|
|
(In response to the many emails by the intellectually curious readers of Trial By Tenderness. New readers please note that spoilers lurk within these dialogues)
Winning the Le Mans
One of the more frequent observations by some readers of Trial By Tenderness concerns their disbelief that a student racing club could win the Le Mans. Why do so many readers tend to nitpick this one issue, while so many aspects of TBT...not to mention the manga and anime that it is based upon...are equally fantastic and outlandish in execution? This has been a constant source of curiosity for the author and several of his correspondents. Granted, enjoying the AMS/OMG manga requires a certain suspension of belief...and TBT extends this sense even further by suspending belief in the continuum of the AMS world. Consequently, many of the characters are out of character...
If I may be so bold to suggest that those of us who are faithful to the manga and anime genre tend towards a stronger compass of intellectual curiosity and creative capacity than the rank-and-file, then it may be within the realms of possibility that this same nature could tend towards assertion rather than investigation. Hence, the need for these 'footnotes' to Trial By Tenderness...
Following are the 10 most probable causes for a Le Mans victory by the NIT Unified Club (in a descending order based on an increasing silliness):
10. Keiichi's intelligence was greatly increased by Skuld's IQ-expanding mecha. When he refused to try out her Intellihancer helmet, she slipped it on his head while he was asleep. As with the Test-san helmet Skuld developed to prepare Keiichi for the rigors of job-seeking, the results of an overnight session with the Intellihancer were unpredictable. With Keiichi's intellectual capacity hovering somewhere in the stratosphere, Megumi took advantage of his hyper-smart state and convinced him to design an innovative engine that relied on component swapping. The sheer innovativeness of this engine design granted the NIT club a certain competitive edge in terms of auto mechanics...
9. Chihiro, while in Europe, was part of the Krauser professional motorcycle racing team. After returning to Japan and starting up Whirlwind, she was offered an opportunity to study for a year at a crack engineering institute in the US. While the NIT team won the Solar Federation Solar Car race, Chihiro was learning . Thus, she was exposed to state-of-the-art engineering techniques; a number of these methods are research-based and thus technologically in advance those available to the teams that traditionally build Le Mans race cars. Beyond this, her exposure to the rigors of the professional racing world sufficed for her to develop a technique of coaching, which greatly improved the chances of the NIT team....
8. Winning the Le Mans requires a blend of excellent driving skills and engineering versatility. In the history of the NIT Motor Cycle Club, both attributes have been proved over and over again, both within the AMS manga and TBT. A victory in the Le Mans becomes a logical extension of the employment of these attributes...
7. Their car, the Nissan GT1 R390-LM Hybrid, almost won a Le Mans in 1999 (it placed 3rd overall); thus, there is no shortfall of performance as far as the automobile is concerned. If one researches the winning times and lap counts of the past ten Le Mans, they'll find a 1.3% statistical variance. On the basis of machine performance alone, the NIT entry clearly has the potential to take the checkered flag...
6. When one has the Head of the Demon Prankster office on their side, it's quite possible that the number of race car retirements due to mechanical issues will increase...
5. In what has been revealed as another case of Tamiya and Ootaki sabotage...it was subsequently discovered that the fuel supplies of many of the other competitors included watered down gasoline. Naturally, both sempai deny all accusations and blame these multiple incidences of subterfuge squarely on Toshiyuki Aoshima...
4. If Keiichi can call out for delivery and contact a Goddess, and then make her fall in love with him...winning the Le Mans would be child's play...
3. One of the Goddesses winked, and the winning of the Le Mans thereafter became a done deal. I just failed to include this fact in the narrative...
2. Somebody was selling a lot of Senbee bottles of imported soda to the other race drivers...
1. The other drivers are untalented dorks...
Okay, there you have it. I could come up with another 10-list based on how characters from other anime impacted the race (i.e.: Miyuki and Natsumi were posing as Megumi and Sora; there was a Starseed in the engine of Keiichi's racer; the design consultant for the original Nissan racecar was the Mendou Corp) but I'm sure you could imagine this far better than I...
So in the realm of authordom, I offer these three justifications:
1) TBT is an angsty bit of work, so I decided to include a rah-rah story arc, with the hopes that this would inject a more cheerful tenor into the story.
2) I wrote a number of chapters that pretty much exclued the avatar SI character to satisfy AMS purists who feel that the author is too 'present' in the fictional narrative.
3) The whole purpose of this chapter was to revisit the spirit of the NIT team's Solar Federation Race victory while serving as a backdrop for Keiichi to propose to Belldandy in a big way>
