LYX’s Personal Guide to Song Without A Name trivia!

SWAN 1:

• Song Without A Name is only slightly off from the ‘Insert Title Here’ that this story sported as its title the entire time I wrote this first chapter. Hell, it was called ‘teeth.doc’ for a long time, as a reference to how well it was eating me alive. A song came on, and I realized that Song Without A Name was the best title ever. It was relevant, it was close to ‘Fic Without A Name,’ which this story was also called for a while, and also formed a nice, memorable acronym.  
• SWAN is my first, and as of this writing, my only, fanfiction.
• The highschool here is my highschool, in fact. They say ‘write what you know,’ right? Mine was called Lincoln. Edgar’s is not. But the layout and the location and everything else are exactly the same.
• On a similar note, Edgar’s house is my grandparents’ house. He stays in their bedroom and most of his furniture is arranged like theirs was about… 10 years ago.

SWAN 2:

• There really IS a name for when words stop sounding like words when repeated often enough. I looked it up and forgot it again pretty quickly.
• Edgar’s legendary burning skin begins here. This is one of the few traits he got from me. That and biting his lip.

SWAN 3:

• Edgar being shades of grey is sort of a double meaning. At the time, Edgar was being drawn by a good portion of the fandom as monochrome – black hair, nearly white skin, grey shirt, black pants, grey eyes. Grey on grey on grey.
• My family had an ugly pink recliner for a long time.
• Chet is a Cherry Doom in joke. There was discussion of a man in the background of a ‘chapter’ of JTHM that was not Edgar’s, it was Devi’s Meanwhile, actually, who looked stunningly similar to him. The Doomers named him Chet, and a few people taking part in the Zeitgeist project used Chet as the name of the actor who played the very similar to Edgar looking Scriabin. This was my way of including him. Chet really does get around.
• SCHS were the initials I gave to the school. They stand for Second Chance High School in my head, but that’s not what the school is really called.
• Nny’s fortune cookie wisdom is part actual conversation with my mother (‘luck will change’ with me speaking what Nny did) and part the Oracle at Delphi, in regards to the Persians and the Greeks, I believe.
• The difference between ‘house’ and ‘home’ is very important to me. I heard it dictated once in a story about a boy who had lost his house to a fire, and some guy said, “I’m so glad to see you got a new home, Billy.” The kid said, “I never lost my home. My parents are fine, sir. It’s my house that I lost.” That has stayed with me a long time.
• The lucky rabbit’s foot is the same color as Nail Bunny on some shirt or other where he’s colored that light blue color. No one has ever said anything about this, so I’m assuming no one noticed.
• QRB is real infomercial, though it’s about ten years old. It’s my favorite one, too. They really do put this stuff on and take layers of paint off with notebook paper. It stands for “Quickly Restores Beauty.” You can find a shitty version of the ‘mercial itself on QRB.com.

SWAN 4:

• This chapter was written in about 3 days after the prior one was posted. I was pretty enthusiastic back then.
• The first room that Nny rejects is my aunt’s old room. It’s still quite perkily furnished. The room he takes is my Dad and uncle’s old room. I took everything out of it but the shelves for Nny’s usage.
• ‘New to You’ was a consignment shop in one of the cities I lived in or drove through regularly, although I’m not sure which one anymore.

SWAN 5:

• I play video games and consumed lots of cartoons back in the day. This chapter is pretty good at showing that one.
• “So sorry for your luck” is a family joke. We ordered Chinese once, and when we called back saying the order they delivered was all wrong the guy ‘hmm’ed very thoughtfully on the other end and then said “So sorry for your luck,” before hanging up.
• I memorized a set of hieroglyphic stamps back in fourth grade. Nny’s spelling of Edgar’s name is based on those.
• I think everyone played ‘The Floor is Lava/Water/Poison’ at some point, yes?
• ‘musical sex’ was a joke with Lana. She dared me to work it in. Shazam.

SWAN 6:

• SWAN 6 begins the first instances of “Oh, crap, I almost made that porn.” Maybe someday I’ll write them as AU’s of the AU. Though I can promise you they’ll all stop the moment you get excited, as I have too many personal issues to ever write porn.
• The basement is still my Grandparents’. Pretty much exactly as it’s described was how it was… yeah, ten years ago.
• The song here plays in a 3D movie in Las Vegas, at the Luxor Hotel. It’s called the Haunted Castle. They actually have it on Amazon.com, if you’ve got the setup for it.

