Drunkard's Walk Forums

By request... Cliff's notes for the ending of I'm Here to Help.
- Previously, Emerald had discovered that Sailor Moon was Serentiy.
- He takes her to a Strange Place in order to try to convince her to not Do That Cleansing Thing.
- Her ghost mom steals her away before he can finish with the convincing, and convinces her to ignore his arguments. Meanwhile, Beryl is attacking. Mom sends the Senshi to fight and die.
- Mom and Pluto deliberately push Emerald's buttons, so that he'll go after them. Pluto is the one who suggested this.
- Emerald descends on the waiting youma and does Bad Bad Things to them. Meanwhile, the Senshi all die. This makes Emerald unhappy.
- Pluto shows up to mock Emerald. Emerald encourages her to keep mocking. Eventually, Pluto realizes that he's draining her. By that point, it is Far Too Late.
- Emerald sucks almost (but not quite all) of the energy out of Pluto. Emerald then uses this to Revolutionize The World in his own special way. That done, he dies from overchanneling.
- Somewhere in here, the Senshi all reincarnate. They're Senshi like that.
- Pluto hops forward briefly into the future she was from, now ending. She reveals that this was all, in fact deliberate on her part. Specifically, once she *had* Crystal Tokyo, she had realized that lobotomizing everyone really wasn't the happy plan after all. The current storylineis the result of her tweaking the timeline over and over and over again, exhaustively, desperately trying to figure out a way to make the Great Cleansing not happen, without destroying the chance of a reasonably happy, functional future. There is a suggestion that at least two of her previous attempts led to Emerald winning - one by going into exile and connecting to the planet Nemesis and one by sticking around and inspiring the invading Nemesians. Regardless, that future ends, taking that Pluto with it.
- Back in present day, the kid who was going to grow up to be Emerald gets a taste of his poiwer a bit ahead of schedule.
- Jump a couple of years forward. Classic slap slap kiss kiss moment between Young Emerald and Reincarnated Mars.

I thought that he dies from a paradox. i.e. He grows up in a world and gains his power and experience in a world where the Cleansing happened. When he does his own version of it, he eliminates that Cleansing, ergo, he eliminates his past.--

Thanks to Basaken for the help.

Ah, yes. My error. He burns through essentially all of his reserves and does not then have enough left to protect him from the Time Paradox.

Much of above is just implied or has to be worked out by the reader. It's actually pretty like th original Sailormoon series - a rather full-of-holes storyline that implies at something epic, which is probably why SM has so much fanfiction which tries to fill in the holes.
Mark _could_ probably write the entire thing out but the entire thing is better this way - lots of stuff to make the reader think but concise and well-written enough to to deliver a good story. I think the closest approximate in literature would be Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" and some of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories - short and brutal (for an SM fic of this particular subject matter; Mark could have wrote a 20 part story about this theme) yet hinting at a greater whole.

Mark Doherty here.
Yes, it's unfortunate that a portion of the people found the ending confusing. However, the entire fic was always written with a giant question mark over the story - was Emerald an anti-hero or a delusional villain, was the Purification brainwashing or did he misinterpret happiness for stupidity? And so on. I could have explicitly laid out what went on, but didn't because I wanted people to read this fic and make up their own minds on what it was all about - I pointed a signpost in the right direction, but didn't give a map and explicit directions.
After I wrote the first couple of chapters, a reader directed me to the Astro City comicbooks - it's an easy to get example of the same story-telling method of mentioning (in passing) major historical story events that don't actually get covered (or aren't covered in the books until years later). It's an effective technique for quickly building a large world history, although some readers prefer to have things explained as they happen.
If I ever do the (originally planned in 1998 ) sequel, I'll clarify a lot of things. As it stands, though, I'm happier with leaving it as is, with the ending a little unclarified.
On a sidenote - hi Elsa. Unless there's two of you out there, I remember your emails on my fics from the old days on the FFML.

Oh, she's the same Elsa.
Hi, Mark, welcome to the DW forums! Glad to see you've dropped in; I hope you find us congenial enough to stick around.
-- Bob
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...The President is on the line
As ninety-nine crab rangoons go by...

Yeah, and I still remember that e-mail you sent out before Pluto got you. ^_^ A week or so is not ten years. -_^

Meh - a week, ten years. They're so close to each other that they may as well be the same thing ( if you compare them to the entire lifespan of the universe, that is )
What can I say, I didn't leave because I had writer's block, I left because I reached a point where I felt I needed to absolutely divorce myself from anime fandom as a whole. If it wasn't for Mai Hime and School Rumble resparking my interest, I might not have been back into the fandom for another 10 years.

I know the feeling.
Trust me.
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead

Mmmm... Mai-HiME...

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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"