“Reversible Error”, End notes

[aadler]

[ Endnotes posted 04 Sep 2020 ]

Where did the idea for the story come from?

In general, I just liked the idea of filtering other fandoms into the world of Buffy, primarily through the mechanism of the Great Slayer Awakening. More particularly, the death of Alex in the indicated episode of Lost purely pissed me off, and the revenge fantasy that this event triggered in my mind led to the notion of other stories in various veins.

Is there any particular significance to the title?

Not especially. I mean, if you read the story you can see that the term can be loosely used to apply in general principles — they do now have a way to reverse the Slayerness in girls that shouldn’t have gotten it or changed their minds, plus a way to apply it to previous candidates that were passed by before but are now suitable — but in my mind I just put this label on the story because the label was serviceable.

What is the thing I like most about this story? the thing I like least, or about which I feel most doubtful?

My favorite parts are the initial segment with Alex (from Lost) and the ending where Veronica Mars sets herself to watch the Watchers. Those are the moments that stand out for me, though there are nice touches here and there.

Like least … the original idea had drawn inspiration from some of the submissions I’d seen at Twisting the Hellmouth, and I wanted to cover a number of different subjects from a number of different fandoms. I also didn’t want to simply keep telling the same story, so there was a lot of variety in the stories. That wide range of change in tone, and the fact that sroni wrote not quite half the individual segments, meant there was a … well, a lack of unity overall. Yes, it was a collection of stories built around a central foundation, but to me it seemed that they just kind of went all over the place.

Is there anything I think I could have done better, or might do differently if I had it to do over?

Well, it was the last time I attempted a collaboration with sroni. I hated to give up on the possibility, because I raised her in fanfic — in Buffyfic in particular — and taught her everything I could about writing, but the fact remains that we just have such different approaches to storytelling that it’s very difficult to get our styles to mesh. Neither of us really even attempts to do things the way the other one does, so a partnership between us, however much we might have desired it, turned out to be … not impossible, but providing an end result that didn’t really justify the effort we had to put into it.

Was there a different direction I might have wanted to take the story, and what would have been some of the advantages of the not-taken path?

Like I said, more unity overall. And, if it had just been me, I probably wouldn’t have chosen all the exact same ‘subjects’ we did together. (I liked and enjoyed both the Red String and the Wotch online comics, but I don’t think I would have seen them as favorable subject matter for my own approach, and I still think those two are probably the most cumbersome and least satisfying of the dozen segments highlighted.)

Any observations to add at the end? One thing that did succeed, in my opinion, was our focus on ethnic variety. These were all fandom crossovers, so we picked out things we had liked and interwove them with the Buffyverse mythos. Even within those limitations, of the dozen profiled — Slayers or thanks-but-no-thanks Potentials or soon-to-be-Slayers (including one guy-who-could-magically-turn-into-a-girl-and-back) — only four were white-bread Anglo: two were Mexican, one African, one Japanese, one Chinese, one Iraqi, one Sikh, and one American with enough Spanish heritage that she could barely pass for a native in Spain.

Hey, it was something, and we got some fun out of the doing.