That's the *only* odd thing about her?  ^_^
Dark-skinned women with platinum blonde hair
are rare enough as it is, plus her unusual attire.
The plastic bag should just be another of the
oddities associated with his first perusal of Urd.

You're right, but I need to point out the bag with her
initial apperance.  Any ideas on how I should rephrase
it so it draws his eye (and subsequently I make mention
of it to the reader)?

Try going the other way.  Having seen a woman so attention-getting, so
beautiful and mysterious and other-worldly, that a simple mundane shopping
bag stands out as incongruous.

Honestly, I'd prefer that you end the fanfic here.
The scene back at the temple seems tacked on, and
it breaks the mood too much, and is, again, too
expository, spelling out things (like the fact that
Urd is the Goddess of the Past) that are better left
implied.  Leave it like this and you have a very
nice, melancholy story that's paced nicely.

And here I'm going to disagree (except maybe the
'Goddess of the Past' bit, since we know who she is
if we're reading this). I definitely want to wind
things up on a more upbeat ending. Urd does have
issues with remembering the past, particularly when
it comes to romance, but she has dealt with them
before she met Troubadore, and in time she'll deal
with them afterwards as well. It might be hard, but
she is a strong character, as evidenced in her talk
with Yoshi. I wanted to bring her back in line with
the same usually happy person you see in the manga,
but this is meant to hint at depths that aren't really
touched upon all that much there. The melancholy
brought on by the season is for the most part over.
She was telling the truth to Yoshi about wanting
someone to talk to. Likewise the scene brings it
back into the feel of the manga, which I like to
think makes the story a little better since it can
be more easily fit into the series in the mind of
the reader.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to talk you out of this.  I just
want to point you to "The Sixth Sense" DVD.  There's an alternate ending, a
scene M. Knight Shyamalan described as his favorite scene in the movie.  And
it's easy to see why:  it's a speech by Bruce Willis (on video tape, from
the wedding) in which he describes his feelings for his wife.  It's moving
and wraps up a lot of the emotional issues.  However, it totally destroys
the impact and pacing of the end of the movie.  Shyamalan talks on the DVD
about the difficulty he had in removing the scene, because he liked it so
much.  However, as a viewer, I had to agree that his decision; the original
ending is powerful and leaves off at just the right moment to have the
greatest impact on the audience.  In order to have that impact, Shyamalan
had to delete his favorite part of the movie.

Here, too, I know that you want to leave it on a upbeat note and wrap up
some of the emotional issues surrounding Urd.  That's fine in and of itself,
but it detracts from the emotional impact this story *could* have had by
leaving the ending melancholy.  I think you should suppress your personal
desire to have the happy, all-tied-together ending and leave some threads
dangling in order to have the greatest effect on your reading audience.

I'll say no more about it; I just want to throw that at you and have you
mull that over.

-Richard


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