Commentary - Nothing Special
So, I asked for fic commentary requests. (If you want to put in a super-late request, feel free.)
This is for eowyn_315, who requested a commentary for Nothing Special. You should probably read that before looking at this commentary.
The original fic still looks like it did, and my notes are the bits in blockquotes.
Nothing Special
This was written for the prompt of “shindig”. I was thinking about Buffy’s birthdays, and realised that the only birthday we didn’t see on-screen was the one in season 7. So I started wondering…
At breakfast, there were no spoons. Somehow, despite Willow’s roster of Washing Dishes Duty, stuck up neatly on the fridge, they’d still managed to run completely out of clean spoons.
It’s actually my housemate’s fault, mostly. I was on my third day of trying to figure out how to write about Buffy’s birthday, and she walked in from the kitchen and announced that there were no clean spoons in the drawer. And, rather than trying to solve this dilemma by helping her wash dishes, I promptly grabbed my notebook and wrote this whole thing out in one hit.
I just liked the idea of Buffy’s day being made up of completely mundane things. Things which aren’t actually all that mundane, really - like weapons training - but seem mundane to her. Especially given the mood she’s in.
She complained - which was fair enough, really.
And then Andrew said “There Is No Spoon” in a dramatic voice, and him, Dawn, and Amanda started a long, rambly discussion about virtual reality spoons, and if there were “no spoons” if they weren’t there in the first place, or if it was a double negative which cancelled out something vital in the space-time continuum of inherent spoon-ness… at which point Buffy gave up and started eating her cereal with the pancake-mix ladle.
Dawn, Andrew, and Amanda being the three geekiest options, and people who I love to write hanging out.
The conversation is, of course, about The Matrix.
Eating cereal with a huge ladle is messy, but entertainingly so.
There were no flowers, or card, or special cooked breakfast, either. But she hadn’t been expecting it.
The first indication that today is supposed to be special.
I can see Joyce making a big deal of a “special birthday breakfast” - and in season 6, Dawn and Willow probably would have too. But this year, everyone’s a bit busy.
- - - - -
At work, there were two jocks with black eyes and anger management issues, one sophomore with a stepfather she hated, one AV-club nerd with a crush on someone, one junior with too much homework, and three kids trying to get out of class by faking childhood traumas.
(Basically, the same sort of people she was dealing with in Help.)
Principal Wood sighed and said “It’s a never-ending cycle,” and Buffy nodded silently.
There was no lunchtime phonecall. And no cheery well-wishers. But she had a good day anyway.
This is set between Potential and The Killer In Me - so Robin Wood isn’t part of the team yet.
- - - - -
At the training session, there weren’t enough weapons.
Really.
She’d spent seven years building up an arsenal, with her own weapons chest, her own stakes, her own axes, her very own rocket launcher… and with Spike taking two of them, her taking one, the entire gang keeping one each, just in case, and now eight Potentials each lining up and choosing something to practise with, there just weren’t enough to go round.
Xander said he’d go and collect the emergency stash from his apartment, and hopefully they wouldn’t run out for a bit longer. Buffy was just glad no-one had asked to use the rocket launcher.
I have this thing for mentioning the rocket launcher. It’s just so fun.
And there weren’t any streamers, or music, or party hats. There wasn’t time for anything like that, these days.
Buffy spends most of the fic justifying the non-party-ness. “There isn’t time”, or “she’s not expecting it”… which is all there to say that she knows it’s trivial and silly, but she’d still kinda like to have something trivial and silly…
- - - - -
At the end of the day, there were a lot of tired girls going back upstairs, discussing the sword-fighting technique they’d just started learning.
I needed to dispose of every member of the household, except for Dawn. I figured I’d have training finish late - so most of them could be asleep.
Willow and Anya had fallen asleep on the couch - the TV still playing the last scenes of a black-and-white movie.
Andrew was curled up on the floor in a sleeping bag, already softly snoring.
(They all fell asleep mid-movie.)
Xander had gone home. Giles had gone to the airport again. Spike had gone out to find cigarettes. And Buffy went up the stairs.
Giles is heading off to pick up yet another Potential. And Spike’s still got a trigger - and is trying to keep out of the way.
There was no big burny demon. There was no psycho vampire after her mother. There was no Council testing her every reaction. There was no hellgod hunting down her sister. There was no boyfriend losing his soul. There were no vengeance demons. There were no chaos worshippers. There was no-one yelling “Surprise!”
