Ethan is a lot of fun to play with, but you always want to remember both how entertaining he is as a character and how deplorable as a person. If I had kept Nathan alive and brought him out into the greater reality, I could have done it the same way I did with Ethan and Catherine Madison at the end of “In Ev’ry Angle Greet” (taking off together with obvious mischief on the horizon), or I might have kept Nathan around to alternately help the Scoobies and cause trouble for them (sort of like chipped Spike, now that I think of it) … but this is the way it went, so that’s how it is.

As for names, I’ve always been flexible with names. In fact, for a while there I cited ‘someone is using a false name’ as one of the identifiable markers of an aadlerfic. I may be doing somewhat less of that now, but it’s still there.