Work Text:
This is an extended writer's note for Isekai by Moonlight, between "Chapter R" and "Chapter StrikeR". If you don't like reading writer's notes, or you really don't want to see any spoilers for the remainder of Isekai by Moonlight, go read something else instead.
Every writer comes up with ideas that look like they could fit into their current stories, but are ultimately rejected. One of the things that I needed to decide for Isekai by Moonlight was "Which dimension did Petz sent the main characters to?"
I was still considering Isekai by Moonlight to be a deconstruction at the time. (It still is a deconstruction, but it's past the "pull down all the old clichés" stage and well into the "rebuild the genre with what's left" stage now that it has its own plot.) Where would a deconstruction send the characters?
We were dumped out of the dimensional vortex into deep space. As I hugged my dearest, my final thought was of how much I wished we could survive in a vacuum...
If we're looking at random chance and assuming other realities have similar physical laws to Isekai by Moonlight, that's the statistically most likely result of a random teleport. Even a one-in-a-million chance would probably dump the characters into space, but maybe inside of a galactic cluster somewhere if they were very lucky.
But killing off the characters and ending the story in a single two-sentence paragraph is boring, even if it is realistic. (This, by the way, is why I ignore people who say my stories need to be "more realistic". Realistic stories are boring.) And there's nowhere to go with that setup, either. So, add a rule that the characters have to be teleported to some place that supports life as they know it.
Now what?
It had been over two decades since we'd been dumped onto this world. We had learned which plants are edible, which animals to stay away from, and how severe the winters could get.
Now, we had a small farm. Makoto and I had two daughters, while Ryou and Ami had two sons... and the children were at the age where they were wondering about the biological differences between them.
But then, one evening, there were lights in the sky and a crashed shuttle from a spaceship – the Star Leaf.
It looks like the Adam and Eve scenario we had going was suddenly bigger than we thought.
I gave this one quite a bit of serious consideration, but decided against it for two reasons. First, it would have be a serious change in tone and genre. People expected to read the third chapter of a magical warrior girl story, not the first chapter of a survival story. Second, it's been ages since I last watched Gall Force (I don't know whether I even have a working VHS player any more), and I dont remember the plot well enough to set a story in that world. And if I'm not confident about using the codifier of the "settle a planet that turns out to be prehistoric Earth" genre, I'm certainly not going to use a knockoff like the 2000s version of Battlestar Galactica.
I haven't completely abandoned the idea of a "next generation" of Senshi, though. If I live long enough, you might even get to see the adventures of Kino Yanagi, Mizuno Tsubame, and Kumada Kiyoko (no, Yuuichiro doesn't take the name Hino when he marries Rei) fighting Lunar Eclipse.
So, add another rule: No changing the genre.
We were dumped out of the dimensional vortex in front of our school. But it wasn't our school despite looking exactly like it; the sign out front read Crossroads Junior High School.
Ah, no.
Nooooo...
We've been dropped into dubbed Sailor Moon, haven't we?
Confirmation of that came quickly, when a particular twin-tailed blonde ran over to see what all the fuss was all about. "Amy? Lita? How'd you get here so fast? What are you doing back here, Greg? And who's this other guy you're with?"
Shoot me now. At least Usagi has redeeming qualities – Serena's a total airhead.
I realized that this would quickly devolve into "complaining about dubs that I don't like". I know that I hated reading fics like that back in the 1990s, so no inflicting them on other people.
We were dumped out of the dimensional vortex into a desert. Not a completely abandoned desert, though. We were dropped into the lap – literally, in Makoto's case – of a blond man wearing grey biker's leathers who was cooking an iguana over a campfire. He looked at her in surprise and asked, "Makoto? How did you get here?"
"I'm sorry, sir, but I have no idea who you are. Or where here is," she added as I helped her up.
"Right. Ed and Minerva warned me that this could happen. Hello, my name's Doug Sangnoir."
I never completely abandoned this idea, but in the end, I decided against crossing over with Drunkard's Walk. I know that story's author, Bob Schroeck, would let me write the crossover; we're prereaders for each other's stories and co-writers on the KanriKyaraProject, after all. But DW comes with a quarter-century of backstory and a web of connected old-school fanfic cycles that I'd have to at least acknowledge. And, to be polite, I'd have to invite Bob to help write my story, and he's busy.
I'm not saying a story where Our Heroes visit and explore other realities won't happen; in fact, as I type this (May 2025), I have 79kb of text in a development file for just that concept. But it probably won't happen that way, and I definitely wasn't ready to have it happen when I wrote the third chapter of Isekai by Moonlight.
Then I realized that Lyrical Nanoha was the perfect crossover. Magical girl warriors who made a habit of befriending (one way or another) other magical girl warriors and then training each other? Sailors Mercury and Jupiter could use the power-ups. And Isekai by Moonlight: Chapter StrikeR was a title that fit into the chapter naming convention that I had going. Midchildia, here we come!