Lyrical Chronicles - Super Robot Wars x Nanoha x Madoka (and others)

[Olvelsper]

Greetings and salutations, chums. It's been a long time since I've posted on the boards. I've decided to take up writing my own fanfiction recently. I kept pestering Dracos to read them, and he told me to go ahead and post my stuff here.

So I will!

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6814206/1/Lyrical_Chronicles : This was my first story I started. It's basically a crossover crisis. I'm using magical girls as the heroes in the story as a result of me deciding to try and write the Battle Fantasia concept in a different way than it was being written on Spacebattles forums.

What's Battle Fantasia, you say? It's basically a set of youtube videos that inspired a bunch of people on the SB forum to make up their own stories where different series could interact. It's like Super Robot Wars, but filled with more big pink beams of friendship and giant pink hearts instead of giant robots and hot blooded shouts.

The basic idea amused me, and I decided to see the thread develop. However, I didn't like how they did it at all. The lynchpin of the whole story was based on a magical girl that attempts to suicide on national television. This would get interrupted by Fate or Nanoha, but it would expose magic/magical girls to the whole world.

I didn't think that fit the spirit of magical girls or Super Robot Wars at all. So I set out to do my own thing. I basically call it the Super Route of the project because I'm going for a mix of hot bloodedness and FRIENDSHIP. I've got 19 chapters up right now, and I basically updated a chapter a day usually.

Give it a shot, and tell me what you guys think.

[Olvelsper]

Updated the fic to chp 20. Working on chapter 21 now. Not sure if anyone here has given this one a peek unlike my other stories.

[Brian]

I've gotten to chapter three so far.  I've only recently come into the Madoka fandom, and Dannycat scarred me from SRW, but I'm giving it a shot anyway.

You get a lot of credit for using Mami, because I've got a huge weak spot for her getting a Good End. :3

Enjoying it so far!

[Olvelsper]

SRW is more for the flavor than anything else. The original idea on Spacebattles was to make it like a magical girl version of it, so I decided to use them as supporting roles and some inspiration.

[Brian]

SRW setting I'm solid on.

Characters?

...yeah.  You've made a choice I can follow.  No complaints here!

[Jason_Miao]

Blitzed through the chapters in 2.5 hours.  Familiar with Madoka and MKR, only have played one SRW, and know nothing of Nanoha other than what Midnight and DarkAlpha have told me. 


Thoughts are in spoiler box, since Madoka is ridiculously easy to spoil and I'd hate to do that for this series.

Spoiler: ShowHide

1) Enumerating the original timeline as 0, the first chapter pegs the jump back after iteration 3 is done.  Given that, it seems odd that Homura cares that Mami is around for her own sake early on, rather than merely as someone who might be able to help her get back to her original universe.  Homura was shown to be fairly ruthless towards anyone that isn't Madoka (e.g, last encounter with Miki), so her being happy at Mami for her own sake seems somewhat off.

Past the part where the MKR cross occurs, Homura doesn't really seem to think about Madoka much at all.  And that's weird, since Madoka pretty much defines Homura's personality.

I should note that, the jump after iteration 3 could be construed as "And then, lots more time travel occurred, and Homura continued to fail in each one", so if you consider the anime as iteration "ten thousand+", then her personality early on in the fic could be argued as her having not being too far away from timeline 0.  But there's one point where the captain is debriefing her, and she mentions that she's gone back in time 4 times, so you may have excluded that interpretation.


2) re: timestop powers, she technically shouldn't be able to do that anymore, since she was sent to the new universe by Madoka's wish instead of her shield.

http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost.php?p=3564265&postcount=1882

Q - Could you elaborate a bit more on the power of Homura?
UG - The weapon that looks like Homura's shield is actually a sand timer. When the flow of the sand is blocked, time is stopped. And when there is no sand on the upper part of the sand timer and then the timer is reverted, one month's worth of time is turned back. But before that stage is reached, only time stopping is possible. This means the special power of Homura is the ability to manipulate one month's time's worth of sand in the sand timer. As for the time passed and then turned back, since it was not the focus in this work I did not think it through very thoroughly. I think you can say that the world split up and became parallel worlds there.

3) re: "Not so good at math", did you happen to check out the translations of the problems she was solving in ep 10? 

Found this page when I was curious as to the math questions:
http://wiki.puella-magi.net/Mathematics_of_Madoka_Magica

I really liked what you cast as Mami's wish, which slots into the end of Ep 3 very well.  I liked many other parts too, but that one stands out in my mind.

[Olvelsper]

For the time shield...

