02-01-2007, 07:21 AM
So, I've been thinking about a Mai-HiME plot bunny.
Say that, rather than telling the Obsidian Lord to go do something anatomically impossible, Mai accepts his offer, then promptly backstabs him before he can lock her away.
Then, rather than making a world according to her desires, she starts trying to set up various combinations of events to try and achieve the best balance between everyone's ideals.
And what the heck does that mean? It means that she creates the Mai-HiME manga continuity. And Otome. And its manga. And quite possibly a large number of other universes. And then lets them collapse when they all end up averaging exactly the same.
Eventually, she concludes that that line of investigation is a dead end and follows the logic that she jumped to intuitively in canon - that the most moral choice was to let people make their own decisions, and just hope for the best.
But... those 'possibility model' worlds... they were real, too, in their own way. Maybe not as real, but...
So she thought about it for a while, then restarted the 'real' world... while letting people remember any lives they had lived in the projections. Then she took the power from the festival... and spread it out thin, tucking it away in individual shares for people to access or not, as they chose.
Created magic. Rather than stay God.
Of course, that meant that the HiME were still HiME, but hey - Kagutsuchi might be a heckova problem to house-train, but no one could say he wasn't useful...
Then, at last, she goes to bed and sleeps the sleep of the just.
And when she wakes up she realizes that the rules mean she's remembering the lives she would have had, also.
What happens next? Well...
Okay, so, the reason for the thread title is that each person in the story had at the very least several additional lifetimes, whom we may or may not recognize.
Well, whom we likely will recognize, given what's shown in the Mai-X franchise - that people's appearances don't really change from one 'incarnation' to the next, allowing for differences in art style.
Which is why Mai can remember being a Trouble Consultant with a bad reputation, or a gravatic engineer who was once stranded on a desert planet when she was still in primary school. Why Nao knows magic and has started to babble when she gets nervous and thinks she might be kinda gay now. Or bi, she's not sure. Why Takumi has gotten much better at wisecracks and wants to start growing his hair out into a long braid. Why Yukariko's grown a spine and has taken up track. Why Akira has a sudden fondness for baggy jackets and keeps catching herself stuttering. Why Shiho has suddenly switched to a pre-med study track, and can crack boulders with her bare hands. Or even why Midori learned German overnight and has conceived a sudden horror of dolls.
I'm sure there are some things I'm missing...
^_^
Ja, -n
===============================================
"I'm terribly sorry, but I have to kill you quite horribly now."
Say that, rather than telling the Obsidian Lord to go do something anatomically impossible, Mai accepts his offer, then promptly backstabs him before he can lock her away.
Then, rather than making a world according to her desires, she starts trying to set up various combinations of events to try and achieve the best balance between everyone's ideals.
And what the heck does that mean? It means that she creates the Mai-HiME manga continuity. And Otome. And its manga. And quite possibly a large number of other universes. And then lets them collapse when they all end up averaging exactly the same.
Eventually, she concludes that that line of investigation is a dead end and follows the logic that she jumped to intuitively in canon - that the most moral choice was to let people make their own decisions, and just hope for the best.
But... those 'possibility model' worlds... they were real, too, in their own way. Maybe not as real, but...
So she thought about it for a while, then restarted the 'real' world... while letting people remember any lives they had lived in the projections. Then she took the power from the festival... and spread it out thin, tucking it away in individual shares for people to access or not, as they chose.
Created magic. Rather than stay God.
Of course, that meant that the HiME were still HiME, but hey - Kagutsuchi might be a heckova problem to house-train, but no one could say he wasn't useful...
Then, at last, she goes to bed and sleeps the sleep of the just.
And when she wakes up she realizes that the rules mean she's remembering the lives she would have had, also.
What happens next? Well...
Okay, so, the reason for the thread title is that each person in the story had at the very least several additional lifetimes, whom we may or may not recognize.
Well, whom we likely will recognize, given what's shown in the Mai-X franchise - that people's appearances don't really change from one 'incarnation' to the next, allowing for differences in art style.
Which is why Mai can remember being a Trouble Consultant with a bad reputation, or a gravatic engineer who was once stranded on a desert planet when she was still in primary school. Why Nao knows magic and has started to babble when she gets nervous and thinks she might be kinda gay now. Or bi, she's not sure. Why Takumi has gotten much better at wisecracks and wants to start growing his hair out into a long braid. Why Yukariko's grown a spine and has taken up track. Why Akira has a sudden fondness for baggy jackets and keeps catching herself stuttering. Why Shiho has suddenly switched to a pre-med study track, and can crack boulders with her bare hands. Or even why Midori learned German overnight and has conceived a sudden horror of dolls.
I'm sure there are some things I'm missing...
^_^
Ja, -n
===============================================
"I'm terribly sorry, but I have to kill you quite horribly now."