Nightman:  With me here are the co-authors of Urusei Yatsura - The Senior Year,
Fred Herriot and Mike Smith.  Thank you both for coming.

Mike Smith:  Pleased to be here.

Fred Herriot:  A pleasure.

Nightman:  Then let's get started.  First of all, how did you two get into UY
fandom, and when did you start writing fan fiction?

Mike:  I had been an anime fan since I was a child and saw the old black and
white versions of Astro Boy and Prince Planet, followed later by Battle of the
Planets and Star Blazers.  I knew some French and the local French channel ran
Cat's Eye, Candy Candy and Captain Harlock.  Plus, I grew up beside a Japanese
family...so I got to know a bit about the Japanese culture.

I first heard of UY from an old write-up about it in the U.S. sci-fi magazine
Starlog, who were doing a spread on anime which had come to North American TV
and a few which had yet to come.  Although the report had a lot of errors (Lum
had 1,000 volt kisses), it peaked an interest.  It wasn't until I got the Viz
version of the UY manga that I really got into it.

Then, I joined Lorraine Savage's Anime Hasshin fan club (which I'm still a
member) where I could get nth-generation fansubs of the UY movies and TV series.
Once I saw it, I was hooked!

UY came at a sad time for me.  I had dropped out of community college where I
was studying film, TV and radio production (from a college which will remain
nameless) and I was trying to break in as a scriptwriter and getting rejected by
even the Japanese anime factories and the CBC.  I was only working in the
summers on a farm and so on and so forth.

When I saw UY, I just thought, "I can do this."  So I wrote the first story for
UY, which was Alternate Lum-san.

I had never tried fanfics before...but then this was at the time when the only
way you get fan stuff out was by APAs or bringing it out on your own (and
probably running into the copyright police).  I joined an APA in the U.S. called
Endless Road (run originally by Dan Kellaway) and showed the original script in
my trib and was amazed by the response.  I then tried it with some Japanese
penpals of mine, and they liked it too.

History then took its course.

Fred:  Well, my indoctrination into Japanimation in general pretty much took the
same path Mike's, but it was pretty limited (Star Blazers and Battle of the
Planets/G-Force) and it wasn't for a long time that the whole idea clued into me
that these shows were made originally in Japan.  I didn't get the wide range of
TV Mike did, but there was this one Buffalo-based station that eventually showed
promos for Robotech that caught my eye (but I never got the chance to see the
shows themselves until years later).

It wasn't until I was almost through my time with the Canadian Armed Forces that
I started discovering anime in earnest AS anime, not the American butcher-jobs
they did with BOTP and to a lesser extent Star Blazers.  That was thanks,
ironically, to Adam Warren and Toren Smith, who were putting out their Dirty
Pair comics.  I picked up the third series and got hooked.

After I left the military, I discovered a shop in Buffalo (which is only a 30-45
minute drive from where I lived at the time in Welland, Ontario) that sold anime
and learned of the Science-Fiction Animation Convention, a local anime fan club.
As I recall (I could be wrong, though), it was through my associating with SFAC
that I got into Anime Hasshin and from that, I wound up meeting Mike thanks to a
letter he sent to me sometime later.

It was Mike who introduced me to UY.  At first, I was pretty hooked into Dirty
Pair (I'd written two large fanfics on that series to be published as fanzines;
I later had them archived with r.a.a.c.), but over time, Mike got me into the
series.  I read his original scripts for ALS and other stories he wrote that
wound up into UY-TSY and we pretty much took off from there.

But it wasn't until early 1996 that I came to meet Alan Septumus, a State
University of New York pre-med student, at the comic shop in Buffalo.  It was
Alan who convinced me to put UY-TSY on the Net.  Once I got Mike on the
bandwagon, we were off.  And as Mike said, the rest is history.

Nightman:  Then let's get directly into UY-TSY.  Which one of you had the first
spark of inspiration for this storyline, or did you both have a piece of the
puzzle and decided to work together to make it a whole?

Mike:  I originally only wanted one UY story...then when I first showed it to
someone, I wrote five more, with Be Forever, Nassur being the final one.  It
wasn't until I met Fred at university (where I took film studies), that we
thought we could work on it as a series together.  We sort of grew together and
the series evolved on its own.

