Whoops!  the first posting of this document had no line breaks, and was 
therefore unreadable by most web browsers.  I normally prefer working in 
plaintext, and simply forgot to convert before sending it in.  It won't 
happen again!  -KMS
*****
What is this?  This is a rambling, long-form attempt to express and work 
through some of the thoughts I've been having about Ultra, where it's 
been, where it's going, and why I fundamentally disagree with certain 
directions Ultra has been headed in through the second and third season.  
Because of its length and level of analysis, I decided to submit it as 
an omake rather than simply posting it to the message board.  

When I first informed Twoflower of what I was writing and what I hoped 
to do with it, he said he would agree to post it as long as I put a 
disclaimer of the following sort on it:



*!*!*!*!*!*
This document is _not_ an official statement of Ultra policy.  It is 
only a declaration of its author's opinions and ideas.  By posting this 
as an "informational omake", Twoflower does not indicate his editorial 
approval (or disapproval) of anything contained herein.
*!*!*!*!*!*



Magical Troubleshooting Crossover Fighting Federation ULTRA:
A Long, Mildly Contrarian Analysis
by Kerry "Ked" Stump  (kerryms@yahoo.com)


Table of Contents:

  A disclaimer.
  Just what _is_ Ultra, anyway?
  What makes a Ultra episode good.
  What makes a Ultra episode bad.
  A detailed analysis of division size.
  Pro wrestling ("classical sports entertainment") vs. Ultra - is it 
really a worthwhile paradigm?  [Who needs those steenkin' heels?]
  So where do we go from here?


  A disclaimer.

I'm writing this from two perspectives:  1) I'm a dedicated Ultra fan 
who loves the series, and wants it last and prosper.  2) I'm a 
prospective Ultra author - I recently sent my season 4 queue 
application, and I plan on applying at every future opportunity.  As 
such, I'd like the series to still be "writable" whenever my number 
comes up - and this document is a relatively blatant attempt to 
influence the series towards my vision of that state.

Throughout this document, I'm going to be saying what I think.  That 
shouldn't be too offensive, not most of the time, anyway, but I can 
think of a few toes that I'll have stepped on before the end.  
Therefore, I'll accept the flames as they come, and apologize (and suck 
up) here in advance:  I understand how hard it can be to write 
creatively, especially under the sort of deadlines that Impro uses.  
Anyone who can produce a readable and marginally funny episode gets a 
big chunk of respect from me.


  Just what _is_ Ultra, anyway?

What is Ultra?  Ultra is _different_.  

Ultra is not classical fanfiction.  No single author or group controls 
this series, though one man has a defining influence upon it.  It is not 
a "limited series".  It is not a serial in the normal sense.  It is not 
truly episodic.  It does not have a direction or an outline.  Ultra is 
not properly a crossover nor an "original" fanfiction, and I don't think 
it really shares much with other Impros beyond the production mechanics.  
And it is most definitely not professional wrestling.

Ultra is probably best defined as a cross-rip, that bizarre style that 
grabs whatever elements it wants from any number of fictional worlds, 
and pastes them together in a wholly unique new universe.  Given the 
volume of the material, the multi-author flavoring, the "rules" of the 
game, and the broad yet intermittent editorial direction from Twoflower, 
the closest analogy in classical anime fandom is Undocumented Features.

UF, of course, is most widely remembered for egregious author insertion.  
Self-insertion is a non-starter in Ultra - anyone trying such a thing 
would be flamed into crispy oblivion.  But!  The other thing that UF was 
really about was _fun_.  Self-referential, cross-ripped, multi-author 
_fun_.  And can anyone disagree with me that Ultra, beyond any other 
reason, rationale, or goal, is about having fun with the setting?  Keep 
this analogy in mind - I'm going to do more with it later.

Ultra belongs at least a different genus than the other Impros, and 
maybe is even further away than that.  While the mechanics of getting in 
the queue and posting may be the same, the similarities stop right 
there.  Ultra, unlike any other Impro, is not about writing a story, it 
is about treading textual water while generating standardized 
amusing/awesome situations.  

Most Improfanfic productions do have periods where they maintain a 
holding pattern, but this is only until a good/brave enough author gets 
his turn and starts the series plot in motion again.  An Impro that does 
not develop adequate direction and does not attract an author that can 
give it some will stagnate, either literally or in terms of readership.

Ultra, on the other hand, is intended to remain stagnant.  Any given 
episode may move an individual subplot towards completion, but the 
series itself can not be moved in any real direction.  Next week, no 
matter what, the fights have to continue, H&D need to show up, and It 
Will Be Funny.  Period.  I imagine that there may be ways to advance 
some sort of metastory, but to date only the change-of-God plot line can 
be counted as that sort of thing.  And that plot line hasn't made for 
any _real_ change in the series - only the jokes are different in the 
third season, not the story.

The only way I can think of to give Ultra a real series-level plot is to 
turn it into a deadly serious setting where the GvE confrontations have 
dire metaphysical consequences rather than silly/superficial effects.  
This could be an interesting direction to head in for the 
(unfortunately) eventual last season of Ultra...  but until then, I 
think the current paradigm is working.

Finally, Ultra is Twoflower's baby.  It's the obvious descendant of his 
Beta tournament, though with a number of style and retcon changes to 
make it more stable and interesting within the Impro environment.  
(Personally, I would have preferred 2f to just write/run a Gamma 
tourney, but I guess the volume of Ultra makes up for the reduced 
(average) quality.)  Twoflower wrote the rules of this game, defined its 
boundaries, and gives it a good hard nudge every ten or so episodes.  
And, for the most part, whatever direction he seems to be nudging the 
subplots in tends to be followed.

But Twoflower has apparently decided not to exercise real editorial 
control over the series.  I can think of multiple points that he could 
have simply told an author, "Let's not go there."  This is most apparent 
in the continual influx of poorly considered new fighters.  Characters 
that don't really fight, can't match the tone of the series, or (as 
tends to happen most often) are too obscure for 3 out of 4 authors to do 
anything with.  (I still don't really know anything about Bart and 
Rico.)  While the rules 2f has created don't explicitly state that he 
can make this sort of intervention, there are plenty of loopholes and 
broadly worded directives that he could interpret creatively if he 
decided he needed an excuse.  And let's be honest - only a real asshole 
would refuse to make changes that Twoflower wanted, even if there wasn't 
a specific rule on the books that dictated such a change.

The sort of control that Twoflower has exerted comes mostly through 
example, message board musings, and rules updates.  And I can only think 
of three important interventions he has made:  1. Getting introductions 
relatively (though not entirely) under control.   2. Nudging the 
universe more towards the pro-wrestling paradigm.  3. The change-of-
deity thing.