The “burny demon” is The Judge, from Surprise, the psycho vampire is Kralik, from Helpless, ditto for the Council, the hellgod is Glory, in Blood Ties, the boyfriend is Angel from Surprise (obviously), the vengeance demon in question is Halfrek, from Older and Far Away, the chaos worshipper is Ethan, from A New Man, and the people yelling “surprise” are from Surprise…
It was utterly uneventful.
None of those birthdays were particularly fun, but Buffy’s still a bit wistful.
- - - - -
At bedtime, there was her bed.
But she couldn’t get into it and fall comfortably asleep, because her little sister was sitting in the middle of it, holding a cupcake.
Yay for Dawn!
I went back-and-forth so much on this. At first it was Dawn, then it was Dawn and Spike, then it was Willow, then it was Dawn and Willow, then it was Xander, and then it was Dawn again. In the end, Dawn won, mainly because I love the sister dynamic between the two of them.
“What’s this?”
This, Dawn informed her, was a cupcake. With - tadaa! - a candle in it.
(Yes, she said “tadaa” in the middle of a sentence. It’s the kind of sentence I can picture being really fun.)
“…because I figured, all you have to do is blow out the candle, eat the cake, and listen to me singing. Five minutes, tops. As birthday parties go, it’s relatively safe and unlikely to end in disembowelling or world-endage.”
As well as changing my mind about who it was, I also changed my mind a few times about what was happening. For a brief period there, it was a full-on surprise party.
But I decided that Buffy has too many people around right now. Whenever we see nice moments happening in season 7, they tend to involve everyone else not being there - either coincidentally, or because one of the characters has deliberately gotten everyone else out of the way. Dawn has the same idea, here.
And it was late, and she was tired, and tomorrow she’d have to get up and fight over clean cutlery again. And really, she didn’t need anyone fussing over her, or anything this trivial. She had a war to win.
But…
There was cake. And her sister singing tunelessly as she blew out the candle. And a goodnight hug.
(Dawn really can’t sing very well.)
And for five short minutes, Buffy had a birthday.
Yay! Birthdayness!
I hope you found this interesting!
This is for eowyn_315, who requested a commentary for Nothing Special. You should probably read that before looking at this commentary.
The original fic still looks like it did, and my notes are the bits in blockquotes.
Nothing Special
This was written for the prompt of “shindig”. I was thinking about Buffy’s birthdays, and realised that the only birthday we didn’t see on-screen was the one in season 7. So I started wondering…
At breakfast, there were no spoons. Somehow, despite Willow’s roster of Washing Dishes Duty, stuck up neatly on the fridge, they’d still managed to run completely out of clean spoons.
It’s actually my housemate’s fault, mostly. I was on my third day of trying to figure out how to write about Buffy’s birthday, and she walked in from the kitchen and announced that there were no clean spoons in the drawer. And, rather than trying to solve this dilemma by helping her wash dishes, I promptly grabbed my notebook and wrote this whole thing out in one hit.
I just liked the idea of Buffy’s day being made up of completely mundane things. Things which aren’t actually all that mundane, really - like weapons training - but seem mundane to her. Especially given the mood she’s in.
She complained - which was fair enough, really.
And then Andrew said “There Is No Spoon” in a dramatic voice, and him, Dawn, and Amanda started a long, rambly discussion about virtual reality spoons, and if there were “no spoons” if they weren’t there in the first place, or if it was a double negative which cancelled out something vital in the space-time continuum of inherent spoon-ness… at which point Buffy gave up and started eating her cereal with the pancake-mix ladle.
Dawn, Andrew, and Amanda being the three geekiest options, and people who I love to write hanging out.
The conversation is, of course, about The Matrix.
Eating cereal with a huge ladle is messy, but entertainingly so.
There were no flowers, or card, or special cooked breakfast, either. But she hadn’t been expecting it.
The first indication that today is supposed to be special.
I can see Joyce making a big deal of a “special birthday breakfast” - and in season 6, Dawn and Willow probably would have too. But this year, everyone’s a bit busy.
- - - - -
At work, there were two jocks with black eyes and anger management issues, one sophomore with a stepfather she hated, one AV-club nerd with a crush on someone, one junior with too much homework, and three kids trying to get out of class by faking childhood traumas.
