Before and After 08 - "Before Tabris"

The latest chapter on FFN

Commentary below will no longer be hidden by default. Be warned for spoilers here.

I'd thought before writing chapter seven that these two chapters could go together and make something of similar length to chapter six. It seems I was right on that, but the story is much, much better served by having them separate, for they accomplish different purposes. "After Armisael" was all about the futility of living. Here, this is Rei denying what she is over and over until she's forced to accept it.

A bit part of what distances Shinji from Rei is how he says he's afraid of her, that he doesn't want to see her or Misato. What does Shinji do? Run away from painful things. The Rei we have now is colder, and she isn't like the friend he knows. I hoped to take that to the logical extent, and while Shinji would try to run away as much as possible, it stood to reason (at least to me) that at some point he might get cornered, and in doing so, Rei would learn just what it is that makes him avoid her.

Make no mistake: Rei's trying to understand what she is here, why she sees and feels things that shouldn't be. She latches on to the idea of being Yui because that's digestible, palatable compared to the alternative--that she's something much more bizarre and Lovecraftian in origin. What's more frightening--a creature of unthinkable thought and motive with grotesque and disgusting bodily features, or a girl like Rei who is that creature bottled into a human-looking form? For Rei, the fear is that that thing will come out, and she will no longer be herself. I tried to draw as much as I could on "The Case of Ayanami Rei" scene in episode 25, where the image of Rei I taunts the others, saying that they're afraid because of the thing that might not have human form (cue inkblot images). What Rei wants in dying is to no longer be, not to wake up and be something else again, something stripped of what she used to be--or worse, something completely inhuman.

I originally wrote the escalator scene first. The result was a chapter that jumped around a little chronologically. It felt like something more likely to be actually written by a person, but it also seemed rather ineffective at showing, at least to me. I made things more chronological by going to the lockers first (do they even have lockers? the best I've seen are a couple scenes from Rebuild where Misato slaps Shinji in what looks like a bathroom or a set of showers versus Shinji and Rei donning their plug suits in some sort of cargo container).

I spent comparatively more time on Rei's confrontation with Kaworu. I inserted the paragraphs where Rei imagines what Kaworu's saying with more details than he says. This, along with the couple scenes where Rei looks into the mirror and sees something wrong with herself, I felt was necessary. Otherwise, Rei's fear of being something else isn't really catalyzed, and it gives credence to Kaworu's hint that Rei's memories aren't gone, merely suppressed or taken from her, yet something is able to creep back in.

How Kaworu describes the First Ancestral Race is deliberately a bit vague. I didn't want to depict them directly--I vastly preferred to keep their appearance mysterious and secret. Describing their architecture seemed fair, however, and I realized that there had to be some explanation for why they wouldn't have spread to the stars, being as powerful as they were. The calamity that befalls them is no ordinary supernova, but rather a gamma-ray burst, something thought to be an extremely deadly event if one were to hit Earth. I drew heavily from the EvaGeeks wiki to get this background right, but it's very tangled and complex. For instance, a lot of fanwanking has been done just to figure out the possible plot hole in this episode, between Kaworu realizing it's Lilith, not Adam, on the cross and Seele telling him that Gendo has Adam's body already. I put forth my own theory here: that Kaworu, like the other Angels, senses what's in Terminal Dogma and knows it's far stronger than whatever Gendo has. He believes it's Adam because that's what he's been told, and he accepts that that would cause calamity, the Third Impact, because that's also what he's been told, but when he realizes it's Lilith, he understands: there's no extra mechanism here. The only Third Impact there can be is when the Fruits of Life and Knowledge merge, when something of Adam and Lilith come together. They're the same thing, and at last, he understands what Seele's trying to do.

I also consider it likely that what Kaworu says about the hybrid being, of what would happen if he and Lilith were to merge, as being somewhat untrue. I'd think the First Ancestral Race would fear that being's power (as we will see later) as much as they fear it being too prideful to be wise.

I deliberately kept from depicting Kaworu's realization in full until the end of the chapter, to punctuate the use of that name. Giving a name to something you already know of is a powerful thing, so when Shinji looks at her and wonders what she is, she knows the answer, as much as she may try to deny it.

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Simple Perl script and regular expressions

Since I've started posting "Before and After" not only to FFN but to the Fanfiction Mailing List (FFML) as well as The Fanfiction Forum and SpaceBattles creative writing forum, I've had to juggle a number of formats. I still use latex2rtf for the FFN upload, but I've had to develop techniques for the other formats. For FFML, I send out plain, ASCI text (so no macrons over letters, no fancy ellipses, no italics except that denoted by underscores). For the fora, I have to use [i] and [/i] respectively for italics, replace the LaTeX primitives that denote accented characters with their unicode equivalents, and so on. I know well enough that this procedure is some tedious find and replace stuff when done by hand, but Perl's capacity to handle regular expressions makes it easy to automate. For a primer regular expressions, see wiki, but the basic idea is thus: a statement in Perl using regular expressions might look like

$str =~ s|``|\"|g;

where $str is the existing string to be altered. The syntax is basically =~ is for changing in place, s for search, | (or any other character) as a delimiter, `` is what we're searching for, \" means replace `` with a quote (escaped because " usually means a literal string), and g means do this everywhere in the string, not just to the first match. The other | should be the same character as the first | (in other words, you can use whatever character for the delimiter; they just need to all be the same).

The script I use now is below. It's written for use on my linux partition, but the gist of it ought to be portable to windows.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use utf8; #allows for utf characters in input and output
use Getopt::Std; # allows parsing the -b flag to convert to bbcode instead
my %options=();
getopts('b',\%options);

if($#ARGV != 0) #0 means 1 argument (not a flag); -1 means 0 arguments, etc.
{
        print(
"strip-tex [-b] tex_file.tex
        renders a latex subdocument into plain text or bbbcode

OPTIONS:
        -b: renders in bbcode
        default (no flags): renders in plain text
                (does not auto-wrap; use par on result)\n");
        exit;
}
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
open(FILE, $ARGV[0]) or die("Open failed\n"); #kills the script if failure
@lines = ; #each entry in array is a single line (paragraph)
$str = "";
$length = scalar(@lines); #the number of lines (paragraphs)
for my $i (0 .. $length-1)
{
        #common statements (not in if...) are for both formats
        $str = $lines[$i];
        $str =~ s|``|\"|g;
        $str =~ s|\\qs| |g;
        if ($options{b})
        {
                #\x{####} denotes a unicode character by its hex code
                $str =~ s|\\ellip{}|\x{2026}|g; #ellipsis
                $str =~ s|---|\x{2014}|g; #em dash
                $str =~ s|\\=o|\x{014D}|g; #macron o
                $str =~ s|\\=O|\x{014C}|g; #macron O
                $str =~ s|\\=u|\x{016B}|g; #macron u
                $str =~ s|\\=U|\x{016A}|g; #macron U

                #this while checks for nested \emph{} or other commands
                #latex allows nested emphasis, but bbcode doesn't
                #allow nested [i]
                while($str =~ m!\\([^{]*){!)
                {
                        $str =~ s!\\([^{]*){([^{}]*)}!\[i\]$2\[/i\]!g;
                }
        }
        else
        {
                #plain text portion
                $str =~ s|\\ellip{}'|...'|g; #difference in ellipsis
                $str =~ s|\\ellip{}|... |g;  #handling for better breaks
                $str =~ s|---|--|g;
                $str =~ s|\\=||g;
                while($str =~ m!\\([^{]*){!)
                {
                        $str =~ s!\\([^{]*){([^{}]*)}!_$2_!g;
                }
        }
        $str =~ s|''|\"|g;
        $str =~ s|`|\'|g;
        print $str; #hence, output is to stdout; redirect to desired output
}
close FILE;

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Before and After 07 - "After Armisael"

Now released on FFN

Commentary below.

