[Advice Needed / Massive Spoilers] Arakawa's Outlining Slushpile

[Arakawa]

Okay, this is a thread where I'll be posting my various fic outlines. In terms of feedback I'd be glad to receive... I guess at this stage the outlines are likely to expose some gaping flaws in my planning process in general. Would be glad to know what those are, certainly :-)

Going in order from most complicated idea to least complicated idea, let's start with the most complicated idea. (Fortunately, that means it doesn't get more complicated than this, phew):

Ten Percent Worth Dying For (Lucky Star / Haruhi)

This was conceived as an ultralong fic project, which I wrote 6 chapters of, and stalled completely after that, since I was trying to keep the entire attached outline (and more besides) entirely in my head while writing it. So I went back to the outline in my head, wrote it all down, and tried to patch at least some inconsistencies and loose ends and refocus on a few key themes. The result is... inspiring to me on the one hand, as a project worth undertaking... but also still kind of questionable in its current conception.

This is an attempt to depict an epic universe-scale conflict between multiple reality-warping beings. Beyond that, the idea is so dangerously convoluted that it's difficult to encompass it beyond "it starts with Konata getting hit by a bus". Although, after finishing the outline, it occurs to me:

Spoiler: ShowHide

I'm thinking of Haruhi in *Ten Percent* as being like a fanfiction writer who deliberately, though with trepidation, solicits the opinion of Tsukasa, a reviewer known for unforgiving C&C, and then proceeds to watch as she points out gaping flaws in the story. The notion in Ten Percent, however, is that Haruhi is perfecting a design template for a series of physical universes. This makes the field of RPG design and play testing also work as an analogy, which would probably suggest further metaphors to me if I were more familiar with it.

More work is needed to better incorporate this whole universe-design-is-fanfiction-writing metaphor into my understanding of the fic, but does this kind of theme seem advisable? It certainly fits with Konata's perspective in the initial arc of her friends as anime characters in need of character development and a story to participate in. It also vindicates the Ten Percent Worth Dying For title -- Haruhi is struggling to create a universe that is literally worth facing death to incarnate into -- on top of the obvious false lead of Konata receiving cosmic powers after death.

A more primary concern is that, in a storyline where death is even less consequential than, say, death in the Dragonball universe, there's potential for massive whiplash between the perspectives of characters who are aware of these facts, versus the perspectives of characters who aren't aware of the afterlife.

Lucky Star is not a very fertile fandom, though, so if no one has anything to say about this I'll wait a week and post my planning for Anywhere in this World, which should be at least an order of magnitude less chaotic.

[Anastasia]

Straight up honesty, I love the concept here. God-Haruhi goes around and asks anime characters for world creation advice as she works on creating universes? There's heaps of potential if you can keep it interesting with an omnipotent being running around. Okay, that said, lemme read the outline.

Interesting. I don't have a lot to say, since I feel this is at heart a meta-commentary on fanfiction and fanfiction reviews. I feel like I'm missing certain subtleties here - relevant to the Haruhi fandom, perhaps? It's not where I'd have gone with the concept. Beyond that, it strikes me as ripe for character drift. There's a lot of change and new roles, not to mention Haruhi completely detached from her home setting. That's the rub - there's so much going on and so complicated that I wonder if you are going to lose the characters in the story, or they become too invested into what they're representing to be anything but symbols.

[Arakawa]

I should probably add, the Brigade also accompanies Haruhi throughout the fic. (There's just insufficient room to describe their actions at this 10,000 foot level.) I could probably have mentioned that Kyon acts as a psychopomp figure for Konata (explaining the afterlife to her), and then as a foil to Haruhi (he remembers very well how frightening the universe can be from the point of view of a mortal being, Haruhi not so much; Haruhi's strength is in figuring out how to make a physics system support intelligent life without leaving any evidence of "cheating", "intelligent design", or "magic" that the mortals could find and take advantage of).

re. The risk of losing character development, I'm turning over and over in my head how I would organize the writing process for a fic of this scale. I'm toying with the notion of, instead of going chapter-by-chapter, to write 'strands' corresponding to each narrative element or character arc, and then chop them up and combine into chapters.

e.g. write all the scenes with President Takahashi with one go, put them in the drawer, rewrite as needed for consistency as I develop related subplots, then pull scenes out of the strand as they come up during the logical chapter-by-chapter progression

[Muphrid]

Forgive me; the nature of this story means I'm a bit out of sorts when it comes down to how critical to be.  I've focused on the questions you had for going forward.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Higher!Haruhi used to be a 'lowly' vulnerability tester, while higher!Tsukasa is an important reviewer? Okay, but that means I need to flesh out the pecking order in universe design a bit more. Say, higher!Tsukasa is a bored connoisseur of realities, who discovers that she's been handed a universe with what is -- to her -- a basic beginner's mistake. But to pin it down she needs to do her own vulnerability testing gruntwork, which annoys her to the point of developing her over-the-top Eternal Empress scheme.

Perhaps I'm not clear on the problem; it seems natural that (using namespace higher) Haruhi would graduate from tester to designer over time and that Tsukasa's reviews would be critical in building a reputation.  Tsukasa as an achievement chaser, looking for oddball things to accomplish, makes perfect sense to me.

