The Coin - Chapter One

Chapter One on FFN

With a first chapter of a story, which I haven't had the privilege of writing since April of last year, it's all about setting the stage. In a lot of ways, I'm aware of how this story isn't like "Before and After," as while Rei was influenced and affected by others, Haruhi is much more overt in her feelings and opinions of people. Where Rei would learn from others, Haruhi's interactions with people have a distinct character. She finds what she likes and dislikes in them, and that's what lies at the core of her narration in this story.

Each scene is part of a progression in Haruhi's thought process. The first, in which she decides that this coin business is worth pursuing, is also a chance for Haruhi to be a bit of a showoff and interact obliquely with Kyon. Being a physicist, I enjoy the tidbits of science and mathematics that are sprinkled in the original books, and this was my attempt to work some of that in here. As I say in the note at the end of the chapter, this is a mathematically-valid limit and historically, it plays a part in the recognition of e as a special number. For my part, I think it's much better to look at the derivative properties of exponentials, but it's all about the same, at any rate. Haruhi, remember, is exceedingly gifted athletically and academically. Why is this? I could say it comes from a general thirst for understanding, for trying to find something amazing in the world, but I can't say for sure.

Something I knew I wanted to setup here was Nagato being outside their classroom. In a typical Haruhi novel, Kyon has to adapt to the developing situation, gathering advice from Nagato, Koizumi, or Asahina as it's available or necessary. Haruhi is never privy to this conversations, so this is the beginning of something going on behind her back. Nagato's exceedingly capable and powerful. She already knows what Haruhi's beginning to exert conscious control. While Haruhi leaves, Nagato is telling Kyon and he's thinking about what he's going to do. Kyon, at least initially, won't want the world to be upended, but it's also something he's going to consider greatly. What can he do? Dissuade her? Convince her it's all nothing? Nagato, for her part, is there to observe. While she and Kyon aren't in direct danger, she won't interfere, even if she wants to, for there's a great deal of scrutiny upon her from the Entity.

But Haruhi's not concerned with all of that just yet, even if she does notice it. She recalls here what Kyon told her in "Snowy Mountain Syndrome" and that Nagato fell ill in one of the divergent plots of Dissociation and Surprise. These are all things that Haruhi's knowledge of is incomplete, but what I hoped to get across is that the brigade and its members are intensely important to her. In Haruhi's mind, they've stuck together because they're kindred spirits. It's not just an inaccurate description of reality; it's just not true. While Koizumi in particular and the girls too may be loyal to her, they all have other motives. As I've said, they're not seeking the extraordinary; they already know it exists and are trying to understand it (Nagato) or contain it (Asahina and Koizumi).

Part of my effort to soften Haruhi a bit involved extending the club room scene here. As Haruhi prepares to dress Asahina, she asks the latter how she feels about that. Does Asahina actually enjoy it on some level? I think so. Does she also feel compelled to say yes regardless, in order to keep Haruhi appeased? I think so too. Perversely, it's an equal relationship of sorts. Their inequities are just so piled on top of each other that they cancel out. It's equally...not so good.

Of course, you can't soften Haruhi so much that her wackiness doesn't come out. It's utterly shameless for her to set up this scheme, and yet it's effective. Originally, Asahina would be approached by these two boys and Haruhi would actually kick one of them in the shins, sending him flying a few feet. Again, I toned this down, and her defiance manifests as a "natural" sinkhole. In keeping with "Remote Island Syndrome," where Kyon submits that Haruhi would never see someone killed, it would've been over the top, in my mind, to have her harm this brat with her power. She's not nearly angry enough to do anything of the sort. Yet.

This is also where Kyon returns, of course, and while he enjoys Asahina in her Santa suit, he's also trying to subtly trying to dissuade Haruhi, a symptom of his confused thoughts on the matter. At this point, Kyon's probably trying to see if anything really comes of this investigation. Maybe he doesn't need to dissuade her; maybe he's asked Nagato to make sure nothing really happens. I don't know if I ascribe to this theory, but I think it's fair for Kyon to be more passive and observant rather than forwardly engaging of Haruhi.

Haruhi's plan for analyzing these coins is, in my mind, quite logical. Asahina is going to be the slowest link in any assembly line. Better to have everyone else waiting than to have a load of work pile up on her at the end of the chain. Haruhi's "oversight" is a way for me to hedge this sympathetic portrayal just a little bit.

