Author's Notes, IV:

Notes again already? Yes, dear reader, I know we've only had one chapter since the last set, but this collection of notes ran so long that I felt it best to post them on their own, before the next chapter. More importantly, though, the last chapter had a lot happen in a few pages, and I expected that there may be some reactions to the story, and felt getting my notes up quickly might clarify. Hopefully you'll find them useful. As always, you can always skip past them to the next chapter!

Thanks as always to those who read, and especially to those who review and comment!

Chapter 8:

-Ahaha. No, Maya likely didn't write the article – though Shunsuke almost certainly took the pictures. Apparently seeing an issue of Coolest was not enough to jog his memory, which I'd say is fair.

-So... the alternate timeline. I offered my explanation for it in-story, but I suppose I'm going to have to comment on it nonetheless. I know that it comes across as being somehow negative towards the idea of Hamuko, but it's not. It's a story necessity. At the time of this writing, we don't know what P4G will entail, and for all we know Margaret will mention a "girl" the way that she mentioned a "boy" in the original P4 – but for this story, I needed the two timelines to be different besides a single element. The entire story is about changes in time and small things becoming big things – Ms. Ounishi's classroom lecture early on was setting things like this up. The problem is this – as a "fan," you arguably want to create a world where Hamuko gets to join Minato, or vice versa. But to do that honestly, you're depriving a universe of their particular Arisato – for one thing, in this version of the story, the universe that she'd be theoretically leaving is one that isn't long for existing (for humans) anyway. Naming Naoto's mother "Yui" might have been over-the-top for this, but honestly... this is a universe-long con job, and as a story it doesn't reflect negatively on any of the likable characters. It wasn't for no reason.

-This alternate version of Persona 4, by the way, might be one of the most depressing things I've ever done. Sheesh!

-Challenge #1 to creating a universe "designed to fail" was to make it believable. Not only have we seen all of these people do the impossible before, they have to do so again before the end of this story! I tried to dig down and find logical reasons for all of the things that happen as things collapse, but I also moved through the tale on fast-forward as much as possible, so that there were as few details to contend with as possible. The more moving pieces, the more likely that you can find one that doesn't work (a rule that I clearly do NOT follow with the story as a whole, which sure does have a lot of moving pieces!)

-Challenge #2 was making it worth caring about. That meant showing at least some of the struggle, and also providing things that we hadn't seen before – what Brutus looks like, what Mitsuru's and Shinjiro's Shadows were like, Akihiko accepting his Shadow, the fox not being an asshole, etc. It's one of the reasons that I chose these specific sequences to interweave with the end of Hamuko's world – Minato's reunion with Yukari, the Velvet Siblings in action, and the Aigis/Teddie material were all, in the past, highly demanded stuff when it came to this story, so it was my hope that even if you didn't care for the bleak turn, you'd keep reading to see the stuff you'd been waiting for, and that the other stuff would pay off by the end and make it worth it.

-We don't get to see nearly enough of Aigis and Teddie enjoying each other's company here. I skipped past the discussion bits here to keep things moving – hopefully I can flash back to it later.

-FYI, if you were to ask me who was most fun to write for, but also the hardest to write? Teddie, by a mile.

-The relationship between the two Kirijo labs... the one on Yakushima and the one on Tatsumi Port Island... it's always been pretty vague, and I've tried to keep it vague in this story. Who was where, and at what time? Much like the chronology, it's all a bit contentious.

-Why did the Shadows of the boys take over the castle, rather than form a new area or areas? Because as Shadows of SEES members, they act with a degree of military precision that the Shadows of characters from Persona 4 could not have. They knew what their other selves would do first.

-To be fair, Mitsuru may have been able to survive if she'd had a pair of glasses. It's hard to say. I do think that she'd reject her Shadow, but without the disorientation, she might have thought things through better.

-It's important to remember that for SEES, this is based on their development in Hamuko's route, which is significantly different than in Minato's – for instance, Hamuko helps Akihiko come to grips with the loss of his sister more than Minato does – and is also based on the version of The Answer seen earlier in the story, in which Shinjiro and Akihiko are able to hash things out (with a bit of violence). This also means that Mitsuru and Yukari were in a different place, as they didn't go through what they did in the male route Answer. This is why I believe that Akihiko is able to accept his Shadow, here.

-Where has Elizabeth been? We'll get to that.

-I left what happened with Ken's Shadow up in the air on purpose. Did they fight it, or did he accept it? I leave it to you to decide.

-Namatame never does catch a break, does he?

-Yes, I'm still refusing to state definitively what happened within the Lockdown. I don't plan on telling you, either. We know Izuna survived, and so did Haru. At least one more character will be seen before the end. This isn't a Devil Survivor story (or a Catherine one, or a Strange Journey or Trinity Soul one) – we see what we need to in order to reflect on the main tale, which surrounds the casts of four Persona stories (plus "If..." - which is "Persona Zero" - and the fictional Persona 5 which I made up for this story). Most of the dialogue here is direct quoting, except for the bit about Amane's name, which of course is a reference to the earliest Shin Megami Tensei games. The thematic reasoning behind its placement here is, I think, pretty clear.

-The stuff with Shinjiro's Shadow... if you don't know how he feels, here, then count yourself lucky – or don't, maybe, because it's part and parcel of loving someone completely.

-When Igor serves as mission control, he appears in the corner of the screen like Fuuka or Rise, but his nose reaches across your entire widescreen television.

-For people who read the original After the End stories, there are a lot of payoffs in this chapter. Finally seeing Aigis come through the door, for one, and seeing the three Velvet Siblings reunited. I hope it's been worth the wait.

-The Fountain Arcana is the counterpart to The Beggar, as mentioned in the notes of a previous chapter.

-In trying to figure out what would genuinely scare the Velvet Siblings, I had a pretty short list to work from – their power being so immense. But let's face it – everyone is scared of Alice.

-And now we finally see one of our primary antagonists. MegaTen fans may rightly criticize my characterization of the blond-haired man here. Normally he's a bit more... laconic? Rarely is he excitable and chatty the way he is here. This was a deliberate choice on my part. What we can all agree on is that the blond-haired man is usually working a multi-layered plan, usually more than a few steps ahead of the protagonist of whichever game you're playing. The same is happening here. In this case, portraying himself in this fashion is part of the plan. As Philemon suggests at the story's end – this is a being willing to do or be whatever is needed in order to get what he wants. Why this characterization helps him, though, will wait until we get a better sense of what his plan is. He's certainly had many faces in the different games to date, as it is – in Nocturne he's a boy and an old man, and in Strange Journey he's a girl!

-On whether it's fair that the blond-haired man is portrayed as an antagonist... well, I think people sometimes overestimate how "heroic" he is in MegaTen titles. He wants what he wants, and he'll use you to get there. The fact that YHVH comes off as a much nastier enemy, and the blond-haired man almost a hero in comparison, muddies the perception a bit. Just because the chaos routes are valid options doesn't mean they're in humanity's best interests. Like the man says – he believes in survival of the fittest, and he wants the cycle to end once and for all. The fact that he rather likes humanity doesn't mean that he's their protector.

-Yes, the fly is Beelzebub.

-I didn't bother to write everyone dying, because who wants to read it? Besides... as I wrote in the story, it'd be fair to think that they could still win this. But I tried to put them in as untenable a position as I possibly could. Without Teddie, and without Souji, the mechanism by which they could battle Izanami on her terms is pretty well destroyed, you know?

-And there's everyone's favorite jerk-face, Nyarlathotep. As long as humanity has a Shadow, he will be there – as he's said himself. I did worry that having him be one of the factors in the blond-haired man's plan would be too much... but this is a story that hinges on all of Persona history, and especially with Tatsuya's memory already at risk in the story, it would be strange not to see him. There are more factors in play here, as well, that we've yet to see. For everyone to be involved, you need a suitable set of antagonists.

-If Metis and Teddie are arguably brother and sister (with Nyarlathotep as their nasty Dad), would that make a Teddie/Aigis relationship inappropriate? Hmm.

-Finally, the pay-off that I'd planned back in the original version of "The Eagle and the Butterfly." Yes, this dying universe, and Theo's pushing the Seal's energies over to Minato's side, was always planned. You see now why I skipped relating it back then – the amount of explanation would have destroyed the story. You also see now why I blanched at the idea of this being viewed as a "fix fic" - this isn't a "fix" at all, as it destroyed an entire universe – that of the female route – to make possible. And now we also see that all of the struggling by the doomed Persona-users in this chapter was not pointless – it allowed Theo to do what he's doing here, and makes any victory in the "main timeline" of this story possible. That Ken is able to grab Hamuko and bring her over is almost a bonus... but the story's not over, and Hamuko will get justice for her friends.

-If you're upset that Hamuko and Shinjiro can't be reunited this way, you should hang on. There were, after all, some plot twists in that other chapter, yes?

-The still-unanswered questions – like how Ken got there, and what happened in the Amala Network after Alice showed up – will be answered in due course.

-I know that I deserve to be drawn and quartered for that "I need your HALP" joke, but it was my way of acknowledging that this was all essentially a great punchline – that Aigis finally comes home to see Minato, and she's too busy trying to save Teddie's life to enjoy it. What exactly is happening to Teddie? Keep reading to find out.

-Nyarlathotep does sort of speak for the audience here, doesn't he? Philemon has made some strange choices over the course of the series.