Spoiler: ShowHide

Homura's shield limits weren't placed because I started writing the fic before the series completely ended. I'm basically justified the lack of limits at the time as Homura burning her Soul Gem to brute force it (that's why she needed a Grief Seed so badly with Katrina), and later on having so much magic via Windam that she could use it easier.

In regards to Homura, Madoka, and Mami...

Spoiler: ShowHide

Homura is fresh off the timeline she tried to go it alone. Before the 10k+ timelines aspect showed up in canon itself. I just wanted for Homura to show some focus on Mami too, really. Now that she's alone again she'll be focusing on Madoka thoughts more - with that kind of thought in mind (IE: Oh god, why am I forgetting her, etc.) when she starts gravitating towards Hayate since she'll be playing the role Madoka and Mami played for her in Timeline 1 with Hayate.

I'm thinking of streamlining the fic now that I have experience writing under my belt, though. Do you all think I should do that? Or leave well enough alone?

[Brian]

Just finished chapter ten.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Okay, so Mami goes out like a hero _and_ survives in some form as a composite puella/magus....  I don't know this new character enough to know how well that will work, but suspect that this is actually a great way around Mami's instabilities.

But, damn.  'Not dying alone', huh?  That's an amazingly positive interpretation of her wish, considering the universe she's from.  (I don't like constant gloom, so I approve. :)  Must assume that the other character wished for Mami to survive in some form, as well....

Okay.  Kirsten is Avemaria?  The one that Sayaka goes axe crazy on?  Making her Mami's former partner is ... I'm not sure.  It's interesting, but you've already got so many non-canon elements that I had to take a moment to wrap my head around it.  It would add a new angle to Mami's desperation to get a new partner, but at the same time, somehow makes her feel less sympathetic to me.  Admittedly ... putting her desire for companionship ahead of her concerns for their safety is one of the things that did her in (episode three), but....

Well, I hope this new girl is able to put my favorite broken hero back together.

I'm finding some minor technical errors (nothing that sticks out well enough to point out specifically), but thematically, am enjoying the story.  If I were to say something were missing, it would be ... in those ten chapters, we should see PoV on Mami and Homura from someone in-genre.  It's probably not at all needed, but I can easily see two or three more little scenes from (for example) Nanoha's PoV about how awesome Mami is, and how she's worried about her.

You had a scene with Hayate thinking about how she wasn't eager to go home from her PoV -- and that was a good example of what I was talking about.  Just throw in an earlier one where she's looking at Homura, and first starting up her admiration (if I read the context correctly).

Again, not required, just something to add a little sugar to the thing, which would bring it back to the magical girl feel (and also allow your violent combat scenes later a stronger contrast).

Other than that....  Homura seems to be a bit across the board as far as her characterization and motive, but this could probably be explained away by how rattled she is to be in the wrong universe.

Regardless.  I have many more chapters to enjoy~!

[Jason_Miao]

Heh.  Easy to spoil...first four words have a spoiler.

I'm thinking of streamlining the fic now that I have experience writing under my belt, though. Do you all think I should do that? Or leave well enough alone?

If you have an outline of how the fic should go, you're probably better off doing that first, then revising once that's in place.  I can speak to this, since I can't seem to stop myself from doing the opposite, trying to retweak and reword every scene to be mesh perfectly with everything in the past and everything yet to come (Which is why I can't write anything in a timely fashion, other than short stories).

From a storytelling aspect, I don't think the pacing needs to be streamlined much, although there are always parts that you might want to move faster or more sedately.  Since SRW is a tac-game, and you're using that as a framework, I can see arguments for keeping the action flowing.  So I guess the answer is how strongly you want to stick to the game model.

[Brian]

Hoo ... so my reply up to chapter fifteen got lost....

Well, anyway.

Spoiler: ShowHide

So far, a bit saddened that it appears Mami's become an accessory for this new character instead of being awesome and ... Mami.  But, this may yet be turned around -- the focus is totally on Homura for this part, and her three chapter Vision Quest.

I really wonder if there's some Kyubei/Mokona connection, and that Homura was so willing to trust Mokona, after all things were considered....

Still, Homura gets Fuu's costume and a mecha -- totally pulled a Gandalf.  What's not to like?

[Olvelsper]

For Mami...

Spoiler: ShowHide

She actually starts being active as well...herself soon. The Rayearth story will be mostly about her.

[Olvelsper]

Thanks for the review, Brian. Was there anything in particular that you thought might need improving in general?

[Brian]

Hmm....  No one area stuck out to me, really -- though I did notice a few instances where you had a sentence with an odd structure.  Usually just some repeated words or phrases, most likely a typo.  Like me, you probably need a pre-reader. :p