Hello.
Jason Liao <jxl93@eecs.cwru.edu> wrote:

[snip]

I heard that before they bombed Iraq's nuclear in the late 80s, the
Israeli top brass debated about the political fallout.  One was 

purported

to have said "If I have to choose between popular and dead, or popular 

and

alive, I pick alive."

The parallels between that and Emerald's perception of his role in the
future are interesting.

He's pretty used to being cast in the villain's role (for some reason)
and insulted as a result of this. It all becomes water off a duck's
back after being insulted a few hundred times...

Hundreds of eyes followed the crystals' trails,

Hundreds?  That's it?  Tiny army to conquer the entire earth.  

Thousands

sounds better.  Hundreds of thousands.

Yeah, I figured Emerald vs thousands would've stretched the belief
of readers, even with super-mode Droids. In justification, the
youma in this story were always written as dangerously over-confident,
and the youma have been shown in canon to take down non-magical humans
easily by draining them, so hundreds would be enough for a
spearhead invasion force, if nothing else.

If changing the past can eliminate his future self in this timeframe,
(because he never existed), then why wouldn't it unwind further until 

his

date of arrival in the time, and wipe out everything he's done?

I'll have to change this to indicate that (his) magic can prevent it,
and that doing the anti-purification will drain him. 

You could easily change this and keep the story intact by just having 

him

die for another reason at this point, rather than cease to exist due to
the effects of paradox.  Perhaps, since immortals have their 

obsessions,

he feels no need to continue living (and if he's going to die, dying at
the height of victory and saving the world seems like the best time for 

it

to happen).  Or he needed all his energy to cover the last bit of 

earth,

and didn't have enough to keep himself alive.  Or Pluto's staff has a
failsafe mechanism that any nonSenshi that uses it slowly wastes away.

Yes, I thought long and hard about how to kill Emerald. I decided that
a physical death wouldn't work - he's been attacking the Senshi for centuries
(and these Senshi are way over-powered, according to his descriptions),
so it wouldn't be realistic that he'd be damaged enough in the past. I
thought about losing his will, but didn't believe it to be in character -
he'd want to stick around to see what happens until at least the time
of the rebellion.

In the end, I started to work out what would happen if he won, started
thinking about the sequel, and realised that a time paradox would fit
perfectly into what would happen in that fic if I ever write it. So I'll
stick with the paradox.

In general, I like it.  Probably won't have time to do a line-by-line 

for

months, but hopefully these quick remarks will be useful.

Well, thanks for the comments.

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