Yutaka and Minami's story past the first arc. In my current thinking, they become equivalents to the Evangelion pilots, and at the end when Haruhi dismantles the universe, Yutaka is frightened at the ensuing apocalyptic carnage, and uses Takahashi-shacho's research into the properties of Angels to escape the dismantling and make her way into a different physical universe. She is therefore separated from Minami (who just dies), and, realizing the role of the Beyond in what has happened, embarks on a mad scheme to make clones of herself and send them to various universes to hunt down and imprison incarnations of Haruhi, hoping to be a sufficient nuisance to draw the attention of Haruhi's higher self ('the multiversal entirety of all her incarnations') and call her to task for her actions. This is the source of the slider!Yutaka idea.

This seems generally valid to me.  Why should Minami just die, though?  Is there something else that can be done with her?

A plot thread which introduces Yuuko and Mio (from Nichijou) as demons from the afterlife and describes their intrusion into reality as implausibly young yakuza. They are basically called in by Konata to antagonize Kagami and force her to develop into a fearsome fighter, but they would logically wind up as side characters in the much larger events that follow. Moreover, Yuuko has a whole entire possible character arc regarding her issues as a happy-go-lucky schoolgirl who is in reality an amalgam of 100-odd gestalted people undergoing therapy at the hands of Mai-chan.

I'm not familiar with Nichijou, so I'm not sure how much I can comment on this.  Are you thinking they go from adversaries and instigators to eventual allies?

As mentioned, what are the rules of what Haruhi can't do, and how is it explained in terms of affecting what Tsukasa writes in her magazine review?

It seems straightforward enough to me.  The challenge of building a world based on consistent rules that can support intelligent life but that still presents a challenge for beings like (using namespace higher) Haruhi and Tsukasa to do what they want in isn't trivial.  Such a universe could be judged on, say, how many physical constants can only be discovered versus calculated (e.g. the fine-structure constant).  Divine intervention is frowned upon because beings who incarnate themselves in these worlds expect culturally (for whatever reason) that a world without intervention for most of its span will stay that way; perhaps there are worlds with divine intervention, but they could be judged on a different standard (e.g. the way action movies are different from romance) that Tsukasa's opinions don't cover.

[Halbarad]

I'll be perfectly blunt here: I can't really offer any help or advice here. I don't know the other character groups well enough to comment, and at least from the summary, Haruhi is being used more as plot device than actual character. That's not to say that it's not a valid way to use her here, but it's not an area that I'm focused on or interested in.

Best of luck.

[Arakawa]

Fair enough. This is more or less my takeaway from everyone's feedback so far:

• There are too many characters, many of whom do not have well-thought-out development arcs. Even if every character had a reasonable characterization and wasn't just a conceptual enabler, the arcs might still be stretched too thin with the interwoven subplots to follow. I'm... not sure how to make the fic work, given this.
• The metaphysical stuff (higher selves, universe design) isn't difficult to pick up on, and doesn't seem to require familiarity with the (kooky, obscure, and mildly boring) source material. So I'm at least confident that I can introduce the intention-manifestation mechanism in a way that makes sense. That said, it makes for a specific target audience; in general, people I discuss the fic with are either strongly intrigued, or massively indifferent.
• Attempting to write an idea like this just chapter-by-chapter was a tremendously bad idea.

[Halbarad]

Just to throw out something here as a general piece of advice (for this and other fic ideas): part of the feedback you get is also going to be based on your audience. Speaking for myself (and I think I can probably safely include Brian here, as well), I'm far more interested in characterization and character development than I am in what's happening to the characters directly - 'who are the characters' and 'why are they the way they are' are much more interesting questions than 'what are they doing' or 'what's happening to them'.

That's not to say that stories about crazy things happening to people can't be good stories, but if that's the primary focus of the story and the characters are basically just along for the ride, it's not really something that's going to hold my interest very well, and any feedback I'd give will be limited by that fact.

It's also a major problem with almost any crossover idea. Regardless of what's involved in the crossover, one set of characters is going to get more focus than the others; that's just the nature of the game, since with a huge cast it's nearly impossible to split focus enough to give all of them any chance at character development. For example, here it sounds like aside from Haruhi herself, most of the Haruhi cast are basically sideline or minor characters - they didn't even have enough of a role to make it into the primary outline, which is a big part of what demotes Haruhi to nothing more than a plot device; none of the characters that could (or should) be used to explore her character growth/development have more of a role in the story than 'extra', from all appearances.

At least from my experience of them, most crossovers tend to be of the 'wacky things happening' variety of fic, since the object seems to generally be to see the crossed-over casts interacting with each other in whatever setup is present. It's hard to do any kind of serious character exploration or development, too, since the characters are going to be too busy adjusting to and learning to deal with the other cast(s) than they are on dealing with their own preexisting relationships.

As far as the deeper metaphysical stuff goes, I'd be extremely wary about planning that excessively for any fic. While it can certainly be done well, it's very difficult to couch those concepts in a way that doesn't come across as an Author Tract or Infodump. My personal recommendation (for what it's worth) would be not to worry about trying to use the fic to explain or explore any deep concepts until you feel like you've got a solid grasp of delivering an overall narrative that doesn't involve those things - then you can worry about telling the story first and weaving in references to the underlying concepts in such a way that doesn't come across as ham-handed.

tl;dr version: I like character development and exposition, crossovers suck at them almost by definition, don't expect a lot of feedback from me on crossover ideas. Avoid writing stories to explore metaphysical concepts until you feel comfortable writing stories that don't.