I had difficulty writing this chapter. When I started, I didn't know if I would be writing it as "Before Tabris," encompassing all of what transpires up until Shinji kills Kaworu in Terminal Dogma, or something else. Eventually (and I don't know when this happened) I decided otherwise, and I went ahead with something more like in my original outline.On balance, I think this was partly motivated by some comments I received from bluepencil on The Fanfiction Forum--that in his mind, Rei's manner of writing did not come across as completely authentic, that I'd failed to adequately capture her voice. And while this indeed, in Da-Guru's words, could be attributed to artistic license, I thought this was a good opportunity to reshape Rei's voice as well.

My original outline was somewhat shorter than this chapter. To give it the right sense of pacing, I added the scenes in which Rei walks about the ruined city back home amidst the chaos and looting and meets Hikari. I wavered for some time whether to have Hikari leave without knowing Rei's forgotten her or do as I did, with Rei making it clear. I thought showing how shocked and hurt Hikari would be, even though she understands it, was the more effective choice.

Of course, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. There are a lot of choices I made here. That Rei remembers nothing of her personal life is an artistic choice. It's the dramatic choice. It could be considered unfair. I know there is some debate as to how much or how little Rei remembers after being reborn in episode 23. I don't intend this to be a point of logical argument or reasoning but rather an exploration as to how one interpretation could be consistent with the indusputable facts. Rei's behavior is markedly different here. Her attitudes are different. Taking away everything she knows, leaving a person with just the barest of conceptions, is one way to do that. I won't say it's the only way, but it's one way.

Again, in part from bluepencil's comments, I made Rei's writing style more choppy, though I still believe a good balance of variety in sentence structure is necessary to make a work readable and not come off entirely flat. Rei can be flat in speaking and manner, but in the written word, it can only go so far, and to an extent, I think her flatness is overstated. That said, it makes sense to me that any fluidity she might've gained over time is lost now, that she would be bare and minimal at this point in her new life. She wakes up, and she's hardly treated like a person. Gendo gets his jollies thinking about how he's going to use her to bring back Yui, and Ritsuko, while attentive to her job, is jealous over Gendo's attentions, which in her eyes seem fixed on Rei. While Ritsuko is helpful to Rei here, there are moments where she lets her pleasant mask slip: sending Rei alone with just an unfixed map, telling Gendo how he should look at her, not Rei, when she compliments her.

Fluidity between sentences aside, though, I had a major concern over the fluidity between events in this chapter. In the initial draft, they seemed to come together far too quickly, without adequate time to digest and think about what had come before. I added about 500 words to pad things out a little bit, to make each section come across with the proper sense of timing. It's very important to do so, or else the narrative comes across as merely telling what's happened without giving those events any meaning.

I really enjoyed writing the rebirth scene, as it hits home the abject horror of Rei's existence. She's treated and examined almost in an assembly-line-like manner, and Gendo's indifference to her long-term well-being should feel damning. I definitely wanted the only casual, humane perspective here to be Maya's. She's an empathetic character, she gets squeamish at the sight of blood and guts (which we see so often)--it made sense to me that she would be digusted at how Ritsuko and Gendo treat Rei like a piece of flesh to be mended, not a huamn being.

I didn't want Shinji's role in this chapter to be too big, so I added little to his meeting with Rei that wasn't already in the episode, just perspective in Rei's eyes on how Shinji expected someone else and got her instead.

