Written by Benoit Goudreault-Emond
Author's postscript
Well, that's it. Writing this took a lot of time, and one would wonder why I didn't just post the first 5 chapters and do one chapter at a time from there. The reason is because I'm a perfectionist. Some chapters gave me a lot of trouble; chapters 13 and 16, in particular. 16 was the worse and went through three rewrites, the last rewrite consisting of giving up and scrapping the whole thing. I think I made the right choice; the new ending feels a lot less artificial, although there is less action in it. Thrust me, you don't want the ending with more action; it was really lame.
I have plans to make this a trilogy. The second one will be called "The price of redemption", and I'll let you guess who is redempting. The third is tentatively called "The price of competence," and will deal with those cyborgs in chapter 13. It will also give AVALANCHE a different place in the Planet's destiny, completing the moral reflection you may have seen in the fanfic so far. My reflection concerns the responsibilities of humankind towards the planet that allows us to live. Hopefully, it's not that obvious in there; I try not to make my points with a sledgehammer. This is a fanfic, not a Kant book!
Also, you'll note that Aeris has quite a different personality from the game. Well, not really that different from the game personality as from the personality most fans give her. I've always seen Aeris as quite a bit more assertive than what was portrayed in most fanfics. In the game, she's quite forward, almost blunt. Most authors tone this down; I chose not to. I chose to draw the parallel between Tifa, the "down to earth" lady who's almost pathologically shy, and Aeris, the quasi-angel who's very assertive. I hope to make this more obvious in the next part of the trilogy. Especially since she is acting rather weird. There's a reason for that; you'll see it in the next part of the trilogy better, because she played a relatively small role in this part.
Finally, people will probably ask me why I scrapped the Highwind. And I
know people will ask whether I followed Mr. Verderosa's scuttling of it.
I haven't; I had no plans to scrap the Highwind at first. The reason is
quite simple, really: I had no idea what Cid was going to do against the
WEAPON, and that's the only thing I found! :{) There's a couple
of places in there where the story unfolded differently from what I
thought it would. The whole encounter with Katya surprised me; I first
thought of making her a badder Shinra, worse than her father, etc, etc,
etc, but that's trite. I decided to make her power-hungry, but open to
reasonable discourse. I hope that does not seem unrealistic, but I
thought it would be interesting to make Shinra the so-called "good
guys" (or at least partially) for once. It forces me to find new
threats. At first, I didn't think I'd kill her off, but I realized that
gave a lot more impact to the story.
I enjoyed writing this story. There were parts I was frustrated by my lack of ability to convey what I wanted to say, but it went pretty smoothly, all in all. I hope you enjoyed reading it; that is, after all, the only thing that counts.
You are welcome to send me comments, criticisms, etc. I'll take e-mail only, though. My address is bge@crosswinds.net.
Also, the fanfic you're reading was originally written in Texinfo, a format mostly meant for technical documentation, but which I chose because it's versatile. You most likely have the HTML version of the fanfic, but I can also generate very pretty PDF. If you want the Texinfo source, just drop me an e-mail.
This document was generated using texi2html
Benoit Goudreault-Emond April, 9 2001