Development Gag: Alejandro the intern once competed on a show called Camp TV, which got cancelled partly because of its bland name. The joke is that Camp TV was the original name of the show that became Total Drama Island, with the name being changed because the networks didn't think the original name was catchy enough.
Genius Bonus: The story has a goodly number of obscure references to go with all the famous ones. For the non-geniuses in the readership, there are always the footnotes.
Sunshine is the alter ego of a certain Duncan fangirl, who created the character (used in this reimagining with permission) in part to be a Parody Sue proxy for her fangirlism.
The author describes himself and his wife as essentially a real-life Noah/Katie pair. Guess who Noah's crushing on?
Although this story generally has a good deal of planning by fanfic standards, the author will sometimes run with spur of the moment ideas, especially in ancillary scenes. Bridgette’s dream sequence note based on a reviewer’s comment, the makeover scene before the camping challenge and the dancing at the boot camp party are acknowledged examples of elaborate scenes with little or no planning.
Scenes added for the purpose of error correction tend to have little planning, due to the time constraints which necessitate such scenes in the first place. The author has acknowledged two notable examples:
In the first Boney Island challenge, Chris was meant to warn the contestants during the challenge briefing (as per canon) that a curse would befall anyone who took anything from the Indian Burial Ground located there. For whatever reason, the author forgot to include that bit, and didn't discover the oversight until well after posting the chapter. Rather than go back and quietly revise the scene, the author wrote a scene for the following chapter wherein one contestant who happens to know the legend warns another who has innocently picked up an artifact from the area. This approach gave the reader the same information as the intended scene, and had the benefit of giving the resident Motor Mouth another “mind dump” monologue.
The dancing at the boot camp party was an elaborate scene added at the 11th hour, so naturally at the 59th minute the author discovered a serious problem with it, namely what the scene made Tyler do behind his new girlfriend's back. A hasty repair job ensued, resulting in the "damage control" discussion the next day and the scene on the Boat of Losers with the eliminated player and the interns engaged to implement the damage control plan.
