It's been just over a week since Avengers: Endgame hit the theaters, and the ending definitely stuck with me.

I've been thinking about it a lot over the past few days - in particular, I've been stewing over the fact that two characters in particular could have had a canon-compatible happy ending, but didn't.

This post contains HUGE spoilers for Endgame, so if you're avoiding those, please bookmark this post and come back to it after you've watched the movie.

Are you spoiler-proofed? OK. Here we go.

The heroic sacrifices of Tony and Natasha were poignant and necessary to the Avengers' victory, but for the two of them to STAY dead was not.

If anything, their continued state of deadness was LESS probable than their resurrection, because if I thought of a canon-compatible way to save them before the movie even ended, Bruce Banner can, too.

If you're still sad about their deaths, and you'd rather mentally live in a world where they're still alive, here's a short fanfic I recently wrote, in which Bruce did what he SHOULD have done in the movie.

If you aren't interested in the fanfic, and just want the fan theory:

As long as the Infinity Stones are present and intact, they maintain a stable flow of time, and removing a person or item from the past doesn't seem to change how that person/thing affected the timeline after they were removed.

Because of this, through the power of quantum time travel, Past Gamora was able to reenter the timeline after the point where she was sacrificed to the Soul Stone, without causing her to be absent in the years between her removal from the timeline and her return in Endgame.

Thanos, too, was retrieved from the past without disrupting the sequence of events in the primary timeline. Even after the Stones were destroyed, the disappearance of his past self didn't stop him from having been present in his retirement home when the Avengers arrived.

That being the case, if versions of Tony and Natasha were removed from the timeline before the Stones were destroyed and brought to the present, their actions after their removal would have been preserved.

Nat would still get the Soul Stone for Clint, and Tony would still destroy Thanos' army, but both characters would still be alive.

There would still be a cost. Heroic sacrifices don't come for free.

These past versions of the fallen heroes would be missing at least five years' worth of memories - which, in Tony's case, includes ALL his memories of his daughter. He would have to rebuild his relationship with her from scratch.

They would both forget all the time they'd spent bonding with people after the Decimation, the new friendships Nat had formed, and the years Tony and Pepper had spent as husband and wife.

But there would still be hope. They'd still be alive.

And all the people who loved them, in their universe and ours... all the trauma and PTSD survivors who saw themselves in Tony, and needed that representation of their pain to have a happy ending... all the people who found solace in the idea of Irondad... could live in a world that's that much brighter.

What did you think of the end of Endgame and this fan theory?

Do you think it was a fitting end to Natasha and Tony's stories, or do you wish it had gone differently?

Do you agree with my theory, or did you see a hole in it?

I look forward to reading your comments.

Can't wait to see what will happen in the next page of Just Cause? If you want to get a sneak peek, become a Patron on Patreon to get early access to the written version of page 42!

If you enjoyed the previous pages of Just Cause and can’t wait to see what happens next, you can get a sneak peek at the written version of the next two pages by pledging $1/month or more on my Patreon. :)
 
Patrons also get exclusive access to works in progress, and they’re the first to see completed pages.
 
If you haven’t started reading the comic yet, I recommend that you start at the very beginning - a very good place to start. :P

For those of you who've been reading my Undertale webcomic, Just Cause, or who are thinking of getting into it in the near future, I have some exciting news:

I've gotten enough of the prose version written that I think I've filled in most or all of the possible plot holes, so starting in May, I plan to start releasing parts of the fanfiction to patrons pledging $3 and up on my Patreon.

That means after each comic update, my patrons will get to see a sneak peek of the next scene, weeks before the corresponding comic page comes out.

The whole prose version of the story will be released to the general public once it's complete. I'd do it earlier, but this tale's gotten so intricate that I want to get the whole thing written before I set it loose on the open web, just in case there's still something I've missed.

I've also decided to make the work-in-progress previews of the comic available to ALL my patrons, not just the $10 tier and up.

​I wanted to make my most popular story more accessible to people with tighter budgets, so hopefully this helps.

I've seen a few people doing open collaborations, and I thought it would be fun to do one of my own.
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For those who don't know, and open collab is where one artist creates part of a picture - usually the lineart - and invites others to do the rest and share the results. This could include color, shading, backgrounds, or all of the above.

I deliberately left the face off of this one, because I like how ambiguous the pose is. Is Mettaton jumping? Fighting? Posing for the camera? Inviting a dance partner to come join him? Sleeping? Dead? You decide!

If you choose to participate, please:

1. Add your name or URL to the credits on the image

2. Don't remove my URL from the credits

3. Send me a link to the completed picture, so I can show your work to my watchers and followers!

If you want to have the color, background and lineart in separate layers, you can use the .psd file I've attached below.

