#sw&d

Backstory:

If you don't know, earlier in the summer I had a period where I was laid up and during this time I read a lot of fic, including rereading toht. While I was rereading it, I found that like, every sentence of fic is ingrained in my memory (in the way where I couldn't really quote it but every line just perfectly clicked into place as I read it thanks to my memories), and moreover, I was incredibly fond of it, both for the fic itself and the experience I had writing it/talking with people about it/just enjoying the general Catradora fandom at that point in time.

As I read it I edited some very minor things (like, seriously small, I do this a lot when I reread fics and I'm certain absolutely no one notices, but here's the list as an example), like: typos ("is't", etc), adding contractions when their absence felt awkward (mostly in spoken dialogue), and the occasional removal of an italic (I like italics for emphasis, but I've grown to use them less in my new writing as I learned to better utilize implied emphasis and let people read things in their own cadence, no matter how it "should" be delivered/read in my head. However, as previously said, every sentence in this fic is kind of special to me and removing italics modified the "original flow" of the sentences for me, so this was rare. I actually had a sentence I think I removed one from on a previous reread because it was too close to another italic - like I said, I do these minor changes sometimes - and on this read I went "wait something's wrong there's supposed to be an italic here" and I ended up editing it back in. I don't have proof I edited it out previously but I'm sure I did).

As you might have gathered by now, this fic's verse was deep for me. I mention a lot of stuff from their high school years in the fic and its notes. Usually I have an overview idea of their lives before a fic's story and the development of their dynamic up until that point (along with a few key moments), but for this fic I had quite a few scenes that were from before the start of the fic, and only some of them were actually important. An example of an important one is a scene which at least gets described in toht, where Catra and Adora reunite. I always wanted to write that scene in full even with its inclusion in toht. I also just had a lot of facts and ideas that weren't necessarily scenes yet, but I wanted to convey in a scene, either as an offhand mention like a lot of their time in high school is in toht, or as the entire focus of a scene.

In short, I had a handful of scenes from before their college years I'd thought of dating back to when I was first writing/planning the fic (and maybe getting added to over the years/during occasional rereads, I'm not sure), but I never considered writing them down until recently. I was working on a totally separate project that got me thinking about high school shenanigans, which naturally brought me back to toht as I had recently reread it and it was one of my only fics I seriously thought about the character's actual experience in high school for.

Actual notes (you know, like I normally do):

This isn't broken up into chapters because I don't have that much, this is closer to the "fic notes" post I did at the end of 'catcher'.

The only real thing I "changed" in the toht edit I actually only changed after I started posting sw&d. In my earlier fics, including toht, I had there be a seven months' age difference between Catra and Adora. I've talked about the headcannon this stems from before, but basically I headcannoned Catra as the older one. Later, I discovered their "canon birthdays" (which I think was just a graphic that dreamworks posted on Twitter or something?) and changed Catra to being 3 months older in subsequent fics to fit with it. that caused a problem when it came to a toht prequel, because they were both eighteen by the end of their senior year in high school (legal drinking age is 18 in this verse and they mention they could do it, not to mention catra's summer in clubs). with seven months between them, it was also more likely than not that they would end up in separate grades. I didn't want to do the math to find where exactly I could place their birthdays to circumvent the age-based grade cutoffs (which do have exceptions, but I digress) and also meet the age deadline requirements, so I just went "fuck it" and went with their canon birthdays. i changed the line from "in seven months' time" to "in a few months' time" in toht because it still felt sacrilegious to change it entirely to three months (as I said, I wanted to preserve toht as it was), but when placing the mentions of birthdays in sw&d, i did it based off these canon birthdays. in my heart, its still a seven months age gap and i dont care about the inconsistency, but at least now it isn't directly contradictory.

In sw&d, school isn't really the setting of a lot of scenes, but high school is still a feature of the setting in the same way college is in toht. For sw&d, I only have a few scenes even set in school, but Catra and Adora are facing typical problems for their school age, especially from non-traditional families. All that said, when I went to write this, what I was especially interested in writing about them and their families.

Final toht-related note, is that I made an effort to bring back some formatting from toht. My writing style has changed since then, but there were little things like using parenthesis and following the same capitalization for the fic/chapter titles that I did. I also did chapter summaries in the same style of toht even though I never do them anymore.

Chapter two starts with a scene I've thought about a lot (Adora seeing Catra's scars again for the first time since reuniting, and them being revealed to Glimmer and Bow) and then just naturally filled out with what was needed to complete that and what was implied/discussed in toht. The final scene was supposed to be a short stinger but I just couldn't stop writing.