Fred:  Yeah, that's pretty well how it came out.  As I read Mike's stories and
got into the way he ordered them, I saw the places where I could insert my
stuff.  Of course, in respect to Mike since he did introduce me to the whole
concept, I molded my stories to fit his general storyline.  But as we reworked
and rehashed it, we achieved a better balance between what he was putting into
it and what I wanted to put into it.

Nightman:  Was the first race you created the Sagussans?  Ataru always desired a
harem, and they rather directly fill that role.

Mike:  The first race I created were the Vosians, with Nassur as being the only
Vosian to be in the series I thought about.  Then came the Ipraedies, which were
to be the 'heavies' of the series (something which the original TV series
lacked).  It was Fred who came up with the idea of the Sagussans to me and I
said "Okay, let's try it!" and it worked.

Fred:  Yes, I was the one who created the Sagussans.  Originally, my first story
idea about them was set after Nassur's Story.  Now, we all know the basic plot
behind that story.  But in the original draft of Nassur's Story, Ataru had a big
fight with Lum at the time they found the Sceptre of Lecasur, one where Ataru
ordered Lum to go back to her home planet when they escaped the Mikado.  Shinobu
bullied Ataru to recant what he said and, in effect, make him submit himself to
Lum.  No offense meant to Mike, the storyline ended as you'd expect (Ataru
denying his feelings for Lum and everyone chasing them off into the horizon
after Benten has her baby).

Reading that, I thought "Well, what if, in spite of what Ataru was forced to say
to Lum in Nassur's Story, he resented them, especially Shinobu, for acting as if
they knew what was best for him?"  Thinking about it, I then asked myself,
"Well, what would make Lum and the others in Tomobiki realize Ataru isn't their
pet whipping boy to demean, abuse and control anymore?"  The answer was quite
obvious:  give Ataru his dream, one that Lum and her friends would be next to
powerless to try to separate him from.

The Sagussans arose from that.

Originally, I planned for them to be a race of androids (I've always had an
a.s.f.r.-type fetish for androids; it dates back to an old Superman comic I read
where he fought android replicas of Lois et al, not to mention the Bionic Woman
episodes on the Fembots).  But as time went on and Mike and I revived the
storyline, I evolved them into the race you read of in UY-TSY.

Nightman:  Fred, you've lived and worked in Korea for many years now.  How long
have you been there, and how did you first get into teaching there?

Fred:  I first came to Korea in July of 1996, just after graduating from
university with a BA in history.  Now, getting a degree like that doesn't
guarantee a job, especially in this day and age, so as soon as that year
started, I began scouring the newspaper ads for what jobs I could get.

Originally, I wanted to go teach in Japan via the JET program, but I was turned
down.  So it was lucky for me that I discovered an ad calling for people with
their basic bachelor's degree to come teach English in Korea.  I thought about
it and decided I gave it a try.

I started off at the Tuson Academy in Seoul's Myoung'il district.  It was a
pretty shocking learning experience (I had taken some TESL courses in university
before going over and let me tell you, they teach you nothing of real import
when it comes to real-time teaching in an actual school).  That job lasted until
February 1997 when I got let go.  I came back to Canada, waited for a while for
some matters to clear up (it was at that time that Mike and I finished off the
main part of UY-TSY), then went back to Korea in September 1997, teaching at the
New York Institute in the steel town of Kwang'yang in South Choulla Province.
After a year there, I switched to another institute, the M. Harrower Foreign
Language Institute, in An'gang, a town in North Kyoungsang Province near the old
Shilla capital city of Kyoungju.  That's where I've been since that time.

Nightman:  Also, how do you think it's influenced your writing, other than the
obvious aspects that appear in UY-TSY, such as the Sagussan language and the
history of the Noukiites and their enemies, the Oni?

Fred:  Well, my mother told me one basic thing about writing in general and
fiction writing in particular:  You write what you know.  Now, living day in and
out in a foreign country, with a different language and alphabet, plus little
contact with your native society and culture (though with the improvements on
the Net, that's changing drastically), gets to you.  Things you see, things you
do, food you eat, the words you pick up -- it all simply gets to you.  And over
time, it gets into your writing.