I look forward to seeing what you create. :)

Page 8 of my Undertale fan comic, Just Cause, is finally here! Whew, that one took a while; between the length, multiple poses I've never drawn before, the complex shading, and those freaking Last Corridor pillars, it took quite a few hours of drawing. But now it’s here for you to enjoy. :)

As you no doubt noticed, I ended up ditching the "greyscale battle box" look; I tinkered with it a bit, and concluded that the comic looked way better in full color.

I think I'm also going to change the way I draw Frisk's hair. I've been gradually migrating from cel shading to soft shading with the rest of the comic, and I'm finding that it both looks better and is more fun to draw.

There's also the fact that cel shading requires cleaner lines, and thus more precision, and thus more time to draw. Yup. Soft shading is starting to look pretty good.

Also, a quick note for observant Undertale fans: yup, I'm aware that there's a save point in the Last Corridor. And there's a good, spoilery reason why Frisk isn't using it yet, much like there's a reason why they're using the dagger instead of the much more sensible frying pan, and why they found a dagger instead of the murder route's standard knife.

Welp, time to make the script for the next chapter, and hope it doesn't turn out quite as long as this one.

To get early access to completed art, stories and videos, and to get exclusive access to a special gallery of sketches, works in progress, and exclusive artwork, please consider supporting me on Patreon!
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Criteria #1: Is it necessary for the characters' development?

Some of the scenes - and, more importantly, the protagonist's reactions to the events in them - are necessary for the reader to understand how the tragic situation in Timeline 4 came to be.

They develop the characters' personalities and relationships, and they reveal why the human made the decisions they made and how they felt when they were making them.

Even though some of these scenes are partly reenactments of things that happen in the game, the internal reactions add a new layer to them, and lay the foundation for the less strictly canonical events that occur in later timelines.

Speaking of new layers...

Criteria #2: Can you add a fresh twist or insight?

Even if a scene isn't absolutely vital to a character arc, it can be worth including if you can add something new and interesting to it.

Is there a funny addition you want to slip into the dialogue? An intriguing internal reaction, or inner monologue that gives new meaning to the words that were spoken out loud?

If you can add an extra element to the scene, that new ingredient can make it fresh and interesting even for the people who have consumed the source material several times.

In fact, that strategy can even make the scene MORE appealing to that particular crowd. If someone loves a story enough to go through it repeatedly, they probably love it enough that any fresh insight or deeper exploration will be welcome, as long as it's done well.

Personally, I've kept a lot of the canonical dialogue intact, but I've also taken a fair bit of license to let Frisk have reactions that Undertale's silent protagonist doesn't canonically have, and to let the other characters react to it the way I think they would.

This helps to keep the plot on track, while adding something new instead of simply reiterating what's already been said.

Criteria #3: Does it make later scenes more poignant?

Just Cause contains a number of running themes, catchphrases, and callbacks to earlier scenes, as well as bits of dialogue later in the story that reference earlier conversations and interactions.

Sometimes, a scene early in the story, while added partly for its own sake, has its greatest value in the way it sets things up for a later scene to be five times more poignant than it would be on its own.

I don't know about you, but personally, I love it when a story can take a line or element from earlier in the tale and work it into a later scene, in a way that adds new meaning, continuity, or a sense that this running joke or catchphrase is one of the strings that ties a character's personality or relationships together.

What if the scene needs to be included or addressed, but you don't feel like writing the whole thing?

Sometimes, there are scenes that are necessary to move the plot from Point A to Point B, but you just don't feel like thoroughly retreading that ground.

Maybe you have nothing new to add, or maybe that scene simply isn't interesting enough to warrant inclusion.

In that case, one tactic I sometimes use is to have a character reflect on it later, possibly while walking or getting distracted from an activity they ought to be focusing on.

This allows me to delve further into the character's reaction to the event, without having to bog down the narrative with a blow-by-blow description of a scene that didn't deserve to stay in the final draft.

Have you encountered this question in your writing?

While fanfiction does present this challenge more frequently than most other stories, it's not the only place where this dilemma rears its head. Every fiction writer must sometimes face the question of whether or not to include a scene, and I hope this article made the decision easier for you.

And now, it's your turn to share your thoughts!

What methods or criteria do you use to decide which scenes to include?

Are there any types of scenes that definitely should or should NOT be kept in stories?

​I look forward to reading your comments!

What's the difference between writing a story you like, and writing a story you're flat-out obsessed with?

Over the last week or so, I've seen the difference firsthand, and it's been really striking.

​For two years, as I worked on Catgirl Roommate, I was writing a story I liked.

I had lots of funny material to share, I enjoyed the way the protagonist's character development caught me by surprise, and it was an interesting challenge to write a genre I'd never written before.

Apparently it worked out well, judging by the fact that when one of my friends was partway through it, he was laughing so hard he couldn't speak.

