Below are the controversial changes in recent chapters, but the most problematic one is discussed at length in last place.
Camus is the one sent to assassinate Old Master.
The Cepheus Saint is Albiore rather than Daidalos, one of the uncommon occasions where I picked anime filler. Reda appears, but Spica doesn't exist. Reda gets the Cassiopeia Cloth, as I have plans for Piscis Austrinus. Cassiopeia is Bronze.
Deathmask is different. He has a name that isn't the “Mephisto” from the English dub (but is still called Deathmask), and has a master. There is no more confusion on whether he is evil or not — he is good, just Machiavellian and judgmental. This should make his clash with Shiryu's idealism more nuanced.
Milo is an amazon. I understand this will disappoint people, so I will go into my reasoning below.
People disliked Shun being turned into a girl in the Netflix show for obvious reasons. I have seen fans say they should've turned Aphrodite into a girl instead, but the fact is that, sure, we should have more female characters, but when it came to the main cast, we already had good candidates that went underused by Kurumada (Saori, Marin, Shaina). This was the major complaint people had with the writers calling the main cast a sausage party and turning Shun into a woman. I tried to rectify that by giving them the attention they deserve.
I also added a female main character from the get-go in the form of June, because she is the only canonical Bronze Saint. This was just to slight the Netflix writers by proving canon already had good material for female mains — I admit it was childish, but I love my June now.
I am also in the process of adding new female Bronze Saints by taking clues from noncanon (Delphinus/Dolphin Mii/Alicia), and by creating my own. Besides that, as some know, my Seika will be a very different character from the original too.
Clearly there is more than enough space for female characters, and we don't need to turn Aphrodite into a girl, let alone Shun. Then why do it to Milo?
Answer is simple: I want a female Gold Saint. Let's look at available solutions.
Solution 1 — Take a clue from Next Dimension and make an Ophiuchus Gold Saint.
I can't do that because 1) I have set rules to how the world works that make this impossible. My Sanctuary's Ecliptic Houses are based on the Ancient Greek house system: the ecliptic is subdivided into spaces called “houses” that are immutable since the time of the Babylonians, i.e. even if Ophiuchus enters the ecliptic, it's never going to get a temple of its own, because although the houses refer to the constellations, they are not the constellations themselves. Think of how the Tropic of Cancer has little to do with Cancer nowadays, yet we still call it that; it's similar to what I'm doing. 2) Shaina. Enough said. This is a Seiya x Shaina fanfic too, and she is forever sacred.
Solution 2 — Make Aphrodite into a woman. I mean, he's called Aphrodite after all!
My answer is obviously a no.
Solution 3 — Make a female Sagittarius join the roster later on.
There will be changes in the Gold Saint roster over time, but no female Sagittarius (someone asked me if I was making Seika into the new Sagittarius, and although that sounds fascinating, it's not happening). My June is already peak fanfic, I have to balance things out somehow.
Solution 4 — Genderbend someone else and endure people exiling the fanfic.
That was my choice because I'm a masochist.
Why Milo? There is precedence for Milo being a woman in the Toei 2014 film, and there is Scorpio Sonia; both are noncanon, but still highlight the possibility of a female Scorpio.
Other reason is that Milo is a distinctively masculine name, while Aphrodite is a distinctively feminine name. I enjoy that contrast, a femboy with a woman's name and a tomboy with a man's name.
All of the major scenes will still be there. The fight in Sanctuary will be even more intense, I'd say. The encounter with Kanon should be on par with the original in weight.
I hope this is at least tolerable to readers. Feel free to rip me apart in the comments anyway, I know Milo is in many people's ships.
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Sometimes I get nice reviews on FF.net, and I got another one. I think some of the comments the person made are really thoughtful. It made me wonder a few things about my fanfic, its contrast with canon, etc. I want to add words to some of what has been said, first as a form of gratitude for every nice comment, but also in the hopes that others might find my insights interesting.
1) "The other Bronze Saints don't disappear after the Galaxian War, Sanctuary feels like an actual community […]"
Hopefully more people feel this way about my portrayals. One of the major issues with works like Saint Seiya is the vast amount of underused/ill-used characters. We have tons of these, mostly Silver and Bronze Saints. How I did June is already a sign that I want to better portray minor characters.
Please, I wish for others to take this for their stories too, wherever possible and desirable. The best way I found to achieve it is so find uses for those characters: because Sanctuary is a true society, all-out war was necessary to take down the Pope; Marin is Athena's contact on the inside; Jabu and the others are her allies in preparing a rebellion, but their known participation in the Galaxian Wars means they're a target for the Pope; Silver Saints like Crow and Auriga are a part of Sanctuary's intelligence, and appeared way earlier in the story than my readers have noticed, leading to the purge that initiates the war. People like them, Lizard, Centaurus, Cerberus, etc. are not evil, they are all Saints serving Athena, misled by lies. Their deaths are terrible things, and the Bronze Saints respect their corpses and Cloths like any other.
