So here it is, the major hole in the plot…what the French would not call pièce de résistance, but rather…uh…trou del’ intrigue? I dunno, I’m not French. Grâce à dieu.

It’s a rather obvious plot-hole, but it does seem somewhat common in the genre, probably for completely pragmatic reasons: when a magical-girl-manga’s success warrants a continuation beyond a first volume, an obvious way to adapt the plot to the new, more epic scale lies in introducing a new, greater villain – and have the original villains do a heel/face switch. Which then leaves the question why the original villains were acting so…well, villainous before.
Which requires some sort of torturous plot contrivance to explain why apparently-villainous behavior was somehow conducive to opposing a greater evil. Or just completely ignoring the plot-hole and hoping the readers will let it slide…

The Queen uses a different approach: by trying to impair her audience’s sanity before reaching that point in her story, she hopes to prime her listeners to accept obvious inconsistencies more readily. I mean, once you have gotten a glimpse below the thin veneer of sanity hiding the true, mercilessly chaotic nature of the universe from fragile human minds, swallowing a plot-hole even of this size must appear quite refreshing in comparison.

While it’s a viable approach, I didn’t tag along with her plan and kept whatever-it-was-that-the-twins-were-doing-with-each-other hidden from the eyes of my audience. Mostly because I think my audience’s sanity should already be sufficiently impaired by all of the madness on display in earlier chapters…

It doesn’t work entirely as planned – Snuka catches on to the contradiction. But at least nobody gets so enraged over the plot-hole that any over-ripe tomatoes (or rocks) come flying towards the Queen. So I guess it still worked well enough…

I spend some time vacillating on which member of the team should be the one to catch on. Mopey would have been an obvious choice, as would have been the current incarnation of Biff – both of them qualified on basis of intelligence and scientific thinking. Gregory seemed less qualified, but he’s had his moments of unexpected lucidity in the past…but ultimately, I settled on Snuka. He might not be as smart as Mopey or (currently) Biff, but he’s street-smart instead: he has a well-founded and persistent distrust of other people and naturally suspects hidden agendas behind everything they tell him, so it makes a bit of sense that he’d be the one most likely to catch on.

More on Monday.