So, what we have in Ultra is a truly unique entity.  It does not 
correspond to other Impros, traditional fanfic, or much of anything else 
that I have encountered before.  There is centralized control, but that 
control is remarkably non-interventionist.  And because Ultra is so 
different, I believe we, the community that both reads and writes it, 
need to think about how those differences can be dealt with and/or 
exploited.


  What makes a good Ultra ep.

So how does Ultra's uniqueness apply to how one writes an episode?  Not 
an easy question, but one that I have pondered extensively when thinking 
about the sort of episode I want to write.

Let me expand on a point I was trying to make earlier.  Ultra is neither 
purely a serial nor an episodic production.  Just so we all understand 
what I mean, I'll define these two terms:

A serial is an ongoing storyline that is broken up into easily 
digestible/marketable chunks.  Each segment takes place sequentially, 
and resolution typically does not happen at any level until the end of 
the series/season/story arc.  Dragonball Z is a great current example of 
this, though just about any multi-segment anime I can think of is serial 
in nature.  Most fanfiction longer than a single segment has a serial 
flavor to it - the sort of story most fanfic authors are trying to write 
could best be described as a novel, it's just posted one segment at a 
time.  And this is generally the case with Impros as well.

An episodic series is one that tells "one" story per segment.  In modern 
television/comics/fanfiction, this story is often a multithreaded 
pastiche rather than a single clear narrative, but all of the story 
threads come to some sort of resolution within the segment.  The segment 
is not really attached to a specific point in time, and knowledge of 
previous segments is not at all necessary for complete comprehension of 
the current segment.  Anime tends to stay away from this format, though 
many OVA's are essentially episodes that are wholly detached from the 
serial that spawns them.  A lot of the later Ranma video product was 
episodic in nature (I think).  The episodic style is most deeply 
ingrained within the American TV culture.  Every US sitcom is episodic.  
Most US cartoons are episodic.  American drama is moving away from this 
pole, but only a very few shows have truly forsaken the episodic ideal.

Of course, many things fall in between these extremes.  Sailor Moon was, 
at heart, a serial - but the monster-of-the-day segments were very 
episodic in nature.  Bubblegum Crisis (2032/33) segments were definitely 
serial when viewed  in sequence, but all the pieces easily work in the 
episodic sense as well.  Drawing on US TV, The X-Files does both serial 
and episodic segments.  It doesn't matter what order you view the 
episodic shows... but you'll never fully understand the serial ones 
unless you've been watching faithfully since the very beginning.

So where does Ultra fit in?  As I said before, it belongs somewhere in 
the middle, and this must be kept in mind while one is plotting out an 
episode.  (I refer to segments of Ultra as "episodes" because this is 
the common usage, not because they are more episodic than serial.  Sorry 
about the confusing language.)

Ultra is quite serial in certain ways:  the events of previous episodes 
define and determine what can happen in the current one.  This is 
particularly true when one looks at the "offstage" storylines.  For 
example, the third-season story arc involving Lina, Naga, Darshu (yet 
another obscure character - or at least I've never seen the series(?) he 
comes from on sale in a store), and the search for the Dragonballs.  
This makes little sense to someone just starting to read Ultra at 
episode 25 or so - you need to read the full serial to really get what's 
going on.  On a higher level of consideration, the very nature of what 
can happen in a given episode evolves and changes as the serial 
continues.  Since the beginning, injuries, retirements, Hardcore, 
change-of-deity, and many other possible modifiers have been added to 
the system.  The very act of writing an episode becomes a segment of the 
meta-serial.

On the other hand, Ultra is defined in such a way that every episode 
_must_ contain episodic elements.  A reader who has never even heard of 
Ultra before ought to be able to pick out any episode at all, and, 
providing that he or she knows something about the characters involved 
(which should be the case - this is _anime_ fanfiction - more on that 
point later), enjoy the fights.  The whole setup is episodic - the 
reader is "watching" a television show that does pretty much the same 
thing every week.  Sure, fighters may come and go, have high points and 
low, make alliances and whatnot, but they're still doing the same 
_thing_ - and nothing I can foresee will change that - and that makes it 
episodic.

Earlier, I used the "treading water" metaphor to describe how Ultra 
episodes ideally should work.  The essence of swimming in place is the 
ability to generate thrust through vigorous motion, but controlling that 
thrust so one's center of mass never actually moves.  This requires a 
basically cyclical style of motion - your legs go back and forth, your 
arms trace the same curves through the water, and everything is kept in 
balance.

In terms of writing an Ultra episode, the motion equates to the subplot 
movement.  The direction and movement in the subplots must be obvious 
and noteworthy - simply touching base with a character or a group 
without moving their story forward is like suddenly holding one limb 
still while the others continue to tread water - a situation in which 
one may still be able to keep one's balance in the water, but it 
requires the other limbs to work harder.  And the subplot motion must be 
cyclical.  This does not mean that a storyline should be repeated, it 
simply means that there must always be about the same amount of 
movement.  Subplots should finish, and then be immediately replaced.  
New subplots should not be indiscriminately added - this is like 
treading water faster; a good thing if you want to show off by raising 
yourself further out of the water, but ultimately a bad thing when the 
next author comes along and has to shoulder the weight of all those new 
storylines.  In other words, t
here should be an equilibrium number of ongoing subplots, and every 
author has the duty of advancing all those plots while maintaining the 
equilibrium.

Now this is a totally wild-ass guess, but I would say that the ideal 
number of storylines for Ultra to carry at any one moment is around 
four, or maybe just a little higher.  Four is a lot to fit in for an 
author who can only write a short episode of 40k or so, but not an 
impossible goal.  For the prolific writing geniuses (not me!) out there 
who insist on doing 100k+, four ongoing storylines may not stretch far 
enough.  For these people, I suggest that they write more additional 
_episodic_ style subplots:  a series of events or interactions that form 
a complete story within their episode, and that do not require the next 
half-dozen authors to follow up on it.  I probably should take the time 
to list out the total number of major ongoing plotlines that are hanging 
right now, but I'm feeling lazy, and will leave that exercise up to 
enterprising readers.  I _think_ that the series has at least eight 
plotlines ongoing as of the end of season 3, and in any case several of 
them need to be
 resolved or shuffled off to the side.

