Hello! I have two questions: 1. How do you keep track of the stuff you write in the Toasterverse? I know you write them out of (chronological) order and over (relatively) long periods of time, so how do you manage to keep track of what happened when? And 2. Do Butterfingers and You ever get jealous of Dummy, and all the attention he gets, specifically after he can gains the ability to switch between being human and being bot?
1. There are some touch points upon which I string everything else. Among them: Are Tony and Steve together? Are they using the L word? Are Jane and Darcy living at the tower? Are the interns present?
Each of these answers designate where a story MUST be within the timeline. I can't have Harris in a story but not have Darcy in New York, because Darcy was working at SHIELD when Tony was trying to escape from the fiendish lair where he met Harris. As long as I can pinpoint the point in the timeline, I know how things are laid out.
As to the more precise details, some I have laid out, and some I have only the barest memory of. Sometimes, people will send me a quote or a piece of text that I KNOW I wrote, but I'll have no memory of it, it's like staring at a thing that is familiar only by context. I never get over that feeling of alienation from my own works. I don't quite know what to make of it. 8)
2. No. I get asked about Butterfingers and You a lot. In "Tales of the Bots," what we have to understand is the misplaced code that Dummy possessed made a fundamental difference in his level of awareness. Though the other two were patterned off of his code, they were, in many ways, far more stable, far more effective pieces of programming. They do not have Dummy's fundamental flaw.
That is why the spell settled on him, and not the other two. For lack of a better word, he had more personality than the others, and he was older. Tony's attachment to him was stronger. That does not mean he does not love or appreciate the other bots, but they do not require what Dummy does. They aren't attached to Tony in the same way. That's made clear in the first fic, when Tony and Jarvis are trying to make plans for the bots in case Tony dies. They both believe that Butterfingers and You will be able to work with others, or in other environments.
They don't think that Dummy will survive the loss of Tony. He's different. Even if they don't know why, they do understand that.
Butterfingers and You miss Dummy when he is a child, they want him to stay a bot, to stay with them on the network. But when DJ is a child, he depends on them for companionship and as playmates. In their own way, they are proud of him, and he has taken over a lot of the basic maintenance of his 'brothers.'
They understand him in a way the humans can't but more importantly, they accept him, in either of his forms, without question.