Misato and Rei in the end is something I'd been driving toward for a while, and like I said last chapter, I was hesistant to give them such a strong scene then when I knew this was coming now. Nevertheless, I liked it then, and I like it now. Misato gives a good counterpoint to Rei's line of thinking. Misato is driven and focused (when she wants to be). Rei's obeyed with little thought to what she wanted. I had some trouble with this scene, as I felt like Misato didn't have or express a strong enough reason to be there at first, but in adding some transition material, I got it the way I wanted, and I ended it on a much more fitting note, too. Initially, Misato encouraged Rei to stay alive, saying that she had friends in both Misato and Shinji. It was a touching line, but it also felt off--Misato's coldness when Shinji kills Kaworu, which this was meant to mirror in some way, made that line feel very inappropriate. Misato's not that warm when it comes to death. Here, she stops Rei because in some sense she feels responsible, because it reminds her of what she almost did before, but in the end, she has the same world view: those who live deserve to live, and those who die (especially those who choose it) don't. Strong encouragement is the most she can give.

And that's really what sets up the end. Rei's decision to live, if only for a while, comes from within herself. She's not wholly sold on it. She still wonders if the best thing to do is to die. For now, though, she will move on, so next time she can meet Kaworu and realize just what she is.

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Before and After 06 - "After Arael"

Chapter six on FFN

Commentary below.

Have I mentioned before that plans change? Well, I'll say it again. This chapter has one of the scenes that drove me to write this story, and I ended up burying it at the end, so to speak. 90% of this chapter is new material made up just in the last couple weeks since finishing chapter five, mostly because I was unsatisfied with a chapter that, as I'd originally planned it, had only Shinji coming to Rei's apartment, panicked and stricken over Misato and Asuka, and Rei's attempt to kiss him.

So I fleshed things out a bit. Actually quite a bit, much more than I thought I would. I abandoned the in-depth storyboards that have characterized my writing process of late. I didn't write out all the dialogue first and fill in the gaps after that. I wonder if the difference is noticeable, if the flow of the story is better this way or worse. Clearly, this is the fastest I've written a chapter (or an act of Identity) in some time. Perhaps that's telling me something in itself.

I'd wanted for some time to work in the opening scene here, and since Rei's about to die right after this chapter, this was the last chance. What it means I won't explain, however--at least, not yet.

With the second scene, I wanted to get across Rei's emergent personality, one that is still very loyal to Gendo and who craves his attention, praise, and approval, but is also independent in her own way. Rei has her own vision of the truth, and while she tries to be compliant here, the subtle differences in what she says against what Gendo tells her to say is unexpected to everyone else in the room. Unexpected for Rei, at least, and she doesn't even realize how she's changed. I did want to imply, however obliquely, that this newfound independence could be something Gendo fears, that maybe he would plan for Rei to be destroyed to reassert control. It's not something definitive that I will say did happen; regardless, this scene is meant to show Rei's sense of self-direction.

With how episode 22 focuses so much on Asuka, it seemed wrong to simply shut her out of this chapter, and I thought it plausible that Rei, having learned to value her friends' friends more like her own, would visit Asuka and try to help, even as awkward as she knows it could be. Hikari is really an interesting character, and it's a shame that she'll have to go soon, but while Rei is there out of respect for Shinji, it's Hikari who gives Rei a sympathetic portrait of the girl. Hikari's relationship with Toji is something that mirrors Rei and Shinji as well.

I have mixed feelings about the transition scene here, where Rei sees a couple kissing. In a sense, it's like flashing a big neon sign that says she'll try it later, but it's also necessary. It's an idea that had to be planted; I think on balance I should've have worked it into last chapter and just kept that gun unfired, so to speak, until this one. I also had issues justifying Rei's circuitous travels here. Ultimately I decided that it was better to avoid the issue and let it be as much as possible.

Of course, Kaji's been dead since the end of episode 21. Misato learned about it then, and in chapter five, when Shinji said he saw Misato crying, that was why. So Misato's been dealing with it, struggling with it, for some days now. And I think, only after some careful contemplation and thinking would she go for a plan like this. Did Misato count on Rei being at Kaji's garden patch? No, I don't think so, but she did plan on taking Rei that day; fortune just moved up the timetable an hour or two (this is the kind of coincidence I consider acceptable--it tidies up the plot without seriously affecting the consequences). All along, of course, Misato doesn't say that Kaji's dead. Once the opportunity presents itself, she deceives Rei into coming to her apartment, where she can interrogate her, get the answers that she needs to justify Kaji's death. That's important to her. Like Hikari and Toji, Misato's relationship with Kaji is something that isn't properly fulfilled. That was what I wanted Rei to take away from this confrontation, more than anything else. It gives her the push to move on Shinji.

This scene, in a lot of ways, wrote itself. We have scenes with Misato in her bedroom, working, so we see that the room as a whole isn't full of crazy writing. This, I feel, is necessary since she can't stay cooped up in there forever and eventually Shinji would try to look in on her. How often does one look back at the door if one's just peeking through?

I actually looked up floor plans of Misato's apartment to be sure. See EvaGeeks for plans of Misato's and Rei's apartments, so everything ought to be geometrically correct now. (I did make a mistake in that Shinji has an actual bed, not just a futon, but I fixed that.)

Originally, I was just going to have Misato stuff Rei into a closet, but this didn't seem dangerous enough. Also, Rei gets a lot closer to jumping off the side of Misato's balcony than I thought to do at first. It remains to be seen whether this is a good thing or not when chapter seven comes out. Otherwise, Rei's thoughts inside the refrigerator are largely as I envisioned, except with the presence of "It," the part of her inside Unit-00, to taunt her (not really there, just a manifestation of her fears). This is, in a way, Rei's point of choice: that she wants to continue living and have experiences and not be forgotten.

I wanted Rei to talk Misato down without giving away too much, and drawing a connection between them, having Rei realize herself how she is used and yet she follows anyway, seeking gratification, seeking Gendo's attentions. Emphasizing that parallel and knowing that Shinji is there is enough to pacify Misato, and at the same time, it gives Rei reason to sympathize with her, to try to save her captor.

Nevertheless, the emotional toll of this day on Rei is great, and I hoped to make it feel natural that she'd want some comfort from someone, even if she doesn't necessarily expect Shinji to reciprocate, but that's a far cry from being second-place to Asuka, from knowing that he can't comfort her always. And so, Rei tries to find some solace in the dark and fails, with the halo of Armisael in the distance, a foreboding omen.

I wrote most of the above here after just having finished the chapter. Now that it's posted, I do want to mention that I tweaked the scene with Misato and Rei in the kitchen, right before soldiers broke in to secure the area. I wanted Misato to have a more pronounced breakdown. This way, it should feel like she hesitates to kill Rei for realizing how Shinji will react to it.

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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

While by no means a burden to sit through, On Stranger Tides is rather predictable fare, driven in large part by Johnny Depp alone. As expected by now, Depp's performance as Jack Sparrow is immaculate. His timing and his character's outlandish nature are, of course, the main reasons to watch the movie--in particular, the Sparrow's escape from King George's royal guard and his duel with his impostor double are very well done.

But Depp's exploits are, as I said, expected by this point, and the rest of the film is fairly predictable fare. Cases in point: Blackbeard believes a one-legged man will kill him and so seeks the Fountain of Youth to protect against that. Naturally, he is killed by a one-legged man (and Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa) and therein lies no surprise. When presented with a sinister test by the Fountain (which, even then, seems to be the only real test there is), Sparrow refuses to partake of the waters himself, preferring instead to damn Blackbeard by tricking him into drinking from the wrong cup, finishing him off and saving Angelica. This is both expected and disappointing. Sparrow was already expressed being turned off the idea of the Fountain when he learned he had to kill another to use it; this seems to almost kill his motivation for being there aside from rescuing the Black Pearl, which while logical, is not very compelling.

To cap it off, Sparrow leaves Angelica on an island alone, with a pistol containing only one shot, a particularly cruel fate for someone, apparently, merely mistrusts. Perhaps he mistrusts her throughout the film, but that really doesn't come off and this stranding seems very, very harsh, as if it's done solely to setup the gag after the credits.

Decent fun to sit through, as Depp's antics are still a pleasure to watch, but that's all you can expect from this one.

