#crunchyplastic

For all of these I'm going to be referring to my Dispatch Flambert Time Travel fic, Second Verse Remix! (which just finished being fully posted :D)

2. Summarize the fic using 3-5 memes

Oh god I've forgotten every single meme ever uuuuuuuhhh I genuinely do not know how to answer this omfg

Something something, oh no he's hot, someone sobbing in the rain, happy ending???

4. What things did you research for this fic?

Sooo much and such weird stuff too. I studied real life Torrance and the area around LA to make sure that the places I referred to seemed to fit or were at least plausible. I had to look up a lot of things about Afgan food, names, and culture for Chad/Nasir's family (and a lot of it I didn't end up using, alas). I researched health care, various injuries and how they're treated to make the hospital scenes more realistic (for the record, if Robert was a real person he would be very, very dead if he'd actually been in the suit when it crashed). Of course, I was also constantly referring to the Dispatch Wiki's timeline to keep track of things, especially since I was going to change stuff up with the whole time-travel thing. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of little things I looked into. Basically a loooot of research went into this fic. My search history was completely bonkers to look through at one point lmao

14. What is your favourite chapter?

oooooh that's so hard! Um, I guess if I had to pick, it would be between Ch. 6: Face to Face or Ch. 15: Workplace Orientation.

For Ch. 6, I loved writing Chad and Robert finally meeting face to face for the first time, as well as Chad getting all up in Slinky's business. It was fun writing Robert getting to see Chad's softer side (for the record, he might not realize it, but this was the moment Robert developed his crush on Chad, which then deepened over time) and the two warming up to each other. The Slinky argument also contributed a lot to Chad's self-loathing issues that ended up rippling through the whole fic, so it was kind of a really important chapter in terms of character development for both Chad and Robert.

Ch. 15, on the other hand, has lots of some of my favourite dialogue and banter. I had so much fun with Chad and Blazer's text conversation, plus Prism giving Chad shit about his taste in men and his critically broken gaydar. And the conversation between Chad and Robert at the end of the massage just came so easily, it made me really enjoy writing that part. Also it was kinda the last bit of fun times before the shit really hit the fan :)

Thank you so much for the ask, my dear! <3

EDIT: I AM JARED 14 you asked for #12 not #14 AAAAAAH

12. Is there any aspect of your fic you considered changing? How would it have been different?

OKAY OKAY SO.

I think I mentioned it in the authors notes at one point, but in the original outline, Robbie doesn't show up at all (spoilers lol), and Robert genuinely gets picked up by some old guy who just found him wandering the streets after the whole time travel reveal goes bad thing. Thankfully one of my betas pointed out that it felt kinda random, so I came up with the Robbie thing, which was much more fun to include lmao

Another change was that my beta Ren had suggested in the early stages that the beginning of the fic might come off a bit info-dumpy, and that it might be more interesting to have the time travel aspect be more of a mystery. I actually did start writing the fic again, but from Robert's POV, before realizing I'd already written too much of Chad's perspective and doing it from Robert's side would have been just as long. If I had gone with Robert's POV, then the time travel thing would have been hidden up until that confrontation, and would have been the big plot twist for the fic.

I actually do have about 5k of Robert's POV written, though. Maybe I'll post it one of these days as like a bonus feature or something XD