Wedding Bells & So Much More

Playing Catch-Up

It's been quite some time since I did a blog post, so I thought maybe it was time. After all, a lot has happened in the story and I might have some things to say about it.

Sam and Cat and Tori and Jade

One of the biggest revelations to come out of Cat's storyline is the fact that Sam has been gone for a much longer time than Cat originally suggested and that there was, in fact, a note left by Sam that attempted to explain why she was leaving. Unfortunately for Sam, writing and communicating weren't really her strong points, and Cat misread the letter to believe that Sam had grown too exasperated with her and decided to leave. Despondent, Cat decides to seek out therapy to help "fix" her, and it seems to help.

Her decision to go looking for Jade and Tori at this particular point in their relationship is no accident, either, as she follows her friends' lives on social media and in the trades and knows there's some trouble brewing. Her decision to go to them isn't just to enlist their help (since Cat is pretty sure they won't find Sam from the start) but also to try and help them. And, ultimately, be less lonely. As the story progresses, Cat starts to let it slip in the text of her narrative that she's hiding something, but won't even tell "us" what it is. As the secret gnaws at her, the progress she made in therapy is reversed; she starts making what she feels are "dumb" mistakes, until eventually she's haunted in her sleep by miniature Cats all spouting nonsense. Once the secret is out, despite the pain and stress it causes, those episodes seem to stop.

Cat's Interludes

The interludes for Cat's story are all about the lead-up to Tori and Jade's wedding. In my original outlines for this, I had the wedding taking place as the very first Cat interlude. It was a simple affair that would have gone down somewhere in SoCal where the girls are all from. But the more I thought about it, the more Cat kind of whispered, hey, this is Jori, it needs to be a big deal, not a throwaway background event. So, I realized that would be the unique thing about Cat's interludes: they would all be set during this one week, leading up to Jori's wedding. I wasn't quite sure how that would play out or what would happen. I wanted to send them somewhere unique, as thus far we've only ever followed these characters around places like LA or New York.

Somebody's Getting Married!

I went with my own ancestral homeland, Wales for the wedding. A large percentage of my heritage comes from our Wales ancestry (along with some German and a bit of Native American, too). I thought it might be fun to send the gang across the pond to the UK.

So, fun wedding facts!

• Mount Snowdon is a very real place in Wales and is quite a tourist hotspot.

• Alba, the village halfway up Mount Snowdon where the wedding takes place, is entirely fictional. The name Alba comes from the old name of the UK, Alba or better known to some, Albion.

• Albion features heavily in my favorite series of books, The Song of Albion, by Stephen R. Lawhead! It is the name given to the Celtic Otherworld.

• Edrychdros Castle, like the town of Alba, is fake. It's actually a very, very lazy contraction of two words, edrych, which means to look, and dros which means over. So roughly translated, it means "Overlook Castle" - because it overlooks the town of Alba.

• Although the actual castle in Snowdon is fake, my description of the castle is of a very real place. I used the real-life castle, Neuschwanstein Castle, in Germany as a visual stand-in for the exterior of Edrychdros Castle. (Check out the pic below!)

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Readers may remember I had kind of a huge delay when I first started releasing the Cat chapters. This was mainly because I had to do a lot of world-building for Alba and the castle. I had to fully understand where everything was, relative to everything else, where the shops were in town, where Nevel was staying, where Gwen and Ruby were, how long it took to get between them, all that jazz. These may seem like incidental details that don't matter much, I'm very detail-focused in my writing. For the most part, every place we travel to in these fics is a real place. Look up every street name we visited in The Untold Jori, or even the sex museum or the theater hosting Cat's musical. The only "fictional" building was the apartment building where Cat and Sam lived. The same is true for LA, the road trip from Portland to Redding and their stops in between...I spend a lot of time researching these places, visiting them on Google Earth, and investing a lot of time in the descriptions. I want you to feel like you're really there with them. This was doubly true of the wedding chapters. The pics above heavily inspired the look of Alba and Edrychdros Castle in my narrative.

iCat

Another thing I wanted to achieve in this chapter was to give Cat and Carly a bit of alone time. By virtue of dating Sam, or even just moving in and babysitting with her, Cat has the unique trait of being just as much an iCarly character now as she is a Victorious character. Her "rivalry" with Carly, which mostly just existed in her head back in #GrandFinale, was a big deal for her. I wanted to give these two friends some time alone, to hang out and have some fun. I introduced Nevel here as kind of a McGuffin because he oddly enough really is just there visiting family. He's a red herring, meant to worry the characters (and any readers) about what he's doing there.

