[FFML] [fanfic][Sailormoon] Moonshadow, chapter five (draft)

[Harold Ancell]

At 07:08 AM 8/25/2007, The Eternal Lost Lurker wrote:

[ The history lesson. ]

>> Other than that -- it felt rather flat, lifeless.
>
>Yes, this has been the major complaint so far. My style of dealing with
>exposition is to crap it out in one massive infodump and have everyone react
>to it later, because interreaction tends to break narrative flow, but even I
>admit that this particular infodump needs to be spiced up a little.

I suppose so ... but how realistic is that with these characters?

Luna the bound youma is reciting a history that she was deeply
involved in as an actor, but we don't know how she found out all
the details.  Her knowledge of the world outside the Earth obviously
has to be at least second hand.  And the possible effects of the
binding and the significant objective time since those events allow
the author a lot of latitude in how emotional she'd be about it.

And this Ami---sure, she questions, but does she question people
or books?  Here, it has to be the former, but that doesn't mean
she would have yet broken such a habit.

One angle: why would Luna's exposition be so good?  This Luna is
not a court advisor or the like of the Moon Kingdom, she's a
conscripted enemy of unknown prior status.  I suspect youma
would not have achieved as high a status, in canon they're
not much more than foot solders of the week, and not (in the
anime) appearing to have free will.  So you could mess up her
currently neat and well organized exposition, and compel "not
as dumb as she lets people believe" Usagi and maybe Ami to help
organize a better picture.

This would help emphasize the not so dumb bunny, and give Ami
at least a few opportunities to break out of her shell by
interjecting questions.  She needs compelling reasons to do
this, and being handed everything on a platter doesn't do that.

>> more entertaining to read but could easily make it twice the length
>> as well, which may not be a goal of yours!

I certainly didn't have to force myself to read this section!

In general, this is a fantastic continuation of the previous version,
which was one of the most interesting recastings of a canon universe
we've seen.  I'm looking forward to more.

                                        - Harold