I understand that characters are not real people, but tools for the plot. I try to enrich the plot of SS by ensuring that characters are not oversimplified caricatures, and that they have some use whenever possible. I learned a lot about writing better stories by doing this.
2) "You've done so much work with the Gold Saints, not only clearing up inconsistencies from their canon portrayals, but also making them so much more interesting! Deathmask and Shaka stand out to me in particular; the former because his initial canon portrayal was a) one dimensional and b) really at odds with how he ended up being portrayed in later spinoffs, and the latter because his first appearance had so many personality differences from his later version that they feel like two different characters."
Like the anime, I omitted the manga's random visit that Shaka does in Deathqueen's. This would make his encounter with Ikki in Sanctuary less impactful, so I had to find a way to make up for it. I was always confused about what Kurumada wanted from Shaka, so I instead reinforced his Mahayana Buddhism. He's the first Gold Saint who, instead of using lethal force, incapacitates the Bronze Saints and waits for a word from Mu. Originally, the Six-Path Transmigration could kill someone; in my version, it can only ensnare someone indefinitely. There's tension between Shaka's non-violence and Ikki's bloody past.
That is both consistent and interesting, and the length of Shaka's chapter (the longest so far) is also a demonstration of how long the Bronze Saints were actually trapped with him. It was more than enough time for Hyoga's senses to heal.
These changes fit well to me, Shaka becoming a more stable character. Buddhist mendicants are like that: tranquil, reasonable, and distinguishable. You feel safe near them.
My Deathmask is the opposite, a potential menace. He's not an evil man and certainly serves Athena, though he's also an extreme pragmatist. Sure, he has some distasteful opinions, but that's a personality flaw. We all have flaws.
What was Deathmask in the original? He was an obstacle for the Bronze Saints. Shiryu's question is, "how can an evil man become a Gold Saint?" The canon's answer is that sometimes evil people achieve great power (this is fine, but repetitive due to Saga, etc.), whereas my fanfic's answer is that Deathmask isn't evil at all. Shiryu is mistaken.
In "A Strife of Silver", I made Athena say this: "We need Saints as sweet as Shun, and Saints as severe as [Shaina]." She believes both mellow and harsh Saints are necessary for a functioning Sanctuary. There is no ideal personality for a Saint, which means Deathmask is good and in his righteous role.
The worst part in my fanfic, however, is that Shaka is just a super strong dude. Deathmask, in the other hand, holds the fabric of existence together. I rewrote the Cancer Saint to be crucial to the Underworld, Sanctuary, and Heaven. If no one tends for the souls in the House of Cancer, reincarnations suffer a great toll.
This makes Deathmask less unidimensional, more useful, more interesting, and forces me to write him with depth. There's background plot that will slowly be unveiled over time for him, and his death will echo until the Heaven Arc.
3) "[…] then you have the early introduction of the other realms, which is phenomenally appreciated! Especially getting a brief glimpse of Olympus here; one of my biggest frustrations with Saint Seiya is that we still haven't gotten a proper Heaven Chapter, even with all the spinoffs still coming out."
I'd like to know, do you have a personal theory on why Kurumada and Toei never gave us that? I never understood it. I feel that there's a disconnect between what fans long for in a popular IP, and the risks most authors and companies are willing to take. Kurumada had a vision for Heaven Chapter, and that's Next Dimension. It's ok, just not what I wanted. Maybe I'm somewhat of a fatalist, but my fanfic has a beginning and an end, no loose threads. We will go from Japan to Heaven, and it will finish there. That's a big bet to make.
Since I know where I'm going, I know the limits of my universe, and I explore it once it's convenient or needed. The Underworld and Heaven had to appear now, because Deathmask affects them too greatly not to. This hints at more visits from Heaven over time. Actually, Pandora is subtly alluded to for the first time in the Dark Saints Arc, so I wonder if any readers noticed that. She's obviously going to be much more of a key character than in the original.
In all fairness, we have the benefit of hindsight, so we can tie up plot points neatly like that. It's a wonderful, privileged position to be in, not unlike, well… Netflix's scriptwriters. I preface this expressing genuine respect for their labor, despite disliking the results.
With that said, here's another reminder that this is my vision for what I wanted the Netflix show to be. It has all of our Western grittiness mixed in: questions of Becoming, morality, love, hate, violence, peace, and a constant exploration of death and its outcomes. Contrasting this with the X-Men: Saint Seiya we got from Netflix gives me a chuckle. I naively hoped for Netflix to give us all of those things we didn't get from Toei, but here I am, 260,000+ words into writing my vision.
If I had been hired by Netflix, I would've pressured executives and leads in the directions I laid down. Alright, let's make wild changes, make June a main character, focus on Jabu and friends some more, give Marin and Shaina space, double down on Hyoga and Shun, fix Deathmask, create new characters, show the Underworld and Heaven early on, turn Seika into someone else… but keep it Saint Seiya.
