I'm running out of ways to work "trivia" into my entry subjects

[essbeejay]

To the anon who requested playlists, still working on it! For the time being you can check out the aural pleasures tag for a small smattering of songs I use for inspiration/associate with various characters/pairings/scenarios.

Anyway, ch6a trivia! LJ's new way of displaying lj-cuts still pisses me off, so if you want a less ugly looking page like me, just click on the title of this entry to pull all the trivia up.

"That reminds me, when is the strangling supposed to be happening?" Boomer queried. "Can I pencil you in at five? You've gotta give me some time to unpack first."
Favorite line from ch6a. It seems like Boomer gets quite a few of my favorite lines...

• The first title for this chapter comes from Fall Out Boy's Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes; the second from Mayday Parade's If You Wanted a Song Written About You, All You Had to Do was Ask.
• Boomer, his electric slung over his shoulder and the case that housed his acoustic in his hands, singled out the first bedroom door he laid eyes on and made a beeline for it... “I can't believe we get our own rooms!” Butch stopped in front of her and grinned. - My reasoning for Boomer's and Butch's reactions here is that back at JS, the boys share one bedroom (like the girls do in Townsville). Boomer, who's particularly conscious of his status in the pack, makes a more concerted effort to get first pick of the rooms. He's gotta take his little victories where he can.
• “You know this stupid vacation wasn't even Smith's idea?” he interrupted, face darkening at the memory....She was just past her mid-twenties herself and had never raised a child, but she knew better. - Just for the record, I absolutely despise these two paragraphs. Every time I re-read them I cringe. Brick's dialogue is awkward, he doesn't sound like a teenager, and there's way too much tell instead of show going on with Penny.
• “The control pad is here. Access code is zero-four-nine-nine.” - The access code for Brick's desk is the month and year that “The Rowdyruff Boys” first aired.
• She tapped in the combo and a large holographic screen flickered to life above the desk. - At the time I wrote this I became hyper-conscious of the fact that I had seen a screen exactly like this in Minority Report and Iron Man and thought I was being too much of a copycat. Within a few years it didn't matter, since every action movie involving tech of any sort has screens like this.
• A variety of windows instantly spread across the screen, and Penny touched a finger to one of them, then dragged it around the screen, pointing out where each window would take him-e-mail here, personal files here, a simple dictionary password hack program here... - This is quasi-pseudo setup for Butch using the password hack program on the files he “borrowed” from Mitch in ch9.
• “And look, you can call us up anytime you like,” Penny said, tapping in the number to headquarters and waving at Paul when he picked up. - Paul is named for any number of Pauls who worked on the show, take your pick. There's at least two of them.
• Butch and Boomer were already diving into traffic, dodging the honking cars as they jaywalked-well, it was more of a jayrun-across the street to the mall. - IT IS RIDICULOUS HOW PROUD I AM OF THIS JOKE OKAY
• Navigating the street was one thing, but navigating the mall parking lot was another thing entirely. It felt like hours before he made it through the entrance, and it had taken a supreme amount of self-control to not utterly destroy the vehicle of anyone who honked at him. - I made a conscious decision for the boys not to fly or float en route to the mall, as that's the sort of thing I thought would definitely catch the girls' attention.
• Butch coughed and spit on the floor, ignoring the looks of shocked disgust people threw him. - For some reason I was really happy with this little detail I threw in for Butch. Generally in the dialogue-heavy scenes, I don't want larges swaths of story where there's just a bunch of talking heads, but it gets hard to think of little actions for them to do all the time. I thought this was fitting and suitably disgusting and a nice little character moment nested within what is some rather expository dialogue. Also, shit, that's supposed to be spat, not spit. Damn it.
• Butch hoisted himself up so he was sitting on the railing, legs dangling over the edge...He twisted, planted his feet against the rail, and, still grasping the banister, leaned back to watch the downstairs mall patrons upside down. - That's kind of the great thing about Butch. Compared to his brothers, he's such a physical character that I can write him doing stupid crazy shit like spitting on the floor or hanging off a mall railing and it makes the scene a little more interesting. Well, to me, at least.
