For those who are reading my TDI reimagining, The Legend of Total Drama Island, I have good news and bad news.
The Bad News: Rescheduling[]
The bad news, which won’t actually affect readers who aren’t caught up, is that I won’t be able to make the scheduled 2 November posting date for Fourteenth Night. I simply have too many other things that have to be done at about the same time, so I’m postponing Fourteenth Night to Thanksgiving weekend . (Thanksgiving this year is on Thursday, 28 November for readers who don’t know U.S. holidays, so Fourteenth Night is rescheduled to Saturday the 30th.)
I’m hoping that I can subsequently get back on schedule and post Fifteenth Night on the weekend following New Year’s Day as originally planned, but I can’t make any promises. I’m getting into a stretch of episodes where I don’t have much pre-written, although I know the basics of what needs to happen in each episode.
The Good News: Creative Consultants Wanted[]
And now, the good news. This is your chance to be a creative consultant for LTDI, and you don’t even need to be caught up. I am looking for ideas for a couple of multi-part challenges.
In the extreme sports challenge (episode #13), I will be using rodeo moose riding and mud skiing from the original, but I’m not currently planning to use the sky diving. (Trivia tidbit: the rodeo moose riding was originally going to be Dawn’s first appearance, but she is now scheduled to appear earlier.) I will be adding a set of gladiator fights (after all, what is more extreme that gladiatorial combat?) and probably moose polo (with Dawn as the moose handler/trainer), so I need either 1 or 3 more ideas, depending on whether I go best of 5 or best of 7.
The other challenge where I need ideas is episode #15 (canon title “No Pain No Game). I’m changing this one a bit. Instead of the random painful punishments in the original, my version will be themed challenge featuring tasks based on the Labors of Heracles (Hercules). The Labors that I need ideas for are:
- 1st Labor: kill the Nemean Lion
- 4th Labor: capture the Erymanthian Boar
- 5th Labor: clean the Auguean stables (Heracles did this by diverting two rivers)
- 7th Labor: capture the Cretan Bull (I have an idea for this, but I may need it for the extreme sports challenge instead)
- 8th Labor: steal the flesh-eating mares of Diomedes
- 10th Labor: fetch the cattle of Geryon
- 11th Labor: fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides (this is the one where Heracles had to briefly fill in for Atlas and support the heavens on his shoulders)
- 12th Labor: capture Cerberus, the 3-headed dog who guards the entrance/exit to the underworld
In addition to the Cretan Bull, I have ideas for several of these but am looking for better ones. For a couple, I don’t currently have any ideas.
Finally, I'm looking for ideas for challenge rewards, as I've generally been revealing what the winning team's reward is in each episode, something the show was very spotty about. Ideally, the reward should be something related to the challenge, but that's not a requirement. Most of the challenges will stay fairly close to the original, with two notable exceptions. One of these is the first post-merge challenge, as noted above, and the other is the bicycle challenge (episode 18, "That's Off the Chain!"). In the bicycle challenge, the qualifying "race" is a jousting tournament, and the race for invincibility is explicitly based on "The Charge of the Light Brigade".