On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, HARIJUBAL@aol.com wrote:

MURMUR: Okay, up next is the Sailor Moon Z 23.  This episode focuses on the
Sailor Auxilieries and the continuing evil plots of the Dark Kingdom and the
Zodiac.  Think of it as the "Dragon Reborn" or "Crossroads of Twilight" of SMZ.
It continues subplots while not really progressing all that much on the main
plot.

LAVI: Which isn't a bad thing, really.  I liked the additional insights we
get.

CLAUS: Me too.  We learned a bit more about the origins of Steven, Ryo and
Yumeni's powers.

MURMUR: But, see.  We're all basically treading water.  I mean, I agree that
these are important things that needed to be addressed, but frankly I'm not
sure that an entire chapter was neccesary.  It could have been cut in half and
still done the same job.

I'm going to have to disagree.  Pretty much everything in this episode is
necessary to set things up for  our next two episodes, either to get
various balls rolling or to avoid the need for exposition of various
issues in the middle of the final two episodes.  (Or to tie things up
which we won't have time to tie up later.)

We now have all our pieces in place for the endgame.

CLAUS: Um, has anyone else noticed how nearly every Biles fic features at
least one character being brainwashed?  We have Rei here, Ranma in both Children
of Fire and Parallel Lives, Rei --kind of-- in Children of an Elder God, and
so on?

It's a fairly standard Sailor Moon trope.

MURMUR: Well, speaking of Mr. Biles, we have Children of an Elder God 22.
This episode has the Children slowly settling into life in Germany in the
aftermath of the neo-nazi attack.  We see them hanging out, enjoying life, and
generally being normal kids in love.   Which means, of course, that everything goes
horribly, horribly wrong.

LAVI: Isn't that a spoiler?

Reviews, by their nature, tend to spoil.

MURMUR: No.  The reason being, in COAEG, whenever things seem to be going
good, it all goes wrong.  It's a set pattern.  Nobody can be happy for long here.
 Anyway, the one point I really want to make is this: the pacing for me was
just off.

LAVI: What do you mean?

MURMUR: Okay, we have foreshadowing in the fic, which is a good thing.  But
the climax of the story was paradoxically just too sudden a shift in tone and
the surprise villain of the week was, despite the horrific nature of the
villain, just too damn ineffectual to be of any threat.  There just wasn't enough
payoff.

Part of horror often is sudden shifts in tone.  If you have time to get
used to it, it's generally not as horrific.

CLAUS: There were a lot of revelations here, though.  We finally learn what
Seele's objective was, and what happened to Asuka's mother.

MURMUR: No, don't get me wrong.  I liked this episode.  It's just the ending
was paced all wrong.  It was too sudden and too short.  It's as if the authors
just ran out of energy as soon as they saw that they were going into the
rant-into-villain scene and wanted it over with as soon as possible.

I was worried myself that it was too long;' the climax of the story is 30
pages long on my machine.  That seemed long enough for a story which is
125 pages long.




Thanks for the feedback.


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