It's not really a question of needing to add some retroactive new plotlines (that would just make everything even messier) as get rid of some old ones. Most notably, and the one that's been giving me the actual headache: Way the hell back in 2003, there were people who got so annoyed with the way Symphony No. 4's coda (Vortigern's Lake 2) played out that they /ragequit the Symphony readership. Really. That happened. (Go look at the discussion thread for the annotations to Knights III - it all kicked off in there for whatever reason.)

At the time I thought they were full of noise, and I still think the most vocal of them were kind of being bitchy shits about it, but lately I am starting to suspect, pretty much in spite of myself, that they might also have been right. I didn't think so at the time - I haven't spent the last 11 years deliberately chasing a mirage, and at the time I was hugely relieved that (so I thought) the characters had figured out how to get out of the hole the source plot dug for them, but now... I dunno. I haven't come to a conclusion yet, but just the fact that I'm having to seriously think about it troubles me, because, like I said, that's how TIA happened.

>And possibly pull
>the Diqiu stuff out of line and make it its own subsection? It's very
>good material, but it doesn't really seem to directly be part of
>Symphony 5. Either way, even if you don't "fix" anything, it's still
>damn good writing.

The Dìqiú Suite is not in itself a problem, and the reason it doesn't feel much like it's part of Symphony 5 yet is because it hasn't reached the end; but it would be pretty dramatically orphaned by the deletion of Utena and Corwin getting married, obviously, so whatever of it survived probably would end up being its own separate parallel thing. (It'd be what Corwin did with himself after bailing out of the Symphony cast because it was too painful to stay there, most likely. Decamp to a pocket world where he Knows People and try to reinvent himself as someone who isn't in love with somebody else's husband.)

It's like - you ever build a really complicated LEGO kit, and you get to a point where every time you stick on a piece, the pressure you have to apply to do it makes another one you already placed come off? It's like that.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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