But in the end, nothing is found, and Haruhi returns to a state of melancholy. This, to me, is the pivotal Kyon moment. Screw logic. Screw what the others need him for. As much as Kyon snarks Haruhi--he's done it more than once this chapter--he's at least considerate of her feelings. He backs off. He tempers his earlier criticism and encourages Haruhi to pursue the matter if she feels she should. Perhaps Kyon is weary of the masquerade. Maybe he justifies this to himself. He might think it unlikely that Haruhi actually will, but some good credit from her will make his life easier later. Or maybe his thoughts are more aggressive than that--Haruhi's had the powers of a god for so long now, the people around her should accept that she has them. There are several explanations here. Part of the freedom of writing from this perspective is that we don't really know what Kyon's thinking here, and neither does Haruhi. While she appreciates him as much as she's willing to admit, the idea that their outlooks on life are fundamentally at odds is ingrained in her. To me, part of the challenge Haruhi puts to herself is convincing people like Kyon to look for the unusual. She just doesn't know that Kyon's already made that choice in Disappearance.

So we get home, and Haruhi's mother is a bit of a lethal chef, so all she does is prepare ingredients and let her daughter do the rest. Based on the current plan for chapter two, we'll meet Haruhi's father as well. But this is where a seemingly meaningless scene comes back from Chekhov's Armory to hit the point home. Originally, Haruhi was going to have thought Kan was interested in little girls and cemented that in reality by having some questionable photos come out, but I thought this would be a little better. There's nothing like the image of a politician freaking out in front of kids and shattering a wooden table for a few laughs. And while originally, I also had Haruhi realize what that meant explicitly before the chapter was over, her mother's line here seemed like an excellent hook for chapter two.

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The Coin - Prologue

The prologue on FFN

So a week ago I posed the prologue to FFN and to the Fanfiction Mailing List. It was to a good deal of necessary feedback that I retracted the FFN version and decided to rewrite the prologue anew. In my hate, I'd hoped to capture Haruhi's manic, eccentric nature. Instead, I rehashed old jokes and schemes, and I ignored the growth of this character from her initial sociopathy in Melancholy to the character we know at the end of Dissociation and in the as-yet-unfinished translation of Surprise. And while it wasn't my intention to paint Haruhi in such a negative light, I realized that if I couldn't get across her bizarre mindset, I'd have to find some other take on her instead.

What I eventually settled on was, instead of playing up her oddities in interactions, the strangeness of her thought process was just as well. More than that, I found an angle more appropriate for the direction of the story as a whole.

The basics of this prologue are the same as the first one, the ultimate point being that Haruhi has finally noticed the effects of her powers in a way that she can suspect, that she'll think about rather than dismiss. It's a small thing, but it'll take her far. The rest of the prologue as it stands is getting her to that point, showing her attitude toward the unusual and the extraordinary and how she sees herself as being different from others. It's entirely intentional that Kyon's name is not said, of course---I wanted there to be at least some doubt about who the narrator was until it became clear at the end. Naturally, most people are probably able to pick up on it, but there's value in not stating something outright until you want to. No matter how sure people are in their interpretations, confirmation needs to obey the proper timing.

Overall, I'm much happier with this prologue. It really does come down to likeability. If Haruhi is entirely unsympathetic, no one will care about the journey she's about to embark on.

Aside from characterization issues, it actually takes quite a bit of research to make sure you get details right with this series. By nature, those details will be spread out, and it took, in my view, some hunting around. In this respect, the anime is somewhat more useful, I think, than the novels. It's a lot easier to get a visual on things, to capture a lot of information in a short time.

As I said in the chapter body itself, this is my examination of who Haruhi is and what she really wants. All this time, the three factions around her have had their own goals, but most importantly, they want their own survival or the survival of the various worlds they live in. But this story hopes to probe at a more fundamental question: what kind of person goes looking for aliens, time-travelers, and espers like Haruhi does? Is the search for those fantastic creatures the goal? What does one hope to discover along the way, while one makes the journey? In a sense, it's about faith. Haruhi's conscious belief in the fantastic has never wavered, even if her drive and enthusiasm for the quest has been tempered by experience and time. Look at the people around her: they believe in those fantastic things because they themselves are fantastic, but to them, it's merely reality. It may be a thing of curiosity, but it's still something they accept not out of faith but knowledge. It brings into question, among other issues, whether one can ever find something truly fantastic. Once that thing is found, doesn't it become part of the greater world? Doesn't it become as accepted and ordinary as everything else?

That may be too much a question of psychology, but I think it relevant.

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"Before and After" Conclusion - Chs. 9 & 10

The final chapters on FFN

So this is it. A story ends. Endings are always something difficult for me, this one a little less so because the feeling I meant to end with has been so clear.

That's not to say these last two chapters haven't been difficult. In part, it's my disquiet with their writing process that I present both of them together, if only to give myself the feeling that I'm ending with something I'm comfortable with, instead of the chapter nine that we have, of which so much comes directly from the source material. To a great extent, I could come up with nothing better to do for these parts. The events that transpire here I've interpreted as having a direct impact on Rei's thought processes and mindset. I couldn't simply gloss over them. Conversely, there's a lot of mental contemplation that happens in both the last two episodes of the series and End of Evangelion. A lot of this I chose not to rehash, simply because I thought doing it from scratch when necessary would be more powerful. In addition, such scenes I felt were difficult to integrate into a "real-time" sort of story the way "Before and After" generally is.