SWAN 7:

• I still wish I could use that song listed at the top in this story, but Japanese is an insta-lose if used in a fanfic which contains no Japanese connection. Which is a shame, because the lyrics are still perfect. I though I might cave someday – none of the characters are German, after all.
• ‘Best is a relative term’ – from another thing I told someone over a fortune cookie.
• Edgar and Nny have some flashes of old conversations from the books here. Though they did this in an earlier chapter too, reliving their first introductions, and will continue to do it.
• I used to space out (no pun intended) very frequently to Peter Schilling’s music, particularly this song. I imagine the Homicides making music like his.

SWAN 8:

• The playground here is interesting in that I’ve included it when everything else is ten years old and that playground, which isn’t, wasn’t there when I went to that elementary school. (Hell, that’s not even the same building I went to school in. They rebuilt the damned thing.) Our playground had been the parking lot and it was often full of glass. They built the one Nny sits on maybe in ’98 when my other scenery is from ’96. It’s a strange thing for me to think of that playground in the area when it wasn’t around in the time that my grandparents still had a recliner and boxes in their basement.
• I noticed that very large swing when I first visited the playground. Seriously large kids these people were anticipating.
• Pepito’s house is my other grandfather’s house, down to the ‘too much shit everywhere.’ My grandfather is OCD or something, so he only wears blue and buys everything if it appears to be on sale. The descriptions of his entire first floor are, again, ten years old. I actually have video of his house that I might try to share someday.
• Pepito’s house, though, like Edgar’s house, is not located where its model house is. There was an old woman who knew me across the street from the school, and Pepito’s house is where hers is. Edgar’s house is where mine was.
• Trechcoat Guy. It took people a while to get that he was Dib. Mostly because I was adamant about ‘I am not doing a crossover where the ZIM characters are important.’ I don’t really consider it a crossover, either, but whatever. I’ve thrown around having Gaz live in the same building as Devi and Tenna since this chapter.
• In further, ‘Pepito’s House’ trivia, I based his porch off of my friend Jessica’s. The yellowed doorbell on her house didn’t work though.
• Another ‘from the books’ line here with Johnny being introduced to Squee.
• I watch water patterns in the shower.  I ended up giving Nny lots of my own quirks.
• Amusingly enough, the shower I imagine Nny using is one in the smaller girls’ gym in my high school. Assumedly because I’ve not been in the boys’ locker room shower area. There are two gyms, the newer, bigger ‘boy’s gym’ and the older smaller ‘girls’ gym.’ We always called them that, though there was little about either that made them for one sex or another besides who could visit what locker room. The big gym is even closer to the choir room, but for some reason I still sent Nny to the girls’.

SWAN 9:

• Adding ‘in bed’ to the end of your fortunes was something introduced to me by my friends at the University of Pittsburgh, though they preferred ‘in bed with a sheep.’
• Johnny’s made up fortune is from Rocko’s Modern Life, a show on Nickelodeon about ten years ago.
• Our cooking class was connected to a room that might have been used for sewing once, but I don’t know that anyone did any in the time I was there. The rooms were separated by some ghetto screens from the seventies.
• The foot injury and the fish song happened to me. Dancing to the legendary “How Much is the Fish?” I twisted my ankle and couldn’t get around for a few days. Whole thing swelled up to the size of a softball. I was probably injured when I wrote that bit in, now that I think about it.
• The goatee bit was written, or drawn, actually, a while before this chapter was written. The context in the drawing is different, but the dialog is the same.
• Sitting in the dark listening to Above All the Silence with some candles lit is one of the weirdest things ever. Just so you know.

SWAN10:

• I loved the bridge in my school. I really did. Sky Bridges and over traffic walkways are really cool to me - Pitt had one too.
• In the winter, I could see the roof of my school from my bedroom window. That’s how I know about the gravel. I never got to go up there, myself.
• I used to do the ‘I’m gonna fall off the wall’ thing all the time, and my boyfriend at the time would freak out every single time. I started doing it just to fuck with him. Another bit of myself I gave Johnny.
• Johnny’s talk here about the roof is really not tied to this school. It’s tied instead to the 15 and 1/2th floor of the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. It was just a heating, cooling and spot light access point for maintenance people, and you had to squeeze through a broken window to get there, but once out there, it was glorious. There was gravel up there too. Up and over was all I could feel when I looked at the city from there. I also did quite a bit of faked falling up there.

