-Double Date: Extras Edition-

An In Depth Look Into a Kingdom Hearts Fan Fiction

By: The Darkside Incarnate (a.k.a. the guy who has way too much time on his hands)

SPOILER WARNING!!! ANYONE WHO HASN'T READ DOUBLE DATE SHOULD STAY AWAY FROM THE EXTRAS EDITION UNTIL YOU'VE COMPLETED THE ORIGINAL!!!

-The Story-

Welcome to DD: EE, a special tribute to Double Date, a short story that I wrote that people actually read. This is an in-depth look into that story, examining it in all of its glory. Now, a lot of you give me more credit then I deserve. First of all, I didn't have this all planned out from the very start. See, in reality, it all began with the simple desire to write fan fiction. See, up until DD I'd been upholding a strict policy of original fiction and only original fiction. I tried to write a Kingdom Hearts story at least twice; and a Teen Titans one six or seven times. But each and every attempt was thwarted by a sucky idea.

So, school came and went; I ended up staying in Nevada during my winter break, during which I sat around the house and did absolutely nothing. It got really old really fast. So, I brought out my handy dandy lap top and started thinking up a random story to take up my time.

I decided that it was going to be a Kingdom Hearts Fan Fiction. Before, I'd tried to write about things foreign to me, confidence, and super-heroism that kind of thing. Granted, my main genre was Supernatural, but it didn't seam like I could pull it off in fan fiction. So, I decided to make the story an AU, taking away most of the supernatural layers; (The Keyblade, Heartless and all that) I thought of ways to incorporate things from that Fantasy World into the Real World in a Real Form. The first was simple, changing Sora and Roxas from Key Blade wielding bad asses into students at Destiny High.

Next, I decided that the main plot would revolve around a romance between Roxas and Namine. I knew that that was my most favorite pairing, and that I couldn't live without them in my story. I was bored with Sora and Kairi, so I made sure that they were paired up from the very start, and then I thought about how the romance should be handled. From what you see of Roxas in KH2, he looks a bit meek, not too strong-willed until later. Sort of like Oz from Buffy. And so I put Roxas in a situation I'd experienced too many times in the past, something that you just couldn't have. I'm a dude, I like girls, and usual the girls that I like don't like me. So I thought of all the nervousness and confusion of First Love, which I'd experienced before, and put it into the story. Of course, I had a very shallow interpretation of Love not so long ago. And this story was one of the main things which led me to what Love truly is, but more about that later.

So, the girl that Roxas wanted, but was too scared to talk to would be Namine, Namine's best friend would be Kairi, whose boyfriend would be Sora, whose cousin would be Roxas. See, it all connects.

Of course, thinking up a story and writing it are two very different things. So, as I wrote, I was unsure of myself, I'd never ever written about characters that I myself hadn't invented, I was afraid that I'd make them do things that they would not normally do (which I ended up doing quite a few times in RR). So, as a result, there were lots of foolish writing errors.

I made the first chapter short, showing how new I was to this kind of writing. I posted it up, nice and clean with a title "Double Date". I got five responses within the hour. A few said that it was great and that they wanted more, others said that it needed work, and with a little polishing, it could be something great (thanks for that, guys, that first chapter did need some work).

So I removed it for a minute or two, fixed some errors, revised, and posted again. I began work on the second chapter while watching Charmed. The third came a little while later. The story wasn't all the way thought through, though, and I sort of rolled with the punches. I'd only really planned chapter one.

At chapter five, I made a major decision which changed the fic from a happy-dippy fluff fic into something a little bit more serious. According to one reader, I changed abruptly from the happy awkwardness of a first date to a dark and more angst filled world, and did it in a way where it was actually a good thing. So, I introduced Xemnas and Organization 13 to the fic. It was then that I realized that I would be making a sequel, and I needed something to branch off from. That's the main reason why The Organization was inserted, because I needed a strong connection to carry on the sequel.

The sixth chapter proved to be the last, and by far the most fun to write. I ended the chapter with some of my best ending sentences ever and said goodbye to Double Date for a while.

But just because Double Date was done didn't mean that I still couldn't learn from it. I reread my own story a few times, going over the interlocking relationships of the characters, exploring the vastness of the universe I could create from this super-short fic. Double Date had a happy message; Love is real, it exists out there for everyone, and it only takes a single action to set it in motion. Whether it's making that first phone call, or posing a quick conversation that leads to "Will you go out with me?" or a note that says; "Will you be my girlfriend" with the yes, no or maybe box. Granted, it isn't love at the very beginning, it starts out as something lesser, but I wanted Roxas and Namine to have something deep, the love they had at first was childish and borrowed a lot from typical high school romance. But in the sequel, Rocky Relationships, I would explore the darker side of love…the self destructive qualities that make us human. But that, of course, is another story.

Tune in next time for an in-depth look into the characters.