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Episode 2 notes are finally up. Whew. They're long!

www.acsn2.com/~locbaseb/h...2notes.htm

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Question: The author of that episode, was he the one who tried to write a "sequel" to your story after the fact on S-C? Or was that someone else? My memory is blurred and this stuff isn't online anymore so there's no way for me to look around and check :P

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Ha ha. No. You are talking about Patrick Gilchrist, one of the other writers at S-C. He had originally wanted to be on the Hawaii writing team (and Alaska for that that matter), but since he was only 16 I thought he was too young. I always liked Patrick but I just didn't think he was old enough to pull off something this ambitious.

So anyway after Hawaii and Alaska became big hits, Patrick decided to do his own version of a fanfic, which he advertised as an unofficial "sequel" to Hawaii and Alaska. His story was called "All-Star Survivor: Canary Islands." I never personally read it (I was way too busy back then to read other stories than my own) but a lot of people told me it was pretty good. I was never affiliated with it in any way, and to be honest it did sort of bother me that he billed it as a sequel to my stories, but Canary Islands was one of the few fan fics at the time that actually got an audience and actually finished.

Most other Survivor stories during this time period petered out after 3 or 4 episodes. But Patrick surprised me by being able to finish a story all by himself, and I had to admit I was wrong about him not being able to do it. Truth be told, he probably should have been on the Hawaii writing team. He really surprised me.

Trivia Note: There were a few other young writers who wanted to be on the Alaska writing team, but I wouldn't let them. One of them was a kid named Rafe Judkins. But of course Marcy you probably already knew that. The only reason Rafe ran the Tonga game was because I thought he was too young to be a writer on the Alaska team. He was going to have to make his mark in the Survivor fan world some other way...

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Question the Second: For episode one you talked about holding a vote to decide who would go, and that Kathy won but this author was all snotty about it... how come it doesn't sound like there was such a vote for Ep. 2? Was everyone busy, or was it that y'all wanted to avoid confrontation? Just seemed weird he'd be allowed to single handedly decide to vote Ethan out, yet the *majority* of you pick Kathy and he's all "grrr"

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No, the Ethan vote was already decided before he sat down to write it. We always decided, as a group, who would be the next bootee. So we had already voted on Ethan as being the next to go. The instructions given to writer #2 before he sat down to write were, "Just pick up some of the storylines from episode 1, progress them out logically to where they'd go next, and then vote Ethan out at the end because Ethan just doesn't fit into Keko."

The writers didn't have free reign to just make up bootees as they saw fit. We all decided those as a group, before the episode was written.

If I recall correctly (remember, this was over five years ago), booting Ethan out in the second episode was a pretty easy choice. After all, he didn't have any friends on Keko after Teresa left. And since none of us knew what the hell to do with him as a character anyway, he was a good scapegoat boot from our viewpoint as the writers. We could lose him and not lose any of the characters we thought we be more interesting. And since he would have been next, logically, after Teresa, it actually made sense. Easy choice.


Note: One of the biggest rules I had for Hawaii and Alaska was that we would NEVER boot a character just because we didn't like writing for him. I tried to beat people over the head with that logic from day one on both stories. I figured every character had a chance to win this story, even if we didn't like writing for them. So I tried my best not to let the writers gang up on a certain character just because we thought they were "boring." Of course, with Ethan there might have been some of that going on. But since logically, he would have been next anyway, it really made the whole thing a lot easier.

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Also, since the cleanup, some of the dynamics have changed -the Colby, Alicia, Michael pairing wasn't apparant at all the first time.

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Yup. I decided to be much more direct this time and just plain spell out where the power core is. Normally I never do that, normally I like to leave my options much more open. But I wanted to try an experiment this time around.

Of course, the negative with doing that is that I might write myself into a corner where I HAVE to go a certain way with the story. But we'll see. For now we'll just point out those are the decision makers and leave it at that.

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*For the record, the votes were originally (in keeping with sporadic voting/inept Keko) -

Alicia: Richard
Colby: Ethan
Ethan: Richard
Gretchen: Michael
Kathy: Ethan
Michael: Gretchen
Richard: Ethan

it was like everyone was afraid to confer and just all covered their eyes and blindly voted praying they were safe.

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I wish I could defend that, but in truth I don't remember why the votes were all spread out like that last time around. I know there was a reason for it. The votes weren't random or anything. But I'd have a hard time remembering what we were thinking.

