A Perfect Circle: Author’s Notes

I have changed the incorrect dates, cigarette brands, ages, locations, etc, to correspond with the canon, have removed superfluous external excerpts, and re-named a handful of chapters. That was fun.

Excerpt notes: 6 November 2005: The beginning of the story has been re-written, to everybody's benefit. There are, however, several issues of incongruity I have to comb through and edit. Some of the earlier chapters are still shaky and, in light of story evolution and development, there are several elements falling out of line and sequence. Now that I have a solid idea of where the story is going, I will re-align things.

These are the canonical details that need to be fixed:

• Tokyo Babylon took place in 1990-1991, not 1992. As such, Subaru is 25, not 23; Seishirou is 34, not 32; and the events were "nine years ago", not "seven years ago".
• The Dragons of Earth shack up under the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Buildings, not the freaking Diet Building. I have no excuse for this one.
• Subaru and Seishirou smoke Mild Sevens, not freaking Wild 7's. I blame Battle Royale for that one. Because I don't have a better excuse.
• More manga have been released since two years ago, when this started. Given that critical details about Fuuma's true nature have been revealed, his character is in need of streamlining.

Excerpt notes: 21 April 2004

I'll be frank here. I hate the beginning of A Perfect Circle. Really. Freaking. Hate it. It's horrible, it was intended as a joke, it is convoluted, and it scares off my literate audience from the get-go. Did I mention that the entire story needs a sore dose of foreshadowing for any of the characterizations to make any sense whatsoever? Well, it does. Bah.

As soon as I snatch vestiges of my life back from school, I will proceed with gutting the beginning of that story within an inch of its life.

--Trench Kamen, April 21, 2005

Excerpt notes: 4 April 2004, posted with chapter 16 on FF.net

I usually try to avoid author’s notes within the fic itself, but it feels like a good idea to add one at this time.

It has been almost two months exactly since I last updated "A Perfect Circle", something for which I apologize. In addition to the generally chaotic state of my life right now, I took a short hiatus to write the (complete) short story "Valentine", which lodged in my brain until I had done something with it, and ended up taking far longer to complete than I had anticipated. April is going to be even more chaotic than February and March were. I have AP tests, SATs, the research report, etc, all at the end of April and the first weeks of May, not to mention keeping up with all of the bits and pieces of my personal life, so it may be just as long if not longer before the next chapter of APC is uploaded.

Hopefully, that will not be the case. I would like to write as much on this as possible before I leave for Europe after school lets out, but once I return, I have the summer to write. I thank all of you who have been following this from its beginning, either since the actual first date of publication last May, or jumping on later. It means a hell of a lot to me. This story has come to mean a lot to me, and I am determined to stick with it to the bitter end, come hell or high water. It is at this point 209 pages long on Microsoft Word (12 pt font, Times New Roman, single spaced), and it is going to get longer. (Hey, kind of like!... never mind)

In short, "A Perfect Circle" has not been abandoned. It lives on. I thank each and every one of you for sticking with it this long.

--Trench Kamen; April 4, 2005

First notes: 13 June 2004, three chapters in
I don’t know where this story is going, but I want to follow it to its end.

This is one of the stories I have little trouble in tracing back to its origin, or at least to the closest conclusion regarding an “origin” any writer can make. It was originally going to be a one-shot conversation fic involving Seishirou and Fuuma following through on their offer to eat crepes together in X/1999 volume 14. Seishirou was going to explain how both he and Fuuma are hollow shells, and then leave. That was going to be about it. The fascination with this particular scene / dynamic lies as much in my fascination and congruencies with the two characters as it does in the allegory it paints in “real life” with my friends posing as various X characters. I can deny to a fault that there would be no pseudo-symbolic congruency with the actual characters themselves and with us in the real world, or in using the dynamics and analyzing the characters and how they interact as any sort of basis for real-world analysis, but subconsciously the idea and inspiration are so ingrained that hints of such cannot help but manifest. Such is the coil of obsessive fandom.

The ending is something more or less conceived after extending the idea to Seishirou and Fuuma sleeping together after the crepes scene (this started as a long-running joke that to this day will not die) and wondering what exactly would happen if such a union were to occur, and what probable motives could be behind this. In many ways, this fic is my outlet for slashing and hacking through the worst-case scenarios I could see occurring in my life at the time given the ironic circumstances while still maintaining the awareness that the characters are indeed not an accurate representation of the motives of anybody in my life, but more and more I think that I can see minute but critical congruencies born more by circumstance and idiosyncrasy than by personality and temperament. More as a product of my paranoia than a product of actual real-world occurrences, I imagine more vividly the destructive spiral relationship polygons / circles, misunderstandings, jealousy, hollowness, insecurity, lust, self-perpetuated isolation for an image or security, masks, and possession can wreck.

In that faculty, this is in no way a true story so much as it is a satire. It is not intended to be an allegory for my life, though beneath the intention there is always subconscious intervention. Freud would have a field day with this one. But as such, I would like to make it clear to anybody I know personally who is reading this that this is in no way a personal attack to anybody or borne of malice, and that any parallelisms in the mannerisms of the characters and the actual people are a product of the fact that, in many ways, we are like our characters. Why did we choose to be them in the first place? I do not deny that this was inspired by the parallelisms I see between us and our characters. It is also supposed to stand of its own merits and on the actions of its characters unrelated to its relation to us. Somewhat of a paradox.

But I rather like paradoxical satires.

--Trench Kamen, June 13, 2004