One of my good friends started talking about Dave and Bambi fanmods to me sometime around April 2022, showing me some of the songs and characters that it was interested in. I think it was Dale's song that I heard first? I was passively aware of it for a while, but it didn't really grab my attention too much until November '22. I made a one-off DnB OC named Chad that was loosely inspired by the random and silly lore that I saw in Gapple character bios on Funkipedia, maybe I'll post about him one day. Later in December, the same friend showed me a song from a (leaked?) Gapple build that had a similar leitmotif to a song I made. It kin-assigned me Dave on the spot once I started talking about the context of my song being related to interdimensional travel, and that got me into actually learning about the original Vs. Dave and Bambi, and its terminal lore... the rest is history!

Thank you for the kind words, it means a lot to me! Twitter is my enemy for having an absurdly short character limit, so I got a little long winded with this.

There's a lot of things going into this AU... it's hard to summarize them in a single response. But, if I had to put them in some logical order, I'd say first and foremost, I want to tell a story that helps people. One that gives them insight, understanding, comfort, that their experience and struggles are understood and represented, and how those things can be overcome. It wasn't my motivation first starting out the project, but it quickly became my priority when ANS pt. 1 garnered more attention than I expected. A lot of topics will be covered with the characters, some of them fairly dark, many focusing on how trauma manifests differently for people in line with my interpretations of events that happened with the characters in canon (Dave being the current spotlight for this, though there are more to come). But I do so with the intent not just to show what trauma (and other things) IS, but to also show that, no matter where you are in life, no matter how bad your situation may be or how hopeless things may feel... there is always hope. There is always a path to recovery. There is no such thing as being beyond help or healing.

The reality is that many people, especially young people, experience traumatic events but may not fully understand it, how it affects them, or how to deal with it. I was once one of those people. And I would like to, if I can, be a voice for them, for the experiences that are hard to explain, that don't neatly fit all the checkboxes of online questionnaires or resource lists, that aren't talked about as often in mental health advocacy and awareness, things that feel they have made you a worse or unpleasant person rather than a kind and "pure" one. I know I'm being rather vague and philosophical about it, but we're so early in the story at the moment that most of these things have not yet shown up, and I'd like to leave the details of those things to surprise. I can say, however, that my interpretation of Dave is pretty solidly in the category of the last thing in that list.

Maybe I'm getting a little ahead of myself by spelling out my vision for the whole AU, but, it feels important to talk about. Important to know that this is not going to be a tragedy, or "angst for angst's sake". It is very solidly in the hurt/comfort category, though each part of that loop sometimes takes a while to set up. Everything that will ever happen in this story is ultimately in the context that things get better, even if it's nonlinear, or really hard, or takes a really long time, or you're not the same person as you were before those things happened to you. Pain changes us, sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever, but it does not doom us.

As for my other motivations... I honestly just like making absurdly long and complicated AUs based on other story- or character-heavy media. Devius Ex Machina is not my first rodeo with this type of thing, but it is so far the only one I've made that's actually made it past the Perfectionist Planning Stage and gotten as far as it has in the released story. I'm rather much a creature of habit - these projects tend to come out because I find something intriguing about a character in the source and want to explore it in more detail. In this AU's case, it is Dave's 3.0 lore, as I was fascinated by the implications of his terminal logs and wanted to give it more depth. It quickly grew to be larger than that, though. At this point it's a conglomeration of my headcanons, references to other DnB media, exaggerating connections I've noticed in source material, and "here's my take/explanation on why this thing is this way". I've done that for as many things as I can, including the Lord Bambi lore and the original DFAC mods. I'm just doing what I like and having fun with it, really!

I'm very glad that people have liked the story and the art so far, and it's been wonderful to see people create things for it, or inspired by it. As long as I have made some kind of positive change for people with this story, then I am happy. After all, my motivations are only as effective as their execution. I've never done anything like this that got this kind of publicity, so it's bound to not be perfect in addressing the complicated subjects that I want it to, but I still want to do my best!