Building a Deck of Cardholders

Well. Here we are, my friends. At the end of the biggest plot I've done, and will likely ever do! Cardholders was an amazing ride, and even if I didn't get to do every bit of setup I wanted or casual srsposting (irony), I'm immensely satisfied with how all the events played out by the end of it all. What I think I'll do for this blog is start with the origins of the plot, then talk about each character, and finish with some cutting room floor that never made it to the forum. So, let's begin!

ORIGINS

If you've read my blogpost on the Anti-House League, you can tell that by the end of Season 10, I was hankering to do a collaborative megaplot after Curse, Dark Matter, and Salvagers were so very fun to be part of. Of course, as discussed there, the Anti-House League was very dependent on a very specific setting to really work, and people were not warm to the House - the kicker was the request for less complex settings, which put the kibosh on any chance of suggesting it for S13/S14. So I discarded the League, but it didn't mean I didn't want to megaplot, leaving my brain idly poking around.

Then I read this little story. Which, by the way, you should read all the stuff on Taste of Static. It's really good and really obscure, it deserves extra views. But either way, what this did was plant the idea in my head of a group themed around an ordinary deck of cards, where they all had different suits. The colors were my own invention, added to make it easier to sort and distinguished the cards rather than just four 2s, four 3s, etc. Originally, though, it wasn't going to be full mega! I was thinking of a more Council-sized plot at first, where it would simply be the Court - Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and maybe 10, that wasn't certain. It took some thinking and deciding to start adding Number cards, and then to take advantage of Numbers to open the floodgates to collaboration...

And with a framework in place, I started coming up with ideas and locked it in for Season 12! Having it so early also let me do the four Season 11 cardholders, too, so that worked out nicely. With that done, let's talk about the characters - we'll do it in order of direct encounter!

THE CHARACTERS

Paul Castello, the very first Cardholder to be met! In retrospect, it's kind of funny that the Card of Cards was used up before the plot proper even happened rather than being a major part of it, huh? Well, that's how it goes. Asterisk War was originally not going to be into Cardholders, unsurprisingly, but once the idea of the Number Cards took root in my head, the bosses of my two plots became the obvious picks to use it in 2021. There's not much to say about Paul that I didn't say last year in Chatzy, really; mostly just that the Castello callback was pretty spur of the moment, and that the Card + asterisk fusion was largely to allow me to play around with that big bulky design I wanted to use somewhere in a card plot. As well as that he was supposed to be the one who gave Baccarat his deck. Sure glad I didn't cut that plot thread off early now!

Futoshi Shimano, the other 2021 preview cardholder. Unlike Paul, he was a lot more direct in terms of adding the card - I knew I wanted to give him a power-up here, and I knew that it'd be a good way to introduce Ebisuwaru. That first scene ended up a little different from how Ebisuwaru as a whole was played, but that was because at the time I hadn't settled on the supernatural charisma aspect - Ebisuwaru was just going to be a convincing guy who talked people into doing bad things. As for Shimano himself, not much more to say, honestly! He was a great antagonist and I'm glad Yakuza Plot went down after all rather than me skipping to Cardholders last year.

Professor Yao Zerr, the first 2022 card himself. The Red Jack was one of the cards I came up with very early on, before Season 11, as he was designed based around one of the original concepts of it just being Court Cards - the idea that a lot of the Cardholders would be first met during Season 11 as ordinary Agaman citizens, only for Season 12 to reveal that the Man in Purple had coerced and convinced them to join his schemes. Ultimately, only a few actually played out like this, since this was also dependent on the smaller quantity that Court Cards would have as a plot. It's a bit harder to come up with and set up 36 people a year in advance!

As for the professor himself, he was one of the most straightforward concepts, but the specifics of why he took the Red Jack were vastly improved by Monda Akademio. Originally, he was just a xenophobe, who disagreed with the concept of Agama opening up and letting modern technology rival magitech and magic, and willing to fight to stop it. He was much less sympathetic than Zerr on-forum, who was desperate to keep the Academy alive whatever it took. As for the Bermuda connection, when I started forming the idea of Bermuda as being an Act of the Cardholders, I just shuffled him into it as a character who felt like he fit. That, Rivaleux, and Nue is actually what as a combination made me decide to focus on Court suits for each act!

Oh, and his name was taken from something I wrote elsewhere a loooong time ago. A story someone wrote played on the "alternate names for Professor E. Gadd" joke in Partners in time by using one of them, U. Reeka, as a rival to Gadd, and then I wrote a contribution to the story that had Yao Zerr, another of those names from PiT, as a rival to both of them. So the name stuck in my head for a decade and a half and then I used it here.

Ah, Tropico, beautiful home of El Presidente. A fun game series that I have a funny history with! My first encounter was with the demo on the Railroad Tycoon 2 CD, where I played it and thought it was neat, but never looked into getting it in the future because I was babby. Then we had my playing Tropico 4 a few years ago to get Keith Presto, and then this year I went on a big Tropico kick and decided to incorporate it into my megaplot. It helped that the Ignazio plotline was one of, if not the very first where I really played a major role in someone else's arcs and ideas, and I was very happy to revisit Isla Alfombra. 

General Castillo himself was a pretty fully-formed character once it all came together (which made him perfect for my Tropico 3 playthrough), and the Card of Edicts was perfect for him to keep control of the place. It was one of my favorite examples of Cardholder interactions, really - stuff like Rivaleux's meeting with Presidente is an example of one of those things that I wanted to do more of and was unable to. Overall, he was a great example of this plot being Chao self-indulgence start to finish and my lack of regrets about that!

