| abstract
| - This was one of the first stories I decided to add to A Short-Lived Dream. I almost put it in The Heels of the Unknown, but I was unable to develop satisfactory plot details for it during the writing of that collection. I have long felt that some kind of resolution to The Benefactor's cliffhanger in Dragon Ball: Cold Vengeance was needed, despite Destructivedisk at one point several years ago saying that he didn't think such a thing was necessary. For a while, I considered putting this in an early chapter of Dragon Ball: Heart of the Dragon. After thinking about it more, I decided that this story would work better as a one-shot. With that said, there is not much that I had planned for this story before I wrote it aside from the fact that TB needed to escape Niflheim somehow. At the outset, I didn't plan on introducing Audacci in this story. Indeed, I began writing this story before deciding to add Audacci to it. I had an idea for a sort of "evil triumvirate", similar to the Sith triumvirate of KOTOR 2, for Heart of the Dragon. I don't remember when I came up with who would be in it - this was a gradual process that slowly developed over months of thinking about villains for HOTD. From that brainstorming came the idea that I could ally Audacci, The Benefactor, and Majin Sesami together. Even after coming to that realization, it took me a while to think up the specifics for how this would unfold. As of yet, I haven't quite decided on how to introduce Majin Sesami to the group, as that will happen in Heart of the Dragon; but for Audacci and TB, I felt it would be better for them to meet earlier, to already have a plan to re-awaken Sesami at the beginning of Heart of the Dragon. I always wanted this story to be short and abstract, to deal with a lot of things in subtle ways. This presented a problem in the writing, and indeed, this story, despite being relatively short, took me forever to write; it was immensely difficult to convey things how I wanted to, for some reason. At multiple points during the writing, I questioned whether I should discard everything and start over - that level of doubt is more than I've ever felt for any other one-shots before this one. From start to finish, this one-shot was a ten day project, which is quite absurd for something that isn't even 2500 words long. I wrote the first six or so paragraphs in the very early hours of October 13, 2016 from 12:32 am to 1:46 am. I obviously wasn't writing with good rhythm at the time - I would write a few words or sentences, take a significant break, and come back. This was because I was drunk the whole time I was writing. Being drunk makes it harder to write in some ways, but easier in others. Obviously I wouldn't get drunk to write if I didn't think the benefits outweighed the problems. As well, I want to mention that I began this one-shot two days after finishing Not So Far, which is unusual for me. I usually spend much more time between my one-shots. In this case, writing about Ledas inspired me to do the story about The Benefactor. This is, after all, the first real look at what's coming next for TB since the completion of Cold Vengeance in 2012. That's a long time - almost five years. This is similar to how The Great Sushi-Eating Contest also showed for the first time in several years where I was taking Ledas next. Because of that, I consider this story to be a "brother" of The Great Sushi-Eating Contest. Regardless, I wrote those opening paragraphs and then didn't touch the story again for another two and a half days. I thought a lot about what I wanted to do with the story in that time. I was afraid that Ice Age Coming would be "pointless", that the description of TB's escape was meaningless. To fix this, I added more emphasis to his hatred of Ledas driving him through the snow, literally keeping him alive and warm amongst the snowstorm he's trying to escape from. At the same time, other techniques that later became defining characteristics of ASLD stories began to show themselves in this story. My Japanese literature class of Fall 2016 impacted me most when we discussed haiku; the sparse, plain, terse style of haiku began to be reflected in my prose in this story. Also, I tried to start making my prose a lot more subtle than before. This was also something I attempted with THOTU; I tried to take that kind of thing to the next level in this story. This kind of thing is difficult to talk about because I don't think it's appropriate to reveal so much about what I'm trying to do. But it is important to note that in this story, I began taking subtlety far more seriously. I wanted readers to work for answers, to have to come up with conclusions, to have to figure things out, moving away from the type of fiction that explains everything. I wrote a big chunk of this story on October 15th. It took me roughly the whole day to write about another two pages of the story, which took me up to TB and Audacci talking about Ledas and Gohan. I was writing very sporadically, slowly, and without much confidence. This was a difficult story to write in all phases - conceptually, technically, tonally, thematically, and most of all, figuring out how to make this story matter to me, to be a story I felt was worth telling, was a surprising issue I spent many hours trying to find a solution to. From 11:27 pm of October 16 to 2:15 am of October 17, I edited and changed things for what I had already written with the intent to deal with all of the above-mentioned issues. I spent the rest of the day completing the story. The first draft of Ice Age Coming, which was partially finalized, was finished at 10:35 pm on October 17th. In the early hours of October 19th, I edited the opening part of the story again, for I was not satisfied with how it had turned out. I spent roughly two hours re-editing a section I had previously edited and deemed finalized. It is exceedingly rare for me to do something like that. I only re-edit finalized sections if I have deep concerns about the quality of the story, as was the case here. I didn't touch Ice Age Coming again for three days. In the early hours of October 22, 2016, I once again edited the opening part, this time adding in a few entirely new paragraphs to fix the issues I had with it and to more cohesively deal with the themes I wanted to. Later in that day, I once again edited the opening part (before TB meets Audacci), and once I was satisfied with that, I quickly edited the remaining part of the story and then posted it on this site. So as can be seen, I had significant issues with this story that required me to spend hours tinkering with it - an unusual move for me. It was the opening part I had a problem with - TB's escape from Niflheim. The part I thought would be hard (meeting with Audacci) ended up being the easier part to write, though that's not to say it was easy to write. The opening few paragraphs may seem inconsequential, I suppose, and until I re-read the story again for this anthology's endnotes, I can't say entirely why that was, for I don't remember everything that went on in this story, as I wrote it entirely while drunk. Every time I wrote or edited, I made sure to get drunk first. As such, there are details that are unclear to me now that will return to me when I re-read. This story is one of the most significant in terms of building up to Heart of the Dragon, and in that way, it continues the theme of fanon character one-shots from The Heels of the Unknown. I made this DLC of Dragon Ball: Legacies as a way to, metaphorically-speaking, re-write Were It So Easy. I wanted to show the growth in writing between the two stories while also providing a good little tale about The Benefactor that will have future importance in a major story of mine. We'll see how successful I was. Anyways, onto the endnotes!
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