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X-Men: First Class

On the backs of strong performances from James McAvoy and Michael Hassbender, director Matthew Vaughn has delivered a surprisingly good prequel installment in X-Men: First Class. McAvoy's Xavier is a refreshing, youthful portrayal, a painting of a brilliant idealist who's yet to be tempered fully by experience into true wisdom. Hassbender as Magneto is single-minded and driven, and the audience gets from the two real chemistry and glimpses of their friendship. Perhaps most touching Xavier's attempt to foster Magneto's power in moving a satellite dish to point toward Xavier's estate. The two men share a touching moment as Magneto relives a memory of his murdered mother, one he didn't know he still had. It is for moments like these that I think Xavier and Magneto could really be called partners. Their friendship is made believable, despite their clear differences in opinion and outlook on the world.

The film stands well even outside these two performances. First Class promises an intriguing look at a time in which mutants still live in secrecy, and as such, it breaks new ground on long-standing themes for this series. Jennifer Lawrence gives Mystique (or Raven, as she is known for the majority of the film) a decidedly vulnerable quality, torn between conformity in maintaining her shapeshift to blend in with society and embracing her own identity, symbolized when she chooses to remain in her natural, blue-skinned form for the remainder of the film. Implicit in this is the notion that Xavier himself is somewhat too arrogant or normal to truly understand her, which is what drives their ultimate division. For the others, the choice between embracing humanity or fearing them is made, one by one, and the parallels between other times of minority vs. majority clashes are made clear. Perhaps most directly is when Magneto protects the mutants from both the American and Soviet navies' barrage of missiles and cannon fire. Magneto resolves to send the munitions back and destroy both sides, but Xavier insists that there are good men there who don't know better, who are "just following orders." On the one hand, it's a moment that makes everyone in the theater wince, knowing the association of that phrase with some of the worst atrocities in history, including the Holocaust. On the other hand, it epitomizes Xavier's idealism. Magneto's response to his comment if, however, utterly predictable.

It should be said, then, that in one sense while First Class is bold and new, it's still somewhat flawed. While Kevin Bacon's character Shaw is utterly sinister and a pleasure to watch, the arc of Magneto's journey is altogether too simple. That Shaw would seek out mutants and assemble them for an ultimate eradication of normal humans is not a new concept, of course, but Magneto's adoption of this philosophy feels misguided. Magneto was abused by normal humans and Shaw, a mutant, alike. In one way, his victimization in the Holocaust is enough to stimulate a deep mistrust of normal humans by analogy, yet he still has this deep-seated hatred for Shaw. This dissonance comes to a head when Magneto says point blank he agrees with Shaw's ideas--but Shaw killed his mother and thus has to die as well. I say there was dissonance--there should've been, but there wasn't, and at no time does he seem to consider abandoning his position (and adopting Xavier's instead) in response to Shaw. Hence, there never seems to be a real chance of anything other than the ending we know must occur--that Xavier will be unable to walk, that Magneto will go his own way with Mystique.

Perhaps that's the problem with First Class--that we know what will happen, and there's a temptation for the filmmakers to excessively acknowledge that. Hugh Jackman's cameo, telling Xavier and Magneto to, er, mind their own business? Hilarious. Xavier writhing on the beach, struck by a stray bullet, saying over and over that he can't feel his legs? It was enough when we saw the bullet hit him in the back. And perhaps because of needing all the pieces to fit, we never get the feeling of Xavier and Mystique's friendship, which the film sets up as having been established since childhood. We don't even get a strong explanation for Mystique's "crush" on Magneto, though her hopes for making a bond, for finding common ground with anyone, are clear.

Despite these problems, First Class is an enjoyable film, and though we normal humans may never embrace Magneto's position, we can certainly understand it. We understand it because even today, people don't always play nice with others based on what they look like, what they believe, or some other thin excuse for violence and prejudice. This, more than superpowers or fighting for good in the world, is what keeps X-Men relevant for years to come.

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