Chapter Text
If you don't care what names I use in this story, just skip this chapter.
I'm using the original Bright family names in this fic. This is partly to avoid confusion - I've now heard like six different accounts of how the Shaw family replaces/overlaps with/coexists with the Bright family - and partly because I think Elias Shaw is a stupid name. (No offense meant to anyone who might actually be named Elias Shaw out there.)
I did worry about the ethics involved here for a while, and that's why I ultimately decided to post this story on AO3. After all, on this site, you can set the search results to exclude anything tagged "Jack Bright." If you don't want to see the name on this site, you don't have to, no matter how many times it's been posted. As such, so long as the story's only here and it has that tag, I'm not too worried about people who've had bad experiences with the original author coming across it and having their day ruined by the reminder, which was my main concern about posting this at all.
And because I feel obligated to put it somewhere, I'm disgusted by the actions of the original creator. I wish the character's name wasn't also his name. (I know the character was a self-insert OC to begin with, but I've read more fanfiction about him than original material, and that's what I'm basing my characterization here on - and believe me, I know how characters change when people write fanfic about them.) He is not a good person, and I blame him personally for the fact that I lost sleep thinking about this naming headache. For pity's sake, dude, would it kill you to not ruin your own story by being a terrible person IRL?
Anyway. If you for some reason clicked on this fic and read this preface and are only just now deciding not to read it because I used the original names, I don't blame you.
Now. Let's get on to the actual story.