SWAN 11:

• I knew some people who were using phonebooks as the leg to their table. They had previously nailed a leg on with a big rock.
• “Why are people so unpleasant?” comes to visit.
• My roommate and I screamed, “You suck at this job, Pepito!” for a few weeks after I wrote this.
• I wanted the end to be sort of ambiguous, time lapse wise. I don’t really know if I succeeded.

SWAN 12:

• ‘Nothing solidifies something in the memory as the wish to forget it’ came to me in a spam e-mail, with a bunch of gibberish. Crazy weird, that.
• The channel with the shopping network underneath it was at my friend Mab’s house. Her neighbors got awesome cable and so did she by association – at least in places. The video game channel had women’s hands gliding through the background of it all the time like shadows, showing off sparkly things or rotisserie ovens.
• I wrote a long essay to myself about music in SWAN. Edgar’s mental recap is part of it.
• I think the mental deck of cards thing came from some Slayers thing about a million years ago. I associate the idea with Valgaav, but I have no idea why or how.

SWAN 13:

• Wolverine Way really is the street in front of my high school. Wolverines were our mascot.
• I just recently found an old key that looked just like I pictured the key to hell on my grandparents’ wall. The same house that Edgar’s is based on.

SWAN 14:

• Nny and Edgar discussing the key has Nny laughing, but not telling Edgar what he’s snerking at. He was thinking that maybe the key would have some man parts on it as well, from how gay he’d pegged Pepito and Squee to be, but kept it to himself.
• “I can take care of myself, Mother,” is a modified line from the old days of the game I played with my good friend Jen. The one that became Chaos Knot.
• The apologies at the bottom of this one refer to how long it took me to post this chapter originally.

SWAN 15:

• ‘rock the fuck out’ is from a seriously cracked out Harry Potter fanfic. I don’t regularly read fanfiction, but this one was so incredibly fucked up that I had to. Dumbledore is the one uttering that line in the fic. “Harry, you must rock the fuck out.” Yeah.
• “It’s Showtime.” Think Beetlejuice, if you’re not already. Alternately, you could go with Jem, but it was Beetlejuice at the time.
• ‘hello little boys, little toys’ is from Shiny Toy Guns’ ‘Le Disko’.
• ‘massakrieren’ means ‘to massacre’, in case that wasn’t apparent. Crow asked for the inclusion of that one.
•  ‘product’ was what the gay boys who lived down the hall from my friend Amy called the stuff they put in their hair and on their faces.
• “Du hast mich nicht gehört!” –You didn’t listen to me/You didn’t hear me.
• “Oder es ist immer der Edgar…” – Or it’s always Edgar…
• Mann, wer hätte das gedacht, - Man, who woulda thought. Also a lyric from ’99 Luftballoons,’ which is probably the only reason Johnny knows it, though we can never be sure with him.
• “Dammit Jim…” Original Series of Star Trek reference. Hopefully this didn’t need to be mentioned.
• ‘I’m gonna verb the fuck out of you.’ I’d been using variations on that format for weeks, and along with the Star Trek, Crow asked for that to be included.
• ‘giant Q-tips’ = American Gladiators. This show is ages old, by now, and doesn’t come on anymore, but I bet if you YouTubed it, you’d see what I mean, if you’re still in the dark.  (Apparently, they just revived this show. Still, YouTube it.)
• Das Tod” and “Blutige…” are ‘The Death’ or just ‘Death’ and “Bloody…” respectfully.

SWAN 16:

• The funeral home did have a parking lot about two blocks from my highschool. There was never a trailer in it, though.
• A guy from my hometown who I didn’t meet until I was in Pittsburgh tried to flirt with me pretty hard and he was a scum bag, but he did in fact steal his internet from a nearby office building with a Pringles can. I am not making this up.
• Cheez-Whiz is one of the most pleasurable words in the world to say. Crow and I held out the ‘z’s for ever for no real reason for weeks.
• MacGyver was a show from the 80s about a guy who could fix pretty much any situation with totally useless objects. He could get out of anything. Fixing something well, but sorta ghetto-ly is MacGyvering it. Check Wikipedia for more on that.
• Fishsticks. I can’t even really begin to explain fishsticks, or how they happened, but it was a joke between me and BitterApples on dA. It inspired LYX.com’s header image of Homicidal Fishsticks.
• I actually said ‘warm and gooey’ or ‘twitchy and gooey’ or something like that, to the lovely BitterApples when she complimented this very story. She laughed at how horridly dirty it was, and then even I, who meant it totally innocently, had to laugh at how awful that was. I worked it in for her as thanks.
• Pieces of glass from the playground here as a call back to the glass in mine in elementary school.