[Jason_Miao]

This was conceived as an ultralong fic project, which I wrote 6 chapters of, and stalled completely after that, since I was trying to keep the entire attached outline (and more besides) entirely in my head while writing it. So I went back to the outline in my head, wrote it all down, and tried to patch at least some inconsistencies and loose ends and refocus on a few key themes. The result is... inspiring to me on the one hand, as a project worth undertaking... but also still kind of questionable in its current conception.

Without looking at your outline (since it wouldn't help; I've only read a few Haruhi novels and know nothing of Lucky Star), I just remark that diligently following your outline isn't necessarily the best option; if planned scenes or chapters simply won't turn out the way your outline dictates, try writing it without the outline in mind.  It doesn't always work out for the best, but I've found that when it does, it leads to scrapping the planned scene (and sometimes even the outline itself) for something better - and even new motivation to write more.

Note that this is part of my own approach to writing, and isn't a universal truism: for example, I know that KLSymph writes chapters by setting up a grand outline, lining up chapters and objectives, and knocking them down.  I do that for technical and persuasive writing, but I find that doesn't work for me in persuasive writing.  On the other hand, it clearly works for KLS.  So if my approach doesn't work for you, then try something else.

[Arakawa]

Rotating the above idea to the back of my mind for now. Thanks for all the advice, it's very helpful to keep in mind what the (perhaps inevitable, perhaps merely overwhelmingly-difficult-to-overcome) limitations of a conceptually-heavy crossover are going to be in terms of storytelling.

And, true to this being a slush pile, here's the (very rough) opening chapter of a more character-driven Haruhi fic I'm considering. The first half of this some of you might have seen before (the "Two Hypotheses" draft I posted way back when), I re-edited and adapted it to this idea since I figured that the characterizations I would up doing for the Brigade members would fit this particular fic quite well, and were too good to waste on Slider-Yutaka anyways.

Will follow up later with an explanation of where this is (hopefully) going. (Fortunately, I have a long weekend ahead of me to write it up in.) I have a hopefully-solid idea of the characterizations and what I need to resolve between the various characters, and a cloud of very vague notions for plots which could serve as a framework for the basic conflict.

So (riding on a wave of inspiration) sample chapter now, outline/ideacloud later.

Curious to hear what sort of impression this produces. This is my most-focused attempt to focus on characters and not plot gimmicks, so I'd be curious to hear as well what sorts of shortcomings writing this has revealed.

[Muphrid]

Immediately on learning the details of the special approach that the SOS Brigade was about to let loose on an innocent flower viewing convention, Kyon set Haruhi off by warning that if the Brigade Chief were permitted to "go wild" they would all be headed for a repeat of the summer movie fiasco. But this didn't make any sense. The summer movie was a summer movie and the spring entertainment was an interactive entertainment for a flower viewing party. The two required a completely different mindset and approach; also a touch of insanity, true, but surely these were different kinds of insanity that had nothing to do with one another!

So, I must confess that, until this point, I thought first-person was in play and that Kyon was narrating.  This does make clear how the story is being approached, however.

Immediately on learning the details of the special approach that the SOS Brigade was about to let loose on an innocent flower viewing convention, Kyon set Haruhi off by warning that if the Brigade Chief were permitted to "go wild" they would all be headed for a repeat of the summer movie fiasco. But this didn't make any sense. The summer movie was a summer movie and the spring entertainment was an interactive entertainment for a flower viewing party. The two required a completely different mindset and approach; also a touch of insanity, true, but surely these were different kinds of insanity that had nothing to do with one another!

Perhaps, "the two required completely different mindsets and approaches"?  Just some agreement concerns.

I also find "summer movie was a summer movie" a bit odd.  It's not quite parallel structured compared to "spring entertainment was interactive entertainment", so...yeah, I dunno.

The clubroom had been turned into a den of chaos. Conflicting assemblies of candidate props cluttered the place, while listless-looking attempts at assembling tasteful costumes hung on the spare seating arrangements. No one could find the time to put things away properly at that particular point in the schedule. Mikuru Asahina, resplendent in maid uniform, had displaced Haruhi from the computer desk and was presently clicking away at something with intense concentration. The Brigade Leader was joined at the central table by Kyon and Koizumi, who were copying lines from the master script onto index cards in a fairly apathetic flurry of activity.

There are some passive voice problems here.  Suggest "had turned" instead of "had been turned".  Consider "Kyon and Koizumi joined the Brigade Leader".  Not passive, but (in my mind) can also be snappier:  "was presently clicking" -> "clicked"

"The kind who wants her trick to work?" Kyon rejoined, noting the pole's aberrant behaviour. "You're missing the entire point here, which is that if you want something more impressive than featureless plastic, you'll have to pick a better conceived trick. The one you chose might well have been put in the book to take extra pages. And if what you want is someone in our entertainment who attempts magic tricks but lacks the basic attention span to pull them off," Kyon sighed, "then reluctantly, as a last resort, yes, I would agree to sacrifice my little sister to your scheme to keep you from tarnishing your reputation as Brigade leader, but I'd prefer..."

