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foxinthestarsSanpellegrino Aranciata is not as tasty as Orangina.
Also, random MagiRanger babbling that only Jessie will maybe get, but it's been bugging me...
Brief-ish recap: Time-travel magic exists, but the Heavenly Saint who invented it, Chronogel, thought it was so dangerous that he sealed himself in a mountain and placed a terrible curse on the magic. Not knowing details beyond "Sensei says don't do that," MagiYellow uses time-travel magic to save many innocent lives, but thus triggers the curse, which MagiShine/Hikaru/Sensei then tells us will end the world unless either MagiYellow dies or we fix it with a MacGuffin from Mt. Chronogel which Mt. Chronogel will kill you if you take. MagiShine is about to take it anyway out of self-sacrificing nobility and Sensei-ish devotion, when into this mess steps Awesome Villain Wolzard (who is not at all Darth Vader---he's better at the Vader act than Vader was). Wolzard just shoots Mt. Chronogel, takes the MacGuffin, and gloats that you can do that when you're not a goody two-shoes. We get the MacGuffin from him after a giant robot fight and everything comes out okay (except Mt. Chronogel I guess).
When I first watched this, I couldn't help thinking, "You know, Wolzard has a point. Chronogel was a stupid bastard and blowing him to smithereens improved this situation dramatically." I mean seriously, you're worried that time-travel magic could muck up history or even destroy the world, so you place a curse on it that very likely will destroy the world if anyone so much as uses it to pay their phone bill on time. That seems remarkably stupid.
But this is one of those places where my fanfic-inventing tendency---normally a liability for anyone whose audience I am as I constantly think of cool things they could have done instead of what they did---actually cut the other way and made it better. When I started thinking "You know, if I was writing this/if I was Chronogel, I would have made the curse like so," I realized that there was actually no barrier to supposing that was the case, so yes, made it better.
My idea was that this curse is not made to end the world; if it runs its course the target of it, who used the time-travel magic, doesn't just die, they are erased from history. There is the "make the punishment fit the crime" aspect, but also, if that person never existed, then they never would have used time-travel magic, and thus any damage they did to history would be undone by the curse. Removing them comes with its own risk, of course, but if Chronogel was designing this curse to protect history from malicious damage by a villain (having already instructed all the good guys to just not do it, and good guys generally follow rules like that, right?), it would seem like the lesser risk. Not so in our case! We've got our legend and our little song establishing that we're supposed to have Five Colors, and if one of them were just gone, we probably would have been screwed by about Stage 3 when we came up short on parts for the MagiDragon, so when MagiShine says that this curse will cause the End of the World, he is merely glossing over unpleasant details.
Setting it up in such a way that if you really need to change history and have it stick, someone will have to sacrifice their life as a token of their serious and noble intent would also have seemed like a much better idea under other circumstances.
So, I like my little patch job there; the story doesn't seem stupid anymore.
(There is still the matter of why Wolzard even wanted a "Staff of Forgiveness." You could suppose it was just an item of power, but I don't recall him using it as any such thing in the ensuing giant robot fight, so really the whole thing plays out as if Wolzard was actively trying to save the heroes' butts. Which I could actually buy, given what an honorable/sportsmanly villain he's been up to now, plus exactly how good at the Vader act I suspect he is...)
Also, random MagiRanger babbling that only Jessie will maybe get, but it's been bugging me...
Brief-ish recap: Time-travel magic exists, but the Heavenly Saint who invented it, Chronogel, thought it was so dangerous that he sealed himself in a mountain and placed a terrible curse on the magic. Not knowing details beyond "Sensei says don't do that," MagiYellow uses time-travel magic to save many innocent lives, but thus triggers the curse, which MagiShine/Hikaru/Sensei then tells us will end the world unless either MagiYellow dies or we fix it with a MacGuffin from Mt. Chronogel which Mt. Chronogel will kill you if you take. MagiShine is about to take it anyway out of self-sacrificing nobility and Sensei-ish devotion, when into this mess steps Awesome Villain Wolzard (who is not at all Darth Vader---he's better at the Vader act than Vader was). Wolzard just shoots Mt. Chronogel, takes the MacGuffin, and gloats that you can do that when you're not a goody two-shoes. We get the MacGuffin from him after a giant robot fight and everything comes out okay (except Mt. Chronogel I guess).
When I first watched this, I couldn't help thinking, "You know, Wolzard has a point. Chronogel was a stupid bastard and blowing him to smithereens improved this situation dramatically." I mean seriously, you're worried that time-travel magic could muck up history or even destroy the world, so you place a curse on it that very likely will destroy the world if anyone so much as uses it to pay their phone bill on time. That seems remarkably stupid.
But this is one of those places where my fanfic-inventing tendency---normally a liability for anyone whose audience I am as I constantly think of cool things they could have done instead of what they did---actually cut the other way and made it better. When I started thinking "You know, if I was writing this/if I was Chronogel, I would have made the curse like so," I realized that there was actually no barrier to supposing that was the case, so yes, made it better.
My idea was that this curse is not made to end the world; if it runs its course the target of it, who used the time-travel magic, doesn't just die, they are erased from history. There is the "make the punishment fit the crime" aspect, but also, if that person never existed, then they never would have used time-travel magic, and thus any damage they did to history would be undone by the curse. Removing them comes with its own risk, of course, but if Chronogel was designing this curse to protect history from malicious damage by a villain (having already instructed all the good guys to just not do it, and good guys generally follow rules like that, right?), it would seem like the lesser risk. Not so in our case! We've got our legend and our little song establishing that we're supposed to have Five Colors, and if one of them were just gone, we probably would have been screwed by about Stage 3 when we came up short on parts for the MagiDragon, so when MagiShine says that this curse will cause the End of the World, he is merely glossing over unpleasant details.
Setting it up in such a way that if you really need to change history and have it stick, someone will have to sacrifice their life as a token of their serious and noble intent would also have seemed like a much better idea under other circumstances.
So, I like my little patch job there; the story doesn't seem stupid anymore.
(There is still the matter of why Wolzard even wanted a "Staff of Forgiveness." You could suppose it was just an item of power, but I don't recall him using it as any such thing in the ensuing giant robot fight, so really the whole thing plays out as if Wolzard was actively trying to save the heroes' butts. Which I could actually buy, given what an honorable/sportsmanly villain he's been up to now, plus exactly how good at the Vader act I suspect he is...)
