#shoutout to whoever figures out what that headcanon is :3

[chaoticgoodthief]

Echo

[heckyeahepithetswitched]

candaru liveblogs reading her own writing: episode 5

redwood arc let’s go

for some reason I remember spending a really long time on this intro; like, the words weren’t coming out right and I couldn’t even think of an opening scene (not that what I ended up with was great)

...but this whole page is my favorite scene xD

it also took a while but when I realized “wait this is the swap version of my brotp” I knew I just needed to dig a little to find a golden dynamic and then boy did I

these two are idiots and I need to talk about them more often

the change from “preferred extracurricular activities” was changed to “astronomy signs” since... let’s face it... most of Percy’s dialogue could remain untouched and still fit swap!Sylvie, so I tried to find excuses to at least change the flavor to be sleep-related when possible

in another screenwriting book I read about how change in location can make a scene much more interesting

so everybody thank the author of that book for the birth of boxer!Molly (because I wasn’t sure where she lived yet and this was a good vague way to dodge showing her room)

(very mild tw below)

this was supposed to just make her vague and mysterious (like how Ramsey is originally shown in silhouette) but I think I accidentally just made her even more attractive

whoops

not as good as the line “well, I do have an... EYE for these things,” but the joke here is that Zora is an antique.

once again I love lines that are like “wait hold on—” and nope we’re just continuing into the scene, never gonna address that again

it actually took me a while to decide which of Molly’s girls got to take Fred’s role; at first I felt it should be Phoenicia or Trixie since they are her best friends, but later on I knew that whoever it was would have to get themselves stuck in the woods somehow, and since the “car crash” joke isn’t funny without— well, Car Crash— I had to find another way to basically leave them immobile for Detective Sylvester to find. Not knowing much about Trixie and Phoenicia, it was hard to come up with a way to do that without involving a bunch of other people (which I’d then have to get rid of before Sylvie came in), so I ended up going with Death Cap since

1) I needed someone with an epithet,

2) I already had the idea that she had mushrooms that could knock someone out via spores, and

3) Jello was probably joking about the “mushroom girl is the final boss” thing so he’s not gonna invalidate my made-up epithet

...on a related note, “Fiona Boss” is a lame pun on “final boss.” You’re supposed to say it with an Italian mobster accent.

I also decided (...back in the Museum Arc but shhhhh) since there’s no canon voice for mushroom girl, it would be cool to have her be mute.

and I was right. it IS cool. mute characters are awesome.

my beta reader thinks swap!Bugsy and Arnold are more interesting than their original counterparts and... I actually kinda have to agree

then again Bugsy and Arnold are my least-favorite canon characters so I may be biased

this ongoing bit is probably one of those jokes that was more fun to write than to read, but I really did have a fun time writing all their constant bickering

yeah I debated whether or not I was allowed to use this gimmick for a LONG time and eventually decided yeah, heck it

kid!Zora is largely responsible for how involved I got with this fandom; I have literally never been this active in any fandom, ever, with people latching so hard onto the ideas that I put out and then making their own works out of them and continually spinning this bigger and bigger web of fanworks and love for these characters

what was I talking about I don’t remember

So, there’s actually quite a bit to this line! In the original, Ramsey says:

“The make alone is pretty nice. ‘Bout 60 years old— Eh, 65, give or take. ‘Prolly worth at least a few thousand bucks.”

As you’ll notice, Ramsey was correct in his estimation— but Zora is even more accurate, because her Epithet lets her tell the age of an object down to the minute. She rounds to half a year for Molly’s sake. And the use of “pesos” rather than “bucks” (slang for American money) was 1) to imply that different forms of currency still exist in EE, and are slowly merging together like the languages did, and 2) as a small shoutout to the ethnicity headcanons of my Zora friends (before Jello actually confirmed her ethnic makeup publicly).

this is code for “I’ll decide Molly’s motivations to join the BB later”

*puts my hand to the screen longingly*

ms lockhart you’re one of my favorite characters and you weren’t even in the show

I’ve stated this on record NUMEROUS times but I can never say it enough

Eros is Percy’s weird uncle figure

I tried REALLY hard to stick with characters’ canon powersets, but in some instances it was absolutely necessary for them to fulfill their roles (i.e. here and with swap!Percy in the museum). anyway people seemed to really dig Daydream so that’s cool

Mela is a reference to Doctorsleepytime’s blog but he never read the scripts :”)

before I had a deadline it was really hard for me to find motivation to work on the scripts and VP Gorou ended up being my sole biggest motivator because I knew batsy would love him and I also knew batsy would actually read the scripts

thanks batsy

the Banzai Bees all having Howie’s disposition but a fierce loyalty to this big soft donut man is probably one of the purest things in the Redwood scripts, if not the purest

we never actually see Molly go fully feral in the museum scripts so it’s fun that we get to here. in my head she’s got the frazzled hair, the foaming at the mouth, all of it. do not mess with Molly.

to take the place of the mildly-customized Banzai Blasters, I needed some mildly-customized Worker Bees

so

I ended up using the OCs I created once on a whim

I died when I realized I had an excuse to make mistew wamsey canon

I had to add the Jenga tower because I realized Ramsey never fired a gun for Sylvie to hear hgksdaflghdsf

would you believe me if I told you I almost had Zora turn into a kid (and then continue pretending to be one for the majority of the scripts) to convince Sylvie into letting her go

you all know I hold the highest respect for Mr. Blaber as an incredibly skilled creative writer but even legends make mistakes and this is me calling him out on a poor choice of analogy

yes I see how it’s related because it’s about saving/catching the many vs saving/catching the few but STILL

zora: wait you can be a cop and also a good person?? wack

at first when I realized “wait, banzai VPs are supposed to work in pairs,” I was worried that I’d have to find another character to accompany Gorou

but then I realized having a partner who made him do all the dirty work and never went out with him was the most Gorou-like solution possible

THIS IS ONE OF THOSE LINES THAT’S FUNNY IN CANON BUT THEN THE SWAPPED VERSION IS SO MUCH WORSE

I wanted to emphasize how swap!Sylvie’s just a little bit less pure than canon!Percy. Percy immediately refers to Ramsey as “partner” once they start working together, even though he’s a criminal, whereas Sylvie at this point still very much sees Zora as a means to an end. It’s a small difference, but it’s there.

oh yeah I forgot to talk about how I ended up with an uneven number of characters to swap so instead of doing some weird three-way swap with Howdy, I just gave his role to the cat

and honestly that was one of the best decisions I ever made on the Redwood scripts