Before it was "Brigade Leader" and now it's "Brigade leader"?

"That's the thing!" Haruhi explained half-distractedly, "we are pursuing an ambitious bait and switch strategy, first drawing in the audience with what seems to be a collection of unrelated tricks..."

Very clever, Haruhi.  Very clever.

Kyon just shook his head and accepted Asahina-san's tea with the requisite gratitude. (Particularly requisite gratitude, since the young lady kept favouring him unnecessarily and neglecting Haruhi's still-standing order to spill every third cup!)

I take it when the point of view slips close enough to one particular character, the way other characters are referred to shifts in turn?  You did it with Haruhi becoming Suzumiya-san as Asahina went for tea.

This was what Kyon generally did, Haruhi observed to herself, when he couldn't handle the fact that Haruhi was right about the universe and Kyon was wrong. It seemed to help him coexist with his superiors if he had a reminder that there were plenty of people in the world more difficult and unreasonable to deal with than the Brigade Chief.

Making a prediction that this part might rub someone the wrong way.  I'm not sure what's worse--Haruhi not acknowledging that Kyon had a good point because she honestly believes in herself too much, or the alternative of keeping up a facade in front of him anyway despite knowing that he poses nontrivial questions that ought to be answered.

And...now she's Brigade Chief?

Kyon had kept insisting that Haruhi prepare detailed written plans as her first step, as though she wasn't going to do that all along! This was a live production, of course you couldn't just spoonfeed your actors everything as they went along, as you would in a film production. Her brigade members would have to learn the game plan, memorize the script, and be prepared to improvise, as this was an interactive spectacle where the audience might throw any sort of unexpected curveball their way!

Along and along.

That's right, her next priority was going to be checking off that pesky item titled "selection system keeps outing Yuki-chan as an alien". That was completely unacceptable. Alien or not, the entertainment they were putting on was not going to be staged at the expense of Yuki's reputation. She already got enough grief for being bookish, eccentric, and supremely stilted and awkward with her choice of vocabulary.

Yuki-chan?

Okay, now Haruhi felt just awful. It didn't help (though it did limit her options from here) that the door opened at exactly that moment, Koizumi splashed everyone with his informationless eyesmile, then explained that his part time job had called, that they might need an extra hand or two, but hopefully not. Not, they probably wouldn't after all actually, he hoped he would be able to stay around and continue lending a hand. Now excuse me for a minute, I just need to finish talking to Kyon.

What is the significance (who's saying it, what does it mean) of the underlined?

In truth, Koizumi had indeed been getting an uncomfortable feeling that if he'd come back upstairs ten minutes later he'd have become witness and participant to some sort of spectacular emotional blowup on the part of the Brigade Chief. So he was simply covering his bases in order to not have to explain the need to slink away to some closed space in the middle of Haruhi shouting her head off about how no one was helping with the preparations. Haruhi guessed all of his reasoning, and guessed correctly. Except that there most certainly wasn't any danger of a blowup! This Brigade Leader -- or so Haruhi hoped to herself -- respected Nagato too much now to do something like that, not with the silent alien present in the room.

Here, we come out of Haruhi's point of view for a moment to see what Koizumi was really doing.  That's...I have mixed feelings about it, especially doing so for part of a paragraph before going back to Haruhi's point of view ("or so Haruhi hoped to herself"?  unless that means something Koizumi is observing about her?).

Dammit, now Haruhi was getting in the habit of calling Yuki an alien! This had to stop right now!

And because of the above confusion, I'm not sure whose thoughts this paraphrases.

So, the thing with Yuki and the selection system was, their flower viewing party was going to be organized more or less as a huge, scripted game of Werewolf, but with aliens instead of werewolves and the elimination mechanism of the original game replaced by something much more fair and inclusive. The alien faction would be picked using a 'pseudo-statistical sieving game' which took the results of a short personality quize (administered to audience members under threat of penalty) and 'analyzed' them using completely made-up principles to determine the likelihood of the subject being an alien.

"Quize"?  I'm...not familiar with Werewolf, I think.

The top, say, seven candidates would go on to form the alien fanction.

Faction.

The only problem was, when she tested the procedure on Brigade members it kept giving Nagato a score of about 74%, which mean she'd inevitably get sorted into the alien group. This wouldn't do by any means. If she was picked into the 'alien' group at the entertainment, she would steal the show completely, and Tsuruya would probably be indiscreet enough to spread a synopsis at school, accompanied with the usual laughter. Then no one would take Yuki seriously anymore. Even if it was all in good, such a shy and fragile alien might well make an extra long term library withdrawal and spend the next six weeks sulking behind the original Spanish version of 'Don Quixote, Part Two' or something of the sort.

I'm really puzzled by going from Nagato in one sentence to Yuki in the next.

"Suggestion," Nagato was suddenly there peering over Haruhi's shoulder at the todo list, "exempt known interface from participation in the selection process. Interface is pre-emptively labeled 'not alien', producing preferred effect on audience due to seeming false positive."

