hold on to him if she doesn't know what it is he likes about her, what it is he loves?

That's the thing. At her best, Akane is a stand-up human being, unbelievably kind and a friend to all living things. At her worst, she lets her anger and insecurity get a hold of her, and she lashes out at whatever's around. Akane doesn't think anything of the former. There will always be this small aspect of surprise, in her mind, when other people notice how good she can be because to her, it's the way people should behave. At least, when her impulses don't get the best of her.

I think that's the person Ranma can admire and be attracted to, and because she doesn't think it's unusual, Akane doesn't comprehend that, at least not yet.

I didn't originally plan to have Akane realize Ryoga's feelings for her in this installment, but as I was writing, it felt like the right thing to really shake her. Again, it's duality--the competition between Ranma and Ryoga for her mirrors her situation with Ukyo and Shampoo. How do we react when we look at others and see something of ourselves? Does it assure us, or does it horrify us? Here, it brings up more questions, more doubt, more confusion.

Having already made it abundantly clear that Akane was being controlled by Keema, the only way to really end this act was to hit home that Akane's realized it. Hence, the blocks that Keema must've installed in her mind have begun to break down, in pieces, in shards, in her voice echoing through Akane's mind. Later on, I'm going to run with the idea that Akane is a little more resistant to mind-tampering than the average person. Not a lot, not as a major plot point, but just to tie back with how she could eventually be broken out of the shampoo mind-wiping and this here.

Of course, by this point, it's a bit of a running gag that Ryoga can survive almost anything, and here, luckily for him, he escapes the collapse of the tunnels fairly unscathed.

Beyond all that, the act is fairly contemplative. It's an exploration of the mind, and I think a lot of that speaks for itself and demands no further comment. Thanks for reading. Act four next week.

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Identity 6.2 - "To Fly Like Faeries of Fables Old"

Chapter six, act two on fanfiction.net

Commentary below.

I think this is an act I wouldn't have written before--at least, not the way it's written now. It's simple in construction; I'm actually rather surprised it turned out as long as it did. That's not to say I'm unhappy with it. Quite the contrary, I'm pleased that I could tell this aspect of the story in a way that didn't feel underdeveloped and without stretching it out unduly.

Coming from canon, where injuries are comical and treated as such, there's a lot of death in this story, a lot of death just in this installment. I think Ranma sees himself as having crossed a precipice when he killed Saffron, no matter how justifiable it may be, and while that event doesn't paralyze him or make him unable to use necessary force now, it also compels him to remember, to remind himself, that what he's doing is ugly no matter how he rationalizes it. There is, or there should be, a part of him that detests what he's involved in now.

Yet there's also a part of him who's all too glad to see it done. It's not reckless, insane pleasure, no, but it strikes him as just and fair. That is the wrath he brings down on the Sorcerers. I know there was one reviewer who said he was sick to death of Ranma "holding back." I could only smile to myself a little bit, knowing that this act was coming. You can't make Ranma a cold-blooded weapon overnight, and he still isn't that even after the events of this act. Because he takes no pleasure in his deeds, he's not a monster.

As always, the early parts of a chapter are setup for things to come. Here, I wanted to emphasize Ranma's budding mastery over Sorcerer arts. It really is quite incredible that he's come this far with magic, isn't it? Some might say too incredible, even for a character who's shown vast aptitude for foreign techniques in the past. I let you, the reader, decide on that point. But it will soon come to the point where even the Sorcerers fear Ranma to a degree. He represents nothing they've ever seen before: an outsider who wields their magic to a great extent.

Of course, with a story as dour as this, it's important to have moments of levity to lighten the mood, to provide contrast, and I hoped to do that with Ranma's learning to fly scene. There is, of course, an anachronism in Ranma knowing of Buzz Lightyear, but I think it's a forgivable one. All in the name of fun, after all.

I admit, one of the things I worried about was the Amazons' arrival. There's no avoiding that it's convenient, but as always, I note that if they hadn't arrived, is it certain that Ranma wouldn't have escaped the Sorcerers anyway? Wounded, maybe he would've been caught, but maybe not. Surma's arrival here does suggest that this installment is some number of days after the previous one, so the timing is a little tricky, but I felt this was the best way to tell the story, to let all the pieces be shown on the board, so to speak, before we get to how they come into conflict and interact.

Anyway, that concludes the commentary for act two. See you next week!

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