SWAN 17:

• The ‘new seat’ is a reference to the blue seat my family had in our old crappy red car. This was an improvement over the lawnchair we had prior by leaps and bounds.
• Formal Homicidal Orgy is a drawing I made several years ago. I don’t like it as much as I used to, but the idea behind it (formal suits and fucking with people’s perceptions as to who Johnny was ‘with’) has been in my head as something to go into SWAN since I drew it. I’ve been waiting nearly 2 years to write that section. The descriptions of the other kinds of clothes they wore are references to other ‘____ Homicidal Orgy’ pictures I made.
• Cherry Doom. I can’t even imagine having to explain it, or the other flavors, but they’re all flavors actually featured in the comic.
• When Johnny says “We don’t deal in that here,” the line I really wanted to put in, but couldn’t because the joke would have been lost on all but 3 people, was “We don’t do this at Christ Church.” The joke comes from my uncle’s wedding. They got married at some church that neither of them were familiar with and every time they suggested something to the wedding planner, she’d tell them, “Oh no, we don’t do that at Christ Church.”  My family started saying that anytime there was a need to say “We don’t do that here,” or “That’s not how it’s done.” Essentially, a family in joke version of “You’re doing it wrong.”  It really took all I had to not find some way to include that line, but Crow and I are pretty sure it would take restraints and a date rape drug to get Nny into a church.
• Edgar’s culinary disaster is one me and Crow had. We stocked up on some serious beans, and threw them all together, but the soup was too thick, so we ate it with tortilla chips and pretended that was what we meant to do.

SWAN 18:

• Johnny’s experiences with the ‘courting’ spiel are rather similar to some of mine regarding the same ex of mine that was present for the ‘I am falling off the building’ stunts that I wrote about higher in this list.
• We really needed eggs when I wrote the bit with Tenna. This was my way of dealing with not being able to make anything, I guess.
• Johnny and Edgar are watching Law and Order when Johnny goes on about the theme song. It’s the “Trial By Jury” theme song, specifically. That incarnation of the show was pretty boring, but the theme song was amazing. It’s likely that there’s no way that they would have shown a lady getting killed in that version of the show, but this universe is a little screwed up anyway, so just roll with it.
• Johnny and I have the same defense mechanism.

SWAN 19:

• The crappy hotel room that Edgar and Johnny stay in is based on one I stayed in with my family after visiting Cedar Point, which is a phenomenal amusement park in Ohio. The hotel, called Dusk to Dawn, actually had all those problems aside from the monster in the television. Everything was bolted down and things looked rather questionable all around. A drunk man wandered into our room that night and threw pizza on our one bed. It was an experience. I think the light actually hit my cousin.
• Edgar references Ringu/The Ring here with mention of the girl/Pepito coming out of the television. Ringu is one of my favorite movies ever.
• I imagine Johnny wearing Edgar’s clothes as PJs. I’m not really sure why. The ‘outfits’ in this scene are drawn out in the ‘Pajamicidal Orgy’ picture on my dA account.
• I think I imagine that they’d been 13 floors down.
• I am pretty sure that neither Edgar nor Johnny is gay. Edgar focused his whole existence from day one on Johnny that there was really no need to develop a sexual preference. I feel fairly sure there’s really no one else he’s attracted to. Johnny is bisexual in that he actively dislikes both sexes equally. So more like asexual, but making special cases. Really, I feel like no one here is gay. They were just all each other ever had – there was no way to not feel strongly for each other.
• Demon Spleen is a bit of an Angry Beavers reference, actually. Show on Nickelodeon in the 90’s. Totally loved that show.
• Johnny’s reverse seduction bit came to me so naturally to write that it sort of worried me.
• The bit about a person becoming more attractive to you once you find out they like you is true on the whole, actually. We had a lecture about this in my Psychology class at the University of Pittsburgh.
• Tenna’s ‘supplies’ line is from my lovely Lana, who actually said ‘Going to get some KY?” to some friends who had uttered Edgar’s line, and dared me to put it in SWAN. Said friends had had some questionably drunken gay sex or some such just recently. I didn’t want to go the brandname route, and I really enjoyed the ambiguity of ‘supplies’, so that was what I went with instead.
• Yes, it is Tess, in case any of you are still not sure.
• Johnny’s song is close, in my head, to the opening theme to the game Chrono Cross, as lame as that sounds. It has the same amount of flow and elegant and the same amount of sharp, fast, kill you stuff.
• I shook violently writing the last scene. I was so upset, I nearly threw up. Johnny’s death had been planned for nearly three years and actually writing it really felt like severing a tie.
• I guess I like the idea that if people were referred to by their songs, then you just read a fic called ‘Johnny.’  Really, that was the idea though, SWAN is really all about his memories and how people relate to him/were affected by him.