For an excellent example of the sort of subplot equilibrium I'm 
promoting one need not look any further than NBC's ER series.  During 
any given episode, there are four or five ongoing character subplots 
that are moved forward, and in about every-other episode, a storyline 
gets resolved or a new one gets added.  These storylines are added to 
episodic plotlines describing what notable things happened in the er on 
the day(s) portrayed by the episode, notable things which may deal out 
lasting consequences, but do not strongly affect the series continuity.  
Of course, ER is written by a small team of writers who spend four hours 
each day coordinating their efforts, and Improfanfic will never be so 
seamlessly organized, but I think that we should model our goal on their 
example.

Once the author has determined what is going to happen in the episode 
and taken into account how it will affect the series' continuity, it's 
time to work out the details and actually write it.  At this point the 
author has probably outlined a competent episode - one that won't hurt 
the series, but one that won't impress too many readers.  This is the 
point at which the author can stop sweating (well, maybe not 
entirely...) the mechanics of writing and start dealing with the reason 
we're all here - having fun.

I read Ultra (and a lot of other fanfic) because it's _fun_.  It's 
_funny_, too, but a great episode doesn't really require more than one 
or two good yucks in it to round out the humor requirement.  Fun is what 
I get from watching characters I enjoy do things that are genuinely 
interesting.  "Interesting", to me, has a rather broad meaning:  it can 
mean tragedy ("The Bitter End"), it can mean inspired idiocy 
("Lemonade"), and it can mean high character drama (going a little 
further afield, "Secrets" by Ken Wolfe - the best SM I've read in years, 
though it's kind of hard to track down a complete copy).  Ultra, 
however, is a different brand of interesting.

A little personal history here:  I've been a follower of the anime 
fanfiction "scene" since 1994 - back when the only available "good" 
material consisted of some Dirty Pair, some really good Bubblegum 
Crisis, Biles's and Gagne's early Ranma product, and this oddball 
crossover thingy called "Undocumented Features".  Well.  I read through 
the DP, and the BGC (and thusly got addicted to Shawn Hagen's writing - 
has anyone heard anything from him in the last year?), and eventually 
hacked my way through the Ranma stuff.  And I had fun.  The UF, however, 
for some reason struck me as being too dense and cryptic to read, so I 
ignored it for three years.

I came back to UF in late '97 for a number of reasons - but mostly 
because a web reviewer I respect insisted that it was just the most fun 
thing to read.  And once I got over the unpleasant aspects of the UF 
style, I realized that I was indeed having truly sinful amounts of fun.  
And when I found Ultra this last spring, it wasn't too long before I 
realized that it was almost as much fun as UF, and fun in virtually the 
same way.

"Undocumented Features", for those of you who have not encountered it, 
is the story of a handful of oddball college students who, in typical 
author-insertion style, conquer the (heavily cross-ripped) universe and 
have great parties, great angst, great wars, great disasters, a 
sprinkling of great sex, and generally fantastic everything along the 
way.  I'm not kidding.  These guys never do anything small.  

Want to get away from dreary college life?  They nuke their campus and 
take off on a voyage to the stars.  Have an author avatar that just got 
stepped on while fighting a hundred-foot robot?  They bring in 
mechanics/surgeons who remodel the character into an immortal, super-
powered mechanoid.  Good thing, too, 'cuz the rest of the main 
characters are already tough enough to have a survivability factor 
roughly equal to a super-Saiyan's.  Want to resolve the central series 
conflict?  They provide the Death Star, Dyson sphere, Superdimensional 
Fortresses, multiple demigods, and Highlander-style death duel you've 
been waiting for.  With a little Star Trek on the side.  Need an 
adventure to top that one?  Easy!  They'll set up Ragnarok, and this 
time the good guys get to win!  One apocalypse not enough?  Okay... send 
the avatars' kids to Cybertron, where they kick interdimensional mecha-
god ass.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

Ultra, at its best, uses the same jaw dropping, can-you-top-this style 
as UF.  This is what I come to Ultra for.  We've gathered the most 
interesting fighters from the known anime multiverse, put them into an 
oddball fighting-league thingy, and let them go at each other.  If I'm 
not saying, "*WOW!*" at least once per episode, (twice or more, if it's 
a long episode,) then the author hasn't truly fulfilled his or her duty 
to the setting.

Not every fight needs to go to this sort of extreme - some of the 
characters' styles don't lend themselves too much more creative activity 
than beating on the other guy.  That's okay - an episode that goes full-
throttle from titles to author's note loses a lot of style points.  
Dynamic contrast is an author's friend.  Soft-LOUD-soft-LOUD is always 
popular - Nirvana sold a few million CD's with little more than that to 
distinguish them from their peers.  Or, for a little more of a 
challenge, the episode-long crescendo is a good technique.

It's not necessarily easy to come up with the sort of ideas and 
situations I'm talking about, particularly under a one-week deadline.  
That's why I strongly  recommend that every author start planning their 
episode at least three weeks ahead of the deadline.  I think it's quite 
reasonable to write out the fights and the episodic plots before one's 
"turn" comes up.  Some revisions will inevitably be required to fit it 
to the previous episodes as they are posted, but that will leave the 
author five or six days just to write the continuing story arc material.  
For me, that's plenty of time to write 25k or more, which should be 
enough to advance four or five subplots.

As I write this paragraph, I have no idea whether or not I'll get into 
the fourth season queue, but I already have a show-stopper of a scenario 
that I'll finish my episode with, unless someone does something too 
similar before my number comes up.  It's not written yet, but I've 
outlined all the way down to the multiple levels of humor.  And I'm 
thinking about the fight card, though I haven't settled on more than one 
or two specific ideas.

In the past, communicating with fellow authors was probably a little 
tricky. The recently announced Ultra authors' mailing list eliminates 
any excuse for not conspiring with them.  Every author should have prior 
knowledge of at least the two fight cards preceding theirs, and have a 
pretty good idea of where the subplots will stand when their week 
starts.

Okay, so you've planned out your episode.  You've made sure it doesn't 
mess with the equilibrium of the setting.  You've created a grand 
spectacle or two, and set up your fight card.  Now it's time to think 
about the small things, the details that fill out the Ultra world, but 
do not really define it.

It's a given, of course, that Hiroshi and Daisuke are going to show up.  
Everyone is going to have their own take on their personalities (or the 
standard Ultra charicature thereof), but on the whole H&D are going to 
almost write themselves.  This is a good thing that can quickly turn 
into a Bad Thing.  The Average Pair have been in _every_ Ultra episode, 
and their standard catchphrases, shticks, and interactions are starting 
to get a little tiresome.  I'm not suggesting they get booted out - I'm 
simply saying that they shouldn't get the same material all the time.  
If you need a little filler, put one of them into an odd or difficult 
situation.  It doesn't have to turn into a larger sub-plot (like the 
love-interest thing in the third season) - just make them sweat a little 
and shake them away from their usual routine.  Frankly, given the Jack-
as-God setup, I'm surprised that nobody has taken advantage of the 
opportunity to really _abuse_ H&D in the third season.