(Basically, the same sort of people she was dealing with in Help.)
Principal Wood sighed and said “It’s a never-ending cycle,” and Buffy nodded silently.
There was no lunchtime phonecall. And no cheery well-wishers. But she had a good day anyway.
This is set between Potential and The Killer In Me - so Robin Wood isn’t part of the team yet.
- - - - -
At the training session, there weren’t enough weapons.
Really.
She’d spent seven years building up an arsenal, with her own weapons chest, her own stakes, her own axes, her very own rocket launcher… and with Spike taking two of them, her taking one, the entire gang keeping one each, just in case, and now eight Potentials each lining up and choosing something to practise with, there just weren’t enough to go round.
Xander said he’d go and collect the emergency stash from his apartment, and hopefully they wouldn’t run out for a bit longer. Buffy was just glad no-one had asked to use the rocket launcher.
I have this thing for mentioning the rocket launcher. It’s just so fun.
And there weren’t any streamers, or music, or party hats. There wasn’t time for anything like that, these days.
Buffy spends most of the fic justifying the non-party-ness. “There isn’t time”, or “she’s not expecting it”… which is all there to say that she knows it’s trivial and silly, but she’d still kinda like to have something trivial and silly…
- - - - -
At the end of the day, there were a lot of tired girls going back upstairs, discussing the sword-fighting technique they’d just started learning.
I needed to dispose of every member of the household, except for Dawn. I figured I’d have training finish late - so most of them could be asleep.
Willow and Anya had fallen asleep on the couch - the TV still playing the last scenes of a black-and-white movie.
Andrew was curled up on the floor in a sleeping bag, already softly snoring.
(They all fell asleep mid-movie.)
Xander had gone home. Giles had gone to the airport again. Spike had gone out to find cigarettes. And Buffy went up the stairs.
Giles is heading off to pick up yet another Potential. And Spike’s still got a trigger - and is trying to keep out of the way.
There was no big burny demon. There was no psycho vampire after her mother. There was no Council testing her every reaction. There was no hellgod hunting down her sister. There was no boyfriend losing his soul. There were no vengeance demons. There were no chaos worshippers. There was no-one yelling “Surprise!”
The “burny demon” is The Judge, from Surprise, the psycho vampire is Kralik, from Helpless, ditto for the Council, the hellgod is Glory, in Blood Ties, the boyfriend is Angel from Surprise (obviously), the vengeance demon in question is Halfrek, from Older and Far Away, the chaos worshipper is Ethan, from A New Man, and the people yelling “surprise” are from Surprise…
It was utterly uneventful.
None of those birthdays were particularly fun, but Buffy’s still a bit wistful.
- - - - -
At bedtime, there was her bed.
But she couldn’t get into it and fall comfortably asleep, because her little sister was sitting in the middle of it, holding a cupcake.
Yay for Dawn!
I went back-and-forth so much on this. At first it was Dawn, then it was Dawn and Spike, then it was Willow, then it was Dawn and Willow, then it was Xander, and then it was Dawn again. In the end, Dawn won, mainly because I love the sister dynamic between the two of them.
“What’s this?”
This, Dawn informed her, was a cupcake. With - tadaa! - a candle in it.
(Yes, she said “tadaa” in the middle of a sentence. It’s the kind of sentence I can picture being really fun.)
“…because I figured, all you have to do is blow out the candle, eat the cake, and listen to me singing. Five minutes, tops. As birthday parties go, it’s relatively safe and unlikely to end in disembowelling or world-endage.”
As well as changing my mind about who it was, I also changed my mind a few times about what was happening. For a brief period there, it was a full-on surprise party.
But I decided that Buffy has too many people around right now. Whenever we see nice moments happening in season 7, they tend to involve everyone else not being there - either coincidentally, or because one of the characters has deliberately gotten everyone else out of the way. Dawn has the same idea, here.
And it was late, and she was tired, and tomorrow she’d have to get up and fight over clean cutlery again. And really, she didn’t need anyone fussing over her, or anything this trivial. She had a war to win.
But…
There was cake. And her sister singing tunelessly as she blew out the candle. And a goodnight hug.
(Dawn really can’t sing very well.)
And for five short minutes, Buffy had a birthday.
Yay! Birthdayness!
I hope you found this interesting!