You mentioned the Sagussan language.  It is simply the modification of certain
Korean words (along with some made-up words like daimon'cha along with the basic
number system) using the full range of English sounds (there are 46 of them,
vice 26 for Korean).  That was simple.  But over time, as I started to develop
the Noukiites and began using Reiko in the TSY storyline (and this really came
into play when I started on The Ishinomaki Years), it was easy for me to use a
"letter-flipping" idea I once came up a long time ago for other languages to
Korean han'geul to create Noukiite.

Also, living in Korea means you eventually will come to deal with the han, which
is the prevalent mood that hangs over the Korean people as a whole.  It's a hard
concept to translate into English -- I won't attempt to try to do it here -- but
the idea is so strong that the word "han" in the Korean language has pretty much
has come to represent Korea as a whole (i.e. Taehan-min'guk as the Korean name
for the Republic itself).

Being a history student, I couldn't resist learning about Korean history,
especially the problems Korea has had with Japan.  So it didn't take me long to
develop a general idea where the Urusians (the Onis as others know Lum's people
as) would have a big skeleton in its closet, that being its relations with the
Noukiites.  When Reiko comes into UY-TSY, Ataru and Lum have to deal with that
directly, especially Lum.

Nightman:  How do you describe yourselves as writers?  Are both of you partly
humorists and dramatists, or is one of you mainly a humor writer and the other a
angst/dramafic writer?

Mike:  Good question!  I see myself as partly a humourist and partly a
dramatist.  I've never been comfortable being too much of one or the other
although in real life, I love to watch the wacky humour of Benny Hill and Monty
Python and the morose films of Akira Kurosawa.  If you talk to Fred, you'll find
I can be very moody at times, so my writing is more a reflection of my
personality.

Fred:  Personally, I've always tried to be a serious writer.  And I have to say
that using some of the standard UY punchline gags (the warp-hammers, Cherry
popping out of nowhere, people getting slugged into orbit and the like) gets
boring after a while, so I eventually stopped doing that.  I sometimes say to
myself "I couldn't write a comic story if my life depended on it!"  But there
are times when I can flip in a good one-line.

Then again, readers themselves have different perceptions of humour.  One reader
of my recent series Lonely Souls told me he was laughing over some of the things
he had read in that story.  That shocked me, considering that I started writing
Lonely Souls the day those lunatics destroyed the World Trader Centre and the
Pentagon and I wanted it to be a "dark"-type fic.

Nightman:  How about the biggest question:  how do two people with different
temperament and attitudes get together on an storyline as epic as UY-TSY?  From
the attempts I've made with collaborative fan fiction, I've learned that it's
like cat-herding and then some!

Mike:  It wasn't easy at first, since we had to learn to work with each Other's
styles and temperaments.  It was Fred's mom, Eleanor Kushnir, who seemed to keep
us together when it looked like we were on the verge of coming apart.  We also
brain-stormed together a lot, visited each other's homes regularly, went out
together.  Plus we learned to compromise with each other.  That's the hardest
thing in a collaboration of anything is being willing to compromise.

Fred:  Agreed.  Being a "mature student" in university when I got out of the
military, I myself was pretty starved for friends who could see things like I do
at the time I met Mike.  One of the things I've always had great problems with
is trying to reach out to people with different viewpoints and ideas.  I think I
still have that problem.  But with Mike, since we both had a shared interest in
several things, anime being one, it clicked in pretty well and stayed that way
throughout.

Nightman:  How did you two communicate on matters of character and plotline?
Did you use email to decide these matters?

Mike:  Before Fred left for Korea, we would visit each other's homes regularly
(sometimes as often as three or four times a week) since we were only a
half-hour's drive away from each other, for brainstorming sessions.  When we
were in university together, we would meet as well outside of class (although we
were in different programmes).  We've only been using e-mail and regular mail in
the last couple of years.

Nightman:  Also, how did you decide which of you was to do what story?

Mike:  Whomever came up with the idea first would do the story.  Although, once
in a while, either Fred or myself would take over a story if we were bored or
think we could do it better or as a change of pace.

Nightman:  Mike, were there any characters that were your creation?  Nassur was
one, and I think Hazel was too, but are there others?

