NOTES FOR LEVEL PAIR

**This is nothing more than my own ramblings on this bit of whimsy and should all be taken with several grains of salt as they are all just my personal opinions…

Hiyo! If you are actually reading this, I'll have felt accomplished in writing Level Pair, because it means that I succeeded in catching and holding my audience's attention well enough that they still want to know more beyond the actual story beyond that last chapter from Kuroo's POV… seriously, if you missed it the back button is just above:p

A little bio: I am an amateur writer, have been writing since my early teens (and everything from back then is embarrassing af to read now and it's both gratifying to see how far I've come and terrifying to see where I started). I have completed full novels (like 300+ pages) that I've never taken to a publisher b/c, reasons. I have lurked on fanfiction sights for YEARS as a reader, but had never actually written for any fandom prior to Level Pair, so YAY, first fanfiction! I really enjoyed writing this story, the hurdles and blocks and all. I completely fell into the world and characters and the whole story until it took over my entire life; you can ask my SO, this is all I've talked about for the last month or so. But as much fun as I had, I enjoyed posting it for you all even more :)

Mad props to Craziiwolf and her art for forcing me out into daylight. After years of avoiding it, I got tumblr and AO3 accounts just to post it so I could, at the very least, let her know how her art inspired me. When an artist can get a viewer to experience the emotions and feelings they are trying to portray, they know they have succeeded; it is the same for a writer.

If you are curious about the set pieces that spawned this bit of whimsy, you can find the two main ones that started it on Craziiwolf's tumblr page under the khwingedau tag. Craziiwolf has since expanded considerably on her AU so there are several discrepancies between her world and Level Pair's world; however, that changes nothing with regard to how she was able to pull the emotions out of me and get me to WRITE. A writer can spin a story, flesh out a cast, develop a plot, and present it in an interesting way… but a gifted artist can bring an entire world to life and give it substance and emotion. A visual depiction is almost always more vivid than what our minds can conjure.

If other artists are looking to reach 'fanfiction' status with their work, there are a couple things I'd point out (at least for me personally) as a writer. First, the more pieces you do for an AU set, the easier it is for a writer to get a grasp on the world you create and bridge a story between them. Second—and this is in no way a bad thing, but the more details you throw out, the less freedom a writer has to work your world into a story. With more constraints, it is a greater challenge for a writer to spin a fluid story that flows smoothly and still makes sense. These two things are contradictory in every sense of the word, b/c how can you create more works for an AU and not throw out more details? A good artist can strike a balance, and Craziiwolf does this pretty well.

Ah, so. Level Pair. Some stats:

Final word count: 82, 557. Total chapters: 30. Total pages: 143.

Perhaps equivalent to just under half a standard novel length. Longest Chapter: Asahi's, hands down at roughly 6000 words on its own. Shortest Chapter: Opening 2/2 at less than 1000… I honestly could have combined it with the first and been fine. Chapters I struggled with most: Asahi's and any involving Oikawa. Chapters I enjoyed most: Day Ten 1/1, Reconciliation 1/1, and most of Shouyou's.

I had about 80% of it rough written by the time I started posting… once I hit that point, I was confident that I wasn't going to run into a brick wall and abandon it. As a reader, it's massively frustrating when a good story drops into obscurity because the writer lost interest/fell off schedule/got lazy/had life happen, so I refused to do that myself. If I was going to write for you guys, I was going to go the whole way.

There was something like 2 weeks where all I did was write from the time I got home from work to when I went to bed, my lunch breaks notwithstanding. It all begins as block text for me; when the words are figuratively throwing themselves at the page, I leave formatting until the scene is down on paper. Trying to remember proper mechanics and presentation in the moment is annoying, and I will go back and format/clean everything up later. Level Pair was also written haphazardly; whatever scene was playing clearest in my head was the one I focused on at that moment. If one was fighting me, I'd leave it and come back later to see if it would work better. If one was insistently parading in my head, I'd drop where I was and go write that one.

As far as the story itself… I had most of it written before a lot of details on Craziiwolf's AU emerged and I wished I'd had them sooner because a lot of them were interesting. I didn't go back and change up much after it was down b/c I didn't want to chance burning out on it, but there a lot of differences between them. Certain things were easier to incorporate after the fact, but a few things that I wish I'd known about sooner were things like Kageyama's 'feather mutation', or the red threads between cats, or the altered appearance of a leveler when their other half has a near miss (I still want to try to incorporate this somehow in a post chap b/c I think it's really fascinating).

I consciously chose Oikawa for Kageyama's father because he's often this looming figure in the series already, and they already had the Senpai/Kohai dynamic to work off of. But that was where it massively diverged since I think I really failed to capture his character correctly. Oikawa is a fantastic character and very interesting because he deals with someone of unparalleled talent always just over his shoulder, always threatening to overtake him in the series. The only way he can stay a step ahead is through utilizing his strengths that Kageyama always lacked: his experience level and ability to connect with his team and maximize their strengths. He completely turned into an antagonist for this story and that was never what I intended; it's probably the single greatest plot point I was dissatisfied with.

I also chose to make the 'leveler' link lethal as opposed to Craziiwolf's concept that one of them could survive the death of the other. I think that the potential of both dying would change how people act under stress. No one wants to, but anyone can die for the person they love… but if you dying also kills the person you love, I think you will fight and rail and try that much harder to find a solution, not just cave—albeit grudgingly—to your fate because you know your other half will survive.

