Without further ado,
deird1asked: What about Twenty-Nine Hands? I just loved the symbolism of the desert scenes.That story is one of the few that was actually inspired by fanart. Shortly after I came back from my cross country roadtrip in summer 2008,
framedinloveposted this Spuffy manip called Junction to her journal. It's got such a great sense of place - the desert, the heat, the spartan decor, the surreal, pre-fab house - that I immediately knew I wanted to tell a story set in Arizona, which was one of the states I'd visited and loved. I've always been fond of post-apocalyptic future fics and I thought the bareness of the desert and the remote isolation really gave weight to the world that Buffy, Spike and Dawn were left to. At that point, I'd also recently graduated from college and I'd been very close to minoring in Native American studies. Religion ultimately won out, but I thought it'd be fascinating to write a story using cultural influences and myth as a central part of the narrative. The First Slayer in all her primordial fierceness was a point of fascination for me when I watched the series and I wanted to use the idea of Slayer prophecy and Native American myth and magic to further explore Buffy's abilities. I still really like how I was able to express the deep bonds that our supernatural heroes had with the 29 surviving members of the Native tribe. One scene that I hesitated including - starved, vampire famine victims aside! - was Buffy and Dawn in bed together because of the somewhat incestuous connotations. I hope, ultimately, what came across was the deep, emotional trauma that all of them were going through. In a world where everything they knew was gone, that closeness, despite moral ambiguity, seemed really important for them to have with each other and Spike. Their cycle of survival - Spike hunting for them and his feeding off of them for his own sustanence - was one of the most rewarding parts of this fic to work on.
