It's been growing increasingly obvious over the past... oh, well, couple of years, if I'm being honest... and it's finally time to admit it officially.

Future Imperfect: A Day of Infamy was released way too soon. Ever since then, as we've worked to fill in the time leading up to it, it's been getting more and more unwieldy and difficult to work around. There are an increasing number of factors in the status quo at the beginning of the story that are getting in the way of developments in bits occurring before it. Just to name one example, it's a near-certainty that the captain of the starship Valiant will not be living on Tomodachi in the spring of 2412.

This leaves me with three choices.

1) Preempt the pending developments responsible for the discontinuities. This would be ugly, awkward, time-wasting, and very annoying to me - and that's in the best case. In the worst case, it'd screw up the process to the point where the balked plots simply won't come out any other way.

2) Let those developments go forward, then come up with individual handwavey excuses for each and every situation to just coincidentally resemble the old status quo when ADoI opens. This would be... well, stupid, really, especially given how many different things I'd have to do it for at this point. Also, though it might just be workable as regards Utena being on Tomodachi, there are other pending developments that simply couldn't be reversed in this manner anyway.

Okay, I suppose technically there's also 2a) Some combination of 1 and 2. This would combine the disadvantages of both and also roughly double the workload. Just... no.

3) Rescind A Day of Infamy, take it back into the shop, wait for the timeline to catch up with it, retool it so that it fits back into its spot in history, and re-release it. This would be a lot of work. It'd also be a bit, uh... Lucasian of me. I expect it would tick some people off, too.

On the other hand, I've done something like it once before without the world ending, and quite frankly, Cybertron Dreams didn't need renovating half as much as ADoI is going to by the time Symphony No. 5 is over with.

(Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.)

So that's what I'm going to do.

To make matters worse (for you guys, anyway), I have no timeframe for this. Things seem to be happening much more slowly now than they did a few years ago, so I can't even make a credible guess as to when S5 will reach its climax, let alone how much longer after that it'll be before I get my ducks in a row for a full revision of ADoI.

Ah, well. Can't make an omelet...

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.