• The A/V equpiment all suddenly exploded to life, color sparking across the screens and high energy music blasting out of the speakers. - If you would really like to know what I envision as the music for the girls' promo video, it's their transformation music from that shitty PpGZ anime they made. I think it's the track titled “PpGZ.” Whatever, it's the one that plays when the three of them are all transforming at the same time, not the individual sequences.
• He halted, eyes widening as he took in the store display. Three giant banners were displayed in the windows of this shoe store, each featuring one of the girls full body from the chin down, their lips just visible at the top. - Everybody's seen Jupitrie's awesome rendition of the shoe ads, yes? Okay, good.
• “Thank you,” Brick said in a voice that sounded less like an expression of gratitude and more like a threat. “Now let's go.”...“Bubbles! We have to get moving! We're here for publicity purposes, not to go shopping!” - Here's that two sides of the same coin thing going on again. In their respective scenarios, Brick and Blossom are more interested in getting their siblings to move, while their siblings are more interested in goofing off.
• The redhead sighed. Brick couldn't believe that even at, what, sixteen? Seventeen? She was still wearing that ridiculous bow. - Two things here-one, since this chapter is ostensibly from the boys' perspective-third person POV, yes, but the narrative is following them-the narrative itself doesn't start referring to the girls by their names until after the girls have all addressed each other by name. Granted, the boys probably figured out their names back when they were younger and fought all the time, but I'm not convinced they would've cared to remember them. Two, Brick and Blossom are each quite opinionated about the other's accessory of choice, because they are both pots and kettles.
• Brick could see them coming and motioned hastily at his brothers to back out over into the next aisle....Brick paused and looked up at the genre of their aisle. His eye twitched....This was getting ridiculous. The boys scrambled into the next aisle as Bubbles bounced over. - I know the boys backing out into aisle after aisle was very ridiculous, which is why the narrative called attention to it. This was my screwball comedy moment. I am a sucker for a good, old-fashioned screwball comedy. Also, it just occurred to me, but the type of DVD store they went into is a relic of the early aughts (2000s) that doesn't really exist anymore in malls or shopping centers. Uh, Townsville is just... behind the times. Yeah. That's the reason. Definitely not because the author had a derp moment.
• Brick's eyes were glowing red and murderous as he glared at his brothers, who instantly pointed at each other in silence. - This is one of my favorite siblings moments between the boys.
• They were surrounded; there hadn't been enough time for Bubbles to make it to her sisters' side of the store, and now she was doubling back, closing in on the last aisle where the boys were. They had nowhere else to go. - When I first wrote this the geography made sense to me, but on my subsequent re-reads I felt it didn't make any sense at all. OH WELL, NO ONE COMPLAINED \o/
• Brick turned to his brothers and motioned: I am going to strangle you both to death by each other's intestines when we get home. - I'm still not sure how this could be translated with hand gestures, but I also believe in Brick's power to communicate threatening messages to his brothers, as he's probably had a lot of practice.
• There was a rumble then, one that was faint and undetectable to the average human, but six boys and girls in a movie store felt it. - I really like this moment of unintentional unity between the six of them.
• “Cocaine is a hell of a drug,” Boomer said in a low, mocking voice, and at the looks people threw at him, he cried indignantly, “What? Are you kidding me? You guys never watched Chappelle's Show?” - ALL THE TEF READERS HAD BETTER UNDERSTAND THIS REFERENCE OR I WILL BE VERY DISAPPOINTED IN ALL OF YOU
• “Some timing, huh?” the woman interviewing her said. “On a day when you're being honored for saving the mall from massive destruction by Mojo Jojo's Giant Robo Jojo-” - The way the timing of this works out (in relation to the other “prequel” chapter), the girls' fight with Mojo and Buttercup's breakup (ch7a) actually occurs before the boys' return (ch6a). Time-wise, it's been roughly a week in between each chapter... but the latter event is what gets covered first in the story. If I remember correctly, it was ordered this way because when I asked Team Awesome which they would prefer to see first, the boys' return chapter won out, and ordering them chronologically didn't matter because they were prequel chapters anyway. I think it wound up working nicely with the narrative, especially since Buttercup has her big talk with Mitch and then Butch in ch8.

Originally posted at http://essbeejay.dreamwidth.org/109098.html.