Specifically, I miss Maddi and Seth in the very beginning, when she was just getting on her feet after ridding her life of all things Sebastian and Chris, and she was started to get intrigued by Seth. There was something about his vulnerability that still tugs at my bitter little heartstrings, and he just brought the natural joy out of her that she’d lost. I suppose there was something subconscious to my desire to put on The OC to lull me to sleep instead of Gilmore Girls, as it was New Year’s Eve in game, and that was THEIR holiday.
And while I’m being honest, she probably would have sucked it up and stayed with him, even if it meant half of her heart was somewhere else. She almost did, in fact. He gave her time to think and she picked him. Twice. Even though I don't think she was 100% sure about it. I know she WANTED him to be the one, and would have tried every day to make him the one. They had such an adorable, organic romance, and she stubbornly wanted to stand by it. She and Chris had that young puppy love that just became more, as they grew up together; with Sebastian, there was this instant connection, that nothing and no one could have stopped if they tried; but with Seth it was just this pure, natural evolution.
Which is why, as much as I hate retcon, it was absolutely key that Seth’s player came up with the alternate reality/alternate history/ rewrite. The only way it would have even made the slightest bit of sense that Maddi would leave her fiance is if she realized that she didn’t really love him. And since she did love Seth, in the fondest way (it was comparable to how she loved Chris), she would have stayed. She would have stayed and it would have been fine, probably for years and years and years, then one day she’d wake up, forty years old and miserable. Once again, some honesty: That was how the initial breakup with Chris happened. She’d felt that connection to Sebastian, and though she didn’t quite know what it was, it slowly made her more and more frustrated until she realized she couldn’t be with Chris.
That’s why we had to make it so that Maddi and Seth never dated. In my thought process, everything leading up to that one New Year’s Eve still happened. (The one with the blue cut-out dress, if anyone was following along.) All the semi-flirting, the curious thoughts, the looking forward to seeing him every day, it all happened. It just got downgraded to a passing crush. Seth’s impossible to NOT have a crush on. I’m pretty sure everyone has one. (That’s why, when it seemed like he and Maddi were going to be a thing, so many other people tried to get in the way.) But then Dallas came along, with all his sophistication and his promises of marriage and family and all these things that Maddi ultimately wanted, and she told herself that she was in love with him.
But because she wasn’t, it was easy to walk away from him once the person she truly, completely, and intensely loved came back to her.
Anyway, that’s not to say I’m not happy with the way things are now or that I regret anything. I’m still pretty stoked about it. Every so often I look at Maddi’s family page just to confirm everything is still there, just as giddily as I did when they first got engaged. It’s still strange to me to think that two RL years ago they first met (I remember very specifically that I was looking stuff up for my friend’s birthday) and even though I could tell they had something special right away, I never thought it would get to the point it has.
But even with being thrilled about this, as a spectator, as a reader, reading Maddi and Seth’s early story was so goddamn cute.