Golden Drive Commentary (Chapter 1)

I figured I’d do this commentary because some people might want to know what happened behind the screen as I typed out A Golden Drive Through Equestria, and even give some nice tidbits of information.

I guess I’ll begin with the very beginning. Why did I write A Golden Drive? Well, simple really. I was interested in the genre of Displaced. This is FimFiction’s own way of saying “we cosplayed as people, the cosplay becomes real after we fell in a portal.” Unfortunately, at the time, the Displaced Genre was more of a power fantasy sort of story, where you go to Equestria dressed as a villain and making it your bitch.

I wanted to do something different with the plot. Something unheard of. My original idea was going to be a fanfic where a character cosplays as an Attack on Titan character, wearing the signature uniform. But, because of how uniform it is, when he does get displaced, he has no idea who he is displaced as, leading to a puzzle of who he is as he dwindles the list down. Eventually, he’d be revealed to be a displaced Annie and the story would unfold from there.

However, I mulled over the idea for quite a bit. It wasn’t until I watched the final battle between Gou and his father that I realized who I could create.

And thus, A Golden Drive Through Equestria was born. Funny enough, someone pointed out the title that, if the story takes place in EQG, then why is it called A Golden Drive Through Equestria? Well, I thought it’d be a cool title. As for why I set it in EQG, I think it was mostly because it’s much simpler to put it there than in Equestria.

The other thing I decided to do was to cross it over with RWBY as well. The reason didn’t make itself known to me until I thought about it. Ruby’s super fast and it could be interesting to see how she’d interact with the speed of Gold Drive. There was also the connection that the two shows had a racism-born rebellion subplot to them. Not only that, but each Rider and member of RWBY have a matching color and even eye color.

Ruby and Drive are red/silver.
Weiss and Mach are white/blue.
Blake and Drive’s special type (born from the future Drive) is black/yellow.
Yang and Gold Drive is yellow/red (when Yang’s angry)

Though I think one of the bigger reasons was because I wrote it around the time Volume 3 came around, the first Volume to be made after Monty’s death. I cannot remember exactly why I included RWBY, if it was to make a rival for Kelly or because I wanted to pay homage to Monty, but RWBY and Drive just meshed too well for me to separate them when it came time to write it.

And also because “And don't get me started on that edgy Little Red Riding Hood cosplayer” sounds very funny.

The opening quote nods to RWBY and the overall theme of the story, where Kelly struggles to share her body with Banno. I think I have a recurring theme in my fanfics (or at least drafts of them) where a character is sharing a body with another character. I had it with Scout and Homura and at one point had an early draft of a story where an OC shared a body with Takatora.

I made Kelly Ryoma Sengoku because I sort of wanted to tie his mad scientistness to Banno. Banno never really had a human form outside of the flashback where he tortured Heart and the idea was that you’d cosplay as some villain.

I think I should point this out now: Kelly is not a self-insert. She may have some reactions that I’d share, but she’s not one hundred percent me. For one, I’m male and I entered the Rider fandom around 2006 the earliest. And while I do enjoy some of the villains Kelly listed, I am not one of those guys who lusted after Chase’s pants.

Ross crashing into Kelly is a bit of a nod to how Weiss and Ruby first met. I wanted Ross and Kelly to not be aware of each other’s fandoms because I sort of wanted to have them find out themselves. In fact, I intended on having Ross know only up to Volume 2 and Kelly only seeing up to the end of Drive, mostly due to the fact that Volume 3 and Ghost were still on air as I was writing.

Originally, the Merchant was gonna displace Kelly. However, a pseudo-beta reader (he read the story after I posted it, but reviewed it as though it was a beta read) pointed out how it’s repeated, so I replaced him with an OC, and I think it’s the best decision I made for this.

Niko ‘Sid’ Zoloto is basically three different characters meshed into one dude: Roman Torchwick, Sid the Lock Dealer, and Mr. Gold from Once Upon A Time. In fact, the naming he has matches these three. Niko is the name of the protagonist from Grand Theft Auto IV, whose cousin was named Roman. Sid is obvious, and Zoloto translates to Gold in Russian. As for why he calls himself Sid occasionally. Well, Sid is the username he used for an MMORPG that changed his life forever.

The Token was the one thing I always wanted to include, and it may be one of the reasons I decided to include RWBY into this, since having a character who has his own Token would be cool, especially if he left it in capable hands. And what better way to summon someone than to say “thus kindly I scatter”?

I originally had Kelly wake up and Applejack telling her that Iron and the gang were hauling her until she scared her away. This changed somewhat thanks in part to getting feedback from the beta reader.

I decided Applejack would be the first person Kelly’d meet, since, outside of Pinkie Pie who just gasped, Applejack was the first friend that Twilight made in the show. I think it worked out well, since Applejack’s knack for honesty puts Kelly in hot water sometimes.

Believe it or not, Iron’s freak out over Applejack’s legs are what caused me to realize that I should explain things for the non-Rider fans. The Beta Reader had no idea why Iron was freaking out about the mismatching and I realized I needed to notify the audience that Iron was a perfectionist.

The reason I decided to do the “hero with bad powers” idea was because I believe humanity inherently wants to do good. Seeing descriptions of Displaced stories and the tags having “SEX” and “GORE” just make me think that every story is basically “Oh wow, I’m Sauron! Time to ram my one Ring up Celestia’s…”

I didn’t want to do that. Even with the Annie story, I wanted the protagonist to try and be a good person, even when memories of the person he’s cosplaying haunt his dreams. With Gold Drive, I struck, pardon the pun, gold. Banno is an absolute slime ball, out-scumming even the kid who called himself Judge. Pair him up with someone who enjoyed the Kamen Rider franchise and wants to be one to help people, and you got some conflict.

I like to thank Freeze for giving us the blank closing screen for Drive, just so I could edit it to make the closing screen for Golden Drive. The idea is that for each character that appears, their face will appear in the closer, more akin to Gaim, OOO, or Ghost than Drive (where it just features random cars), with the faces changing depending on the scenario.

With that, I am done writing up commentary for the first chapter of Golden Drive.