Mike:  I also created Pamela Shapiro as well as the Mikado, the Keeper of the
Spectre of Lecasur, Ayanba Onsen, and had a hand in creating Mie Seikou.  Also
some of the hybrids Nassur adopted are my creations as well as his computer on
Home Base.

Fred:  Sometimes, I still have trouble with that! (grins)

Nightman:  One of my favorites of the middle set of stories was the chapter
entitled Time Curse.  How did you come up with the notion of a Tokugawa-period
Mendou as a samurai wannabe?  And what about the freaky Colonel that fired at
Lum's ship?

Mike:  From the first time I saw Mendou (in the first UY film), he seemed to
always be associated with being from a samurai background.  Since most of Time
Curse was set at a time before the Mendous got their fortune in big business
(which was implied not to have occurred until after the Meiji Restoration), I
thought even the Mendous had to start from a 'humble' beginning.

One of my favourite non-anime films is Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which deals
with a village which hires a group of desperate samurai to protect themselves
from a band of bandits, I then figured that in this village in this time period,
there needed to be a village protector of some sort.  Thus, Mendou's multi-great
grandfather became a proto-samurai.

As for the wacky U.S. Colonel, I guess he came from some of the bad U.S. war
films I've seen over the years.

Nightman:  UY-TSY started out as Classic UY, and then was rewritten in its
present form.  Who decided to rewrite the series, how did that decision come
about?

Mike:  The original title just sort of appeared because we couldn't think of
something better to call the series.  It was Fred who decided to change the
title and rewrite parts of the series.  He had done some surveys on the Net and
found a lot of people didn't like what we were doing, so he took some of the
more serious concerns and changed things accordingly.

Fred:  Well, actually, I didn't do "surveys" as Mike said.

When I was working in Seoul, I was cut off from Net access (this was just before
the big PC-game room explosion that's come across Korea in recent years) for a
while.  Patrick Vera, a reader from the Philippines, kept me somewhat in contact
with the Net.  Finally, I discovered a local Internet café which was just a
subway ride away from the Tuson Academy, so I got a new Net account and was
pretty much back in business.

At that time, I learned that while I had been off the Net, a lot of readers of
our stories had chatted about it between each other and had come up with a lot
of criticisms about the series as it had run.  Those comments were brought up to
me by another reader, Sean Gaffney.  And hearing these sorts of things, my
friend, I have to say, royally pissed me right off.

This is my big bugbear about writing fanfics.  Night, you know this as well as
we do.  We do this because we enjoy doing this and want other people to enjoy
reading it.  That's why we want to get comments and criticisms from our readers.
If people have a problem with what we've done, tell us about it for Lyna's sake!
And not wanting to tell we, the writers, about it, but at the same time telling
other people about it and spreading all sorts of biased opinions about some
stories, really hits me the wrong way.

Anyhow! (breathes out)

Once I took a few cold showers, I looked over what was said, then picked out
things I agreed with, then started reworking some of the scenes.  At the same
time, I decided I wanted to rework the "Tiger Saga" storyline (Sakura's Class
Reunion, Arrive Reiko-chan, Tag Race Mark Three, The Return of Koosei Ryooki and
Spirit-War Tomobiki plus Together The Outland) to better reflect the idea that
in spite of what happened in Enter Space-Hybrid Hazel that starts things off,
Ataru's and Lum's feelings for each other don't fall apart, but begin to grow
stronger.  In essence, the story where the "break" between them happens (Ataru's
First Girlfriend:  Arrive Windy-chan) comes much later, but by then, they've
gone through the Spirit War and realize that no matter want, they want this to
work out.

By the time I got back to Canada, I'd convinced Mike to go along with it.
Around this time, the title of the series was changed to UY-TSY.  Looking at it,
that was a logical decision.

Nightman:  Mike, from what Fred's told me, there was one story that was
originally intended to be a part of the UY-TSY lineup called The Horror of the
Works.  Could you describe what that originally was about?

Mike:  THOTW involved the UY gang mistakenly attacking Chie Budou's daughter
Aikyou, who was a very powerful Shinto priestess-in-training, thinking she was
Ataru.  In anger, she sends everyone by magic to a place called 'The Works'
which each character would confront their greatest fear.  For Lum, it would be
losing Ataru.  Shinobu, being unmarried for life.  Mendou, serving Ataru.  Lan,
losing Rei to Lum.  Etcetera, etcetera.

