Who is the real false Katie?

[ardweden]

Arcana is officially over, and as such, I checked some details over with Brett and figured I would put up a post explaining as much as possible about !Katie. Yes, I knew who she was this whole time... probably because I designed the character.

Comments

[grysar]

Two thoughts:

1) An funny resolution to the too many reversed Arcana in the fight problem. It turns out Yumeka was just pretending to be most of them to get a higher recruitment commission.

2) Awesome resolution to the problem. It turns out Yumeka was a key driving force to recruitment by attempting/committing various atrocities while in the form of regular Arcana. This would give the reversed a reason to rally, but one that could break apart in the conflict. If we pulled it off, we'd then just have to face the hardliners.

It might go a little something like this.
[Random reversed] You killed my brother Jim. [PCs] Jim? Do we know a Jim? ::check the logs:: [Random reversed] Die! [PCs] No seriously, we don't know WTF you're talking about.

[ardweden]

Resolution 2 would have been funny, in a dark sort of way. And made perfect sense.

[kamalloy]

Well, by tormenting Katie she did make Satoshi suffer by proxy, though many orders of magnitude less than what she did to Katie.

Was the initial idea a collaboration between you and Brett, or was it all you? When did you come up with it?

Why did she have it in for Katie so much? Was it because Katie was the anti-her, or had she observed the group long enough and decided that was the best way to cause all of them the most pain?

(Edited to add question.) I assume she was also responsible for Megan's change in appearance? What was up with that?

[ardweden]

The initial idea was a collaboration between myself and Brett, yes. We were talking about how to get Taki more involved in the game... I wanted to help, so we came up with the basic idea of !Katie to give Taki a kick in the pants. Her first appearance was break 13 (between sessions 43 and 44). She showed up again, just to Taki, in break 21 (between sessions 55 and 56

[ardweden]

As a note, Yumeka being Seiji Usukani's girlfriend (motorcycle guy!) was as much a surprise to me at the time as it was to the rest of you. I didn't come up with that. :)

[kamalloy]

It's a good thing Satoshi didn't find that out, or he would have been in a guilt coma for the rest of the series. ;p

[rowyn2001]

I talked to Ard a bit about this already. From my memory, part of what kept !Katie from being discovered (and probably part of her intelligence) was that she tended to keep away from those who had a close relationship with Katie, either by chance or not. Kaede was suspicious but didn't pin anything on anything more than reacting to the recent stress that was going on initially. And from my memory had only two or three times where he interacted with !Katie. I think it was also during a time when Moti was away so Kyon was more out of the picture.

As for Haruko, Taki, and Satoshi, Taki was busy being taunted, Satoshi was busy being teased (and hey, Katie's cute. Hormones can do a lot) and Haruko never really had more than a superficial relationship with Katie (and eventually got more antagonistic).

All in all, I think she made a good foil and a good plot-change for Arcana. Some Arcana, especially reversed, are malicious bastards and nothing showed it better than this.

[grysar]

Yeah, Haruko decided she just really didn't like Katie. So she noticed the behavior, she just didn't have enough of a relationship built up to classify it as a change.

I think the main problem, foil wise, was that we subsequently spent mounds of time being paranoid and lacking ways to check even if we were being conscientious. That wasn't really a lot of fun.