On May 31,  1:57pm, Derek (Lanzer) Liu wrote:
> Subject: Re: El-Hazard Conclusion
> At 10:31 AM 5/31/96 -0700, deckerd@agcs.com wrote:
>
> >You may recall that I had a Theory about how the OAV series
> >would end. I was convinced that Makoto would turn out to
> >resemble Princess Fatora because he _is_ Princess Fatora.
> >That is, she would have been changed into a boy and sent
> >to Earth with a wiped memory to better hide her from her
> >enemies.
>
>     Hmm, they've told the audience that the real princess
> was captured in episode 4 and 5 already, so that wasn't really
> a possible situation.

I realized early on that some game would have to be played with
time for my theory to work. After all, Makoto has a history of
life on Earth going back at least a couple of years, and Princess
Fatora had only recently disappeared. However, Ifurita having
been in the high school basement for 10,000 years and still
knowing Makoto suggested to me that time slips were not ruled out.
Having now seen Princess Fatora on stage and getting a taste of
her personality...I'd suggest changing her into a boy and sending
her to Earth just to learn humility! I certainly wasn't expecting
her to turn out to be such an unlikable sort.
>
> >On the other hand, at least my guess-planation would account
> >for why Makoto resembles Fatora so much in the first place.
> >As it stands, it was just an Amazing Coincidence.
>
>     Well, why think it won't be a coincidence otherwise?  What
> happened seemed pretty typical to me.  Either a prince/princess
> stumbled upon a strange place and found someone resembling him
> or herself, or this main character traveled somewhere and people
> treated the character like god until he founds that he resembles
> someone important.  I'm pretty sure I've seen that plot for quite
> a number of times. :)

Well, as I pointed out in my Animerica review, the original plot
is that of Prisoner of Zenda, which dates back to 1894 and inspired
a rash of imitators. In Zenda, the king of the mythical country
of Ruritania and the Englishman who resembled him were related,
being the result of hanky-panky by their common ancestors a few
generations back. Edgar Rice Burroughs (creator of Tarzan) wrote
a pretty flagrant imitation of The Prisoner of Zenda called The
Mad King about 1914, and again, in his version the king and the
royal impersonator resembled each other because they were closely
related. The plot has gone through numerous iterations since then
(as in a Mickey Mouse newspaper strip serial in the '30s), and
may have become so familiar that later authors didn't even bother
trying to justify the resemblance because the audience could be
assumed to recognize the storyline at once without elaborate
justifications and framing devices. In the case of El-Hazard, the
creators freely acknowledged Prisoner of Zenda and Burroughs as
sources (see the liner notes for the first episode), but they don't
bother to explain why Makoto resembles Fatora so much. Instead,
the story is based on a loop in time, with Makoto's resemblance
to Fatora being apparently an accident and relatively unimportant
in the long run.

> >while still concluding the first series enough to allow it
> >to stand alone in case no sequel is ever made. Still...of
> >the several women in the cast with an interest in Makoto...
> >I was astonished to see the choice that was finally made.
> >Not the one I'd pick!
>
Uh oh! Spoiler ahead! Watch out!

>     Yeah, that was pretty surprising at the end, but I like that
> since Nanami & Shala^2 weren't anything close as an ideal babe.
> (Not keeping in mind that Elfurita can destroy a city in two seconds
:)
After I wrote my comment, I went back and watched the last episode
again. It sorta penetrated my thick cranium that Makoto is an easy-
going, soft-spoken, thoughtful, sympathetic, senstive kind of guy,
while Nanami and Shayla-Shayla are loud, pushy, brassy, impulsive.
Neither would be a good match for him, unless he wanted to be led
around by the nose for the rest of his life. On the other hand,
the newly humanized Ifurita needs him, and apparently the project
of reforming a killer android with the power of several nuclear
bombs appeals to him. (I even seem to detect an echo of Blue
Sonnet here. The way to soften a killer female android/cyborg is
to give her some experience at a Japanese high school. Share a
bento box, make a friend!) Still, even though Ifurita was under
outside control and not responsible for her actions when she
blew up whole cities and killed thousands of people, I just
wonder how the good citizens of El-Hazard would react to her
living in their midst even though supposedly reformed?

I also wonder how the El-Hazard TV show differs in this regard? I've
read that Princess Fatora doesn't exist in that continuity (so
maybe somebody decided the royal impersonation plot was a dead
end) and Rune Venus is younger (suggesting to me that maybe she
would be the romantic interest here), but otherwise I don't know
much about it.

--Dwight Decker