On Fri, 27 Nov 1998, Shunsuke (and Paul!) wrote:

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[Boku no Marie]

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Title: Music-Box Angel, Episode 4: Nu Sommes Du Soleil
Series: Boku No Marie (My Dear Marie)
Genre: Romantic Comedy/Drama
Author: Matthew Johnston
Email: matt2518@gladstone.uoregon.edu

Homepage: http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~matt2518

Date Sent to FFML: 11/3/98
Size: 32K (about 5000 words)

Summary:

Marie washes dishes, Hiroshi has a plan, Tanaka sets a date, and Mari
gets all starry-eyed.  All this, plus a peek in a few diaries!

(This is the final episode of Music-Box Angel.  Go to the web page
above for the all-original Music-Box Angel theme song in MIDI format.)

{Paul}
  First... episode 5, ne? Second... niiiiice closer. You're right
  about the whole epilogue nature of this... may even want to call it
  an epilogue, since it does a very nice job of tying things up. We
  see a lot of reactions that were curiously (or perhaps deliberately)
  absent from earlier chapters...then again, there's been precious
  little time to sit and think as of late, hasn't there? Very nice
  WAFFy bit with Hiroshi and Mari at the end... and some oddly direct
  reflections on the part of Marie as well. A nice closer to what has
  been a good series... even if I didn't know the source at all. 14
  or 15 out of 20.

Hehehe... my bad about the title mess.  ^_^

Thanks for the compliments.  The reactions that appear mostly in this
episode were deliberately left out of, say, episode 4.  I figured that,
given the siuation, the reactions would probably be a little delayed until
after sleep, wonderful sleep.  ^_^  Plus, it gave me a chance to use the
"diary" technique used so much in 19th century English Lit (which I've
been reading too much of this term).

The directness of Marie's self-evaluation is a little odd, but she's
changed a little as a character over this story.  I used her diary as the
one place she could and has been direct with herself.  We never see
it/them in the anime, so her indirectness in the series can be explained
and... and I'm going off... ^_^

Anyways, thanks.  And what exactly does a 14 or 15 out of 20 constitute?

{Shunsuke}
  Now here's a different ending to a WAFFy fic, some but not all the
  issues resolved, and some doors open for exploring without becoming 
  silly.  Marie doesn't have any definite direction to go, she has 
  many choices, yet you know whichever it is it will be the right
  one.  This is a better end than most, and not just for the positive 
  result.

Thank you.  I like happy endings.  A lot.  ^_-

  About the diaries, in a couple of cases saying whose words are
  whose would be an idea; unless being used as a tool to surprise 
  readers, it can be temporarily confusing.

At the beginning of each section, I usually identify the writer of the
diary in the first sentence, if that's what you mean.  The contents of the
diaries I deliberately didn't edit heavily because I was afraid the
diaries would start sounding contrived.  Usually, we don't get the
opportunity to edit and re-edit our diaries to make them sound just right.
So any vagueness or ambiguity can be blamed on my "technique" (artistic
laziness).  ^_^

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--Matt

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"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both
incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by
twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper."   -- Rod Serling
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