In Akayama DanJay a giant anime space-robot rebuilt the universe to beat up another, bigger anime space-robot. But nothing ends so easily! Professor Akayama’s video-confession was just damage-control. Can she ever pay for her crimes? (Currently on perpetual hiatus.)
(Before sections are released, I’m writing notes to myself in the “commentary” column. To avoid spoilers, ignore everything to do with my commentary!)
| Chapter One | Commentary |
|---|---|
| The Other Way | Start Again |
| DanJay Blinks | Meaning in Fiction |
| Scream at the Sky | Outsider Art |
| Chapter Two | Commentary |
| ??? | (Professor Akayama tries to convince the world to skip a trial for the pilots of the Hurricane, but Daisuke and Charlie insist.) |
| ??? | (At the trial, the Hurricane pilots reveal Akayama’s deep involvement with the dystopian regimes which dominated the planet until the Hurricane’s construction and the unification of Earth.) |
| ??? | (Akayama herself is put on the stand. She does a very, very bad job of making herself look any better. She makes the case that her involvement in Earth’s reconstruction should absolve her, in the same way Lucille can’t be blamed for the untold suffering she caused the Hurricane. This buys her time.) |
| ??? | (Hearing herself mentioned, Lucille dives back into her trauma-delusion. She tries to save her crew, trapped in tooth-balls, but cannot. She is pursued by Anihilato.) |
| Chapter Three | Commentary |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | (In the ‘real world,’ Lucille goes on a Dantean journey because of her delusion, where she finds a victim of Akayama’s human experimentation. The whole world turns on Akayama more than it already had. This might last several chapters, overlapping with the events described in the next chapter.) |
| ??? | (The Dantean journey starts in Japan, goes to North America via Alaska, to Antarctica by Cape Horn.) |
| Chapter Four | Commentary |
| ??? | (In prison, Daisuke and Charlie talk about first meeting Akayama. Akayama entertains herself in solitary confinement with a machine which simulates DanJay.) |
| ??? | (In the simulations, DanJay wrote the book Akayama DanJay. Akayama puts him on a convention-panel talking about the book so she can come to terms with what she’s done.) |
| ??? | (To get more information out of DanJay, Akayama alters the simulation by hand, but it doesn’t work. So she makes the simulation an adversarial-network, forcing DanJay to butt heads with himself. To simplify things, DanJay writes a short-story, Sattva, which he claims condenses the themes of Akayama DanJay to a few pages.) |
| ??? | (Butting heads becomes excruciating for everyone involved until DanJay realizes he’s a simulation interacting with itself—which is true for all sentient beings in a pretentious cosmic sense, but especially true for DanJay in a literal sense. This satisfies Akayama.) |
| Chapter Five | Commentary |
| ??? | (In the trauma-delusion, Lucille tries to save her crew from the teeth, but meets blind Faith instead. Faith describes how she got here while they walk tooth-ball to tooth-ball.) |
| ??? | (Faith had recently met Anihilato, who tricked her with a dangling lure like a deep-sea fish. She describes how Anihilato mistreated her and how she escaped.) |
| ??? | (The enemy Hurricane tells Lucille it’s ready to infiltrate the universe in which she won, to torment the humans she rebuilt. It reminds her of the eternal pain she inflicted in victory.) |
| Chapter Six | Commentary |
| ??? | (In the ‘real’ universe, all the enemy Hurricane’s particulates have long since self-terminated except one, which is met by an unnamed entity, implied to be that enemy Hurricane in the trauma-delusion.) |
| ??? | (Lucille tells Akayama about her trauma-delusion. Akayama tells her how great the original Hurricane was supposed to be—how it could use thoughts to affect reality.) |
| ??? | (Charlie and Daisuke reflect on the close verdict to execute Akayama. The White Hurricane arrives with the mass of a billion universes.) |
| ??? | (The White Hurricane introduces itself as the Hurricane as Akayama had originally intended it. It has already collected countless universes in what it calls its “heavenly flesh.” Lucille is half-relieved, half-disappointed that this doesn’t validate her trauma-delusion.) |
| Chapter Seven | Commentary |
| ??? | (The world is terrified, imagining what heavenly flesh looks like from the perspective of the merciless Professor Akayama—but some people are actually totally into it and want to join the White Hurricane.) |
| ??? | (Daisuke and Charlie mock-execute Akayama, making her the bird-thing again. They explain she’ll die as soon as she’s not nigh-omnipotent anymore.) |
