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[Knight Random]

I thought it wouldn't hurt for me to say a few words as to what was going through my head when I wrote this episode, since quite often other people don't pick up in the weird subtleties in my episodes. I wanted to have a male character in the Sandra thread who would be a counterpoint to and possible love interest for Sandra. I originally wanted to have someone who was an android and I would leave his connection to the evil androids from the keep [37149]. Then, JH wrote an episode explicitly referring to Sandra's having been Fred a few months ago. This clashed a bit with my idea of the thread and Sandra's character. I had previously kind of written the thread under the assumption that Sandra's past had been changed and that she was less of a transformed female Fred than a female analog of Fred. But since the idea of Sandra as a transformed Fred was now established, I decided to do something interesting with it in plot terms. I decided to make the counterpoint/potential love interest character another dragonslayer who had been a good friend of Fred's and still remembered him. He would be someone who was basically a good person but still something of a male chauvinist, and his role in the plot would bring out Sandra's conflicted attitude toward Allarian society and the Allarian idea of honor, and eventually force her to understand her true nature as Fred so that she would have to choose who she ultimately wanted to be. She would now have looked at his/her society from both sides, and that would put her into a major internal conflict.

I wanted to have a pre-existing character fill this slot since it would have seemed kind of odd to me to have Karen Ford torturing a character who hadn't existed at the time she'd been writing. But there wasn't really anyone I could think of to fill the role--EAS has far fewer interesting male supporting characters than interesting female supporting characters. I ultimately threw in Johnathan of Collins, who was the identity I established for "you" in that bizarre thread with Lyra and Zerm II and the Gorbal and the walking dead and people losing their names and all that jazz. I suppose that this means that at some point he'll have to say "Well, this sucks." :)

[JH]

Feel free to email me or PM me if you have any particular ideas for this, or any other, thread. I wouldn't want again inadvertantly to write something that derailed the plot from the direction that you were hoping that it would go in. That offer extends to all our other writers, of course.

I must read up on the episodes with Johnathan, to try and get some idea of his character.