SWAN 20:

• The chapter I hadn’t wanted to write. Originally, 19 was going to be the end. Granted, I would have tied things up neatly in 19, so you knew why he died and all the other stuff you get in 20, but Johnny’s death was really going to be the end of it. Some people, namely Lana, Crow and my old roommate/good friend Melissa, got upset enough that I wondered if I should go just a bit more.  Then this happened.
• The blood stain smiley was Crow’s idea. I added ‘Look Edgar, no palms!’
• One of my goals in SWAN 20 was to do a lot of parallels and weaves of older things. Weaving all the songs from prior chapters in was one of the first instances of this.
• There is nothing more horrible for you as a grieving person than seeing other people who don’t know that a great black thing has just consumed your life be happy at each other. I felt this when my cat died in 8th grade on just a fraction of the level I’m sure Edgar does.
• Lo Mein smell really does not leave things with any kind of willingness.
• Originally, the entire ‘Johnny loses his memory’ bit was not in here. All of it. Everything between Edgar saying the ‘even when my eyes are open’ line to the point when Johnny remembers, minus the Pepito and Squee scene, was not part of my original version of this.
• I think it surprised me how much control Squee has in that relationship.
• Tonja referencing the proto-Tenna we see in the Johnny comics, of course.
• “Edgar do you play?”  is a throwback to Johnny’s first weekend with Edgar, which I hope I didn’t actually have to make note of.
• Tenna driving a car through Edgar’s house and Devi mentioning voices in her head are referencing ‘I Feel Sick.’
• I think we all have memories like the ones Edgar is afraid of – stories we’ve been told so often we’re sure we remember them.
• Memories in general are a big part of SWAN which is why this Johnny losing them really made sense to put in. He’s still got his bit of hypocrite when he insists that he’s the person Edgar knew without his memories, but had insisted years ago that he wasn’t the person Edgar remembered. Lover, yes, maniac, no.
• ‘women’s television network’  Mmm, Lifetime Movies. The death of many productive afternoons over the years. They’re pretty much just so bad you can’t help but watch them.
• “paintings of little girls modified to be demons” Crow and I saw these at the Food Court of the Damned haunted house in Portland in 2007. They were those lovely doe-eyed crap paintings you see at second hand stores, but all modified to have a few heads or sharp teeth and tentacles. They were excellent and I wanted to buy them all.
• ‘Best is relative’ strikes again.
• School and roof action to flash back to SWAN 10. Fake falling included.
• “Tell me about me” stuff is going back to SWAN 2-ish.
• ‘wore a ring for weeks on end’ – I drew Johnny with a ring forever, and no one said a word.  I was sort of surprised.
• Johnny totally has a weak spot on his ear, and Edgar is good at exploiting this.
• ‘without sin’  Whoo, I made Edgar loosely quote the Bible, despite this incarnation of him not being religious at all. I don’t think this is the first time he’s done this.
• ‘tell me how you really feel’ – My mother says that all the time. I couldn’t not put it in there.
• Making other people happy had been another big theme here. I felt like it was important that Johnny relieve Edgar of the job once he knew what it had cost.
• I don’t know where they’re waking up, or even if it was from more than sleeping. If you want to imagine sex on the pink chair, then go ahead.
• Lana had a bit of a hand in this last scene.
• ‘Song Without a Name’ has been slated to be the last song in this thing for such a long time. I named the whole fic after this song originally, even if it drifted to being named essentially after Johnny.  It sounds nothing like Johnny’s song, but it is appropriate nonetheless.

• Incredible, Lana.

Thank you, guys. I love you all so much.  I hope this little blip adds some additional fun to your SWAN experience.

Don’t worry.  Johnny and Edgar won’t let me go now. You’re going to hear more from them.

-LYX