Nightman:  What ended up happening to that story?

Mike:  I think we decided to drop it because we couldn't get it to work in the
way we wanted to.  There were several stories which didn't seem to work, but we
may use them in the sequel series.

Fred:  Agreed.  Also at the same time, I wanted to write a direct sequel to
Mike's first story, Alternate Lum-san, dealing with the fall-out of what
happened in that alternate timeline.  So when we elected to drop THOTW, we put
in Darling's Bad Day - Alternate Lum-san Revisited.  Sometime later, Sean
Gaffney did a follow-up sequel to that called ALS III.

Nightman:  Something I've always admired about this storyline is the incredible
breadth and depth of the universe you created.  How much time did you spend on
developing races like the Ipraedies, the Zephyrites, the Sagussans and the other
inhabitants of that universe?

Mike:  Like anything else, all the races evolved as we worked on them.  It was
sort of thinking, "I'm a (blank).  What does it mean to be a (blank)?  How did
the (blank) come to be?"  Plus, we saw what was going on in series like Star
Trek and other sources and tried to put a spin on all of them.  In sci-fi
series, alien races are always evolving and changing, so the time spent on them
is unlimited.

Nightman:  Do you both keep notes on these races and characters?   If so, how
detailed are they?

Mike:  We only kept notes on the important things...like uniform colours, the
various insignia, and alphabets.  Anything else is mentally noted.

Fred:  Although late in working the series, we wrote up a general list of all
the races we brought into UY-TSY for the readers.

Nightman:  Is there a UY-TSY Bible out there? [1]

Mike:  I think we tried doing a 'bible', but we kept changing things so much,
it's more or less a series of mental notes and whatever was written in each
episode.

Nightman:  Which races were who's idea?  Could you give other writers tips on
how to develop new aliens for a science-fiction series?

Mike:  I know the Vosians and the Ipraedies are my ideas.  The rest are Fred's.
The Seifukusu Dominion is one which wasn't ours, but we adapted for our own
purposes.

Fred:  Let me cut in here for a second.  The Seifukusu are actually based on the
Imperial Uruseians as depicted in Lew Burton's UY fanfics Just a Dream and Still
Dreaming.  That's where we got all the "imperial" names for Urusians in our
storyline.  Also, I drew up a direct connection between the Seifukusu and the
Urusians based on Lew's ideas.

Mike:  As for tips, think about what is to be a member of the alien race and
also think about how different in thinking this race is from Terrans' thinking.
Also, think about culture and language, two things which were all but ignored in
sci-fi films until Star Wars brought them out.  An alien race is more than just
some actor or actress dressed up in a funny costume.  It's an idea.

Fred:  Agreed.  I guess I came up with the same general concept dealing with
non-Terrans at the same time Mike did.  You cannot do like they've often done in
Star Trek and other series (I haven't seen Babylon 5 so I can't comment on that
series, though others have said that things are much better there) where the
aliens are pretty much hominoid and can fit in pretty well.  The universe, I
believe, is much, much more diverse than that.  So when I bring in an alien race
to my story lines, I do as Mike said before.  Put myself into the shoes of one
of these beings and imagine what his/her/its life is like.  You work it from
there.

Nightman:  One of the major levels of detail that makes this work is the
creation of artificial languages used.  How did you create them?  Are they joint
collaborations, or the work of one of you?

Mike:  It depends on the race.  The Sagussan language is purely Fred's
invention, which is based on Korean.  Yehisrite is my idea, which is simple
Romanizing a Japanese word and moving the letters to a formula and adding
apostrophes when needed.  Vosian is another language I invented and its mainly
sounds which seem to sound neat together!

Fred:  But with Yehisrite, I provided the actual formula to make it work, going
A=Z, B=Y and so on.

Nightman:  One thing that seems to irk people about UY-TSY is what some perceive
as the sudden change in Ataru Moroboshi's character.  Why did you feel that was
necessary, and how do you think it fits with Ataru's character as depicted in
the anime and manga?

