[PRE-NOTES]
This is not part of the fic, these are literally the author's closing thoughts, if that wasn't immediately obvious.
[/PRE-NOTES]

Hoh boy. Fifty-three weeks for something that, had I the same pace I had when I started, should’ve taken ten. Not that I would have it any other way, of course. Despite taking fifty-three weeks, there were really three periods of major activity throughout that time.

The first major period was the first five chapters, which took two months to write, although a decent chunk of that was because I wrote ‘Revenge…’ in the middle of it, which took the better part of three weeks. Those first five chapters went relatively well, ignoring some “minor” holes and threads I sort of forgot to tie up later. Fang’s desire to smoke was supposed to have a bit more presence, but by the time I started up the second period of activity I had left it hanging for too long to bring it back without it just being horrible. There was a pile of ideas I had that would have played into all sorts of mental trauma and doubts and whatnot, and I simply didn’t have the skill to put it down in a way that I thought was coherent.

The problems started a bit after I released ‘The Bridge, Part One’ in November. First was that finals were coming up and Forza Horizons 5 caught my interest, so that ate up a lot of my free time. Second was that I genuinely did not know what I wanted to do with the rest of the story. I had the next two chapters planned out, and absolutely nothing after that. There was a brief period where I considered having ‘The Runaways’ be the final chapter, having the ending be extremely open-ended. Needless to say, that would not have been very good, and I’m glad that instead of doing something retarded I sat on my hands for months.

Around December and January is when I finally got a new idea for where to take the story, although it still took me until fucking April to actually start writing any of it out. ‘The Bridge, Part Two’, ‘The Runaways’, and ‘The Pieces’ were all written within two weeks of each other and represent the second major period of activity. Originally, my plan was to have ‘The Beginning’ and ‘The Cracks’ continue as they did, and have Anon, during his freakout anxiety session, call Naser in a panic to try and anchor himself to something. During that conversation and/or a follow up one, Anon would learn about what happened in Volcaldera during their absence, and seeing a relatively decent opportunity for stability, convince Fang to return and live happily ever after.

Also originally, I planned to have ‘The Pieces’ be its own, one-off thing that gave insight into Ripley and grant context to how he would act near the end of the story. Thank fucking God that this did not happen. As I was writing that chapter, I had a happenstance conversation with a user named Castellano, which turned into much longer conversations after I released it. ‘The Pieces, Part Two’ and ‘The Stranger’ would not exist if it weren’t for these conversations, and I think the story would have suffered greatly if I had gone with what I originally planned.

The third period of activity was from June to September, when I wrote everything from ‘The Beginning’ to ‘The Reunion’. There were a few ideas bouncing around with regards to this section, like how Fang would handle trying to play music, if she would be successful or not, and if so, how much. It was sometime in here that I really honed in on not just how the story would end, but how the characters would end within the story itself. Bear with me for this one, I promise it will make sense.

The way the points structure of Snootgame is set up is designed to create growth in both Fang and Anon. With Anon, it’s things like trust in others and dependability, while with Fang, it’s things like self-agency and independence. These don’t necessarily contradict, as it’s important for people to both be independent for themselves as well as dependent on each other, while not being too much of one or the other.

It’s because of this points structure that Endings 1 and 3 share some very similar parallels. They both represent a Fang that hasn’t grown into developing her own agency and independence. In Ending 3, this means a Fang that simply changes to suit whatever they think the person they are depending on thinks they should be, and an Anon that grows into that rock that Fang is able to hook onto. In Ending 1, this results in a similar Fang without agency or direction, but with nobody to depend on. Anon in this ending is mostly flaky, dismissive, and unable to understand what a relationship requires. (All of this is assuming a narrative canon point total, which for Ending 3 I assign three points to Anon and zero points to Fang, which is the minimum to achieve that ending, and for Ending 1, zero points to Fang and one point to Anon, that one point being the guitar/study choice, which not even I am cruel enough to deprive Anon of that.)

All of this is to say that I technically could have gone all out for a ‘Golden Ending’ to this story with enough effort, by say, going on to reconnect Fang with Trish and Reed, bringing Fang back to music with therapy and support, maybe reintroducing Naomi to help Fang conquer her guilt, and et cetera. Anon grows to be the support that he needs to be to achieve this out of raw necessity, but I would need to give Fang a lot of agency that she previously didn’t have in order to make it the whole way. I explicitly do not do this throughout those final chapters that I wrote. There are a couple of points in particular, mainly the notebook page tearing in ‘The Cracks’ and Anon “warming Ripley up” in ‘The Stitches’, where Anon kind of deprives Fang of agency, not through malice or disinterest, but out of a desire to protect and help. In a more perfect ending, Fang could take charge in these small moments and conquer these small pieces of fear and guilt that eventually build towards a larger payoff that I described earlier.

I did it this way because I think going from Ending 1 to Ending 3 is a good bridge to cross as they contain those parallels that I mentioned, and doesn’t go too far into super fanfictiony ‘everything is happy and perfect’ territory. Irony, I know. Also, because I really did not want to write any more of this story. I love it to death, but I mentally clocked out a good few months ago, and I’m very glad to have it done. A whole extended ending where everything gets fixed would have taken me another year to write and by then nobody would care anymore, myself least of all.

Once again, thank you to Castellano for his input across multiple chapters. Thank you to the Writer’s Guild of Retards, for putting a dozen extra eyes onto my work to look for errors and whatnot. Thank you to /snoot/ and /snoot/ for sticking with this for fifty-three goddamn weeks, and thank (You) for reading my four-in-the-morning ramblings about scaly fanfiction of a scaly visual novel parody of a scaly visual novel that STILL HASN’T RELEASED KO_OP YOU FUCKS.

Anyways, as a reward for reading all this shit or for going TL;DR and scrolling straight to the bottom, here’s a secret-not-so-secret epilogue that I wrote for Valentine’s Day that was secretly-maybe-not-so-secretly canon to this story the whole time. Kind of.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/37023070

"I live to please. Sometimes all you need is someone to push you in the right direction to change everything you thought you knew. How’s that for a life lesson?" ~Castellano