Having the possibility of surviving the death of your leveler with the potential of finding a new one also inherently undermines the concept of each character having one perfect person for them out there. If you have a character who is the 'second' perfect match for someone whose leveler has already died, you've inadvertently condemned that character to a lonely life if the original leveler had lived—unless you are in a paradoxical world where everything is set to happen without exception—i.e: the existence of every 'second' leveler occurs only in tandem with an 'original' leveler destined to die, and every 'original' leveler will always die so a 'second' leveler can succeed them. Otherwise, a 'second' leveler could potentially wander the world alone with no chance to connect with their other half if the 'original' leveler of their destined match never dies. Which also brings up the idea that if the 'original' leveler has to die for the 'second' leveler to gain a soulmate, does that make the 'second' leveler the 'second best' option for the soulmate with two levelers? This concept was tougher for me to toy with particularly if we are talking birds which frequently mate for life, with some species even dying of loneliness if their mate is killed.

I say this, but then go and give the cats the potential for variable 'level threads'. Ha, I'm horrible. I guess I felt it was a little more logical in this case because cats are often not monogamous—a female may breed with any number of males and raises kittens alone; a tom will relentlessly try to spawn as many offspring as possible and will regularly kill off any that aren't theirs. I could see the 'multiple' leveler scenario working here to an extent. But once the leveler link is established between them, I still treated it like the birds' link in that it is lethal for both if one of them bites it.

I never mentioned directly who attacked them in the beginning because an attack like that is violent and vicious and while Craziiwolf mentioned Shiratorizawa as 'responsible' in a roundabout way, I didn't feel like placing that directly on them as we don't really know anything about them at all. Aoba Jhosai started out being 'the team to beat' at first in the series but by the end, I was sincerely torn on who I wanted to win that match. I think every team is kind of like that, and wouldn't want to make Shiratorizawa out to be evil somehow.

I struggled to translate the 'burning' wings into something realistic for Level Pair and still be able to maintain how they'd never realized they were levelers growing up. Levelers are supposed to be myth at the beginning of the story and their wings spontaneously igniting through their spats as kids would have completely undercut that… so I treated it more like an internal chemical reaction that made them sick and acted like an internal acid release in their wings or something. In keeping with this, it made more sense to me for Kageyama to have a tougher time through arguments because he does still have his wings.

I also didn't make 'who did it' a huge focus of this story because, for me, the center stage point was first and foremost how Kageyama and Hinata cope and connect. It was a journey of discovery and realization before it was ever a story of revenge. That's why you didn't see anyone else until they returned to the rookery and no one else's POV until the 'epilogue', either. Any backstory for the others was *generally* viewed through the tint of Kageyama's/Hinata's memories because Level Pair was very much their story.

Ok, so I have one thing I want to mention and it makes me cringe with embarrassment.

There were several small mistakes I made that were easy to miss throughout the story that I will always see, but there's one huge one I'm absolutely shocked no one called me out on: Momma Yu. It glares at me every time I run across her in the story and I want to bang my head against my desk every time it happens. Okay… so here's the thing, I do actually know the names of all the characters in the series that show up in Level Pair. This mistake was monumental when I finally noticed it and unfixable without being inconspicuous by that point since she'd already shown up in posted chapters. When I first brought her in, I mixed up Nishinoya's first and last names at that particular moment and used the wrong one for her. And continued to obliviously call her like that until I was working on Asahi's chapter and the point where he calls Noya 'Yuu'. I swear, I stared at my screen for a good ten minutes in mortification and anger. And then I closed my laptop and went to Dairy Queen at 9:15 at night for some ice cream. Not only did I use Nishinoya's first name (and I totally love Noya, like how could I have botched that), I spelled it wrong on top of it. Talk about insult and injury. I couldn't fix it at that point without people noticing, so I just left it. For my sanity, I feel the desperate need to apologize—both to you, my readers, and to my characters (seriously, can you imagine Noya's unequivocally unimpressed expression?).

I'm not sure how I feel about my writing style. My SO says I 'dictate' my stories and I can kind of see that. I have a huge compulsory urge to describe everything and I sort of 'tell' readers how they should feel instead of letting them identify and sympathize with the character themselves. I'm a control freak and OCD af, so I struggle with overwriting my chapters, and end up letting my readers do very little thinking of their own. And that becomes an issue when it slows down the movement of a story. Too much information or over examined points are often tedious and that's a big reason why a lot of people will walk away from prose writing or poetry. You read a story to get to the conclusion, not necessarily to pause and look at the flowers along the path any further than in passing, so anything not directly relevant to the scene you are writing or critical to the story in general can be discarded—and I hate that part of editing. I'm not good at paring down content, because it all means something to me, and disassociating with the chapter in order to evaluate it correctly kills me. It's the single greatest point I think I'd get hammered for if I ever took one of my novels to an editor… besides them tearing my plots to shreds, lol.

As of right now, I have several plunnies for little post epilogue blips… like how Oikawa dealt with his son's abdication, potential Natsu reemergence, Yaku showing up, some kagehina fluff, the emergence of Hinata's wings, a bit part on Yachi/Hitoka and one on Asahi/Yuu, possibly a meeting between Oikawa and Kageyama… probably more I'm forgetting at the moment or haven't dreamed up yet. Ha, yeah, I have my plate full, lol. I might go dark for a week or two, but I wouldn't bank on me being gone.

So thank you once again to everyone who stuck with this in any way, I wish I could tell you beyond words how much I am truly grateful for all your support and kind words… they really make my days so bright :) Stay awesome guys; Nyx signing off.

P.S. If anyone has other thoughts on this or scenes/things you want to see... drop me a line! Never know, it might spark another bout of inspiration ;)