Author’s Notes

I don’t like Author’s Notes. I love to read them, but I kind of knee-jerk against writing them. If I wrote the story with anything within spitting distance of competence, I shouldn’t have to explain it, and if I have to explain something, I suck and should have written an essay, instead of a work of fiction. (Or I could blame the audience for ‘not getting it,’ but my ego’s not quite Joss-sized.)

I wrote the beginning of this during Intersections, but ultimately decided it was too dark, and it sat gathering dust on my hard-drive. Having already made Xander a vengeance demon, and a hyena, and a Bot, and killed him a time or three, I figured Intersections was dark enough without ripping his eyes out and making him a Bringer, too.

The Bringer bit was entirely past-tense in the original story, literally a two-sentence blurb about how Willow and Xander ended up in the position they occupied in what is now Part Nine of a way-too-long story.

Various characters got *wicked* short shrift. This story covers half of season seven, and I just couldn’t write any significant amount of Anya or Dawn or Andrew or Faith, without it just getting totally out of control. Some characters, like Wood, I just plum forgot (no great loss, IMO). Plus it’s all from Xander’s whacked-out unreliable perspective, so he’s not gonna really know, or much care, what’s going on in Amanda’s mind.  Occasionally I go AU for no real reason, originally there was no Dawn in this story, but now there is, but I got rid of Tara, because Oz's death would be more relevant to the conversation, simple as that.

The most annoying part? Xander is being driven crazy here. He’s being fed a diet of lies, false perceptions and just enough truth to play into his deepest insecurities, and stoke the absolute worst parts of human nature by something that’s been doing this for a couple thousand years and has some pretty sharp knives in its drawer. And he’s the freaking narrator! What was I thinking? It’s *so* easy to hate Xander, to call him abusive, racist, condescending, patronizing, blah-blah-rhubarb, and here I’ve got him using words like ‘slut’ and ‘fag.’ I don’t look forward to people pointing at this and saying it validates what a creep Xander is, because that will just prove that I completely failed at what I set out to do here.