Speaking of the Almighty...  God ought to make an appearance in each 
segment.  It's easy to forget, but one of the basic foundational 
gimmicks of 
this setting is the fact that _God is responsible for this whole mess_.  
Ultra is part of God's plan for the universe, and for mysterious and 
bizarre reasons it is a very important part indeed.  Therefore, God 
should not just make a token appearance in a backstage/office scene, 
He/She/It ought to actually meddle with what's happening "on stage" in 
some way that shows off the power of the Godhead.  Oh, wait - Jack 
doesn't have full divine power.  Well, at least he should visibly (to 
the readers, not necessarily the audience) try to advance his agenda, 
whatever that is.  (Since I first wrote this, direct control of Ultra 
and possession of the godhead have been awarded to separate entities.  
The point is still valid for both positions, though.)

Finally, don't ignore the Ultradome!  Physical setting is important to 
any story, and the Ultradome, while not very well explored, certainly 
has a lot of  character.  As the home of several dozen extremely quirky 
fighters from many and varied backgrounds, a lot of truly wild and crazy 
architecture must have been included in order to accommodate everyone.  
The audience adds even more versatility to the environment - and why is 
it that nobody from the audience ever gets sucked into the action?  

In the case of Omega division fights, I believe we have seen a trend 
away from detailed and interesting settings through season three.  Don't 
simply put two Omega fighters on some generic deserted dirtball - put 
them on an interesting planet taken from fiction, anime, fanfiction, or 
even one of your own creations.  Let the natives run away in terror as 
god-like powers are casually tossed around, or if the locals are of 
particularly hardy stock, let them have at the fighters.


  What makes a bad Ultra episode, and how to avoid those problems.

Bad fanfiction is a fact of life.  For every good fanfic out there, 
there are several more that almost nobody can stand to read.  
Improfanfic, Ultra in particular, has been blessed with pretty good luck 
in this regard - there have been no totally unreadable Ultra episodes to 
date.  I'm aware of several other multi-author collaborations on the 
'net which have not been so fortunate.  Still, there have been more than 
a few episodes that were less than fun to read;  not because the author 
did not have any good traits, but because the author did not adequately 
deal with certain problems.

The first, last, and, according to one friend of mine, only rule of good 
writing is proper grammar.  Very little can turn off readers faster than 
painfully lousy grammar.  Unfortunately, unless you write for a living 
or you were one of those nerds who actually paid attention during fifth 
and sixth grade English, your grammar skills are probably not up to the 
task of writing a twenty-page fanfiction, at least not without a little 
bit of help and some extra effort.

The very first thing an author needs to do is to check for typing 
mistakes.  Use the spell-checker.  We all make typos... and the spell-
checker can catch a lot of them.  Unfortunately, the computer does not 
know every word, probably will not recognize whatever Japanese you use, 
and can not tell you if you used the _wrong_ word.  This means that you 
actually have to go back and proofread it yourself.  Besides simple 
spelling mistakes, keep an eye out for common homonym errors.  If I had 
a dollar for every time I've seen "lose" and "loose" confused in anime 
fanfiction, I would never need to work for a living.

While you are proofing for spelling mistakes, keep an eye out for 
grammar and word transposition mistakes.  A grammar checker can be of 
some help, though it is more likely to drive you nuts with little 
niggling comments about using passive voice.  (Passive voice is 
considered to be acceptable usage these days - unless you work for 
Microsoft, apparently - it simply is not desirable to use it 
continuously.)  The only real solution is to read, re-read, and re-re-
read what you have written.

The very act of proofreading can be difficult.  One must concentrate in 
order to do it well, particularly if the subject matter was written by 
the proofreader.  I find that I have the tendency to look at what I have 
written and remember what I meant while I was writing it rather than 
actually seeing the letters and words on the page and parsing them.  If 
you make yourself physically read the words you write, then you have 
succeeded with the second-hardest part of proofreading.

The hardest part of proofreading is actually knowing what is and is not 
proper grammar.  As I noted before, the majority of us really do not 
know the rules of English well enough to proof a document the size of an 
Ultra episode.  The solution is to find someone who is a grammar whiz 
and get him or her to proofread it.  Ideally, the author will trust his 
editor/proofreader enough to let them make whatever changes are needed, 
then send the document onto its destination without showing those 
changes to the author.  Not everyone is trusting enough to tolerate that 
sort of arrangement (I certainly have not found a proofreader I trust 
that far), but it is something to strive for.

An inevitable problem of collaborative serial fiction is that sooner or 
later (typically sooner) one author will write the plot, a character, or 
a subplot in a direction that the next author just plain hates.  When 
this happens, the following author is left with the temptation of 
somehow undoing the previous author's developments.  This can be done in 
about three different ways - an author can set up some elaborate 
circumstance that undoes the disliked development, an author can rewrite 
history and tell what "really" happened, or the author can just plain 
ignore what happened before.  The American comic scene has, due to the 
widespread abuse of these tactics by the hacks Marvel and DC employ, 
coined the term "retcon" (for "retroactive continuity [change]") as the 
name for this.

The most basic, fundamental rule of Improfanfic is that the current 
author has complete control over what happens in his or her episode.  If 
an author wishes to retcon, he has that right.  The right to do 
something, however, does not automatically make it the right thing to 
do.  Retconning in particular is something that ought to never ever 
_ever_ be done.

The ultimate goal of writing is creation:  Creation of narrative, 
creation of humor, creation of character, lots and lots of creation.  
Retconning is not creation - it is the deliberate destruction of another 
author's creation(s).  It shows disrespect for the process of creation, 
the value of creation, and the creator whose work is retconned out of 
meaningful existence.  Furthermore, it sets a precedent - by 
demonstrating that retconning is a feasible tactic, future authors are 
encouraged to employ it as well.

If a previous author does something that you do not like, my best advice 
is to just go with it.  Do not ignore the characters or situation that 
you think were mishandled.  On the other hand, you are not obligated to 
try to repair what you see as damage, particularly if you can not think 
of any means of repair other than a retcon.  Eventually another bright 
author with a little more time to think the problem over will fix it.  
If you are truly incensed, include some pithy comments about the 
situation in your author's note... and then just let it go.

