Rowan - Thanks a lot! Â Â Haruhi Suzumiya is my favorite character from her own anime, and Katsuhiko Jinnai is my favorite El Hazard character... so the scenes with both of them in it will probably be my best work. Â It's certainly the scenes I enjoy writing the most.Here's an update!: http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=269068Just scroll down to where "Chapter 2 - The Alliance of Haruhi Suzumiya" begins.
All right! I checked out chapter two. The interactions between Jinnai and Haruhi continue to be quite hilarious. Two individuals with a remarkable talent for hearing only what they want to hear... pair them off, and watch them come to some amazing conclusions! I thought that Groucho's... attraction to Haruhi was a bit weird at first - but then again, given that Queen Diva is a rather sexy babe herself, it's certainly possible that Bugrom tastes in females may run in that direction.
The interactions with the Roshtaria crowd were a bit weaker, I'm afraid. I was a little confused as to why Kyon and Itsuki were asking about things like schools and sightseeing, as though they were visiting tourists. One would think that their priority would be to locate their missing members! Kyon would be especially worried about Mikuru, since he tends to regard her as a very fragile and delicate girl.
Speaking of Mikuru, Nanami's mentioning her experience as a waitress and how that fate might have befallen one of their companions seemed WAY too convenient. Given how randomly the group was scattered, it's quite a leap of deduction to guess that anyone else would have landed in the desert, let alone that they'd wind up working as a waitress. If you meant that as a plot hook to give our heroes someplace to start looking... well, I feel it could have been done better.
On the topic of sightseeing... You seemed to be a little overcautious in adding your own touches to the world of El-Hazard. It's strange to assume, for instance, that the Roshtarian Acadamy is the only school in El-Hazard! When Kyon asked about places of learning, Dr. Schtalubaugh should have been able to rattle off several, even if none are quite as majestic as the Academy. The Alliance is made of many allied nations, and surely they don't all send every student to Roshtaria to learn!It actually made me chuckle, too, when the Priestesses referred to their own Alma Mater as "that place where we priestesses go to train". If you don't have a name, make one up! El-Hazard is a huge and wonderful place, and the OAV only touched on a scant handful of the continent. Don't be afraid to make up your own places of interest, or to fill out details that the OAV left out. Go beyond just the people and places mentioned in the show!
It seems a little strange that the Roshtarian group hasn't asked about any strange powers that Kyon and Itsuki might have developed.
To date, every Earthling that's come to El-Hazard has recieved a special power of some kind. While it doesn't necessarily follow that the Haruhi group will also get powers (they came to El-Hazard in a different manner than Makoto's group, after all), the Roshtarians should certainly suspect that such powers could exist!
It was nice to see Fatora and Alielle introduced to the group. It was particularly interesting to see that Kyon seems to have taken a shine to her, in spite of her misandronistic ways (I guess Kyon is so used to being abused by domineering women that Fatora doesn't seem so bad in retrospect). I kind of hope to see this develop further - though it's kind of hard to imagine Fatora actually warming up to Kyon. I shudder to imagine what will happen once Fatora meets Mikuru... Poor Mikuru!As for the close of the chapter, in which the Shadow Tribemen get their hands on Yuki, whose data has been reconfigured to resemble a Demon God's... I'm cautiously optimistic. It's potentially an interesting twist, but there are many ways it could be poorly handled. Try not to have Yuki's new role too closely match Ifurita's!
All in all, another great chapter! Your primary weakness seems to be in handling the good guys, as I haven't really found any flaws with the sections dealing with the Bugrom or the Shadow Tribe. I don't know if it's because you have a better feel for the villians, or if those are the sections that you simply enjoy writing more (making the good guy sections a "necessary evil", in a way).
You also seem to be a bit timid in developing and expanding the world of El-Hazard, and stick too closely to the people and places referenced in the show. Once you shore up those deficiencies this will be a solid piece of fanfiction.
And Chapter 3 is complete! :http://forums.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?t=269068Just scroll down to where "Chapter 3 - The First Night of Haruhi Suzumiya" begins. Big thanks to Spanner for really inspiring me with the earlier constructive criticism. It gave me a lot of great ideas for the protagonist scenes!