Is Nagato really going to use the word interface around her?

Haruhi had long ago noticed that her brigade members all seemed to have well-defined coping rituals. Kyon would sequester himself with either Koizumi or Yuki for strange and inane conversations. Koizumi had probably doctored his phone somehow, to be able to cause it to ring at suspiciously convenient moments and escape to his part time job. Yuki walled herself off from the world with books. Mikuru... actually, Haruhi wasn't sure what Mikuru did to cope. She didn't seem to bottle up her distress for subsequent coping, actually, instead making a fool of herself in front of whatever audience was fortunate enough to witness the ensuing moe antics.

How does she know they're lame and inane?

It wasn't like pushing her around a bit and then forcing her to dress in a bunch of revealing clothing... and take part in some embarassing situations... was anywhere near as bad as the catastrophic possible scenario of some jerk catching Mikuru's first love, leading her on, and then leaving her devastated!

Embarrassing.

While Haruhi was busy being praised, the other brigade members had gatherd around her custom-made magic kit, scratching their heads. Eventually they concluded that the equipment wasn't going to eat them or whatever it was they'd been worrying about in the first place, which left the question of who got to keep what.

Gathered.

"It like to be frank once in a while," Tsuruya's father explained, taking great pains at all times to enunciate properly past the interestingly-shaped tooth deformity he shared with his daughter, "since, of course, I ordinarly don't get much room to do so... no, I'm not going to sever relations with any of you. No, it's just that the role you were playing..."

Ordinarily.

Generally, it was difficult to see what kind of help Kyon would be able to ask for, at least that wouldn't duly inconvenience the partiarch and that Kyon couldn't get from other sources.

Patriarch.

The title on the dust jacket was "Erotic Woodblock Art of the Meiji Era". There was also an exceedingly stylish rendering of a tentacle monster in action, which would probably have caused most conoisseurs of period art to break out in excited hives.

I think it's connoisseurs.

"To be thoroughly honest," the elder Tsuruya observed in his unvaryingly-friendly voice, just as Kyon was hoping to forestall this sort of excessively leisurely observation with a polite but pre-emptive goodbye, "I would kill to see inside that thing and find out what sempai thinks your friend has to do with the twentieth centurys. That said, I seem to be losing my composures, which is a crying shame."

Century.  Um, "composures", plural?


Overall, I find this pretty reasonable.  I think the transition from when Haruhi's contemplating the various roles of the brigade members and when we're actually at the flower viewing performance could be made a bit stronger.  I'm concerned about all the point of view changes, as you know already by this point.  There are times I'm not sure whose thoughts are being paraphrased.  That said, I think the form of omniscient narration you use here is generally fine.  It just feels like you get too close to one character's thought processes at times to be switching to another's view for a short stretch and back again.  But that may just be me, mind.

The characters of Tsuruya-elder and Onoki seem well-developed, and their interaction makes both of them more concrete.  I think this is going to be a fine idea.

[Oroboro]

Interesting stuff. You sort of outlined your general ideas in IRC a week or two ago, so I've already got a general idea where you want to go.

I'd echo what Muphrid said about perspective - it's a been confusing when it switches around sometimes, so you might want to add in some extra stuff to clarify that.

On a note about characterization, this scene struck me-

"My sister's maiden name is also Suzumiya, apparently. It happens. Well? So?"

Eventually, Kyon recovered from this sudden assault on his freedom from societal entanglement, enough to start in on his response:

"Well, first of all, she explicitly told me she doesn't want romantic involvement. Uh... I mean, not with me specifically, just as a general rule based on the obvious observation that high school romance isn't very gratifying anyways and it's not clear what will happen two years from now anyways. If we happen to stay in touch for a long time after graduation and we feel the need to become more thoroughly involved, I mean, then..."

He was realizing that it was practically written on Haruhi's uncle's face that he thought Kyon was also sounding like a "wet dishrag", and changed tack abruptly.

"So, I'm not certain why you think that me being on the brink of romantic involvement with her is a bad thing. Not to mention, that's just a very odd way of putting that we're both involved in the same club. I'm not sure what that changes, or what indications you've had that I'm 'on the brink' of anything. It might be valid and perceptive of you to ask that question, but in short I don't plan on doing anything stupid and I trust Haruhi to..."

Namely: Why would Kyon so desperately clarify his not-relationship to two complete strangers? Whenever Koizumi or Taniguchi get on his case about it, Kyon just blows them off tersely. Even if it's her uncle, I have a had time seeing him not just getting annoyed at the intrusion into his personal life. Kyon's not generally very forthcoming about his feelings to other people.

Also, the earlier conversation between Onoki and Tsuruya is a bit hard to follow, since it concerns two recently introduced characters talking to each other with little cue as to which is which. (I'm really the last person who should be making this criticism but whatever.)

Anyway, looking forward to what you plan to do with this. I'm not used to your writing style, so it's a bit hard to follow, but that's just a personal quirk. I'm just a huge fan of first person narration in general.

[Arakawa]

Muphrid: Thank you for the detailed C&C, although... okay, I should have made it more clear that this chapter is still going to go through a rewrite or two. (Especially given the POV experimentation that's going on -- there's a reason why omniscient narration is hard to do well.)