There is one (mostly) theoretical exception to my general position 
against retconning.  It is possible that an author may do something that 
is so egregiously bad for the series that virtually everyone in the 
Improfanfic community (the message board, chat room(s), mailing lists) 
agrees that it should be excised from the continuity.  "Final Fantasy: 
Legends" recently had this happen - an author turned in an episode that 
was (reportedly) well written, but totally thrashed the established FFL 
universe during a period in which it was still just blossoming.  After 
some brief debate on the message board and appeals from some of the 
upcoming authors, the episode was retconned entirely out of existence.  
I believe that this should always be an option for the Impro 
community... but the threshold ought to be set at the highest reasonable 
level.  I do not believe that Ultra has ever approached that threshold - 
the Darth Vader debacle did not even begin to approach the point of 
justifying the ret
con that was applied to it.  Sure, Darth was an inappropriate choice - 
but he should have been left alone until the next PPV, then booted.

As the series grows longer, more subplots come into being, and more 
characters show up, remembering everything that has transpired becomes a 
serious problem for authors without eidetic memory.  Accidental retcons 
are not only a theoretical possibility, I am convinced that they are the 
explanation for a couple of the characterization snafus that cropped up 
during the third season.  There is no perfect plan for avoiding these, 
but there are a couple of things that every author ought to do that can 
help.  First of all, before writing anything at all, every author ought 
to read through the last two seasons worth of Ultra.  With one's memory 
of the past refreshed, one is less likely to make continuity errors or 
accidentally plagiarize previous authors' ideas.  The other tactic is to 
send a draft of the episode to an Ultra "expert" for review and advice.  
If the retcon is serious enough, he or she will probably spot it 
quickly.

One problem that comes up from time to time is episode length.  Ultra is 
a fanfiction representation of a weekly television show (and the events 
surrounding it), and so it ought to follow one of the basic rules of 
television scheduling:  Thou shalt not produce a show of unpredictable 
length.  This is not a precise rule - Ultra is sports (not sports 
entertainment) programming, so it obviously is not going to last 
precisely one hour or whatever its time allotment is.  On the other 
hand, it ought to be at least predictable in length - a boxing match 
lasts 4 (min/round) * X (rounds) + Y (minutes (of hype)), a basketball 
game lasts about two hours + overtime, [American] football lasts 3.5 
hours + overtime, et cetera.

With the differences in writing styles, a given length of time will not 
result in a specific length of text - I tend to be somewhat wordy (as 
you have surely noticed by now), while others do an excellent job with 
sparse, elegant language.  Also, given the thickly multithreaded nature 
of the off-stage subplots, the actual duration of time represented in an 
episode can be significantly longer than its "on-air" duration is.  
However, there is a sense in which textual length does directly, 
proportionally translate into duration:  the amount of time it takes a 
reader to read an episode.  When I sit to read an Ultra episode for the 
first time, I want to spend about 30-50 minutes reading it - more than 
that and it gets a little tiresome, less than that and it feels 
disappointingly short.

I think, and these numbers are _highly_ subjective, that Ultra episodes 
should be between 40kB and 100kB in length, with the ideal length being 
80kB or so.  You will notice that the majority of Ultra episodes have 
fallen into this range, but about 25% have missed on one side or the 
other.  I am not saying that these episodes are necessarily bad, just 
that they are not ideal.

Let's look at the low end of this range.  It is possible to write good 
Ultra material into an episode shorter than 40k, but surely something 
must be missing.  It might be that there are not enough fights in the 
episode, it might be that the fights are not adequately fleshed out, or 
it could be a lack of off-stage development.  In the most extreme cases, 
it can (sadly) be attributed to a lack of writing skill.

Since Twoflower can not do background checks on potential authors who 
have no track record at Improfanfic (and even if he could, I think that 
it would have a chilling effect on Improfanfic), the responsibility for 
determining whether an author should get in the queue devolves upon the 
author himself.  This is not something to be taken lightly - failure to 
produce an adequate episode can produce problems for the series and 
painful flaming and humiliation for the author.  Every author who signs 
up should have reason to believe that they can succeed at the task - I 
would recommend that every author know for certain that they can write 
at least 30kB of decent prose in a week before they commit to writing 
for any Impro.  Note that I do not think that previous experience 
writing fanfiction is needed... though it certainly is a plus.

The other extreme is a much different sort of issue.  Authors who can, 
with the relatively short lead times inherent to Improfanfic, produce an 
episode longer than 100kB are probably excellent writers with the skill 
to say all the things they want to.  These authors can be the solid 
backbone of Ultra - but excess episode length brings its own type of 
problems.

An episode may run long for reasons similar to those an episode may run 
short.  There may well be too much off-stage development - while the 
current author has the right to do whatever he wants with the subplots, 
there comes a point at which the author is trying to take over a 
storyline and force it in the direction he prefers.  Likewise, by 
putting too many fights in an episode the author begins to exert an 
unreasonable amount of influence over the future of the divisions.  The 
average episode (through #26) has only 4.4 fights... but there have been 
individual episodes with double that number or more.  (4.4 
fights/episode figured by counting total wins on the "Current Standings" 
page and dividing by the number of episodes.)  A few episodes have had 
three or four title fights - this should never happen on a weekly 
broadcast, only at the pay-per-views.  It is also possible, though 
highly unlikely, for fights to be too detailed.

Pay-per-view/season finale episodes should be the exception that defines 
the rule.  The first three PPV's have been in the 150kB range, and I 
assume that Twoflower has decided that this is the standard for such 
things.  Since these are supposed to be extra-long special episodes, 
they should be noticeably longer than the normal episodes.  Since 
Twoflower has shown us how much he is willing to write, it is up to the 
rest of us to stay well away from that limit.
 

  A (not so) detailed analysis of division size.

This entire document was originally intended to be a multi-page rant 
about how division sizes keep expanding and how this crisis could 
eventually be the death of Ultra.  As I thought some more about it, I 
discovered that it isn't quite the massive problem that I thought it 
was... but there is still some room for concern.  I'll try to keep my 
comments short and to the point.

Let's work the numbers on division size.  As I mentioned previously, 
Ultra has been averaging about 4.4 fights per episode. (Maybe a few 
percent higher than that, since no-decisions were not included in this 
calculation.)  Ultra seasons are about 10 episodes long, so a typical 
season will have about 44 fights.  Each typical fight has two 
fighters/teams, so double that number to 88 "slots".  (There are fights 
with more than two sides, but non-division (hardcore) fights more or 
less cancel that out.)  Let's call that 90 just to make the calculations 
simpler.

