Intermission
Let me tell you about the development process of this fic. At first, this was just whatever I thought up. There was a joke of a plan, which only got up to Yatsuhashi seeing him before I said fuck plans. And the fic continued that way for a while, being pretty much whatever the hell I wanted it to be. As I was working on Chapter 8, though, I realized that at some point, this thing has to end.
So I thought up an ending really quickly: Jaune wins in the Vytal Festival!
I knew enough to know that you need a team for the Vytal Festival. And Jaune doesn't have one! So, I thought to give him a team. But with who? There were three spots open, and I wanted to give them to ones that were deserving, and not those betrayers. Yatsuhashi and Nora were easy choices. Ren I discarded for some unknown reason, probably something to do with being too close to JNPR originally.
Anyway, I quickly thought it to be at least one of Team RWBY, partially thanks to, at the time, wanting Yang as a potential love interest for Jaune down the line.
Yes, Yang was originally going to fall in love with him at some point during this.
Here's my little joke of an initial planning thing, just to not only prove my point, but also to show just how bad my planning skills were:
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Brinkmanship: The plan:
Pyrrha ← This is how you spell her name! Please do not fuck it up! C'mon man
If there is one thing that I have to give credit to myself for, it's that I didn't fuck up her name once. Everything else might be complete trash, but there was no way I was gonna put something out that misspelled names. I made 3,000% sure that there was not a single Pyhrra, Pyra, Phyrra, or Pyrrah walking into this fanfic for no reason. Give me that, at fucking least.
Ch1: Pyrrha is told about False transcripts, has mental battle, eventually decides to tell Ozpin. DONE
Ch2: Results from Ch1
Ch3: More of Ch2, Ozpin Tells Jaune some stuff
Ch4: Beginning of the bullying, Yatsuhashi Is first defector this chapter?
Who knows from here?
Chapter size: around 1500 words at least please
Love interest? Undecided, leading toward Yang because LOL (no idea when this will matter probably not for a bit. AVOID MAKING HER THE WORST BULLY! [I think I fucked this one up already lol])
I can not plan for shit. NO MORE PLANS! JUST DO!
The rest of this page is a playbox for ideas. HAVE SOME GOOD IDEAS!
Ch2: Nora is off finding the world's biggest pancake or something equally hilarious, this is reintroduced later right after super depressing chapter (DONE! REMEMBER THIS PLEASE!)
No BLURBS! They weren't as good as I thought they'd be.
The bit about the blurbs was because in my previous fic before this, Welcome to the 2020 College Football Playoff!, I had a summary blurb for each chapter. I got rid of that before starting this.
Have Jaune defeat a Goliath sometime in the future as an ultimate callback to C2!
What Goliath? This sentence is from absolutely nowhere.
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The planning document for SoiB is… about 8,000 words long. That alone should tell you how much I have improved.
As I was continuing to write, however, I began to feel that a love interest wouldn't make too much sense. Not for a super-independent Jaune. With love out of the question, Yang stopped making sense. But I still needed that 4th member, and really wanted it to be from Team RWBY. That left three choices: Ruby, Blake, and Weiss.
It took until Chapter 10 to figure out who it would be. I chose Weiss because I remembered her professional attitude, and thought of something clever: Why not have Weiss spin away from them? She would get tired of all the craziness and join up with Jaune. And things began to roll on from there. You might be noticing a small, but important jump in quality in the more recent chapters. Slightly less in your face stuff, better word choice, yadda yadda yadda.
This came in unintentionally. In Chapter 13, Pyrrha was originally going to destroy his room. That's what the dark vortex was about, being the horrid thoughts taking her over and making her do all of that. But, I canceled that idea.
Alright, so then the question became, How to make Weiss spin away? I couldn't make RWBY less crazy, and have Weiss stay in the crazy camp, because then WTF is she gonna do with Jaune? Probably kill him or something.
But my brain now had a plan! I'd never actually had to make a plan before. In my previous fic, there was no need for such a plan, because once the football season was over, that was it. There wouldn't be anymore stuff unless I felt like it. Now I had a plan. And once I have a plan that makes sense in my mind, it takes a lot for me to reconsider. So, the only way I could go was up. Make everything more insane. And that's what the next few chapters are gonna do. The story's atmosphere gets worse while the writing gets better.
This tug-of-war between my improving skills and the plotline, being forced to take into account my past mistakes, keeping me stuck in a lane I eventually stopped wanting to continue on became almost impossible to deal with, and eventually I just had to give it up, abandoning this fic and letting it be stuck in the limbo of cancellation.
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But this little plot, the only thing that came out of this that wasn't a complete cancer, stuck in my mind. I wanted to do it. I wanted to get this done more than anything. It was pretty hard to get other fics written. This eventually became too much for me to bear, and before I knew it, I was focusing on this plot once more, looking at what I could do to avoid the mistakes that brought Brinkmanship down.
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Thus as Signed off in Blonde began to take shape, there was two goals that were/are/will be paramount.
1. Still have them trying to get rid of Jaune, but instead of it just turning straight to murder, they have an actual reason. And not only that, the action of getting to that point is something that can actually be foreseen, has a real progression instead of just plotting in "I wanna murder him!" as pretty much their entire personality. Instead of mortaring them, they gradually turn bad.
2. Give people proper reactions. Instead of things just happening because they do, actions get taken because it makes sense to them, for their personality. Be reasonable, even as a response to unreasonability. No more changing intelligences and traits to suit the needs of a plot, instead the plot is made with those things already in mind.
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Basically take this fic, and drain away as much of the crack as I possibly can, making the feeling of it completely different. Almost a one-eighty in regards to the original.
Now you get to enjoy the second part. There'll be a lot less interruptions from this point on, and the complaints will be mostly about much more subtle things, ones that could be passed over if you just glanced at the words, like I do with every fic that I read. Hope you can find just as much enjoyment out of that as the first part.