| ??? | (While Lucille and Akayama remake the Galaxy Zephyr, they argue about who’s in the heart and who’s in the head. Lucille demotes Akayama to the guts, to operate the Wheel and generate mass. Lucille gives the heart to the victim she met on her Dantaen journey. The people of Earth aren’t merged into the Hurricane Armor, but their brainwaves still contribute just as they did in Akayama DanJay.) |
| ??? | (The White Hurricane offers to absorb them into its heavenly flesh. Lucille declines. The White Hurricane accepts this, and the Galaxy Zephyr turns to leave. Then the White Hurricane is confused. It thought the rejection was a test, and thought accepting the rejection would convince the Galaxy Zephyr to join. Lucille explains thinking that way shows they failed the real test. The White Hurricane is enraged.) |
| Chapter Eight | Commentary |
| ??? | (Lucille reaches into the Galaxy Zephyr’s heart.) |
| ??? | (In her trauma-delusion, Lucille and Faith trick Anihilato.) |
| ??? | (Then they trick the enemy hurricane.) |
| ??? | (Lucille rips a chilling tooth-sword out of the Galaxy Zephyr’s heart.) |
| Chapter Nine | Commentary |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | (Is it enough? The two giant space-robots fight! Although Lucille’s tooth-sword is the cruelest thing imaginable, it should be thematically clear that her side represents acceptance of the existence of suffering while the White Hurricane represents the naive view that suffering can and must be eliminated, which creates more suffering.) |
| ??? | (The ‘real’ future-anime world has cultural conflicts as a vocal minority demand to join the White Hurricane. As a result, the brain-waves powering the Galaxy Zephyr are weakening.) |
| ??? | (During the fight, the White Hurricane mentions the enemy Hurricane particulate and reveals that it, too, rejected salvation, so the White Hurricane put it out of its misery. Lucille, insulted by this rejection of the existence of suffering, initiates another meta-isekai to empower her tooth-sword.) |
| Chapter Ten | Commentary |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | (This meta-isekai should somehow involve the Lucille, blind Faith, Anihilato, and Enemy Hurricane from the trauma-delusion-tooth-sword, and the ‘real’ anime-future earth. Akayama’s hyper-trained DanJay is involved, too, so Akayama can demonstrate that she really has been redeemed. This meta-isekai should last several chapters and interact with the fight against the White Hurricane.) |
| ??? | (Isekai ideas: More high-school slice-of-life. Debate club. Too insufferable? DanJay’s story, Sattva. Quarantine protests. Overall theme: how to deal with people who claim they want to stop suffering while only contributing to it.) |
| ??? | !!! |
| Chapter Eleven | Commentary |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | (When the White Hurricane sees the power Lucille’s tooth-sword obtains through Akayama’s redemption and the acceptance of suffering, it agrees that Akayama’s original vision for the Hurricane could improve based on Akayama’s current vision. They agree to lay everything on the line in a tournament-arc of one-on-one interactions between ordinary humanoid representatives with no memory of the giant space-robots they represent. The White Hurricane’s representatives should initially parallel Lucille’s Dantaen journey through Akayama’s dystopias.) |
| ??? | (But the White Hurricane tricks them in the final round: it forces them to send blind Faith instead of DanJay, perceiving Faith to be the defenseless source of the Zephyr’s power, and its humanoid representative is the entire White Hurricane without its memory wiped. But while Danjay represents the connection between the divine and the mundane, Faith herself is ungraspable, and she rebukes the White Hurricane’s over-protectiveness.) |
| ??? | !!! |
| Chapter Twelve | Commentary |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | (Having screwed itself over through ignorance and hubris, the White Hurricane implodes and its collected universes return to normal. But, Lucille shows the imploding White Hurricane the enemy Hurricane particulate which never self-terminated, which was reproduced during the meta-isekai. It pleads to return to eternal torment, because it hit a groove and found meaning in the emptiness.) |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | !!! |
| Chapter Thirteen | Commentary |
| ??? | !!! |
| ??? | (In the end, Lucille, Akayama, and her forgiving victim walk along the beach. Akayama doesn’t have much time to live, as the bird-thing is crumbling. In their last moments together, they have a delightfully pretentious conversation about God or something, and the waves wash Akayama away.) |
Ted Writes 