So we have 90 "slots" per season.  If each of the three divisions 
consisted of ten fighters/teams, the thirty contestants would average 3 
slots/season.  At the beginning of the fourth season, there are 14 
Gamma, 10 Lambda, and _16_ Omega, for a total for forty fighters/teams 
and an average of 2.3 slots/fighter-season.

2.3 slots/fighter-season is not, on the face of it, a bad-sounding 
number.  If every fighter fought once every four episodes (as this 
number would seem to indicate), it would keep all of them reasonably 
fresh and interesting.  Unfortunately, Ultra does not work that way.  
Popular/well-known fighters, fighters involved in storylines, and 
fighters who go for the Hardcore belt get a lot more fights, while 
fighters without anything going for them may only get one fight in a 
whole season.  Underused fighters become dead weight - they contribute 
nothing, until they get trotted out for a throwaway fight, and since 
good writers feel obligated to work with characters they feel are 
underused, they have a diluting effect on the series as a whole.

The other disadvantage of having so many characters is the burden it 
places on each writer - more characters means more ongoing minor 
subplots and rivalries, and more subplots means that either the author 
gives less time each one or simply ignores a bunch of them.  Either way, 
subplots end up hanging around much longer than they should, and the 
chance increases that someone will get confused and write one into a 
dead end.

I think that the goal should be 10 fighters/teams in each division.  
This number allows some flexibility - there is still room for a new 
fighter to _occasionally_ be added - while giving even the least-used 
fighters a chance to fight twice per season.

The problem, of course, is cutting all the excess fighters.  Twoflower 
has judiciously retired a just a couple after each season, but the 
league keeps on growing.  I believe this is a situation where Twoflower 
ought to exert more editorial control and just get it over with.  Maybe 
a mid-season special PPV could have a massive retirement tournament, or 
maybe whoever is God at the moment could smite the weak, pathetic 
losers, or... whatever.  Any way it is done will inevitably be 
traumatic, but this sort of painful surgery will help the series in the 
long run.


  Pro wrestling ("classical sports entertainment") vs. Ultra - is it 
really a worthwhile paradigm?  [Who needs all those steenkin' heels?]

This is likely to be the most controversial section in this essay.  It 
definitely is the most opinion-based section, and I know that many 
readers will flatly disagree with my assessment of this issue.  I can 
only ask that you at least take a moment to consider my ideas, and not 
just dismiss them automatically.

You will immediately notice that I do not hold "Sports Entertainment" in 
very high regard.  Since Ultra started, I have repeatedly tried to force 
myself to watch professional wrestling.  It just doesn't work, not for 
more than an hour, anyway.  I understand very well what makes these 
things so popular, and I like many other narratives that use the same 
sorts of tactics.  (Someday, I'll write an essay comparing and 
contrasting DBZ to pro wrestling, but that's not really relevant here.)  
But professional wrestling, in all its bluster and hype, deeply offends 
the ever-rational critic that forms the basis of my personality.  
However, my dislike for sports entertainment elements in Ultra does not 
derive from my dislike of sports entertainment in general.

Here's the gist of my argument:  I think that deliberately making Ultra 
_more and more_ like professional wrestling is not good for the long-
term health of the series.  Ultra is _anime_ fanfiction after all, not 
WWF fanfiction.  The pro wrestling environment is distinctly different 
than the Ultra setting, and the expectations for a WWF/WCW/[league of 
your choosing] character are markedly different than the expectations 
for an Improfanfic/anime fan fiction character.  This is not to say that 
Ultra does not [intentionally] resemble and should not take ideas from 
real "sports entertainment" sources - it simply should not be forced 
into the same mold by continually, mindlessly adding more wrestling 
"flavor".

Once again we need to return to the question of what Ultra really is.  
For the purposes of this discussion, the most relevant answer is that 
Ultra is the Improfanfic sequel to Twoflower's Beta tournament.  The 
Beta tournament episodes were more rigidly structured, but even the most 
casual reader will be able to find the roots of the Ultra "style" - 
crazy off-stage subplots, truly wild fight scenes, and a sense of 
underlying movement with metaphysical ramifications that never quite 
pans out in any significant way.

Ultra took the Beta concept and converted it to a format that was viable 
for Improfanfic.  The most fundamental change required was the mechanism 
to convert a closed tournament into an ongoing weekly event.  There was 
any number of possible ways to do this - one good model could have been 
the Street Fighter style "fighting circuit".  (Just imagine the sort of 
fun you could have with this!  Ultra in multithreaded quest mode/road 
trip...) Twoflower, probably because he apparently is a fan of the real 
thing, decided he wanted to model it after pro wrestling.  This paradigm 
allowed for the fighters to be concentrated in one spot, literally fit 
the weekly format of Improfanfic, and provided a bunch of ready-made 
ideas for wacky fights.  In other words, it was a Good Thing.

Through the first half of its first season, Ultra mostly stayed within 
the "Beta-pasted-into-ongoing-series" bounds.  Everything was played 
very, _very_ straight.  There were some pro wrestling references, but 
Ultra was mostly its own thing.  And then Twoflower posted his "Booker 
Training" omake.

I am not going to argue that "Booker Training" has destroyed Ultra.  In 
general terms, I think it was a very healthy nudge in many of the right 
directions.  However, "Booker Training" also was an indication by the 
series' creator that authors ought to write and treat Ultra as though it 
were a professional wrestling league.  This didn't really sink in right 
away, but by the middle of the third season the message board discussion 
of Ultra was dominated by wrestling-related plot ideas and analyses and 
multiple characters had been re-written to fit into the wrestling 
paradigm.  We have come so far in this direction, and yet I have heard 
no one ask, "Is this really where the series ought to go?"

My belief is that anime fanfiction and professional wrestling have 
several fundamental incompatibilities, the largest of which is their 
differing treatment of characters.  Professional wrestling characters, 
as stated many, many times elsewhere, break down into the "faces" and 
"heels" - characters that are cheered, and characters that are booed.  
Beyond this, each one has a recognizability stat, and a number of 
shticks.  The casual viewer has no real idea of where these people come 
from, and their life outside of wrestling is a non-issue.  Characters in 
anime fanfiction have that sort of extended background - we know what 
they do besides fight, we know what motivates them, and in Ultra we 
often get to see them out of the "wrestling" context.

Yes, there will have to be good guys and bad guys in Ultra... but I 
reject the face/heel concept out of hand.  Face/heel status in pro 
wrestling is something that is achieved through blatant manipulation of 
its audience.  When the crowd sees a character do something mean or 
evil, their reaction is to boo.  This level of manipulation is possible 
in Ultra, but the range of manipulation is limited to the _virtual_ 
audience; the anonymous faces filling the Ultradome.  The _actual_ 
audience - you, me, and the several hundred(?) other readers - are not 
going to be convinced of a previously established (as all Ultra fighters 
must be) character's good or evil nature by what they do.