I took a look at chapters four and five. I'm afraid this will likely be my last review for a while; I'm going on vacation starting next week, and won't have ready Internet access for much of that time.Anyway these chapters introduced another stroke of fanfiction brilliance: SOS MAN! Again, it's so perfectly Haruhi for her to insist on such a thing, and so perfectly Jinnai for him to be so taken aback by it. I was intensely amused to see how he eventually settled into the role, though, and look forward to more amazing exploits of SOS Man!Haruhi becoming Bugrom Queen was an interesting touch. (I presume that's the element that you meant when you said you had it planned all along, and it wasn't a "correction"?) It flowed very well, and it was an excellent explanation for Diva's composure at how enthusastic her Bugrom subjects were about Haruhi's transformation. Diva's revelation that there was more to the prophesy that she shared with Jinnai was an interesting touch. It's all too easy to believe that Diva would have kept the prophesy of the great setback from Jinnai when she saw how well he was doing.I chuckled when Diva held Haruhi back from adventuring with Jinnai due to her new duties as Bugrom Queen. It seems that her new job is not all fun and adventure, as she thought it would be! I wonder how long Haruhi's enthusiasm will hold out once she learns she has to deal with a lot of boring stuff, too.I'm also quite interested as to how seriously you're taking this Bugrom prophesy stuff. If it really is as accurate as you're making it out to be, does that mean that the Bugrom will eventually rise to glory? And if so, just what exactly will that mean for the Allied Nations?Anyway, back to the Roshtarians. Fatora seems to be getting along with Kyon about as well as a person with her personality possibly could. The dynamics between these two presents an interesting take on Fatora that I don't think anyone previously has even attempted. Heck, the very idea of her even forming friendships seems a bit beyond the pale. From what we've seen of Fatora, she seems to divide the world population into four categories: Big Sister, Alielle, sexual conquests, and slaves. Unlike most folks in the slave category, she doesn't seem quite as inclined to treat Kyon like dirt. Maybe his submissive personality appeals to her? Kyon's sort of nervously half-hearted enthusasm about her chumminess is perfect as well.I thought it was a little too convenient that Makoto correctly guessed so many things about Yuki just by a picture of her, but I suppose that's okay since Yuki's character design was pretty much created to emphasize those stereotypes - a cute, glasses-wearing geek girl to appeal to the sizable viewer demographic that goes for that kind of thing. It seems that Makoto himself is part of that demographic...Fatora's and Alielle's gushing over the sexy pictures of Mikuri and Haruhi was to be expected. It seems a bit strange that Itsuki would choose such... provacative pictures to show to the group when he could have just showed them the normal pictures and left it at that. Then again, he's kind of a strange guy. It's probably best for the sake of Kyon's composure that there was no need for Itsuki to show of his undoubtedly large and embarrassing Kyon picture collection. Something that I didn't really notice until the Bugrom's attack on the three priestesses was that you avoided a very common difficulty in fanfiction (and, indeed, even in the canon): you avoided bringing the whole friggin' cast along on the adventure! This is quite commendable, as a large cast is awkward and usually the reasons for them all tagging along are contrived or nonexistant. A group of seven is much more managable, and you were able to pay proper respect for the left-out cast through cameos like this one. Kudos!And now, the Shadow Tribe. Unlike the Roshtarians' somewhat-hard-to-swallow powers of perception, the conclusions they drew about Haruhi were presented pretty logically. The reemergence of Galus as Mecha-Galus was a bit comic-booky, I'll admit, but this entire fanfiction is written in a distinctly comic-booky manner, with significant nouns and verbs italicized for no apparent reason. So it is, perhaps, forgivable.I was a bit curious about Yuki's "powers of invisibility". Are those the powers she gained as a human travelling to El-Hazard? Does this mean that Yuki's human body qualified to grant her the power, even though her data reconfigured itself to demon god afterwards? Or are these invisibility powers something the Shadow Tribe gave her when the scientists were tinkering with her?Yuki's amnesia is a good angle to take with her. Normally, she's a bit of a tough character to write since her reality-altering powers and her link to the Integrated Data Entity gives her so very much deus-ex-machina potential. With her knowledge of herself and others so limited, it gives a lot of leeway in granting her some interesting character development.Lastly, it seems that you have something in the works with Mikuru and the impending visit of the Duroslandian noble. I'm curious to see how that plays out!As you can see, I had very little to actually complain about this time - your writing is definitely shaping up! I leave you now with a typo to fix: "ring Kyon's neck" in Chapter 4 should be "wring Kyon's neck".