bard_linn

Bard Linn: Hello, everyone! I hope you enjoyed the final chapter of Butterfly Effect.

Kiraya: It's hard to believe it's been over six years, isn't it?

Bard Linn: More like 6 and a half when you take the planning time into account.

Bard Linn: These notes are going to be a bit longer than usual - I hope you'll forgive us, but there's a lot we want to reflect on.

Kiraya: Yeah... man. Where to begin?

Bard Linn: *pulls out her LIST!*

Bard Linn: I was reading a book with an interview by J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, a long time ago, and something he said something about writing stayed with me always, and I think it is particularly apt for fanfiction. He talked about a friend of his who wrote stories then put the pages, one at a time, up on a window so people could read them. He talked about how you don't have the ability to go back and change things - and that's somewhat true with Butterfly Effect.

Bard Linn: Sure, you can take a fanfiction down and revise it, but it has already been seen. People love it in its current incarnation, flaws and all. JMS talked about it being true for TV, and I think the same applies here.

Kiraya: That's true with anything published serially, which is part of the difficulty of the format.

Bard Linn: I have a hard time thinking of posting fanfiction as 'publishing' (pretending to be real authors, haha!) but very true all the same.

Bard Linn: I still feel like we got most of the story we wanted to tell out there, though. There are some things we introduced that we didn't flesh out as much as we could have, some lose ends I might have edited out if we went through the entire thing but I really think it's a solid piece over all.

Kiraya: We tried to tie together the important things.

Bard Linn: I think we did, too.

Kiraya: Among which we deliberately didn't include Holy/Meteor or the Weapons.

Bard Linn: Yes. We didn't think it was plausible to have everything that is mentioned in the game just 'happen' to be found in the story line.

Bard Linn: Especially such things that are distant legends.

Bard Linn: I'm mostly pretty happy with how the relationships, romantic and not, also turned out.

Kiraya: While we'd planned a Seph/Zack/Cloud triangle from the beginning, there was quite a stretch in there where we were thinking of making it a lot less obvious.

Bard Linn: We actually considered keeping BE gen for the entire story at one point.

Kiraya: But then thought about it, and... really, no romance at all over such a huge timespan is rather unbelievable.

Bard Linn: Yeah.

Bard Linn: And then Zack/Seph/Cloud was supposed to happen right after he woke up. Jenova got in the way there.

Bard Linn: Though that shift is nothing like the one with Chaos.

Kiraya: Ha. Ahahaha. Aha. ^^;

Bard Linn: But everyone loves him, so you should thank Kiraya for him. :P

Bard Linn: Mostly I'm pretty happy about all the types of relationships. We have AerisxReeve, which is adorable and sappy and cute.

Kiraya: We have Rufus/Yuffie, purely a business relationship.

Bard Linn: We have ZackxSeph which started out as a friends with benefits and grew into something else.

Bard Linn: We ALSO have Tifa/no one and Vincent/no one (during fic…Vincent/Lucrecia in the past, obviously).

Bard Linn: Which makes me really happy. It is perfectly okay to be single and live your life that way if you want to, or aren't ready for that.

Kiraya: To be quite honest I've never liked "everybody pairs off" scenarios, so... yes.

Bard Linn: I'm also really happy that pretty much every change in here can be linked back to Cloud waking Vincent up - it might take me a while, but I can talk you through it. We didn't make random changes just because it was an AU - I really wanted to keep it in line with that premise. Change one thing. Change the world.

Bard Linn: - save the cheerleader. *shot*

Kiraya: Pfffffffffffft.

Bard Linn: *stops with random Heroes References*

Bard Linn: Thank you to those of you who gave feedback, who stayed with us, who were helpful and clamored for more - you had more of an affect than I think you know.

Kiraya: We're grateful to you for all the encouragement and support you've given us over the years.

Bard Linn: I really am proud of what we've done with Butterfly Effect. There's no way I could have done it without Kiraya, but I think we would have both had times when we would have wanted to give up without our readers.

Bard Linn: Anything you want to add?

Kiraya: I know I definitely couldn't have stuck with this without Bard Linn's pushing, and all your support, so... thank you, everyone.

Bard Linn: *coughs* Pushing is a nice way of saying it. XD

Bard Linn: Anyway, I hope Butterfly Effect remains to be a strong story you all enjoy for years and years to come. ^.^

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