The interlude wasn't supposed to be a thing, but I realized I had a few scenes I imagined from other perspectives and so, while writing the real chapter 3 (this fic goes: chapter 1, chapter 2, interlude, chapter 3, chapter 4) I went back and inserted some of the interlude. I then worked on the interlude here and there as I worked on the rest of the fic, but because I wanted to leave it open to add content all throughout their high school years if it seemed right, I couldn't post the interlude until I had basically finished the fic in case I wrote anything, thought about it from the families' perspective, and was like "no actually that needs to go in".

The scene with Catra and Scorpia at breakfast in chapter 4 was actually supposed to go: Catra POV for that night, Rose POV for the morning, but I couldn't have the Rose scene in the interlude before what preceded it, and I couldn't just tack an interlude onto the end of the fic and ruin the final ending line I really wanted, so I ended up writing both halves of the scene in one go from Catra's perspective.

The story with Rogelio/the naming of the Fright Zone was basically that it was winter and Rogelio felt like he was getting sick, so he crawled under the radiator to warm up and nap. He slept soundly, for several hours, and Shadow Weaver thought he had run away when she realized he wasn't there and no one had seen him. She started threatening and abusing the kids trying to get one to confess what they saw or where he went (because she was sure he wouldn't have been able to plan and get away without help) and the trauma of the incident led to one of the kids christening the house the Fright Zone because it's a fucking hellscape, and it stuck.

The backpack Adora and Catra have during the scene where they get caught is their emergency bolt bag. Adora had an old backpack that was ratty she had been hauling around which Angella replaced shortly after she moved in with them, so that became their fist bolt bag. Catra already had a bolt bag ready before she even reached Scorpia's home given how often she had to move. They basically just swapped bags when they reunited so if something went wrong at the other's house, they could come to them and be prepared.

In the scene with Catra and Scorpia watching Tangled, Catra started being bratty and watched upside down once Mother Gothel started getting manipulative because she really wasn't comfortable but absolutely wasn't going to admit that a Disney movie could make her uncomfortable (you can have trauma responses to anything, but she couldn't handle "expressing weakness").

Adora got mad in the mentioned scene of Angella being short with her because she didn't view it as fair. It's kind of easy to leave out that Adora has a problem with lashing out when emotional too, mostly because what she does is knock stuff over and kick it when she's frustrated with herself. In this AU, I interpreted it as a "minor anger problem" with when things are unfair, AKA when she fails despite trying her hardest or when she feels someone has set her up for failure, and so it is unfairly imminent.

Because toht was from the very start of me writing AUs, it's also before I came up with things like Winterfest (hence the mention of Christmas) or Catra's full dietary restrictions (hence her eating waffles in the final chapter of toht and fries in sw&d). It felt a bit weird to be writing sw&d without these "constants" that I developed probably not long after this fic, but it was also fun to do something different.

Adora (internally) says "Her heart feels bad" in chapter 3, which normally would be weirdly ambiguous and I would consider awkward writing, but for Adora - especially like, sixteen year old Adora - it was incredibly fitting because that girl doesn't know What is going on in her chest, just that it hurts sometimes when she has certain thoughts. It also came across as kind of juvenile to me which was, again, perfect for this fic.

The scene with Adora being unable to sleep and sneaking Catra in is something that has been brewing since toht, when Catra mentions in chapter one how Adora is stressed, anxious, and overworks herself so Catra is the one that picks her up and helps her relax (slash survive).

Catra getting all tense at the scout appearing was just insecurity and worry that Adora would leave her for a good offer. If she had gotten a great offer, their bond might have been tested, but they have been apart before and absolutely don't want to do it again so Adora wouldn't have accepted it unless they couldn't make college work any other way.

Sometimes one of the characters would say some dumb high schooler shit (Like Adora saying they're "almost adults" because they're almost 18... like absolutely not infantalizing eighteen-year-olds/college freshmen who are managing to live on their own for the first time, but also... no. It's not a magic transformation that takes place at midnight) and it would pain me to write because I know better, but the characters don't, so I would have to include it.

Threading the needle between Catra getting hopeful enough to make a move but staying unsure and insecure enough to believe in the “rejection” coming in toht was an interesting challenge.

There's not a lot of the Adora/Glimmer/Bow dynamic in this because their dynamic in this AU isn't super different from their dynamic in most AUs - or even canon, really - so it wasn't something that had a strong pull on me. The dynamic between the girls and their foster parents, and Catra and Adora with each other, and catra and scorpia as sisters, were all more engaging to me. If this was a full AU on its own, I would have rounded things out more to craft a better story, but this was a side indulgence so I just wrote whatever interested me.