Volume Two was finally over.
A lot happened during Volume Two. For one thing, Zeta ended.
o(╥﹏╥)o.
It really was a great show. I hadn't followed Ultraman as it aired in over a decade, but I looked forward to Zeta every week...
I'm getting sidetracked!
Back to my own work.
I ran into a lot of problems with Volume One. For instance, in trying to take care of the details and preserve the narrative structure, I ended up with some parts that people criticized for dragging the story out.
So I made some fairly big adjustments to Volume Two. I cut a few subplots and scenes, shortened some events, and tightened the story.
One change in particular was that I tried not to spend too long on minor bosses.
If you looked at Volume Two in terms of boss fights, there were far more bosses, big and small, than in Volume One.
Of course, the two volumes had different structures to begin with.
Volume One followed an opening-expansion-conclusion structure. It spread outward at the start and drew the net closed at the end, like crossing a mountain: first climbing, then descending. One thread, with two sides—Evil Ghost and Hou Andu—ran through it from beginning to end. The result was that quite a few people felt Volume One's ending might as well have been the ending of the whole book!?
(╯‵□′)╯︵┻━┻
By comparison, Volume Two was more scattered, and so were its main threads. Unlike Volume One, it didn't have a single thread running all the way through. Instead, I scattered pearls: I cast out the foreshadowing and clues first, then gathered them up and strung them together near the end.
The Starweave Ranking, the search for the senior brother, the Fish Monster, the River Domain, the old monk, and so