Overall, I felt the thought process for Rei had to be this: when she's reborn, she wants to die, but Misato implores her to reconsider. When she meets Kaworu, she realizes death won't be enough, as something else that's not her will still remain--that is, Lilith. As the events of chapter nine, the beginning of EoE, play out, she becomes convinced of her own and humanity's suffering, and in a moment of compassion with Shinji and spite for Gendo, she's willing to merge with Lilith and risk losing everything of herself, but instead, she finds herself the dominant one. She explores Shinji's mindset and, when he rejects Instrumentality, she makes the decision to die and let them all be freed. In a lot of ways, that's these two chapters in a nutshell. It's the journey to get to these places that I find interesting.

Most of chapter nine is told from Rei's perspective as an observer. It should be understood that she relates these events from having "peered" into people's hearts as well as going back in time to witness them as a specter, the same specters that reap people's souls and convert them to LCL in EoE. Thus, chronologically speaking, while these events actually happen in this chapter, when Rei would glimpse and experience them is actually during her time after merging with Lilith.

A lot of this chapter is built on the theory from EvaGeeks wiki on the phantom appearances of Rei--the idea that Rei, as Lilith, has transcended time and can be in multiple places and times at once. From this, I hoped to take things a step further: such a being would be effectively immortal, despite "dying" as we see her do in the final scenes of Eoe. For all intents and purposes, the "time" she has to go backward and forward and be everywhere is infinite. She can "exist" after her body has died and before she merged with Lilith at all.

As I said, chapter nine is largely taken straight from EoE, and the skeleton of chapter ten is largely the same, but here, since so much more emphasis is placed on the evolution of the mind, I thought it best to put as much new material here as I could. It's my opinion that episodes 25 and 26 take place alongside or concurrently with the film, and for a while, I'd thought I'd try to reconcile the two and depict them as such, but this I found to be an unsatisfying idea, and I decided to go with what I have here: namely, a glimpse of what Rei would see, which by no means do I intend to be complete. I'd originally thought to depict several scenes with the technicians--Hyuga, Ibuki, and Aoba--but I trimmed it down to one because I thought it'd be too long a jaunt away from the center of the piece: Rei and Shinji. I did hope that passage, with Hyuga's hopes going unrealized, gave substance to Rei's feeling that humanity was full of unfulfilled desires. It's not enough, at that point, to leave that as a blanket statement without backing.

I quickly latched onto the idea of Shinji being shown a dream world of sorts, keeping in mind that a dreaming alone would be a "substitute for reality" and shouldn't be done. Thus, he hears a little bit of what other people think of him. I pondered how to go about this. Instrumentality is depicted in many different ways. Sometimes, Shinji seems apart and himself. Other time, he's flooded with what Misato, Rei, and Asuka think of him. I felt I had the freedom to pursue this passage, then. I tried to keep it brief, as I felt the goal of the ending coming quickly. My reasoning here was that Rei would show Shinji a world that was the pinnacle of his desires--close to what he knows but better in several ways. In this, she tests Shinji, and he realizes that he does want the affections of other people, but not so easily that they become meaningless and fake. This, in my view, is consistent with his final decision in EoE, and I felt it was a logical way to extend his thinking: maybe it's not the only time Shinji made that decision. Maybe he was tested several times.

So we get to the end, and Shinji's alone. Rei wants to fix that, so she goes to Asuka. I considered going into more detail at this point, but that would've felt very off to me. Rei doesn't have that emotional connection to her--some sympathy yes, but not a lot of connection. It would've slowed everything way down here, so I hoped to avoid it. We already know it's going to happen, and there wasn't a lot of value, in my mind, in seeing Asuka's journey toward it.

And that leads us to the end. Asuka and Shinji have survived, and Rei will be the eternal observer, helping the souls of humanity return from the LCL sea. At last, her fate is one she chooses, and over Shinji, she'll always be watching. Here is the culmination of the extended use of A Tale of Two Cities, with Rei mirroring Sydney Carton. But Rei is still alive, even if she's chosen the time and place of her death, and this will not be the last we see of her, nor the last I write of her. As I said, I have plans for a companion story--a sequel in one sense--called The Coming of the First Ones. As Asuka and Shinji try to rebuild humanity's future, one of the other Seeds of Life, the sinister Eisheth, sets its gaze on mankind, and once again, it will be up to the older and wiser children to protect themselves and the Earth itself. Rei will play her part, and it's a story I look forward to writing, at some point in the future.

I guess that's why this doesn't really feel like the end to me. I know there's more story to be told, even if it's part of a different tale. To that end, this is not "goodbye," but rather, "see you soon."

To my readers, thank you.

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