Mike:  When Fred first came up with the changes of Ataru's character, I was more
than a little skeptical about it working.  But, as we got studying more and more
into the series, we found that while Ataru is a sex-crazed idiot most of the
time, he's also a kid that has been bullied.  He is bullied by his classmates,
his teachers, his parents, and even at times by Lum herself.  After having been
bullied a lot in high school, I began to sympathize with Ataru more and more
(and to a lesser extent with Lan).

Comparing it to the "original" Ataru, we see the beginnings of our Ataru in the
fourth and fifth films.  He is growing and changing, while everyone else seems
to be staying the same.  So, after his little visit to the Box (in Enter
Space-Hybrid Hazel), this part of Ataru takes hold.

The rest of the series is Ataru telling everyone "Yes, I love Lum, but it's time
for you all to get on with it!"

Fred:  To me, what happens to Ataru in UY is not just bullying.  It is, in my
opinion, getting into the realm of child abuse, spousal abuse and total social
ostracization.  I myself have been the victim of child abuse, though in my case,
it was because my mother was suffering from steroid rage due to cortisone use
because of her asthma and bronchitis.  Because of that, I can forgive my mother
for what happened and we got along right to the end.

In seeing episodes of UY (I have to admit that I haven't had much chance to read
the manga), I watched all the times people would say that everything was Ataru's
fault, watched all the times his mother says to his face "I wish I never had
you!" and all that and it just pretty much hit me over time:  here is a young
man who has had his whole world turned upside down and there's no one, not even
Lum at times, who takes his side.  No one.

Some people, those who prefer their fanfics to follow as close as possible to
the original storyline, would say that in the long term, it just really doesn't
matter what Ataru feels because UY is a comedy and he's pretty much the basic
instigator for what happens.

Well, if they feel that way, all the world to them, of course.

But Mike and I didn't look at it that way.  We wanted to inject some real-life
feelings into the characters playing out in UY-TSY.  And that meant we had to
deal with the darker sides of people's souls.  And looking at all the abuse
Ataru's taken throughout the TV series and the movies, I realized that deep
down, there's got to be some part of him that just longs for the chance to
strike back at those who hurt him.  And in constructing the events leading up to
the Tiger Saga, we give him that chance.

That whole matter's also what eventually led me to create Nagaiwakai, Mie (with
Mike's help), Nokoko, Reiko, Dakejinzou and the Sagussans.  I wanted Ataru to
find people willing to take him for what he really is and be his friend (or
grandmother, sister or daughter in Nagaiwakai's, Nokoko's and Reiko's cases).
Some would say Nassur fits that bill, too, but with him, I felt that he was too
heavily influenced by his friendship to Lum to count.  That's why I pushed
forward the idea that Ataru wouldn't trust Nassur until after the whole matter
with the Sceptre of Lecasur was resolved.

And when all these people started interacting with Ataru, it gave him the
strength to finally say to those who hurt him before, "That's it!  I've had
enough!  No more of this!  MY life belongs to ME!!!"  And to the people of
Tomobiki, that was the biggest slap in the face they could ever receive.  I
mean, could you begin to imagine this?  Ataru of all people telling those people
to kindly go screw themselves and actually having the power to back that request
up with force?  Why, just imagine?! (laughs)

And from there, comes most of the conflict in UY-TSY.

Nightman:  Fred, one of your creations, one that you've used in many stories
since, is the Nendo-kata.  How did you come up with them, and how did they
develop?

Fred:  Well, creating the Great School of the Nendo-kata came hand-in-hand with
the idea of creating Ataru's sister Nokoko.  I have to also admit, my creating
of the Nendo-kata went line-in-line with my greater willingness to use alternate
lifestyle themes in UY-TSY (Lum's and Noa's relationship; the whole marei'cha
thing Sagussans and Avalonians practice; Shinobu's odd experimentations with
female lovers, like Naromo in My Darlings United and later her relationship with
Junba; even Ataru's one-night stand with his Hustari friend Seisuru in
Dakejinzou's Story).

You see, long ago, I pretty much believed like most military-raised folks do
about homosexuality:  "It's okay just as long as it doesn't happen to me!" and
things like that.  But one night after my mother and her friend Mae Harry had
come back from a trip to Chicago and I said that, Mae laid into me about it
really hard.  And that got me thinking about it.