For example:  Look what has been done to Ranma in Ultra's third season.  
After suffering several setbacks during season two, he has been recast 
by several authors in the "heel" role.  This has taken a number of 
different forms, but the penultimate expression of this was the scene in 
episode 29 where he clobbers Shingo for no [good] apparent reason.  When 
I read this scene, my gut reaction was not "oh, gee, I guess Ranma is a 
bad guy now."  No, my thoughts were, "What the hell is this author 
doing?  Ranma isn't an outright psychopath!"  

The reasons by which I _knew_ Ranma's actions were out of character stem 
directly from two of the fundamental differences between anime 
fanfiction and professional wrestling.  First of all, wrestling is a 
performance event viewed only from the crowd's first person perspective, 
while anime fanfiction (most of the time) and Ultra (always) is viewed 
from a roving, third person, [limited] omniscient perspective.  In other 
words, when we read Ultra we often get to see a character's actual 
thoughts.  This means that when the character goes and does something 
that does not jive with the character's previously observed thoughts or 
style of thinking, then we know instinctively that he or she is out of 
character.  Secondly, when did Ranma ever just beat someone up in the 
anime or manga?  Anime fanfiction demands that either its characters 
stay true to their canon personalities, or if an author wants to change 
a character then a _good_ reason is needed.  Professional wrestling has 
no such canon
 it is bound to - and frankly I don't think I've ever seen pro wrestling 
stick hard and fast to _any_ sort of continuity.

And even if, either by some wonderful writing technique or established 
anime canon, the actual audience is convinced of a character's good or 
evil status, is that audience really going to cheer or despise 
characters in classic face/heel style?  I certainly do not, and I 
suspect most other readers don't read Ultra in that fashion either.  We 
want a character to succeed because we like that character, not because 
we think he is or is not a good guy and desire the catharsis of seeing 
good win.

Besides, while the steroid-enhanced hyper-macho in-your-face posturing 
that is endemic within the "real" sports entertainment industry and is 
necessary to the face/heel system may have some appeal to the mass 
television audience, that sort of behavior can not be duplicated using 
most of Ultra's characters.  It could work with some of the louder 
braggarts, but the rank-and-file Ultra fighter would look silly and out 
of character if written that way.  And I suspect that Ultra's [real] 
audience doesn't get much out of that sort of scene.  (Though this may 
be my anti-wrestling bias showing through.)

So if deliberately writing Ultra characters as faces or heels is hard to 
do, achieves nothing, and just plain looks dumb, the question quickly 
becomes, "Why bother?"  Why bother to try to make Ultra conform to 
"sports entertainment" norms?  Why bother to try to re-write a character 
that we all love already into something we ought to hate?  And 
ultimately, and most frighteningly, why bother to read Ultra if its 
characters and continuity are so warped?

As I said before, Ultra has to have "good guys" and "bad guys" - and if 
you really want to refer to them as "faces" and "heels" I have no 
objections.  But just because you can transpose these titles into the 
Ultra system does not mean that Ultra's broad character archetype needs 
are the same as, say, the WWF's.

Professional wrestling organizations deliberately keep the number of 
faces and heels balanced.  This is done so that in any given match, 
faces and heels can fight.  Sometimes a heel may fight a heel, and I 
suppose a face could fight a face, though I do not believe that I have 
ever seen that happen.  In the majority of [at least marginally 
important] fights, however, it is carefully planned to be face versus 
heel, in order to exploit the crowd/audience dynamics.

Ultra has greatly different audience dynamics, and the gimmick of having 
good versus evil in the ring is much less valid.  Some fights, 
especially the Ultra Rage season finales, gain additional punch from 
this dynamic.  Ultra characters are less purely good or evil, though, so 
your average bout is not going to be a clash of the archetypes.  
Storylines in Ultra are not limited to good characters defending against 
bad characters - in the Rei/Lilith rivalry over Hiroshi, which one is 
"good"?  Which one is "bad"?

My point, then, is simply that despite what some have argued on the 
message board, Ultra does _not_ need to balance its face and heel 
counts.  This is _anime_ fanfiction, and one of the general rules of 
anime is that virtually all relationships need to be hideously complex 
and confusing.  With that sort of material to write, the need for GvE 
conflicts is greatly diminished.  Also, examine your favorite martial-
arts anime - I bet you'll notice that there are lots of good guys and 
just a couple of "heels".  And there may even be some neutral characters 
that can kick ass.  The balancing factor is that the bad guys are 
(mostly) good at what they do - this is not American animation where 
good always clobbers evil in a half-hour (minus commercial breaks).

One import from professional wrestling that I feel ambivalently about is 
the fighter "stable" concept.  On the one hand, gathering fighters into 
stables has a tendency to promote the face/heel concept that I so 
strongly reject.  A stable, even more than one of its members, is likely 
to be classified as good or bad in nature.  On the other hand, it makes 
good anime _sense_ for like-minded fighters to group together.  I can 
think of literally dozens of anime and manga stories with exactly that 
motif.  Everything from Dragonball to (eeeek!) Toshinden uses that 
cliche, and so it probably does belong in Ultra.

I strongly dislike the wrestling-style "interference" in matches.  I 
like to think of Ultra in terms of a sport with rules, and honestly want 
to see interesting and fair fights.  However, I must concede that 
outside interference in matches is an extremely useful tool for pumping 
up conflicts on a storyline/subplot level and, given the temperament of 
the typical Ultra fighter, is to be expected.  Like most tools available 
to an author, it is most effective when judiciously used.

The best direct import from real professional wrestling has to be the 
oddball match format.  Anime characters are supposed to get into strange 
and bizarre circumstances...  so _of course_ they should occasionally 
fight in strange and bizarre places and ways.  Stranger is better - the 
Omega division ladder match was particularly amusing - as long as the 
rules of the situation are clear and not so complex that explaining them 
stalls out the episode's momentum.  (Though I suppose one could write an 
amusing match where the rules are so complex that everyone, especially 
the fighters, can't figure out what is going on.)

I started out this segment by looking at the development of Ultra.  I 
did this both to give perspective on how wrestling elements were not, 
beyond the obvious, low-level mechanical sense, part of the original 
conception of the series, and to set up this last point:  what Ultra, at 
this moment and for the sake of this argument, is.

