let's say.....4 and 9 for black box?
hello cee. you know, it's been almost a year since i wrote black box. `wild to remember that i met you like, maybe only a week or two after i posted that. friendship... also wild to think how much i've written since then...
4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?
Okay, for this one I actually have a really stupid favorite piece of dialogue. Like, I know there's all the emotionally devastating bits, but my favorite line of dialogue is actually a joke. It's from the bleak part of the fic but it IS a joke! (I say that like the whole fic isn't bleak but YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.)
“One… one hundred-thirty eight.”
"idiots lagging" is, for no good reason at all, one of my favorite stupid jokes i've made of all time. Also, fun fact: the idea that Techno and Chat would eventually count together as a comforting gesture/form of bonding had been one of the earliest images i conceived of in the fic. Like, from VERY EARLY that was the plan. So the execution of an idea I'd had from early makes me happy.
9: Were there any alternate versions of this fic?
...sort of? Never really after I started writing it, or at least, MOSTLY not after I started writing it? Like, okay. In the original version of the idea, the thought was "I want to force Techno and Chat to directly bond", funnily enough. The whump was like... okay, so how does Techno and Chat bond? Well, probably if Techno was put in a situation where he had no one else to talk to, they'd be forced to. And people keep on saying the prison will be for Techno...
At one point, the trajectory of the fic would have probably been less whump had someone, at some point, not suggested that they were considering using a regen beacon to prevent the prisoner from being able to damage themselves to escape the prison via hunger. Obviously, they spawn trap the prisoner instead, and frankly, I've never found anyone else who wrote this into the prison before I did, and Black Box is big enough that I genuinely don't know if this was something Sam or Dream actually suggested on stream, if it was something someone in Technocord suggested might be a plan back when I still actually hung out in there, or if I thought someone had suggested it and I just. Made it up. Because later examples of the beacon have a high chance they originated with me. But like... genuinely, the fic would have probably been REALLY DIFFERENT had that aspect not come into play, because the beacon is what made a lot of the other details come into play.
(If you want a fun hypothetical, though - what would Black Box be like if I'd actually known what the prison would be like? I wrote this like, I think three weeks before it was revealed to us at least? I started it before Tommy escaped exile, for goodness sake! You can tell when I hastily wrote in new details as the Bedrock Bros arc continued! So it would be a drastically different fic if I weren't riding that wave of hypothetical. It would probably still start from the same core of 'Techno and Chat as the key relationship in the fic', but it would definitely be... different. Really different.
...I think I've mentioned before that some of that's why the sequel's been hard for me, actually. Because that prison's different. Really different. And so is the tone Techno took when interacting with it. I know that shouldn't affect my AU, but...
What a different fic Black Box would have been, had it been written anytime other than December of 2020.)
(send me a fic and some questions and i'll answer them for you!)