I then had the surprising luck to, sometime after Mae tore a strip off my
backside, pick up a neat science-fiction novel named Warriors of Isis, written
by Jean Stewart, when my mother and I visited the Media Play store in Buffalo
one evening.  I'm not sure what first caught my eye about the book.  And being
at the time somewhat ignorant of some obvious clues about what sort of book this
was, I bought it and my mother and I went off to a nearby restaurant so we could
eat and read.

Ladies and gentlemen, I kid you not!  I had, believe it or not, read almost a
third of the way through the book before it finally dawned on me that this was
meant for a lesbian audience!  When it did sink into me that this was a book
written by a lesbian author for lesbian readers, I found myself saying "Oh, what
the heck!  It's a good book!" and carried on reading.

Eventually, I got to read the prequels to this book, Return to Isis and Isis
Rising.  In reading Jean's books, the seeds that became the Nendo-kata were
sewn.  An all-female society, living without men, reproducing through a form of
parthenogenesis.  Over time, I added several more details (their molluskoid
origins, the Crossing Over, the Unity theme and their powers), then decided to
make Nokoko one of them.  Everything took off from there.

Nightman:  Urusei Yatsura - The Senior Year is a series people either love or
hate; people don't seem to have a middle ground on it.  Does the feedback you
two read about it seem to fit that perception, or how have people responded to
it?

Mike:  I think that what we've done is so radical, that people needed time to
digest it.  Like every other bit of art which changes people ideas, it takes a
while for people to accept it.  What I don't like are people who may have read
one or two stories or even none, and dismiss the entire series as dreck.

I feel personally, though, that everyone is entitled to their opinion, and if
they don't like what we do...write your own.

Fred:  Hear, hear.

Nightman:  From what I've heard, the main reason people dislike UY-TSY boil down
to one of three causes:  the sudden change in Ataru's character (which some
consider to be OOC), the violent rage directed against the supporting cast of
UY, and the depiction of lesbian/bisexual relationships.  Does that seem to be
the main problems people have with this series, or are there others?

Mike:  I think the main problem some critics have is that we're showing
lesbianism and bisexuality as being normal and at times desirable.  I myself
find it hard to accept some of the characters' sexual preferences since I'm not
gay or bisexual and I was brought up in a 'normal' two-parent household.  But
looking back at it, even after things like Ellen and Queer As Folk, there is
still a lot of homophobia around.  But, actually, we've always tried to do
things with taste and avoid doing too much hentai or ecchi stuff (I dislike
pornography greatly).

Fred:  I've already pretty well said my say about the lesbian issues and Ataru's
change of character beforehand, so I'll concentrate here on the attacks on the
UY support cast here.

First of all, we have a group of people who (in Ataru's point of view, BTW) feel
they have the right to rip into him for whatever reason.  Among these people are
his ex-girlfriend (who is also his oldest friend, who has seemed to abandon him
long ago), his parents (who verbally wish and act as if they would gladly be rid
of him), a priestess who cursed him when they first met, a monk who pretty much
seems to want to eat Ataru out of house and home, four so-called friends who
always ride his case because they think it's their duty to protect Lum's
happiness and a rich snob who feels he's God's gift to women.  Then you tack on
a vengeful "friend" of Lum who seems to want to kill you at first opportunity,
Lum's flame-breathing cousin who gets away with almost anything and Lum's
brainless ex-boyfriend atop that!

I said before that all the physical and emotional abuse Ataru's taken has got to
have created pockets of real anger and hate deep inside him.  It boils like a
cancer in your soul.  And unless you have a healthy way to bleed it off, it'll
come back and hurt not only you, but those around you.  In UY-TSY, we created a
situation where Ataru does not get the chance to bleed off his buried feelings
gradually, but forces him to let all that anger go all at once.  Of course, he
does not want to unleash it on Lum.  He cares for her and wants to love her,
make something special with her for the both of them, like all couples should.
He certainly won't do it on Mie (his first true friend in a very long time) or
Nagaiwakai (his grandmother, whom he sees as the perfect counterbalance to his
parents) or Reiko (his daughter) or Dakejinzou (another new friend) or Nokoko
(his sister).

