The Winter Challenge - Commentary - Ch 1-2 (Patreon)

New story, new commentary!  Although I’m wondering how much commentary I’ll be able to write for The Winter Challenge because I feel there’s not that much that will need to be explained.  But that shouldn’t be too big of a problem!  I’ll just ramble about random things like I tend to do.

Before jumping in, a little progress update for you!  After finishing The Vale Voice and The Lie, I thought that I would start working on The Queens of Remnant in earnest.  That was the plan until I saw this: 

Destroyer of all free time 

And I told myself to forget about it - that I had other stories to write - but, before you know it, I’m messaging the artist asking if I can write a story based on it.

So...Queens of Remnant has to wait, and I’m 100k words into a new space bees story!  I’m hoping it will be around 120k when finished, but I also initially thought I could write it in 70k, so what do I know.  Just know that you have that to look forward to on the horizon!

Alright, on to The Winter Challenge.  As a whole, I consider this story to be ‘the one that shouldn’t be anywhere near as long.’  But I clearly have an issue with being lengthy, so...we have another 80k+ word story.  

The inspiration for this was pretty simple - I love Bumblebee, but I also really love writing from Weiss’ POV.  Those things seem mutually exclusive, don’t they?  Well, not anymore!  At least, that was my goal.

Even after deciding that it would be fun, I almost didn’t write it.  I wrote bits and pieces then put it on my list of ‘possibly won’t happen.’  It sat there for a really long time before I hit a random bit of determination and decided that I would finish this and The Vale Voice just to get them off my plate.  So...here we are!

What’s interesting about this story is that the story description was one of the first things I came up with.  This one:

This is the story of Blake and Yang...but let’s give credit where credit is due.  This is the story of Weiss.  And how it sometimes takes true genius to bring two stubborn fools together.

Typically, I don’t consider story descriptions until a few minutes before I’m posting the first chapter of a story.  Honestly, I wish I could just ignore descriptions altogether because I find them so hard to write!  This is literally the only story where I’ve had the description already written down and ready to be copied in when needed.  It was actually really nice!  I should try to do that for my other stories...but...descriptions are still hard to come up with.

I really liked getting into Weiss’ mindset for this story and seeing how she views her teammates after they’ve become friends.  I’ve always felt that Weiss, as a character, has an incredibly soft center that we only get to see the true depths of when we’re in her head.  

Well, we’ll be seeing lots of soft Weiss in the future, and I’ll advise you to keep a close eye on her thoughts towards and interactions with Ruby.  Ruby is her leader, her partner, but also someone she never expected to let so close.  As such, she sometimes doesn’t know what to do about Ruby - which I really loved portraying.

At the beginning of Chapter 2, we see that Ruby has become something like the voice in Weiss’ head that persuades her to do or not do certain things.  In this example, Weiss admits that she would look through Blake’s notebooks if she thought she could get away with it, but she really doesn’t want to get caught and earn a Mom-ism from Ruby.  The best part is that she actually comes up with something that Ruby might say:

Even worse, Ruby would get involved and throw down the holy-stinging-grail of hurts - something like ‘we don’t choose who we love, but we choose who we trust.’

What’s interesting is that because Weiss actually makes that up on her own, I feel like it’s something she actually believes in.  Or it’s at least something that she wouldn’t want to be caught going against with her teammates.

Besides being incredibly soft, she’s also incredibly sassy.   I might have enjoyed that too much, especially when it comes to her describing how obvious it is that Blake and Yang like each other.  She gets a kick out of noticing all these little moments that she sees, and extrapolates to thoughts and emotions that she just thinks Blake or Yang are thinking, such as guessing that Blake loves the smell of Yang’s hair/shampoo.

I found myself adding these ‘guesses’ all over the story as a way for us to get a closer feeling for how Blake and Yang actually feel each other.  In that sense, Weiss is making an assumption, but that’s actually me describing how Blake or Yang feels in that moment.  I think this helps us feel closer to the bees and more involved in their relationship than we would have otherwise.

Also, Weiss tends to use the comments to add more sass, which is never a bad thing.  What’s so funny is that she doesn’t even think twice about how she prefers the smell of roses, which is basically me sassing her right back (she has no idea what I just did to her - the puppet master wins!).

Overall, Chapter 1 serves to set the stage of their relationships and to explain the rules of The Winter Challenge.  I can’t believe I came up with a whole dang list of challenges for this story, but I had to come up with something to string the week together!

Originally, the challenge was going to take place over seven days - meaning they would start on Saturday and wouldn’t finish until the next Friday.  But the story was already getting way longer than I wanted it to be, so I decided to skip the weekend and have the challenge only take place over five weekdays.

Honestly, I don’t like stories where I have to keep track of what day of the week it is...because that’s just another thing to remember amongst a whole host of others.  Thankfully, this was only over the course of one week - I remember that...the...the high school story I wrote (I’m totally blanking on a title), took place over a series of weeks, which made it much worse.

Welcome to Vale High!  Ha.  Got it.

Aww, that was a fun story.

Anyway, Weiss describes the rules briefly because I didn’t want to bog anyone down with some super complicated (and lengthy) monologue spelling out everything in detail.  Plus, as Weiss saw, Yang wasn’t interested in hearing that much boring detail either.  So, if there are other rules to this challenge, we’ll learn them as we go along.

Just like Ruby will keep trying to learn who’s in charge of delivering Beacon’s announcements - any guesses?  I won’t tell you yet...see if you can guess who it is!  (This is one of the situations where you come up with something so ingenuitive and smart, I feel stupid for coming up with the lazy answer.)

Chapter 2 is another build up chapter - this time, leading into the beginning of The Winter Challenge and introducing their competition!  Or, in the case of Team JNPR, telling us why Pyrrha and Jaune won’t be involved.  

Originally, Pyrrha and Jaune were going to compete.  Of course they were - why wouldn’t they?  

You’ll understand more of the significance of them dropping out later on but, basically, I wanted to make it abundantly clear that Team RWBY should win (are your alarm bells going off yet?).  What better way to make it clear that they should win by removing Pyrrha?  (Side note, but I love Pyrrha and I’m making a concerted effort to add her back to a regular rotation in Red Carpet Romance.  I miss her!)

The unintended side effect of removing Pyrrha was this:

“I’ve skipped every break for the last fifteen years of my life.  I’d like to think I’ve earned some time off by now.”

You do, Pyrrha.  You do.  

So, even though that means I didn’t get to write Pyrrha kicking everyone’s butt at everything, rest assured that she’s enjoying her time off with Jaune.  They’re playing videos and watching movies and maybe doing some easy, goofy practices.

Meanwhile, Team RWBY gets ready to take on their first challenge, and all we know is that it has to do with snow and flags.  Hm...wonder what that could be.

Ok, you probably know, but we’ll see what happens next week!  Team RWBY vs. Team CRDL vs. Team SSSN vs. Team NR - who are you putting your money on?  

I think that’s all I have for now, especially since I don’t want to give too much away at the beginning of the story.  As always, feel free to ask questions if you have them, and thank you for the support!

-Miko