Unfortunately, I've got a dirty confession to make:

While I did like the story, I wasn't obsessed with it. And although I liked the characters - well, most of them - I wasn't in love with them.

As a result, writing Catgirl Roommate was more difficult than most of my other projects, and I enjoyed the process less than I did when I was working on stories where the characters really tugged on my heartstrings.

After I finished Catgirl Roommate in December, I didn't do much fiction writing for a while, because I had a lot of client projects and I was focusing most of my creative time on my Undertale webcomic, Just Cause.

Now that one, frankly, I AM obsessed with.

Sure, it's fanfiction. Sure, it's not one of my novels. But the relationships that grew inside this story, and the character development that blossomed within those relationships... these are a few of my favorite things.

Some of the characters became so psychologically complex, some of their bonds with each other deepened in such beautiful ways, and there are so many little running themes and symbols (I'll admit, I'm a sucker for those)... I'm just so in love with this story.

But the trouble with telling a long story via webcomic - especially when you feel a compulsive need to add lots of layers of shading instead of just basic cel shading - is that, while a picture is worth a thousand words, it takes a thousand times longer to create.

​It took months of drawing, and several pages of comic, to work my way through what would be a single scene in a written story. And, over time, I began to get frustrated with how long it was taking to get the story out there.

I have so many scenes that are burning in my heart, and I want them out there now!

So I decided it was time to do what I'd been procrastinating on for a while, and start actually writing the story.

When I did, I was stunned by what happened.

I already had an outline, so I didn't need to figure out what was involved in each scene. I could just go ahead and write, and boy, did I write!

​Where it used to be a challenge to get 300 words written in one day - partly because I had to make sure that as many of those words as possible were funny - now, I was EASILY writing 800 to 1,000 words or more. Sometimes over 2,000.

​​This, despite the fact that I'm also running a business that sometimes keeps me busy for 12 hours a day.

Now, going by chapter count, I'm almost halfway through the story. Barring unexpected delays, I should be done by the end of February, easily.

And then I can continue gradually working my way through the comic version of it, one thousand-word picture at a time.

Do I regret spending so much time on Catgirl Roommate?

Not at all. Even though I wasn't as thoroughly in love with it as I am with my current story, I still enjoyed it, and I still believe it was a story worth telling.

People are still laughing until they choke because of it, and who knows - maybe Sam's growth as a person will inspire other people to see where they can grow, too.

In the meantime, I have stories to write, things to draw, a neglected YouTube channel to create music videos for, and maybe even some healthy self-care to squeeze in between my content creation and business-running.

I'm three scenes away from getting to the part of the story where the backstory is revealed, and I've been dying write that backstory for so long... I LOVE the relationship between these two characters...

*Gives a totally undignified squeal and runs off to work out and write*

Now it's your turn.

Have you written stories you liked, and stories you love, and noticed the difference? I'd love to hear from you in the comments!

I have to admit, I'm a sucker for morally grey antagonists.

Maybe it's because villains are expected to be evil, so when an antagonist shows an unexpected degree of courtesy, kindness or mercy, it immediately sparks my imagination.

Maybe it's because it's a sign of good storytelling when even the protagonists' enemies have redeeming qualities and good reasons for doing the things they do.

Maybe it's because I'm an INTJ, so logical, intelligent characters who put the big picture above their emotional impulses naturally resonate with me, and such characters tend to be cast as bad guys.

Whatever the reason, polite, elegant characters who come across as bad guys to a lot of the viewers and cast tend to become my favorites. This guy is a prime example.

Yes, that is one of the most formidable antagonists in Farscape, smiling warmly at a flower and looking a bit like he's holding back tears.

Scorpius is probably the most complex and interesting antagonist I've ever seen, so it was only a matter of time before he caught my writing fancy. I wanted to explore the motives, fears, hopes and pain of this fascinating character, so finally, I gave myself permission to take a brief break from writing Catgirl Roommate to create a character study for him.

If you're a fan of Farscape, and especially if you're a fellow Scorpius fan, I think you'll enjoy this fanfiction. In Means to an End, Scorpius pauses in the wake of one of his most villainous acts, and reflects on the mission that drove him to do it, and the effect that that mission has had on his personality, his relationships, and his life.

Once you're done reading it, I'd love to know what you thought! I look forward to reading your comments.

It's finally finished: my Farscape Harvey mini-episode is ready to watch on YouTube.

Set during the events of Daedalus Demands and Icarus Abides, this video fanfiction dives deep into Harvey's troubled, isolated mind, exploring his fear, anger, loneliness and regret as he waits for John and Jack's attack to begin, and his resignation as his attempts to defend himself fail.

If you've always thought it was a pity that Farscape never had an episode devoted to Harvey, and that it never really explored his unique point of view or his tragic predicament, you're going to love this. Once you're done watching, please leave a comment and let me know what you think.