This is all far from over

So in about a week I am going on vacation! Woohoo for me!

Meanwhile I thought i would try to make at least one little update here in the meantime, just to keep my readership (hey both of you) entertained. ;)

Today I think I'll just do what I did in my last entry, and go through what things I've changed in this rewritten version of TWC2, now that I'm nearly finished (and hoping to post the final chapter within the next week! :D)

The original version of this fic was, I will be honest, a Mary Sue Festathon. Arama. I suppose it had some things going for it - it was pretty nice to Bushroot, and such - but bah. I don't know. The thing behind it was that I loved Bushroot (and I still do) and I just wanted to give him a chance to not be a total villain, and maybe get a little love in return. So that was the intent....

The result was a bit of an off-characterization for everyone, which in turn was a bit of a theme for the early batch of fics in the series. In this case, Bushroot was just too much of a good guy. He basically does all the same things in the current fic as he did in the original, so action-wise and motivation-wise I guess I was OK, but I think some of the overdoing it came via Beth's response to him.

See, Beth was a little scared at *first* in that version, but she quickly overcame it once she saw into Bushroot's soul in a way no one ever had before and understood that he was a good, good man. :P

Okay, that's a little... harsh, I guess. But it does end up being like that. They see each other as sort of kindred spirits, and although the same twist comes at the end, Beth doesn't let it totally ruin her appreciation of Reggie... who, meanwhile, has a raging crush on her, and she's not entirely sure HOW she feels about him.

So it didn't take too long for me to really wish that I hadn't set up this semi-romance between them, when I've already got Launchpad crushing on her for no reason, and so on... it was just too neat and perfect. I honestly *meant* it to be a one-fic thing and just be b/c Bushroot responded to positive attention and would latch on to ANYONE who was nice to him. But, it went too far, IMO.

There were other Mary Sue elements - I'll go into them in my more specific changes. But the Beth/Reggie relationship was the one that bugged me the most. I ended up altering it slightly so that there's still a sort of subtext to their interactions, but it's one-sided, and it's totally unacted on. I hope that it does come across more as I meant it in the first place, motivated by his loneliness and just being glad that someone, anyone, is talking to him. And there's also a good likelihood that it's because she keeps reminding him of Rhoda, which is a wholly superficial thing based more on wishful thinking (I even have him looking closely at her and thinking how they don't look very much alike; Rhoda is a hottie and Beth is just not. Cute and pretty but not the "hot numero" that Rhoda was. ^_~).

As for specifics, I just kept the same basic outline but changed a lot of things so that they made more sense to me:

- Beth would need permission to actually show up to babysit that evening, so I added a scene where she talks to Launchpad.

- Beth and Gosalyn's interactions needed some major TLC. Actually it took me a long while to figure out how they'd react to one another. I sort of felt like Gos wouldn't have that much of an opinion on Beth, wouldn't actually dislike her - she's a good kid and I think Beth is too mild to actually get her to rebel, so she'd feel kind of guilty disliking her. She doesn't feel guilty disobeying her, though, because Beth makes it so easy. More than anything I needed to find a reason why Gos would want Beth to stay around when I had set it up that Drake VEHEMENTLY did not want her there. I'm sort of still struggling as to why Drake would let her, but having Gos be thrilled that a grownup was basically doing her homework for her (even with Beth's halfhearted attempt at rules) was my best shot for this fic.

- Since I had added a subthread where Drake did not trust Beth, I had to stick in things where he was constantly checking on her.

- The method of Beth's escape was one of the biggies. She just *happened* to be good with plants (still a bit of a Sue-ish touch for this fic, but I have turned it into a firmly-established character trait at this point so I'm not nervous about it anymore), and in the original, she somehow managed to just... charm the plants. I guess that made sense to me when I wrote it, but why the heck would that work? Who can talk to plants unless they have a telepathic link with 'em? That didn't occur to me until some time later. So instead Beth makes a daring escape off the roof, yays. Not... perfect, but a lot more active and less fortuitous and convenient.

- A big change is that she's utterly terrified of Bushroot and they don't hit it off right away... and, as much as she does start to relax around him, she's never perfectly at ease. Just as she starts to get used to him, he goes and gets all supervillainy on her, which is pretty much a guarantee that - sadly - they'll never really be *friends*. But I felt it was important to note that Bushroot really is a villain, even if he's not evil or a bad guy. He's totally self-motivated and not 100% rational. I went into this in my other entry on the subject so I won't cover it here, but I thought it was naive and missing a big part of his character - and of Beth's - if I had Beth just be his BFF.

- The original also had Bushroot decide not to change Beth, whereas here I changed it to leave it up in the air. I think he would've been talked out of it if DW hadn't shown up exactly when he did, but I wanted to let it go either way. Who knows? Oh yes, and part of why he decided to let her go was because the *plants* didn't want him to hurt her. WTF. 9_9

- Since I haven't posted the finale yet, I can't go into a whole lot more detail, but I can say without spoilers that Beth initially got really mouthy with Darkwing. This was when I was going to have her change a bit more by the end of the first five-story arc - just get more outgoing and outspoken, so the idea was that she was more firey under the surface. I've since discovered that this is not who Beth is, and besides, the whole "ironically she loves him as Drake but not as DW!" is kind of a tired idea.

So the end result ... well, this fic is what it is. I still don't love it, to be honest. I just don't feel like it's my most inspired idea, although there are parts of it I really like. But I feel like some of it is reaching, and some of it doesn't go far enough; in all, I'll be very glad when it's done, because I'm mostly satisfied with this rewrite and I hope it'll stand up better than the original did. But I want to move on to other stuff now. :)