In chapter 37 of my Saint Seiya fanfic, I introduced a new female Bronze Saint, Anka. Like a few others characters, she's a completely original creation. I gave her the Piscis Austrinus Cloth and reimagined it as being influenced by the orca, different from how it appears in anime filler. I'm pasting below some of the insights I wrote while picking the orca for the constellation's symbolism rather than another animal, because I thought it was fun.
[...]
Orcas can be found nearly all over the world. In times as far as 70 AD, Hellenic and Latin authors still classified whales and dolphins as fish. Pliny the Elder wrote about whales and orcas (the first called balaena) in Book IX of "The Natural History", alongside so-called "sea monsters, tritons, nereids, dolphins, turtles, mullets, eels, flat fish, horned fish, sea dragons, cray-fish" or animals with "gills and scales" in general. Some cetaceans were also called names like "sea elephants, sea rams" or that of other land animals, but they were often placed in the category of fish by a multitude of authors across cultures. At face value, this is unsurprising; we can't expect ancient taxonomists to tell the difference.
Pliny describes orcas as savage and violent animals that terrorize and kill other whales, who have no other option but to escape into the open sea. He also describes a particular episode where Emperor Claudius was constructing a harbor in Tiber, when an orca was attracted by what they assumed to be animal hides. He describes the orca being trapped with many nets extended across the harbor, and then killed with lances, mentioning soldiers drowning amid the chaos. This means the Romans had direct contact with orcas, and the same should be expected of the Hellenes.
Dolphins are often mentioned by Hellenic authors, nearly always categorized as fish. The word "cetus" or "ketos", the namesake of the Cetus constellation, was used for sea monsters, which were described as serpentine in nature. However, modern translations refer to Cetus as the Whale constellation, and the name "cetaceans" obviously derives from the word "cetus". In Saint Seiya, Cetus/Whale is the constellation of a Silver Saint, Whale Moses (白鯨星座のモーゼス, Kaitosu no Mōzesu, or Ketos/Cetus Moses). The name Moses, of course, has biblical underpinnings.
In the Bible, Jonah is famously swallowed and then vomited by what is called a "great fish", most likely the closest translation to the original text. Older Greek translations may refer to it as "cetus/ketos", but all modern English translations have some variation on "great fish", despite the animal being understood as some aquatic mammal. Christian symbolism is that of a fish nonetheless.
The biblical Moses' connection with the sea, and the importance given to the symbol of the great fish/whale in Christianity, were most likely the reasons for Kurumada's choice of the name Moses for the Whale Saint (not unlike the case of Crux Christ, although I chose the name Georg for cultural reasons).
These are good arguments for Piscis Austrinus/Australis to be a dolphin or even a whale, as it is described as larger than the Pisces. Pisces and Piscis Austrinus are all close to Aquarius; the water of Aquarius' jar is historically described as being swallowed by Piscis Austrinus, and the western fish of Pisces is thought to be swimming towards Aquarius itself. Much like Cygnus, Aquarius retains both aquatic and icy connotations in Saint Seiya, although Pisces lose them in favor of the rose motif. In the anime, the Piscis Austrinus Cloth is given to Reda, one of Shun's rivals in Andromeda Island, whereas Cassiopeia is given to Spica. With his master being Cepheus, this plays into the Andromeda myth, perhaps reimagining Piscis Austrinus as the great fish that attacked Andromeda. I found no historical foundation for this — Piscis Austrinus was immortalized for saving sacred women (in Egypt, Isis; in Greece, Aphrodite's daughter) or as a half-fish creature (e.g. the Kulullû, associated with the water god Ea).
In the original anime, however, the Piscis Austrinus Cloth is depicted as similar in appearance to the Andromeda Cloth, as is Cassiopeia. I think it makes sense for Cassiopeia to be similar to Andromeda, since Cassiopeia was her mother and she was tied in chains/ropes after her daughter's survival, but there is no precedence for Piscis Austrinus to use chains. It was due to this that I completely removed Piscis Austrinus from the picture, retaining Cassiopeia and Cepheus.
I gave Piscis Austrinus to a new, fanfic-only character called Anka-ny, and instead played into its association with Aquarius. It is also an aquatic/icy constellation, so Anka uses icy techniques, like her signature Glacial Horn. She is also capable of using the Diamond Dust, which is canonically demonstrated as a common technique by Dark/Black Cygnus. Anka is a Chukchi; she has knowledge of Eastern Siberia, and was therefore a good choice by the Pope to deliver Camus' duty call. Her full name means "near the sea" ("Анка-ны"), hinting at her place of birth.
Orcas are a common depiction among North American indigenous peoples, Siberian peoples, and many others. Not only that, I am fascinated with orcas, and knowing that the Greek had contact with them, I enjoyed the concept of making Piscis Austrinus an orca-influenced Cloth worn by a Chukchi. I also think Anka ties up well with Camus and Hyoga's duty call, and is an extra female Bronze Saint, which canon lacked apart from June.
I have specific plans for her in the future, as I do for Nachi. Still, she's likely to remain a tertiary character.
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