Stuff I Didn’t Use!

I like to think all of these things DID happen, I just couldn’t get them in with the space I had or the flow I had going or something. NOW INCLUDING CONCEPT STUFF. Because I am easily influened!

Tiny scene is tiny!  This is an exchanged based on some actual advertising my parents ran into when they went to Mexico. Things just got too serious too find a good spot for it.

“I think I want some tacos, you want any?”

“Where are you getting them?”

“Jose’s, I guess.”

“Jose’s? Nny, that’s the place with “We Cheat You Less” as their slogan.”

“Yeah, I know. A guy can appreciate that kind of honesty.”

This was meant to go with Nada Surf’s “Blankest Year”, which consists mostly of ‘Oh fuck it, I’m gonna have a par-ty’.  It was funny, but again, things moved too fast to get it in.

“My god, what are you listening to?”

“It’s like these guys wrote a song about my life.”

“Wow, that’s deep and profound and no one has ever said that before. Seriously, what is it?”

Johnny ignored him to do a subdued sort of dance to the song. It kept screaming “Fuck it” so without any other context, Edgar figured the song would have to have been at least twenty percent about Johnny’s life.

Johnny walked around the room, not doing anything in particular – moving knickknacks and looking at the levels of dust on things and tilting stuff on the wall so they were crooked – all while chanting along to the song. He increased volume or made it a point to look at Edgar when something he apparently found relevant to himself came on, and Edgar just watched him.

After the song ended, Johnny turned to really look at Edgar.

“What are you looking at?”

Edgar shrugged. “You,” he answered.

Johnny leaned on a chair and stared back at Edgar.  Edgar titled his head to one side, confused.

“Jeez, you blinked already,” Johnny said. “You’re terrible at this game, Edgar.”

Edgar thought maybe that was the defense mechanism again.

A teeny-er snippet than before is this fragment of a sentence about music. It came to me in conversation, and I want to use it, and may still, but here it is because this file is not as large as I had hoped.

“…music takes part of my body that has no form and tries to make it break the parts of me that do.”

Because PolyesterRage is good at making me write stuff that I didn’t use, we’re going to try to round up some ideas that I had that didn’t make it, or have questionably made it.

The biggest thing I can think of is Johnny and Edgar actually getting together.  I went through so many versions of this at so many different times.

One version had Edgar getting up some nerve in highschool (this is the Edgar that became ‘other Edgar’ in the handwritten scene) and asking Johnny out somewhere. The conditions were something like Johnny would keep allowing it until Edgar failed to show him a good time. Johnny agreed to it, seeing it as some kind of challenge and started the whole thing off with, “Okay, impress me.”  Several little date-things in he stopped having to be asked to come on another one.   It was in this timeline that I had Devi and Pepito (separately) discover their relationship.  Pepito discovering that he had fucked up when seeing them through a window or out sometime at night, and Devi coming into the choir room on a random Saturday and catching them together in the office thing. 

There are some pictures of this timeline ( Here!).

There was the cliché ‘we fell on top of each other’ version, which was totally a joke and something to pacify my brain while I came up with something better. It was of course on the couch, because everything between them happens there.  It really was similar looking to the ‘May I?’ kiss situation, in that Edgar sort of took control of it.  They literally just tripped into realizing they’d been really important to each other for years, but it was just a little too lame for SWAN.  I felt there was only a certain amount of cliché I could do before it was just ridiculous.

Something I had in mind that could still be entirely true is Johnny’s relations with Devi and Jimmy before Edgar showed up.  I had toyed with Johnny and Devi figuring that they were close friends, and wondering why they weren’t closer.  Party because of that, and partly that they were the only people in the world, they had experimented together, and then realized there was nothing there.  Neither of them has said a word about it since.   Jimmy had been only partly toyed with.  He was teased and baited, even to the point that Johnny went home with him, but he wasn’t allowed to get very far before Johnny decided it wasn’t an experiment he really wanted to do.  (Though in some versions of this version, if that makes any sense, he actually had slept with Jimmy, and this had horrified Edgar when he discovered it.)

I don’t imagine that either of these encounters was sexually driven more than power or control driven, on Johnny’s part.  I’m sure Jimmy’s was, and perhaps after that he’s just been running entirely on sexual frustration from one single instance.

When Johnny came back from the dead/from not remembering, I had originally wanted to have him and Edgar have a small conversation in just lyrics from ‘The Racing Rats’ which was done by the same guys that did ‘An End Has a Start’ but didn’t want 20 to have any more than ‘Song Without A Name’ for its defining song, so I had to leave it out.  The idea that they have found lyrics that mean something to them, and that reciting them to each other would have an impact on them or have even more meaning is pretty important to me, though.  If/when SWAN gets its sequel, ‘The Racing Rats’ will be first.

Because of course it will be based on music.

There was originally going to be something involving Edgar and Nny being persecuted for something and the key and the book being their defenses against whatever it was. There are some pictures of them looking terrified as something tries to get them, and some of them looking determined with book and key on hand here -> http://ladyyatexel.deviantart.com/art/SWAN-Spoiling-Or-Something-22099683

With the theme of Johnny coming back, there were totally 3 versions of that, at least. In one, he wasn’t able to get back at all. Pepito allowed him a single visit to Edgar in which he told Edgar he’d been happy and tried to tell him not to kill himself.  It didn’t work. The theological volley ball thing that Edgar worried about in the 20 that happened actually became reality in this version, and they had to really fight to be near each other.

Another had Pepito actually not being a dick and endangering Squee. He watched Edgar mourning and destroying himself, and watched Johnny aching at how much Edgar was hurting and realized he’d done something pretty awful and let Johnny go.  I decided it was a little more Johnny’s style to throw an ‘up yours’ to everyone involved and solve his own mess.

In another, Edgar simply died from agony, and because his Heaven was being with Johnny, he spent eternity with him in Hell. They generally taunted Pepito and made fun of people in addition to enjoying each other’s company until Heaven came in and was all, “Bitch, bring our toy back,” and there was a fight to keep Edgar that had something to do with the key and I don’t really remember what else.  Yeah.