Subject: Re: SHIN reasoning
From: Joseph Riggs <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2000 21:58:49 -0700

nik wrote:

> SHIN continues to dissapoint me. Why does Tenchi like Sakuya? She is the same as Ryoko
> and Ayeka in the "he's mine, we are destined to be together" way, and it makes me angry,
> because it seems to me that if Tenchi would give the same amount of time with Ryoko or
> Ayeka away from the other girls, he would be just as happy as he is with Sakuya. Yet this
> seems not to be the case, even after the date ep with Ryoko. It's slightly frustrating,
> because even in their mangled, hacked-up forms, I still like Ayeka and Ryoko better than
> Sakuya. The only thing good for Ayeka so far is that she seems to be a little more open
> and a bit less protective than her UNIVERSE self. Ryoko, IMO, is totally getting the
> shaft. I would like to speak to the series constructor and ask him why he choose this
> show's format the way he did.

I haven't seen any of Shin (was over at my parents' place the other day, where I might have
been able to catch an episode, but my little sister pretended to watch Fresh Prince while I
was in the room, and went channel surfing when she thought my back was turned...), so I'm
probably not the best person to be spouting opinions about it, but I would guess that the
logic behind Shin went something like this.

1.)  Whoever was responsible for this show decided that they needed to do something different
with Tenchi.
2.)  Those same individuals decided that Tenchi should have a new "serious" love interest
(i.e. in the Ryoko/Aeka category of interest).
3.)  Those individuals decided that in order for people to take this interest seriously,
Tenchi would actually have to "pick" her as his primary love interest, ironically something
that neither Ryoko or Aeka has ever managed to pull off (I don't care what people think, I'm
still not seeing it in the end of TU).
4.)  Then, because this is something completely different, they had to redo everyones'
backgrounds, and since Ryo-ohki is more often identified with Sasami anyway, they apparently
went ahead and made the transfer of ownership official.

I'd add a couple more lines, but I've read the plot summaries for the a good number of the
later episodes (including the last few), and I wouldn't want to spoil the rest of the show
for anyone who's planning on seeing the entire thing for the first time during the current
run.

On the bright side, Ryoko apparently finally gets an actual date with Tenchi (I'd kinda like
to see that... I don't think she's ever managed to get quiet time alone with Tenchi, unlike
Aeka), Kagato manages to miss this movie (some villians get all the breaks),  and violence
against cabbits is now approved under certain circustances (such as against the species
cabbitus lunacus).

And maybe, just maybe, all of this pain and suffering that many fans had to endure will
manage to convince AIC that instead of screwing around with completely new settings for their
characters (characters are always the most convincing when they're in the setting for which
they were created, for some odd reason...), they should continue the original Tenchi Muyo!:
Ryo-ohki series.  A nice two year TV series sounds good to me...  we don't see enough of
those these days.  Fifty-two episodes of OVA continuity, with the original people involved in
the creation of plot-lines and stories that are more serious than most of what was seen in
both Tenchi TV shows.  65 episodes long, when the OVA episodes are cycled in.  With an
episode 64 that made you feel really, really down (but not as down as one of the female
leads), and an episode 65 that featured a marriage.  If they could pull that off, and have
the same quality of work that it originally had, wouldn't that be great?

I think so.

junior

"If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh?  If you poison us, do
we not die?  And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"
        --Shylock / The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare