Picking up from yesterday…

Even though killing one of our leads (or lead-adjacent characters, depending on how you count) felt necessary for the story, it always felt like a little bit of a betrayal to write a character after we’d decided their death scene. We were asking you to invest in this person, knowing full well that in some ways, that investment wouldn’t be realized. Like we were insider traders. Like we sold you a bill of goods. That feeling’s at war with the feeling that we’ve made the story better and ultimately enriched your experience, but it exists in its own space. Shit’s complicated.

In Rachel’s case, as it happened, we had a ready-made character who could serve as the perfect surrogate for the audience’s investment in her. Zeroing in on Lia’s version of loss could show a lot of detail about how the game works (and fails to work) that we’d kind of hand-waved away before this point. And as Flo pointed out, we really needed to roll these characters out in a low-stakes story so you could relax and get to know them before we made them part of the main plot.