So he decides it's time to cut loose and go medieval on those who hurt him in
return.  Now, I'm sure everyone will agree with me in saying that Rei, Cherry,
Mendou, Megane and the Bodyguards deserve what they get.  Lan, Sakura and
Ten-chan also deserve what they get to a lesser extent (but with Ten, Reiko gets
on his case, so Ataru doesn't really worry about him in the long term).  And
certainly, the way he pretty much has been emotionally abandoned by his parents
deserves reprisal, too.

But the real problem I think people have is what Ataru does to Shinobu.

I will admit to the fact that even now, I have many problems with Shinobu as a
person.  This woman is not just his ex-girlfriend, she is also Ataru's oldest
friend.  And (again, this is Ataru's POV) she abandoned him, both romantically
and friendship-wise, when Mendou came into their lives.  And despite that, she
still acts as if she has the right to dictate whatever she wants to him.  So
Ataru turns around and hits her with the force of the Great Kantou Earthquake.
And Shinobu has to confront the fact that what she's done to Ataru is something
he does not like regardless of what he may have done to her.  So she, like
everyone else in UY-TSY affected by this, has a choice to make.  Walk away from
him or try to reconcile.

Nightman:  How do you respond to these criticisms?

Mike:  Like I said...you don't like it...then write your own.

Nightman:  If you two had to do UY-TSY over again, would you do it the same way?
What would you two do differently?

Mike:  Good question!  I think I would have a few less supporting characters if
I was doing it again.  It's confusing remembering who's related to who and their
part in the universe.  Other than that, everything would probably be the same.

Fred:  Yeah, a little less clutter would be welcome, but we have to remember
that in real life, you meet new people all the time.  I think by bringing in
many background characters, we make the stories more realistic.

Nightman:  You two have promised some sequels to UY-TSY.  What's the status on
those projects, and what can we expect to see in them?

Mike:  Well, Fred's got his UY - The Ishinomaki Years, which focuses on Reiko
mostly.  That's set about ten years after the last main UY-TSY story The Last
Farewell.  Our biggest project is Urusei Yatsura Twenty Years Later, which deals
with a new generation of kids at Tomobiki High School including the kids of the
original cast...with Ataru and Lum as teachers there (this series should be out
soon).  I've done a story or two for UY - Butsumetsu High School, which is set
in the same time as UY20YL but at a different high school.  Plus, I have a sort
of background story called A Spy Among Us, where the North Koreans send a spy to
look on Lum during the entire UY-TSY series.  And Fred is working on several
alternate UY stories and Illusions.

Fred:  Unlike Mike, my muses can be often very finicky at times.  I wish to heck
that I can focus on one thing, but when my imagination goes into overdrive and I
start thinking of new ideas...! (shrugs)

Yes, I am planning to work on (and in some places re-work) UY-TIY, which will
revolve around Reiko and her friends.  It will also look at a sort of resolution
of the Uru-Noukiios problem in reflection of the growing rapproachment between
Japan and Korea in recent years.  And UY-TIY also deals with direct relations
between Japan and Korea in the UY universe, what with the bringing in of the
Choun-bal characters.

Atop helping out in UY20YL, I want to go finish Illusions, which is my fusion of
Shawn Hagen's Bubblegum Crisis fanfic series No Armour Against Fate with the
UY-TSY/TIY/20YL universe.  I think I can wrap that up soon when I can focus my
whole concentration on it.  And I also want to do one or two more Sailor Moon
stories on the line of Sailor Twins and its sequel Faith No More.  And I am
still trying to work out on how to finish my Ranma 1/2 story Three Sisters
without trying to redo the whole Ranma series.

Right now, my priority project is the UY/Ranma/Sister Princess crossover Lonely
Souls, which deals with the possibility of Noa actually bonding Ataru to Ranma
Saotome when they were kids, plus the idea of Ataru having twelve half-sisters.
When I don't feel in the mood of doing that, I do other things, such as a
take-off on Gregg Sharp's very interesting lemon fic Wild Horses and Pokegirls I
call Pokegirls and the Great School.

Again, it all depends on my muses.

Nightman:  Will, for example, UY Double Zeta be a prequel to Illusions?

Mike:  Right now, it's too far in the future to say.  It's all just in the
planning stage.

Fred:  Agreed.

[1] When mentioning a series Bible, we mean the central book detailing a TV
series, its characters and the world they will live in.


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