![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(I am pretty overwhelmed by the fan tumblr right now. You guys floor me. Absolutely floor me. ♥)
I went poking about my files to try and find an early draft of the ch1 party scene where Boomer and Bubbles chat on a porch swing (note that in the final draft Boomer was not even remotely interested in Bubbles until ch2), but it's hiding somewhere and I can't track it down. I do, however, have an early draft of Brick encountering Blossom in the dance studio. The final draft of this is the scene that winds up getting drawn a lot :)
( This pass is all from Blossom's POV. )
It's not evident from just this segment, but this was written well before Brick's character had become firmly defined in my head. As soon as I started reading I remembered. Originally (and I mean YEARS ago) TEF!Brick was a much more apathetic character, a tried and true Stoic with a capital S, significantly different from his eventual iteration due to the fact that even his interactions with Blossom had little to no emotional effect on his person. As a high schooler I think I was really fascinated with the completely emotionless, practically-a-robot character developing emotions and falling in love, but trying to foist that archetype onto Brick didn't make him mysterious or interesting - it just made him super hella boring. When I used to mull this over in my head a part of me would always go "But WHY should anybody want him to get with Blossom if he doesn't even seem to care?" And I'm talking about a character that's very nearly the opposite of what TEF!Brick is now - his current iteration's stoicism is, frankly, kind of a put-on, a mask that he dons in an effort to appear more mature and adult, but it is clear when he is under duress just how much anger and resentment he's got welled up inside him. (I'm probably talking about this too much, now.)
Anyway, his previous iteration - the genuinely emotionless one, the Spock!Brick - just wasn't a character that I could see Blossom wanting to be with. I mean, I can understand it from a story construction standpoint - oh, here is this emotionless robot boy, but he can be taught to love, if only the right girl finds him! And, well, that's obviously a problematic trope, not to mention wildly out of character and kind of demeaning with regards to Blossom, that she should want to "fix" him with her kisses. She should want to be with him because she wants to be with him, not because she believes she has something to teach him about the magical, transgressive, healing power of ~love~. It's not like women are magical founts of knowledge when it comes to this stuff, despite what the romance section may tell us. (Which, incidentally, is more about fantasy than it is about actual love.)
And that all aside, a character being completely robotic has much less at stake. I personally couldn't think of a good reason why I would want him to succeed despite his flaws, because his only flaw was that he didn't care. True, current!Brick doesn't care either, but he's also massively egocentric and selfish and proud, whereas this Brick was basically a blank slate to be projected upon. And I don't like blank slates. Blank slates are blank slates, not characters. Characters have something to lose.
Oof, that was a long aside. There's more in my head about this, especially as it pertains to depictions of the various "romantic leads" in the PpG fandom - mostly revolving around fannish depictions of the RrB, and Ace - but then I'm going to digress completely into yammering on about woobifying characters in a cheap attempt to get us to like them, but who has five hours? HA. Not I!
Why did he even ask her if she would miss him? That was a completely unmotivated question. But hey, that's why it's tfr.
I went poking about my files to try and find an early draft of the ch1 party scene where Boomer and Bubbles chat on a porch swing (note that in the final draft Boomer was not even remotely interested in Bubbles until ch2), but it's hiding somewhere and I can't track it down. I do, however, have an early draft of Brick encountering Blossom in the dance studio. The final draft of this is the scene that winds up getting drawn a lot :)
( This pass is all from Blossom's POV. )
It's not evident from just this segment, but this was written well before Brick's character had become firmly defined in my head. As soon as I started reading I remembered. Originally (and I mean YEARS ago) TEF!Brick was a much more apathetic character, a tried and true Stoic with a capital S, significantly different from his eventual iteration due to the fact that even his interactions with Blossom had little to no emotional effect on his person. As a high schooler I think I was really fascinated with the completely emotionless, practically-a-robot character developing emotions and falling in love, but trying to foist that archetype onto Brick didn't make him mysterious or interesting - it just made him super hella boring. When I used to mull this over in my head a part of me would always go "But WHY should anybody want him to get with Blossom if he doesn't even seem to care?" And I'm talking about a character that's very nearly the opposite of what TEF!Brick is now - his current iteration's stoicism is, frankly, kind of a put-on, a mask that he dons in an effort to appear more mature and adult, but it is clear when he is under duress just how much anger and resentment he's got welled up inside him. (I'm probably talking about this too much, now.)
Anyway, his previous iteration - the genuinely emotionless one, the Spock!Brick - just wasn't a character that I could see Blossom wanting to be with. I mean, I can understand it from a story construction standpoint - oh, here is this emotionless robot boy, but he can be taught to love, if only the right girl finds him! And, well, that's obviously a problematic trope, not to mention wildly out of character and kind of demeaning with regards to Blossom, that she should want to "fix" him with her kisses. She should want to be with him because she wants to be with him, not because she believes she has something to teach him about the magical, transgressive, healing power of ~love~. It's not like women are magical founts of knowledge when it comes to this stuff, despite what the romance section may tell us. (Which, incidentally, is more about fantasy than it is about actual love.)
And that all aside, a character being completely robotic has much less at stake. I personally couldn't think of a good reason why I would want him to succeed despite his flaws, because his only flaw was that he didn't care. True, current!Brick doesn't care either, but he's also massively egocentric and selfish and proud, whereas this Brick was basically a blank slate to be projected upon. And I don't like blank slates. Blank slates are blank slates, not characters. Characters have something to lose.
Oof, that was a long aside. There's more in my head about this, especially as it pertains to depictions of the various "romantic leads" in the PpG fandom - mostly revolving around fannish depictions of the RrB, and Ace - but then I'm going to digress completely into yammering on about woobifying characters in a cheap attempt to get us to like them, but who has five hours? HA. Not I!
Why did he even ask her if she would miss him? That was a completely unmotivated question. But hey, that's why it's tfr.
