| abstract
| - I conceived of this special around the time I came up with the character of The Benefactor. That was when I was about halfway through the Prince Vegeta Saga in late October 2010. I created the page for this story on October 29, 2010 and began writing it at once. In fact, my writing was so rapid at first that I completed the first draft of this story all in one day and posted the whole thing to the wiki as I wrote it in chunks. I posted this story before getting to The Benefactor's first appearance in the Prince Vegeta Saga as a means to introduce him to the readers of The Forgotten. In truth, I remember little about writing the first draft of this story. I remember it being back on a very old computer that barely ran and that had almost no internet capabilities, forcing me to post in smaller chunks so as to not freeze it up by copying and pasting large quantities of words. The first draft of this story did not have chapters or sections. It was about 3000 words long, about twice the length of a good PVS chapter (at the time). The plot centered around a young boy coming into a village, realizing that the village council is not giving the people enough food, and becoming a councilor himself to rectify that problem. He eventually passes some tests and then becomes a councilor before things go horribly wrong and he kills the council and most of the other people of his species. Then Zarbon and Dodoria land, and they are impressed by his power, leading them to take The Benefactor to lord Frieza, who offers him a position on his ship. It was not a particularly good story, and not a word of it survives into the current version (but some of the plot is kept, though re-written). It was inspired by Death Note, and was also insanely gory and focused more on aspects of horror than traditional DB stories do. Additionally, this story was my attempt at being more symbolic and subtle with themes and whatnot than in the regular TF sagas (at least in in their first drafts). I'm not sure I succeeded in the original draft, though. This would continue over into the final draft, though in the final draft, I think I did a much better job at presenting those things. In the following days after posting that first draft, I edited the story, adding in a few scenes that also don't survive into the final version and adding in the section headings. From this early point, this special had 3 chapters, and it remained like this to the end. I essentially finished the first version of this story on October 31, 2010, though I continued to edit typos and other minor things in the coming days and months. The story originally had several theme songs, ranging from a couple songs from Two Steps From Hell to a piece by Ludovico Einaudi. Ultimately in 2011, I decided that the specials shouldn't have theme songs, so I deleted Outbreak's one from this story. This story won the DD award for the runner up to the best special in 2010 from its original version. I am surprised it got any recognition at all, as, in re-reading those old versions for this commentary, I could see how bad Outbreak once was. Destructivedisk was a major influence for me deciding to re-write this story, as his review of it was very harsh. As time wore on into 2011, I began to read this story over more and more and realized that not even I liked it. I'm sure numerous readers liked it - it did win an award after all - but for me, I wanted all of my stories to be as good as they could be, regardless of popular opinion. As I grew as a writer during my stay on this wiki, my eye for quality also grew, and I realized that the original Outbreak was one of the worst things I had ever written. It needed to go. Now, I didn't delete the special because I still wanted to tell TB's origin story - that is important to the overall plot of TF. But I just didn't want to keep what I had written back in 2010. I had these thoughts by early 2011, heavily influenced by discussions with DD as well as his initial review of Outbreak. When I began the first final edits for TF in July 2011 (starting with the Prince Vegeta Saga), Outbreak was on my mind. I thought over the problems that I perceived in this story at that time - the plot was kind of pointless, uninteresting, and random. The Benefactor's dialogue was mostly awkward and bad, and the other characters were not very interesting. Him wanting to become a councilor seemed out-of-character, as did his desire to open the food stores for all the people. So after I did a few final edits on the Prince Vegeta Saga, I decided I had to put a hold on that saga for a while as I focused on executing a nuclear option - completely starting over with Outbreak. This is the earliest thing I completed for TF's final edits. In truth, I remember very little of the writing process. The edit history shows that in July 2011, I deleted everything from the page, but then reverted my edit, as I wasn't yet ready to work on the re-write (which I eventually began in September 2011). I remember doing this. I was very unhappy with this story after reading though it in July 2011, and decided I needed to rewrite it. However, I also knew at the time that I didn't have a new plot thought up nor the willingness nor time to work on it at that moment. So instead, I reverted the edit and mulled over what to do with Outbreak until September, when I finally came up with some ideas for a new plot. I'll speak more to the specifics of the plot in the sections below, but one that is noteworthy is the fact that I wrote final version of this story with the intent on making The Benefactor's character better. TB's character was one of the biggest problems in the original TF draft, aptly noted by DD in his reviews. I thought that it would be impossible to rectify that issue (which was also the main issue of the PVS saga) before fixing the foundation of his character, which was this special. So I changed his history, and he acts completely different in the below version than in the original draft. This was all to make him less awkward, less vaguely lame, and more of an actual realistic terrifying force. Another thing I changed was having Frieza find TB when TB was still a kid, which allows for the parallels between him and Ledas and Prince Vegeta in the Prince Vegeta Saga to have more weight and more symbolic meaning. Another thing I did in the final version is to expand descriptions of scenes to not have random, poorly-explained scene jumps giving the reader little idea of what is going on. The three chapters took me about a month to write mainly because I would take about a two week break between chapters. I don't remember exactly why I did this; probably school and life were busy things for me at the time. But anyway, I began the final edits on September 24, 2011, and finished this special on October 15, 2011. It was a grueling process writing this special from scratch again after, especially since I had to abandon everything that was already there. I didn't have to do that with any of the other final edits (though the edits for Fulfillment Saga came pretty close). So yeah, I think this story is much cooler than it once was, but this is also one of my earlier writings, having taken place in 2011. Even my final edits took place in a period of time where I was developing into a much better writer, so the below story will be an interesting quality-comparison to the later final edits I did. The above picture is the tagline for this special. This was one of the first taglines I came up with for the 8 TF sagas and specials (it may have been the very first), and I like it quite a bit. There is a violent nihilism theme in this special, and I think that tagline captures that theme very well. This tagline also translated very well to a cooltext font/coloring, in my opinion. I added the poem at the top of the story section on July 4, 2013, long after finishing all three sections. There had been a different poem about Sonic the Hedgehog (the tv series) for the original version, but I had deleted that back in February of 2011, well before I began my final edits. As with all the poems, these things are just little recounts about my life or my story; in this case, it was raining at the time, and I was listening to Chopin piano music. I found sheet music for the pieces I liked and began to learn them as the rain poured down on the house around me. It was a little moment that struck me as cool, a tiny little quiet slice of life that contrasts nicely with TB's story in Outbreak. As with all of the poems, the number of lines is no accident; the line numbers vary in a patterned order that can be seen when comparing all of them in chronological order, with this special taking place after PVS and Forever Alone taking place before FS.
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