User blog comment:Rhonda the stalker fan!/Total Drama 30 Day Challenge: The Last Day!/@comment-1874924-20180806205757

The wikia software is being anal again. I've been trying to post this for three days ...

This challenge was interesting, even if my responses weren't always as punctual as I would have liked, and it served as a sort of roll call for how many people still care about both TD and this wiki's social side. I haven't changed as much since joining the fanfic scene as the rest of you, since I was already middle-age when I came in, but I can honestly say Total Drama Island changed my life because it captured my imagination in a way few other TV shows have. (The later seasons and RR, not so much--I enjoyed watching them, but they didn't capture my imagination the way TDI did.)

My "point of no return" came late in the TDI schedule, around the Tri-armed Triathlon episode if memory serves, when from out of the blue I thought of a few Gilbert & Sullivan songs that fit certain TDI characters and incidents. Because cross-referencing is what my mind does better than it does anything else, I quickly decided to take a more methodical approach to this (because that's what I do) and the concept for Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan was born.

Compiling TDI-G&S ate most of my free time for 18 months, and cemented TDI into my consciousness because the nature of that project obliged me to think about TDI much more than I otherwise would have, and to do so for an extended period. I originally wrote TDI-G&S to introduce my niece to the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, but as the project expanded I increasingly felt the need to share it with a larger audience.

At first, writing original stories was not even on my radar. (TDI-G&S uses the canonical story arc.) But one day, whilst setting a verse for "Hook, Line and Screamer", I got an idea that became my breakout story, "Legacy"; and the rest, as they say, is history. So, in a sense, all my fics owe their very existence to TDI-G&S; and in the case of "Legacy", that debt is direct and unambiguous.

Without TDI, there would have been no Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan; and without TDI-G&S, none of you would ever have heard of me, nor I of you.