The thing you pointed at with "Haruhi being right about the universe" is an attempt to incorporate Haruhi's unconscious thought process (which is by definition right about the universe) into her POV, which didn't really pan out due to the implications that you pointed out (making her conscious mind extremely arrogant).

Although... the fact that Haruhi has to constantly struggle with her own arrogance could be a symptom of semiconsciously knowing that she can make anything she wishes for come true. The basic problem she would be grappling with in the fic at this semiconscious level is that, yes, she can make anything happen, but in practice it only tends to highlight the fact that you need to know exactly what you want. The alternate Haruhi (see spoiler box if you want it given away) is much more laid back, in the sense that instead of trying to force the universe to give her exactly the opportunities she wants (and then running into the problem that she doesn't really have an adequate understanding of what she needs to be happy), she just waits for opportunities to show up on their own and ruthlessly takes advantage of them.

In that case I might need to do some more thinking in terms of Haruhi's prior failures, how she's changed her behaviour but is still tempted to rationalize herself as having been in the right.

Oroboro: Also thank you for pointing that out. It would probably be better to have Kyon start by trying to blow the question off, which elicits an implication from Onoki that he can cause problems for them, then Kyon has to attempt to explain his situation on the spot, realize that he hasn't thought it through himself, go back to trying to blow the question off, and finally get cut off with an admonition to read the memoirs.

Now, rather than give the full brainstorm (which wound up with a lot of not-currently relevant detail and alternate possibilities I've wound up not-using), the basic things I want to cover with the fic in several bullet points:

Spoiler: ShowHide

• Onoki Suzumiya, ??? Tsuruya (undecided on what name to use), and Matsuri Takahashima, a war veteran, a yakuza boss, and a physicist respectively, are around due to an earlier attempt to attract extraordinary people by middle-school!Haruhi, prior to the baseball game. They all happened to fit her idea at the time of what an extraordinary person who doesn't have unusual powers should be like.
• Onoki and Tsuruya are aware that Haruhi has a strange influence on reality; Tsuruya-elder has been trying to figure out a way to exploit this fact for a long time, but Onoki is trying to keep him away from Haruhi. (Tsuruya-younger is only peripherally aware that her father and Haruhi have any shared history. She took Mikuru's invitation (in novel 2) to play baseball with the Brigade because she saw Haruhi in passing some years ago and decided to satisfy some curiosity as to what the girl was up to now.)
• Matsuri Takahashima, known in some circles as "The Unluckiest Experimental Physicist in Japan", is a professor of physics who does happen to share a major interest with Haruhi, but all of Haruhi's attempts to hang out with her had been stymied by their inability to find any common ground in terms of personality. Haruhi finds Takahashima intolerably vapid, while Takahashima finds Haruhi intolerably antisocial. Moreover, Haruhi's powers tend to interfere with Takahashima's experiments (hence the physicist's reputation for producing a small number of strange discoveries mixed in among a sea of utterly irreproducible flukes). Ironically, it has never occurred to Takahashima that Haruhi's presence might be a determining factor in the experiments.
• Onoki Suzumiya is an implausibly old war veteran, and Haruhi's uncle. After finally getting tired of war, he wound up freeloading at Haruhi's house Genma Saotome style. However, Haruhi was unable to take the opportunity to connect with him, because Onoki found her to be an intolerable brat.
• Any nontrivial interaction between Haruhi and Tsuruya-elder is generally stymied by Onoki.
• As you might surmise, Haruhi wasn't really sure what she wanted when she summoned these people. She wasn't really sure what she wanted when she summoned the current Brigade either, which led to the contradiction of the masquerade. She is now anxious and jittery about ruining her chances with the current Brigade, who she wants to connect with as people.
• First third of the fic goes something like this: Haruhi grows increasingly frustrated about the fact that the 'moderate success' she's enjoying is nothing like her usual dream of <instant world domination via plan of the day>; however, she grudgingly begins to put together an entertainment for one of Tsuruya's 'business contacts'. Kyon has Nagato translate parts of the memoirs, and thereby discovers how Onoki became aware of Haruhi's powers; after Onoki finds an excuse to invite him to Haruhi's house, he tries to dig deeper into the situation. (He discovers, in particular, that Onoki and Haruhi refuse to speak to one another despite living in the same house.) The memoirs are subsequently stolen by Tsuruya-elder's agents. At the second entertainment, we see Tsuruya-elder's plan, which is to coax Haruhi to warp the fabric of plausibility in the room enough to conclude a difficult deal. (The details are complex but solidly plausible, and rely on the fact that Tsuruya has advance knowledge of the entertainment through his daughter, and can place agents in the room to control the audience's reaction.) Kyon and Onoki confront him, and Tsuruya taunts them indirectly, stating that the information Onoki wrote down was crucial to finally getting the plan working.
  
