This was a lot of fun to write.

I've long harbored surprise and confusion that there aren't more Chibi fics out there. It seems to me such fertile ground for writing and storytelling, especially given the substantial portion of the fandom that won't let go of the Beacon days. Well, as Gandhi might have said if he were in to fanfiction, "We must write the stories we wish to read", and here we are.

As with most of my stories, I set the beginning and the end first, and worked my way through the middle. Knowing what I was working towards—that this was a long con perpetrated by "Dr. Hammerstein"—helped motivate me because I wanted that payoff for myself, while also giving the story structure and an endpoint. (Glynda's "winner, winner" was the other payoff I wanted.)

Having only those parts planned at the beginning left plenty of room for the story to surprise me, and it sure did.

The biggest unexpected delight was everything involving Torchwick. Early in my planning I had Torchwick as a peripheral character, an occasional commentator with little or no screentime. He couldn't be absent because he has a Chibi-canon relationship with the HuntsMan. I had to have Roman around at least to express why he was giving the HuntsMan space to chase the Red Huntress.

As I thought about it, though, as the first few chapters took shape, Roman's role began to shift. I soon realized he could act as the catalyst for the Red Huntress' face turn. That, to me, demanded a few earlier scenes to build up his role as a threat, and before I knew it he was in every other chapter, cackling and schmoozing like no other RWBY character. I have a weakness for characters who love banter and have a unique voice, and Roman took full advantage.

Writing for a character is partly a journey of discovery with that character; you learn about them as you go. Roman, I learned, is all about the theatrics. He is a thief by trade, but he is first and foremost a performer. From his very first appearance this is true: when he's on a Bullhead looking down at a Ruby blinded by searchlights, he doesn't just shoot her, he throws a Dust crystal at her feet and shoots at it. He didn't just want to win and escape, he wanted the biggest possible boom in the bargain. RWBY Chibi plays up this tendency. His objection to Cinder's booby-trapped cake, for example, is wholly stylistic rather than practical.

The best example, of course, is when Roman and the HuntsMan mutually geek out over the Trap-o-matic and show a relationship of 'professional respect'. The HuntsMan, of course, is a Batman cipher, but Roman is under no obligation to honor that... and yet, he does. He adopts and relishes his role in that petty drama. As one reviewer noted, Roman is a genuinely dangerous man, but he prefers to be an over-the-top caricature.

It was a very short trip to get from there to Roman being just as much a comics nerd as Jaune. Their comics shop talk is loosely adapted from Earth comics, primarily DC.

Speaking of adaptations from Earth: all of the nuisance laws the Red Huntress breaks or that Nora researches are real laws from the US. (Lest you think this is primarily a US phenomenon, there are equally kooky, equally unenforced laws around the globe, particularly in places where there hasn't been a revolution in a while to throw out the old books and where the legal detritus of centuries has had time to accumulate.) I could have made up original nuisance laws for the Red Huntress to break, but honestly this way was much more fun, and I'm sure I never would have thought of the seaweed law on my own. As ever, truth is stranger than fiction.

As a matter of style, my goal was for this to be not a satire of superhero stories, but a very silly superhero story. The idea wasn't to say "superhero things are stupid" as much as "these characters are bad at superhero things". I find, as I age, that I have less appetite for the cynicism and contempt that often attend satire. I'm not saying it's good or bad, as that's purely a matter of personal aesthetics; I'm saying I like it less, even from me. (I wrote some satire fics earlier in my life I can barely look at nowadays.)

The closest I come is in Chapter Three, when the HuntsMan's rooftop excursion turns sour on him. Even then, it's not that traveling amongst the rooftops is inherently stupid or a bad trope. It's that it doesn't work specifically for the HuntsMan. Of the characters most strongly associated with the trope, most have either enhanced senses (like Spider-Man or Daredevil) or informants and technology (like Batman) that let them gather information from those vantage points. The HuntsMan has none of those, and that's why he's bad at rooftops.

The story tried to take a strong tonal detour. When Pyrrha talks to Yang about romance advice, I started writing an exchange about why Yang hasn't been in relationships. (Basically, a combination of knowing they wouldn't last because of her wanderlust, and feeling a higher obligation to take care of Taiyang and Ruby.) It didn't take me long to realize it was definitely not Chibi-ish—it was way too Yangsty. I had to redirect it pretty strongly to avoid turning this into a feels-fic. Why do feels keep trying to sneak into all but my shortest humor fics? It's a mystery.

I was least satisfied with Chapter 7. Romantic comedy is not my native genre, and that's the most rom-com chapter. That's even part of the joke—the idea that Ren is taking his cues from rom-coms, and that Blake knows those cues from her (ahem) "recreational literature". Still, it was more a chapter that was narratively necessary than one I really enjoyed.

Chapter 7, though, is the price to be paid for Chapter 8, which I loved. I enjoyed being able to pay off every subplot, character arc, and piece of foreshadowing all at once. It doesn't make sense for every story, structure-wise, but when it happens organically it's a lot of fun.

The Junior Detectives were the last thing added to the story, and I'm glad they managed to find a way in. I enjoy writing for Sun and Neptune: they're a great exhibit of the humor principle about characters who are equally flawed but in different ways, plus their mutual affection is great. I've done some short script-style humor exchanges with them in the past, so it seemed natural to toss a couple in to this story.

It also allowed me to nearly complete my collection of RWBY Chibi running bits. I didn't have a checklist or anything, but if I could work a Chibi running gag or recurring scene type in, I made the effort to do so.

This is a matter of style to me. Chibi, to me, doesn't mean you stop following rules and just write whatever; it means you follow a different set of rules. Accordingly, I tried to maintain continuity as well as theme and tone. Rather than limiting me, this gave me a lot more resources and opened up a lot more jokes: everything from deadly desserts and Zwei owning Cinder to spinach dip and the Compost King.

The end-of-episode previews are not my usual style, but came from a suggestion from fellow writers in the Qrow's Nest Discord. It fits the genre and the mood nicely. It also made advertising on various sites/Discords very easy, as I could just copy/paste the already-written description of the next chapter.

I don't actually have any plans for a sequel, but it seemed genre-appropriate to have that stinger. I mean, if I could find the right plot I might, although it would be a while. I have a behemoth of a story in the works about someone trapped in an attempt to avert the Fall of Beacon. It's turned into a very intricate thing, unlike anything I've ever written before, which is frustrating in the best ways. My working title is "The Education of Ciel Soleil", and it should be coming out in the next few weeks. After that, who knows?

Thanks again for reading!