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*the Micheal/Gretchen feud seems played down (seems good to me)

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Yeah I was never completely sold on that feud last time around. I figured they'd butt heads at first, but in time they'd grow pretty close and actually be friends. So I softened it up a little bit. If for no other reason that it makes Gretchen a little less hot headed. This way, with Mike begrudgingly starting to respect and listen to her, you're more able to realize why (in real life) everyone always loves her.

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I'm still not sold on AHI though (yeah, duh I'm a Colleen and Tina fan) but looking as objectively as possible, I can't imagine Colleen didn't start right off with Tina (she was the only one she was in contact with prior to the show, they were penpals/email buddies).

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I had never heard that at any point prior to you saying it, so I never had that sort of info. But the thing with Tina and Colleen (as I said many times back in 2002) is that I always felt Tina just wouldn't respect Colleen past being a cute little girl. I've always felt Tina has a sort of annoying superiority about her when it comes to things like strategy games. Lord knows I love Tina, but I've always gotten the impression that she thinks people like Amber, Colleen, and Elisabeth just aren't all that scary as opponents. I've never thought she really respects them (other than being "nice people") so that was the tactic I took in her relationship with Colleen in Hawaii. I figured, yes she's like Colleen. In fact she'd probably love her. But when it came to winning Survivor, she'd gravitate towards the Lexs and Johns and Franks of the world, because those were the grown-up responsible ones. I think Tina can be a little condescending when she starts talking about younger players (which is exactly what she did in Australia, with people like Mitchell, Nick, Amber, Elisabeth, etc.) Tina's fun, but she's also got a bit of a big head about herself.

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And I can't imagine Lex and Tina would not be playing up to the cameras on the Colleen popularity train. That's the only thing that seems off to me. Colleen's head would be spinning wishing she had actually studied up on who is who, and people like Lex and Tina would be trying to advance their Q rating.

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Since when does Lex do that? Once he gets into game mode it's like he has blinders on. He's driven, driven, driven. And I've never seen Lex or Tina as being all that interested in media whoring themselves out. Besides, remember by Survivor 5, Colleen was sort of old news. It's not like she was the sweetheart of TV anymore. She'd been out of the spotlight, and out of the Survivor world, for nearly two years. If anything, Kathy was the sweetheart of Survivor at this point. Colleen was fun in 2000, but that was nearly four seasons ago. She'd dropped out of the Survivor community, and gone back to the real world, a long time ago.

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The behind the scenes Kathy/Teresa info is pretty huge -and could greatly affect the entire math equation of the rest of the story. I can't believe I never knew that.

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Ha ha. See, I told you the rewrite would be worth your while. I never told people EVERYTHING.

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Ethan going was also debatable to me, but I see it much more clearly now that he and Colby aren't going to work together. I still think Colby and Ethan would have come together and work with Hatch as protection for all three and he'd be worried about retribution from Alicia and the fear of everyone else of his being an immunity threat.

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Well I sort of based this on the way Colby wanted Kel gone back in Australia. I've heard lots of behind the scenes stuff about how Kel was targeted by so many people on Ogakor (Colby chiefly among them). And how he was pretty much guaranteed to go way before the beef jerky stuff even happened. In fact most of the Ogakors will tell you Kel was pretty much gone the first day. So I sort of went with that and ran with it.

I figured, Colby will want Ethan out, and Ethan will want Colby out. I just couldn't see the two of them working together. Because without the other one, that suddenly makes Colby or Ethan that much more indispensable. Of course you could argue this decision either way, but in stories like this you just have to make an executive character decision in episode 1 and go with it. We had decided right off the bat that Ethan and Colby would never work together, so that's just the way the story was going to go.

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*I believe I said at this time I predicted Frank is going to win (and he still might) -I remember we had the ratings/odds after each episode and who would go next.

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Well I certainly don't see him leaving anytime soon. Do you?

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Also, I still have the promos which were quite fun.

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Oh man. I completely forgot about those. Do you think you can post some? I never saved any of them. Those were a lot of fun!

A) Colby wasn't a winner

B) You're dead on about Tina and Vecepia. I know I need another scene between them soon, but I haven't figured out what it should look like. Remember, they DID talk back in episode one. But I sort of moved them away from one another and into their respective alliances in episode two, so I'm not sure if I really want to draw them back together or not. We'll see. I'm only a little bit into episode three at the moment so it's possible I can fit something in. Maybe I'll just have them walking together to get treemail or something.