• Second third of the fic: to vent her frustration, Haruhi unconsciously summons an alternate-universe version of herself: a child prodigy with a more tractable personality, who had never summoned the SOS Brigade and is instead growing up learning from the experiences of the three OCs. (From the alternate Haruhi's perspective, an experiment she was helping with went horribly awry.) The alternate Haruhi appears in the apartment of a very bewildered Takahashima, who assumes her to be the original Haruhi pulling a prank, and tries to get her back to her parents in Nishinomiya. Kyon tries to get the situation sorted out, and also tries to observe the alternate Haruhi for a clue as to how to help the original Haruhi resolve her frustrations with herself.
• Last third of the fic, which I don't want to give away much of: the Chekov's totem pole is a Chekov's totem pole in terms of foiling Tsuruya-elder's plan; the alternate Haruhi returns to her universe (assumed by Kyon to have vanished once she was no longer needed, much like Yasumi, but in reality she's realized the nature of her own powers and didn't tell anyone) and decides to find her corresponding version of Kyon; the original Haruhi realizes that her worries about losing touch with her Brigade and her strained relations with Onoki and Takahashima are due to her own lingering pride. (Best explored in the fic itself.)

EDIT: As a note to self, the POVs are then:

• Kyon
• Haruhi (original or alternate)
• Haruhi's unconscious. Effectively, both Haruhis share the same unconscious mind; this makes sense since, from the original Haruhi's perspective, the alternate Haruhi is an attempt to figure out what personality change will help her resolve her relationships with the SOS Brigade and with the "Reserve" members she'd summoned earlier on in her life.

Remarks by the other Brigade members should only appear (if at all) if it can be justified that either Haruhi is able to unconsciously deduce what they're thinking, to the extent that we might as well just give all the details.

[Arakawa]

Note: will make a separate thread for 'Reserve Brigade' once I have the first two chapters completed. For now, posting here.

I'd like some feedback with the following scene (which follows on directly from the chapter I already posted). Very rough at this point, but serviceable for asking help with my current hangup.

EDIT: Ugh, after rereading I will say it is very very rough.

Spoiler: ShowHide

This was where the real trouble began, because for Haruhi 'moderate success' may as well have been an unknown and self-contradictory alchemical quantity, like cold fire. She would feel far more comfortable digging up a UFO in her backyard. She would at least have some idea of what to do with the UFO, whereas moderate success carried myriad additional responsibilities which only interfered with attaining outrageous success.

Her bad mood transferred itself to Kyon, who was increasingly annoyed to find himself being absent-mindedly poked and prodded from behind all throughout class.

"Honestly, Kyon, are you going to just sit there and take that nonsense from me all day? Why weren't you protesting? There was clearly no point to what I was doing!"

Kyon suppressed one remark on his tongue about Brigade Chiefs with an ever-increasing craving for attention, and a second acid inquiry whether Haruhi was just going to sit there like a bad dream while the lunch counter downstairs ran out of food.

"I can only assume you're not worried about something?"

Haruhi tried to make a face like she didn't know what Kyon could possibly be talking about, but then finally gave up and exploded:

"Of course! Planning the next entertainment we're going to give! I have to figure out how to get an invitation as soon as possible from one of the *really* interesting families, get in, and surreptitiously search the venue for mysterious artifacts! Or... we could even go aboveground and demand the search for mysterious objects to be our payment. I mean, it isn't much, but it should at least be better than the completely random mystery searches we've been doing!"

In the subsequent back-and-forth, Kyon suggested that the reason Haruhi wasn't satisfied with her progress was that she had no clue *what* she was trying to accomplish.

"Of course I know exactly what I need to accomplish! The sacred mission of the SOS Brigade: to find aliens, espers, and time travelers and hang out with them!"

Haruhi sat back and mulled her own pronouncement over thoughtfully. Kyon took the opportunity to start in on his lunch.

"You're right, the specific details of this mission *have* turned out to be a bit hazy, though..." Haruhi decided.

Kyon looked like he had a retort he wanted to apply at this point, but thought better of it. Instead he opened his mouth and, after first inserting a chunk of rice, expounded a theory that would hopefully prove distracting:

"Look, you say that's your goal, but do you actually know what your purpose in achieving that goal *was* in the first place? Fine, I will agree with you that hanging out with aliens, espers, and time travelers is a wonderful pastime, but it's not very specific. You might find all of those fantastic, phenomenal people, but you still don't have any idea of what exactly you need them for, do you? So you say you wanted to 'hang out'? That is, sit aroung sipping tea and playing board games? Just like we already do with Koizumi, Nagato, and Asahina almost every day?"

Haruhi scowled, then noticed something across the room. In the blink of an eye, she was looming intimidatingly over some classmate (whose name she hadn't bothered to learn) who, fiddling with her schoolbag, had momentarily disclosed the existence of an additional pair of chopsticks beyond the pair she was currently using to eat lunch with.

"You. Extra chopsticks. Give them to me now, please."

The student was taken aback at the entirely reasonable but also staggeringly rude request.

"You owe me a favour," she finally decided, in order to not seem like a complete pushover.

"What favour? They're disposable wooden chopsticks." Haruhi retorted, absconding with the utensils in question.

Kyon looked from the other student to Haruhi and back to his own lunch and started, as Haruhi had already snatched some rice from it, leaving hardly any room for protest. Hold on, wasn't she supposed to buy something from the lunch counter?

"They'll have sold out of the kind I want by now."

In under five minutes? Honestly, did she think they were attending Furinkan High?

"It's not my fault that I like the kind which is most delicious. Where were we?"