Redemption of the Brit Brats

The same can be said of Gwen and Ruby; their presence there is also legitimate. We know that right away because we see their family. But unlike Nevel, who doesn't really care why the gang is there, Gwen and Ruby immediately want to get back at Sam and Cat for how they left things during their last meeting.

I didn't specifically set out to redeem them. When Cat revealed that they were there, I expected them to be their typical, villainous selves. But Cat, through the dialogue and her own inner monologue, reminded me in a way that while they were fun and silly sitcom villains, this wasn't a sitcom anymore and that both of the girls had a lot more depth to them. Just like every other character I've written who had their start on one of the shows.

Their redemption arc serves a few important purposes. First, it shows that under the right circumstances, even the worst of us can possibly be redeemed. Second, It introduces the idea that maybe not all villains need to be "defeated" per se. There are other ways of dealing with people who don't like you than getting the best of them. As Cat points out, things just kept escalating. You tricker us, we tricker you, and on it goes. So Cat, inspired by her scripture verse reading for the wedding, convinces her besties to invite the girls.

We see hints of how the girls must be treated at home when Cat goes to ask them to come. Clearly, they are pigeonholed as troublemakers. But Cat tries to see them as more than that, bless her naive heart, and it actually works.

The idea that not every villain needs to be "defeated" is an important theme that will come up again in the story. Very, very soon, in fact. Jade seemed to stumble upon this idea herself when she briefly reunited with Sikowitz and decided to take the high road with Hayley. It didn't work so well then. But it's possible these two themes may collide at some point before we reach the end of this ride.

Vows & Songs

I went back and forth about Tori and Jade's vows and their wedding song. I even posted an informal little poll on Reddit. If I'm being honest, I think the girls would write their own song to dance to, or sing their vows or something like that. But given the constraints to which I am bound (I'm not a songwriter or musician in any way), I tried to find a way for them to express their feelings through song and performance, as they often do. Hence the custom vows and the dance to Thinking Out Loud, the movies of which I basically based on the beautiful, official video for the song and a few weddings that attempted to duplicate some of it. I settled on that song because I love the melody and the lyrics once again play into the meta themes of the entire story: themes about getting older and facing those challenges together. Even though Jade and Tori are still in their early twenties when they get married, the modern story finds them facing some of the very things hinted at by this song.

What's Up With Sam?

I've gotten some comments and questions about Sam's proposal. Originally, as I said, I was going to have her propose and have Sam outright reject it. As I got closer to writing that scene, it seemed like Sam was being squeamish about the rejection. She wouldn't reject it outright. But she'd lay on plenty of clues in advance to discourage the question from even being asked. From Sam's perspective, things are great with Cat and she doesn't want to add a lot of artificial stress by changing their label or their tax status, as she jokingly mentions earlier in the chapter. She loves Cat, and that's good enough for her.

Maybe it's a bit narrow-minded of her, not to consider how Cat might feel about the situation. But in my opinion, it makes sense, given her history of wanting to run when things get too real.

Obviously, something changed there, since Sam has since booked it. And we get a hint of why in her letter. If you look carefully at the wedding chapter, you might find the seeds that eventually grow into a larger issue for her. Cat herself even calls some of them out. But what really made her leave?

Well, we aren't too far away from learning the truth about that, either. But I've got some more observations on the recent events. Tune in next time for my thoughts on that chapter. Yes, the mega-ship chapter, CaTorAde!

I'll leave you with some more media! These are the gorgeous dresses that I envision our beautiful brides wearing in the wedding ceremony. I'm sure you can match them up with the text. Can you just imagine how amazing Vic and Liz would look in these, if we were ever able to film such a scene? Wow. Enjoy, and see you soon!