fic talk: no quarter post-mortem

[sword_logic]

no quarter is done! and holy shit, i just realized that this makes it six months to the day.

yes. yes i did. there's lore here and it's really funny in retrospect.

i watched glass onion on christmas eve and was left with a burning urge to watch knives out again afterwards, but i only subscribe to Net Flicks and hadn't ripped it from a dvd when i watched it originally, so the next day i was just like, cranky and wanting silly daniel craig movie. Net Flicks had (still has, maybe?) the first two bondses that danny c. is in and i'd never seen them, so i figured you know what, that'll be my evening entertainment. i literally slouched down to queue up the movie and then sat bolt upright again after getting hit by The Thought: hey, what if i wrote a P vs NP sequel, and it was just P vs NP again but about felix and locus?

lol. lmao, even. rofl, perhaps. it took me about a solid fifteen minutes of staring blankly and shaking all my thoughts around to realize just what the fuck the train of thought there was, and... it turns out that "skyfall = P vs NP inspo" is just hard-wired at this point. i literally pavlov'd myself into this by deciding to watch a Bames Jond movie. i really don't know how to quantify how or why skyfall was(/is?) ~inspo~ for P vs NP, except that i watched the movie and liked it a lot when i was in the baby stages of making P vs NP happen. ("everybody needs a hobby." "so what's yours?" "resurrection.") it's like how my trip to the bay area years and years ago was also inspo for P vs NP; i couldn't really explain how or why, it's just something that's linked to P vs NP.

(also fwiw: i didn't like casino royale, quantum of solace was much better, skyfall is S-tier, i skipped spectre bc i couldn't get it from work fast enough and was impatient, and i loved no time to die.)

the long and short of it is that i got blue (red team), who watched other RT stuff but never rvb itself, to watch the entirety of rvb for the first time starting in january, and blue (red team) roped in bacoose and alyssa too so we all ended up just re/watching the whole series together. it was DELIGHTFUL. honestly, BGC has aged shockingly well for something that's very steeped in early 00s Gamer Guy Humor. andy the bomb was by far the worst part of BGC, but he was never ever the best part and aged even more poorly than anything else, lol. the PSAs were also tremendously fucking funny, especially the fucking hddvd one. holy shit. that aged spectacularly. fire safety and columbo day were also excellent on a rewatch.

other short-form thoughts: 9 wasn't as bad as i'd remembered, and 10 was... about as not-good as i'd remembered in the PFL parts. i'd rewatched 11 and 12 while starting to write, but hadn't watched 13 start to finish for a while till we got there together; it was really, really good. 15 was also not good, but so worth it to hear alyssa scream at the temple of procreation bit. 16 is far and away my least favorite season and i'd go so far as to say that i hated it. 17 was so unbelievably good that i still can't wrap my head around it.

some assorted Posts i made during this whole endeavor:

• rewatching rvb9
• rewatching rvb10
• close rewatch of rvb11
• close rewatch of (half of) rvb12
• rewatching mercs trilogy
• more thoughts on mercs
• rvb15 (i remembered nothing from my previous watch)
• rvb16
• rvb17

i am still in shock over this season. "you know i love you, right?" had me actually, genuinely choking up. that meant so much to me in ways that i cannot put words to. holy shit. holy shit! i'm so genuinely speechless over how much i loved this season. part of it might have to do with how much i hated 16 (lmao) and all of us were lowkey dreading 17 when we got there, but it was just so good. it was SO GOOD. the gags all hit, the emotional moments were so incredibly good, and aside from the aforementioned Moment, it's really the last line that keeps getting me: shame i don't speak spanish.

funnee joke show about gamers stuck on a map got me to feel emotions again twelve years down the road. i'm so, so glad that i ended up watching 16 and 17; even though i really did not like 16, it was absolutely worth it to get 17 as a follow-up. the "rules" for time-hopping were really fun, the gags were so fucking funny (the time-travel skit from season 3........), the genuine moments were so, so good, this was such a good season to "end" rvb on. (none of us plan to watch zero, but we did watch some QvsA and i fully admit to being baited to hell by the grimmons. lmao.)

this was an interesting process. this is the longest fic i've written since P vs NP, and given how i wrote P vs NP, i think it's more accurate to call NQ the longest fic i've written. P vs NP was functionally three separate fics written at three separate points in time that i mashed together, and when i reread it a few weeks ago, i felt that very keenly. i made some notes in my ereading app as i was going and i think at some point i'm going to do one more editing pass on P vs NP (ha, a tenth-anniversary editing pass... imagine).

NQ started out a little different than it ended up, but not by too much, honestly. i used up a massive chunk of my writing notebook on this fic, and it felt great to flip through it after i finished posting and feel like i made all the best choices to get what i wanted out of this fic. the breadth of it was originally going to be much smaller, but i like that it ended up being a bigger.

i think the way i structured weekly posting was a good method for me — it broke up the editing process into smaller chunks in a way that ended up working really well. the last two full chapters were very bare-bones in my first draft and i got them fleshed out really nicely between editing everything else, which i'd been worried i wouldn't be able to do. i also stuck to my weekly posting schedule! there were a few times where i was worried that irl stuff might keep me from posting on my posting day, but it ended up working out. i mentioned this in a different post but breaking this fic down into chapters also really helped me write it; my writing was much better thanks to the chapter structure, and i feel like i made better choices because the chapters helped me either rein in or expand the scope of a given thing. in my usual document i keep for cut fragments i've got a whopping 9,361 words this time around. i had several moments where i got 500-1000 words into some scene and realized it wouldn't fit at all; it always feels good to have a moment of realization that something just won't work.

i gotta say, though, the posting part sucked. it sucked real bad. it's hard to phrase this in a way that doesn't feel like a toddler tantrum but jeez, would've been nice to get regular comments. :( generally speaking i work pretty hard on not being put off by lack of attention when it comes to creative endeavors, but it really, really stung this time around. i had a stretch of weeks where every monday i sat down to do a final editing pass and could barely get myself to do it because it felt pointless. the last chapter and the epilogue felt like that, too. it sucks! i really tried hard to not let it get me down so hard, but it did. at least it's posted now.

regardless, i'm very proud of this fic. i wrote exactly what i wanted to write and it made me realize that i'm still improving; i'm a better writer now than i was in 2020 when i finished P vs NP, or in 2021 when i rewrote part 1 of P vs NP. it really truly almost does make me want to rewrite P vs NP, and i think eventually i'll give in to the urge to at least post an outline of what P vs NP would look like if i did rewrite it to be canon-compliant. in the earlier stages of NQ i was worried that i'd fucked myself over unnecessarily by binding NQ's "felix survived" story to the world-state at the end of P vs NP, but now that it's done, i think NQ's ending and the way it closes the loop on canon is great. not to toot my own horn or anything. :B

all in all: very satisfied with this fic. glad that it was this that pulled me back to rvb and that i got so much out of it.

EDIT: also tracked word count in gdocs vs. AO3 (per chapter) this time around! it was very interesting: gdocs has 51,630 words and AO3 has 51,765 words, and the word count discrepancy was all over the place. some chapters had a difference of about 10-15 words (and seemingly no pattern as to whether AO3 would be less or more than gdocs), and one chapter was about 90 words less in AO3 than gdocs. three chapters had the exact same word count. 🤷‍♂️ i can only guess this has something to do with how AO3 and gdocs each parse hyphenations.