User blog:Gideoncrawle/LTDI Status - Seventeenth Night

Mea Culpa
As some of you know, the Seventeenth Night chapter of my Season 1 remake, The Legend of Total Drama Island was supposed to be posted at the end of June, yet is still unfinished. This has been due partly to having too many irons in the fire (including trying to do more read & review both here and on fanfiction.net) and partly to an unaccountable lack of motivation.

I have finally given up on week-to-week extensions and rescheduled the update for Labor Day weekend. (For those of you who don’t live in the U.S., Labor Day is the first Monday in September). This will mean missing an entire update cycle for the second time in a year, but there’s no help for it. Once I do get the chapter done, I’m not going to rush the proofreading. Seventeenth Night is shaping up to be one of LTDI’s longest chapters, probably about 12,000 words. It will cover most of the trust challenge (episode 11) and will have a couple of subplots, including one wherein Dawn shows what she can really do. The subplots are mainly what have been holding the chapter up.

To help tide my readers, over, here’s a preview scene.

The Slingshots and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune
At the appointed time, the campers reassembled near an embankment. Chris announced, “The second part of the trust challenge is called the ‘Three Blind Tests’. Why, you ask? Because, I answer, in each of these tests, one player on each team will be blindfolded.

“The first blind test is the William Tell challenge; or as I like to call it, ‘the slingshots and arrows of outrageous fortune’. One player will stand with a crossbow bolt on their head, and a teammate will try to knock it off by shooting crabapples. Yes, Ezekiel?”

“Not that I’m complaining, but wasn’t it the other way around?”

“Don’t remind me,” grumbled the visibly irritated host. “Reversing it was Legal’s idea, not mine.”

Chris quickly regained his composure, and his standard bland smile returned. “Courtney will shoot at Duncan for the Muskies, and Lindsay will shoot at Leshawna for the Eagles.”

Heather snidely said to Leshawna, “Nice knowing you. Not.”

Chef Hatchet let Duncan and Leshawna closer to the embankment, some ten meters downrange. He gave each “target” camper a clear face shield and a small, oddly shaped hat. The purpose of this strange headgear, Hatchet explained, was to provided a flat platform to stop the crossbow bolts rolling off their heads prematurely. Hatchet had the “flatheads” stand far enough apart that one team’s shooter wasn’t likely to accidentally strike the other team’s target.

Meanwhile, Alejandro gave Courtney and Lindsay slingshots and pouches containing a supply of crabapples. The pouches had carrying straps long enough for the girls to sling across their shoulders, thereby keeping the shooters’ ammunition readily accessible on their hips.

D.J. asked, “Aren’t Duncan and Leshawna supposed to be blindfolded? You said that one player would be.”

Chris replied, “They don’t get the blindfolds, the shooters do.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Courtney snapped.

“Not really,” Duncan explained. “Everyone knows you want me, and the shot follows the eye, so being blindfolded will keep you from shooting me in my privates.”

In less time than it takes to describe, the diminutive dynamo loaded her slingshot, drew it farther back than it was really designed to go, and snapped off a shot with a sharp crack. Duncan winced, but somehow managed to stop himself crying out in pain as the fructose-laden herald of Courtney’s wrath struck him in a particularly sensitive part of his aforementioned privates and disintegrated—in a trice—into so much steaming applesauce.

“You mean, like that?” Courtney asked smugly.

“Something… like that,” Duncan gasped. The pitch of his voice seemed unnaturally high.

Eva smirked and sniped, “I thought you could catch those things. Or was that paintball just a fluke?”

“Paintballs are subsonic,” Duncan explained through gritted teeth as his voice began to return to normal.

When Duncan finally regained his composure, Courtney ventured, “I have to admit, though, you did have a point. Without the blindfold, I’d have to avert my eyes from your ugly face; and like you said, the shot follows the eye.” She looked pointedly at Duncan’s crotch and grinned wickedly.

Duncan decided that he was better off not goading Courtney further, so he bit his tongue and made no answer.

Leshawna asked, “But if the shooters are blindfolded, then it’s all luck, so what’s to trust?”

Chris ignored the question, for he did not want to admit that he hadn’t thought out this test as well as he could have. Alejandro blindfolded Courtney and Lindsay; and at Chris’ command, the trust challenge resumed.

Character Theme Songs Needed
One of LTDI’s multimedia enhancements is theme song videos for the campers, plus Chris and Chef. I haven’t decided yet whether any interns are prominent enough to get themes, but Alejandro and Dawn are the leading candidates. I’ve generally been posting theme videos here as I think of them and can locate suitable videos, but over on fanfiction.net (which doesn’t support appendices) I’ve been revealing them as each player is eliminated. There are several, though, for whom I don’t currently have good ideas, so I need your help. (I’ve recycled a couple from Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan, but I’m trying to avoid going back to that well too often.)

Theme songs/tunes can be of any genre, but my preference is for songs from musicals. They can be either vocal or instrumental; but for vocals, I must insist that the words be relatively easy to understand, either directly or via things like subtitles. Ideally, they should fit the character for something more than just a play on the title. The characters who still need theme songs/tunes are: For the record, the theme that I currently plan to use for either D.J. or Dawn but I'm not sure which is, "If I Could Talk To the Animals" from Doctor Doolittle.
 * Alejandro (if I decide that he’s prominent enough for a theme)
 * Beth
 * Dawn (if I decide that she’s prominent enough for a theme)
 * D.J. (I have an idea for him, but I may use it for Dawn instead)
 * Eva
 * Leshawna
 * Lindsay
 * Heather
 * Tyler

If you have an idea for any of these, please let me know either in the comments below or on my talk page.