Ultra is a fictional reality where a show that has the semblance of 
professional wrestling is, in fact, "real".  In some senses, within its 
world Ultra is the _ultimate_ reality - the place where the Deity 
interfaces with the mundane world.  This has significant consequences, 
which I believe a lot of writers have ignored in the rush to make Ultra 
into wrestling fanfiction.

While the Beta tournament has not officially been designated as part of 
the Ultra continuity, it has been generally accepted as such, with many 
episodes referring to it.  (By the way, Twoflower - why not post Beta, 
or at least a link to it, on the Ultra page?)  If the Beta tournament is 
accepted canon, then it logically follows that Ultra fights are _not_ 
faked.  Everything that happens at Ultra is real, and none of the 
characters are acting.  The [virtual] audience and the home viewers 
_must_ know this, and come to the event from that perspective.

In fact, since Ultra was literally organized by God, and the changing 
identity of God is determined at Ultra, Ultra must be considered the 
most important place/event/thing in its reality.  I am not going to 
argue that Ultra should become more theological - that could quickly 
turn the series into a dead-serious drama.  However, it would seem that 
a lot more characters (especially the "goodest" of the good guys) ought 
to take the events around them a lot more seriously.

Given this, compare Ultra to real-world professional wrestling.  The 
WCW, ECW, et cetera all present what they do as real, but the vast 
majority of their (teenage and older) audience knows that pro wrestling 
is highly contrived fiction.  (I have met only one person older than ten 
who truly believed what he saw was real... and he was scarily 
disconnected from reality in several other ways.)  Since the audience 
knows that they are watching a story, the wrestling leagues feel free to 
craft the most extreme fiction possible - entirely for the sake of 
gathering and holding that audience.  If any of the professional 
wrestling leagues maintained even for an instant that what they are 
doing is real, they would get clobbered by lots of litigation (all those 
little kids imitating what the wrestlers do) and regulation (pro 
wrestling makes "Ultimate Fighting" look humane by comparison).

This dichotomy sets up the greatest thing Ultra gains from using pro 
wrestling elements, the Ultra metajoke: (Fictional) reality is imitating 
(real) fiction.  Ultra characters, which are real in every sense within 
their world, are imitating wrestling characters, which are fictional in 
every sense within our world.  This has become the central gag of Ultra, 
from which most of the non-anime, on-screen humor is derived.  I think 
the metajoke provides a solid core for the series that will allow 
authors to write credible gags for the foreseeable future.

The metajoke, however, suffers from the same limitations that all jokes 
have.  If used too frequently, it wears out.  When all of Ultra's 
characters act like professional wrestling characters all the time, the 
[real] audience begins to view that sort of behavior as normal within 
Ultra's world, and the joke dies from lack of contrast.  Humor also has 
a tendency to be cruel - when a joke is repeatedly on or about a real 
person that you care about, you are much less likely to be amused.  The 
characters inhabiting Ultra are real, at least within the context of the 
story.  As fanfiction authors and readers, most of us do care about many 
of the characters.  It _hurt_ to watch Ranma's characterization get 
mangled, and while that series of events did successfully exploit the 
metajoke, most readers did not enjoy it for long.

The Ultra metajoke will only work as long as Ultra stays "real".  Once 
it changes from a fictional reality to a fictional fiction the joke will 
collapse.  I have seen signs in third-season episodes that some authors 
are beginning to think of Ultra as a fictional fiction, and I worry that 
the trend will continue.  Make no mistake:  Ultra could survive without 
the metajoke, and it might even still be interesting - but it would lose 
much of its charm and richness of humor.


  So where do we go from here?

What is Ultra... going to be?  I do not have those answers.  There is no 
truly equivalent body of work that we can study and analyze, no 
precedent that can show us where we are going.

I hope...  that Ultra is going to last at least another three seasons, 
that it is still going strong a year from now, that it maintains its 
vitality, humor, and style through the inevitable crises that befall 
collaborative fiction.  I do not know how long Twoflower wants to 
moderate the series, or if he plans to bring the series to an end at 
some point, but theoretically Ultra can last for as long as there are 
authors willing to write.

Keeping good authors interested in Ultra requires that good episodes of 
Ultra  continue to be written.  It is one of those ugly, circular, 
chaotic systems, which can be affected by any and every small thing that 
happpens around it, but never in any predictable way.  One of the 
reasons I have been so long-winded in this document is I am trying to 
affect Ultra in some very specific ways, and overkill is the only method 
I can think of that increases my chances of success.  This may be a 
futile attempt... but Ultra is interesting enough to be worth the 
effort.

I will make this one, conditional prediction:  So long as Ultra's 
authors take the time to collaborate, so long as each author takes the 
task seriously enough to plan and _think_ instead of simply sitting and 
writing whatever they feel like, so long as Twoflower or some other 
moderator can find new directions to nudge the series in... so long can 
Ultra survive and thrive.




Wow.  Woooow.  Well, I know I tend to ramble, though this is pretty well 
structured.  I was originally projecting about 20K of text, but new 
sections got added, new ideas showed up, new concerns were raised... and 
here we are, three weeks "late" and 35K over-budget.  Heh.  

I know that nobody is going to agree with all of the things I have 
written... but if this document makes just a few future authors _think_ 
about what they are _doing_ (as opposed to "writing"), then I consider 
it a success.  I'm sure that I have made at least one major error 
somewhere in this document.  I am very sure that much of my logic can be 
refuted on some levels.  I know that I am going to draw some flames with 
this.  Fine.  I can live with that.  I will not respond to any 
offensive/insulting mails or postings, but if you've got a point to pick 
with me, I'm willing to talk it over.  I'll be keeping an eye on the 
message board, and on my e-mail as well.  I'm not in school anymore, 
which means I may not have the time to immediately reply... but I will 
get around to it.  I promise.  Really!

Since I started this document, I got selected as the sixth or seventh 
author for the fourth season of Ultra... so in a month or so, we'll all 
get to see if I can put my money where my mouth is.  Or my reputation 
where my cursor is.  Whatever.

Thanks go out to Twoflower, for Beta, Ultra, Impro, having a cool name, 
and being friendly when we chatted about this omake the other night.  To 
Doug and Jeff, for inadvertently getting me into this colossal waste of 
time called fanfiction.  To a certain retired high school English 
teacher, who would be both enraged and amused by what I'm doing with 
what he taught me.  And to Klaus, for all the much needed ego-boo over 
the last three years.

And to Geoff, if you're reading this:  I still want my Cerebus trades 
back, dammit!

Kerry "Ked" Stump
kerryms@yahoo.com
December 31, 1999  (really!)
(a week after UltraRage Gamma)