At 11:34 AM 11/05/98 -0500, Ranma Al'Thor wrote:

On Fri, 1 May 1998, Mark Doherty wrote:

I'm Here to Help
by Mark Doherty(mdoherty@uq.net.au)

Oh, and if I hated Sailor Moon I sure as hell wouldn't be spending this
much time on a story for it. Do you know how many hours went into this
chapter? Argh. It's the POV of a guy who is the Senshi's enemy, you can't
expect it to be _too_ nice now, can you?

Actually, I have read many fanfics where the only conclusion I could draw
was that the author of the story HATED the series in question, and wanted
to destroy and revile it.  

Oh well, I've stated my position; if people choose to not believe me, I'm
really not going to lose too much sleep over it. I'm not so much angry or
annoyed over flames as I am... well, to put it bluntly, amused. They've 
been really sad, but they're all operating under the misconception that I'm
doing this in a fiction assassination attempt. 

Yet again, I'll state the reason I did this story in _Sailor Moon_; 
disappointment at the one-dimensionalness of SM fiction villains. The original 
SM villains had something; Jadeite's flash of niceness in the Love Boat story, 
Ail and Ann's entire reason for being on Earth, Fiore's relationship with
Mamoru.

They all didn't give a stuff what happened to their victims, but they were
doing it all for reasons, and those reasons weren't usually something as
abstract as the glory of evil, but of very human things like conquest,
saving a loved one(the Doom tree), and so on. Certainly, evil was there, 
but it almost never was the only reason for a villain to do something. 

It boils down to this; I have seriously limited time. I've got stories like
One Hundred Percent Woman and Wild Eyes, both of which are even more popular
than I'm Here to Help, sitting on my hard disk. I've got a hundred fics I could
be doing, ones that wouldn't have me shaking my head over getting lame flames.
I have, as shocking as this may be to some, got a life outside of fanfiction.
I am not a person who wastes his time, because I haven't got enough of it left
over to waste.

But in the end, people will believe what they want to believe. That's fine,
the story's meant to have people believing wildly different things about the
character, it's only fair that my own motivations be seen the same way. Maybe
I'm lying, and I am doing this for the pleasure of tearing down high walls
of idealism, or maybe I'm not and I actually am trying to lend attention to
a sorely underdeveloped part of SM fiction. Maybe it's neither. Shrug the
shoulders and move on, I guess, I don't want to make my motivations any more 
of an issue than they already are.

You'd be amazed at how much energy people can put into attacking
something.  Just take your own character as an example. How much time has
HE put into writing about the Senshi and what he thinks about them? :)

It's a hobby for him; it was either write long, philosophical death threats,
or learn how to do origami. :P

(As for me, those journal entries are laughably easy to write, they take
no time at all. It's the 'live-action' bits that eat up the writing deadline.)

stooped lower yet again?" he added to cover his gaffe. Perhaps this time,
he thought, one of the Senshi's enemies will actually manage to keep Mr 
Swank. But time had shown him before that he wasn't usually that lucky... 

And since Tuxboy is around in the future, he ought to know they won't be
able to hold him.

>From his POV, his very presence should be altering the 'past', so he can't 
think about absolutes of what happens in the future anymore. Unless he wants 
to, of course.

Poison? No, no it wouldn't... it wouldn't be right. It wouldn't get me
what I wanted anyway, the Senshi's physiology, like mine, could almost
certainly handle something as petty as poison. 

Given how willing he is to kill people, I don't see why he'd be reluctant
to use poison on that account.

An idiosyncrasy; it could be for any reason - maybe he feels that poisons 
are a horribly long way to die(so far, except for any conversation he has 
with the creature beforehand, he seems to go for really quick and brutal
ways to kill off an opponent), perhaps it doesn't gel with his honour
system(he might question himself over it a lot; but he's obviously got
some sort of subconcious honour system; Naru would be pushing daisies if
he didn't), perhaps it's just one of those things. 

Probably, however, it's a question of morals. Morals often don't make sense
to other people (why is one thing ok but not another?) And no matter how many
might disagree or agree with his morals, he's definitely got them.

"You absolute idiot," he calmly said to the crystal as every youma in 
the throneroom turned to look at him.

Heh :)

At least if it was human, you could do a little harmless beating up on it
afterwards. :P

Sometimes, I have to wonder what a world without all these powers would
be like. Mundane? Of course. But would such mundanity be a very bad
thing? 

Yes :)

We all wish for things we can't have. We'd love a little bit of magic in our
lives; he has too much. It's the nature of the human beast to dream of the
unattainable. ^_^

In my youth, I dreamed dreams of power. But now, I find that I dream of a 
life most ordinary, for all the world's people. I wonder, if these dreams 
were fulfilled, would they leave the same bittersweet taste that the ones
of my youth did?

Yes.

Probably. ^_^

************  
Mark Doherty  -  mdoherty@uq.net.au
My spam/fanfics are at - 
http://www.tass.org/~mdoherty/index.html

"Time grows short, but I remain tall."