"... hanging out with aliens and time travelers." Kyon finally prompted.

"Right... well, the idea of finding espers, aliens, and time travelers, and then just sitting around with them day after day doing basically nothing *is* sort of monumentally depressing," she conceded, "but, I mean, I've considered the other option... I mean, espers, aliens and time travelers, at least the good kind, would be too busy solving problems of worldwide importance to hang out with us... so unless we were to do something to constantly be at the centre of such problems... and I've already considered that alternative. It feels too much like I'd be threatening them to join me..."

Kyon gaped. So that explained why... hold on a minute, Haruhi, and... at least can you have the decency to leave me some pickles from my own lunch?

"Hm. Wasn't what you did with Koizumi, Asahina and Nagato already skirting close to the edges of that?" he mumbled warily.

"Kyon, what the hell?! Why would you think that? What sort of threat could I have been holding over their heads?! If you don't remember, they joined of their own free will! I wasn't about to stop them from leaving! Or..." Haruhi stopped with an expression on her face that couldn't quite be called dawning horror, more like she'd seen a surprising connection in a math problem, "... was that somehow not the case?"

Kyon thought carefully for a moment and delivered his verdict:

"To be honest, I'm... not exactly certain what their motivations were. I get the feeling they joined because it was just convenient to them for various reasons. Now it's different. Certainly, they could leave at any time, but I get the feeling they're genuinely supportive of what you do, still... I really don't know. You should probably ask them."

"So... you're saying they're actually going to follow me?"

"Assuming you figure out just what we're supposed to be doing, ultimately. Which you still don't know."

"Yes," Haruhi said icily, "which is *why* I'm so busy thinking about how to find it."

And, concluding on that note, she took her frustrations out on exactly half of Kyon's lunch.

The nonchalant way in which she did this caused something inside Kyon to snap at this point. No, he wasn't at all angry, but it occurred to him at that moment that he absolutely must stop yielding like this.

"Huh?" Haruhi paused with her chopsticks halfway to her mouth, looking at him askance, "is something the matter with you?"

The problem, as always, is with how much of this stuff I can get away with, within the bounds of acceptable characterization. Especially, I'm unsure of where the scene goes from here.

Basically, Kyon is now going to try to get Haruhi to pay him back a favour for making use of his lunch like that. If he succeeds, he is going to end up invited to dinner at Haruhi's house that evening. Personally, I don't know if that can be developed plausibly. (Well, but you see, she'll be cooking it for her entire family anyways. Because a day that consists of breakfast, half of Kyon's lunch, followed by Haruhi's mom's cooking would suck, so Haruhi will insist on making dinner herself. It's not that huge of a favour to make an extra portion and also invite Kyon. And there could be no Brigade meeting that evening -- yesterday was a debriefing, today is a day off for the good job giving the entertainment and to let Haruhi collect her thoughts on what to do next. Etcetera, etcetera...)

The problem is that, if Kyon is going to go to dinner that evening, he is going to run into Onoki again much earlier, so the order of events that proceeds from there will be significantly different.

Also, I think the exact same characterization mistake Oroboro pointed out earlier for Kyon is present here. I'm... not sure if that's a serious blind spot in how I see Kyon. I'd be curious what points of this are particularly vulnerable to skewering *heh*.

Anyhow, the final decisions I make on this will affect the subsequent development of the plot sufficiently that I'm currently fretting over this moment. Any help with this would be massively appreciated.

[Muphrid]

I think the critical points in the scene presented are when Haruhi orders the stranger classmate to hand over the spare set of chopsticks, when Haruhi says that the rest of the brigade joined of their own free will and with no coercion...and then realizes she may be incorrect, when Kyon decides to put his foot down about Haruhi taking his food, and the general question of what Haruhi has hoped to accomplish through finding aliens, time-travelers, and espers.

Regarding the first part, I think the chopsticks moment was done as well as could reasonably be expected.  That Haruhi doesn't encounter too much resistance also helps keep her in check.

For the second, I think her realization that she may be mistaken is probably the best way to go about it.  Her reflexive denial makes sense, and that she's willing to consider the possibility that she's wrong is a decent start.

How Kyon will stand up for himself (even knowing what he will do) is going to be key.  You say explicitly he doesn't feel angry about Haruhi rolling over him, and I think that's a mistake.  He should be angry, but he can channel that frustration into something more constructive and permanent.

Finally, it strikes me as plausible that Haruhi would have believed in searching for the extraordinary so fully that she forgot what she was trying to accomplish in doing so.  Thus, I have no problem with the basic premise.


As for how this accelerates the story and forces a meeting between Onoki and Kyon too soon, what is it that you wanted to happen before that meeting?  Is there a reason Onoki would avoid this dinner and thus put the breaks on the plot?

[Arakawa]

Thanks for the feedback. Having this scene continue and lead up to a dinner invitation doesn't create any particular problems, just the flow of the next few chapters would be significantly altered. (Basically, Kyon winds up having Nagato translate the memoirs after his next meeting with Onoki.) Thus I needed to figure this issue out before I could write the stuff that comes afterwards and depends on it.

Unless someone comes out and points a glaring flaw, I think I'll be able to polish the scene I posted above to satisfaction.