Mirabelle Kensington is one of those Cardholders who was more there to serve a purpose than as a strong and solid idea. Ironically, she was created because I had a lot of trouble coming up with a Black Jack, and she wasn't even supposed to be the Black 3! My mind had provided the card name "Black Jack of Sparks" during 2021, and I really liked it and wanted to use it, but nobody ever seemed to click. The closest I got was coming up with the idea of Surf City as a remote-controlled water Stand and then saying that it had additional electric powers from the card, but ultimately, it felt really forced, so I just made her the Card of Waves, and then gave Nikolai the Black Jack because he had more right to it.

Ironically, Iono would have been a perfect Jack of Sparks if she existed pre-season. Oops.

Anyhow, Surf City was actually the original name I considered for the Hawaiian Shirt Tourist's stand, before I found that Bing Crosby had done the perfect song to describe his golf ultra-targeting, so that's why I had the name and worked backwards. The whole enemy Stand user concept came from me rereading 2016 and finding that Ezradamus confirmed he successfully made more than one Stand user, so here she was. I'm pretty happy with how she played out, though considering how minor she was, definitely worked better as a 3 than a Jack. Sorry, Mirabelle!

Nikolai Bernstein, in contrast to Yao Zerr, was NOT meant to be a Cardholder from the word go! I liked the idea of having a rival explorer for Kanade in La-Mulana, but as I mentioned last year La-Mulana plot was very reactive and I ultimately didn't find him to fit in naturally. So around August 2021 I decided to stop trying to square peg and round hole, and instead give him a more solid sendoff by saving him to fill a slot in Cardholders. Originally he was the Black 7, but then I bumped him down to Black 3... and then back up when I didn't have a Jack of Sparks, so instead he became the Jack of Suits. Good for him!

Nikolai was used to introduce the E.M.M.I.s largely because I didn't feel like his event would really be much solo, but at the same time I didn't want to throw him into another event - Witterel's and Nue's worked better solo, Nikolai felt better to take off the board before the finish, and Mirabelle's already had double-duty with the Josuke reveal to the characters. Ultimately, while he was one of the more "there" Cardholders, it still felt like a good wrapup for him, and more examples of Ebisuwaru's ability to convince people to go bad. I might use him again, but I feel no pressing need to!

It's really funny to me in a way to see Captain Robert Witterel and how he changed over time, considering he had probably the biggest jump down. The concept behind the captain and his event was pretty much the same from the start - a tortured soul who needed to be convinced to let go of his guilt and his pain so he could move on and free both himself and his ship. But the ranking, the ranking! Originally, he started as a Blue Ace - see, in the first draft of Court Cards, the general concept was that the Kings, Queens, and Jacks were one big unified group, while the Aces were mysterious wildcards that were backup plans purposefully disattached from the rest. Additionally, he would have been encountered in either the canals of Agama or a nearby lake. 

About when I expanded Court Cards into Cardholders, I had a better pick for the Aces, and instead moved Witterel down to the Blue Queen. His angle there was because during this working, I didn't really have the acts concept yet, so instead the Queens were planned to be the sympathetic cardholders. When I started really shaping Bermuda into Act 1 of Cardholders and ended up with three Jacks who made sense for it, it led to the idea of the connected court cards. At that point, Witterel didn't really fit in Act 2, and I realized I was square peg round holing him, so I bounced him down to Blue 8 and prepped him for Bermuda. He got bounced again down to Blue 4 just because Presidente felt like he earned the higher rank by being more tied to it. So that was how we finally met him! I'm pretty happy with Witterel himself, though. Got choked up writing him finally being at peace with himself and able to move on.

If there were two series I knew above all else had to be represented in Cardholders, they were Metroid and Touhou. Sylux was a very easy start to represent the former, and for the latter, I went to a hat girl who's always been on my back burner - one Nue Houjuu! See, the thing is, I like Nue a lot in a very love to hate way. She's a rat who I want to see get punched, but who I also just enjoy in general. So, naturally, the best way to do that was to make her an antagonist in RP and have you guys punch her out! I liked having more than one villain do getaways when I could, just because it felt like a good way to show that with a megaplot, there's at least some competence. If everyone gets instantly wrecked with no escape plan all plot long, it feels a bit hard to justify the continued fights without also making it seem like the group is too dumb to be an effective-feeling threat, y'know? But since JRM made it clear he wanted me to tone it down, I was happy to make sure Nue was the only real big getter-away-er. She was the Blue Jack for a long time, even before the Jacks were settled on as Bermuda - it was really only the Black Jack that was built for Bermuda rather than vice versa.

Nue, like Yao Zerr, was also part of the original theme of this plot that still got an element of it in the final draft - specifically, a lot of the original Cardholder concepts boiled down to "people who cannot handle change". Nue reflected this by her inability to adapt to the new Gensokyo, and took the card to try to hold it back to the old nature by any means necessary. She's probably the character who most reflects that specific moral in Cardholders as-is, actually! Anyhow, thanks for the thrashing. She deserved it.

The Keeper of the Light... now, I want to say that there's no real event or Cardholder that I'm actively dissatisfied with, as opposed to, say, the Doyle or Solo events of years past. But that doesn't mean there aren't cases where I didn't go "man, I could have improved that character". In retrospect, I think my main issue with the Keeper was trying to have my cake and eat it too; I wasn't sure how much of a stubborn jerk to portray him as, whether he was the type to triple down or the type to just be doing his job, and it meant that when we got to the island I wanted the fight but I also didn't feel like he was a jerk. So we got Pierrette forcing it. Which, I do feel like it ended up a good way to put her on the Kobber radar relatively naturally! I think in retrospect, I would have made him more of an obstinate jerk who just stood in the way no matter what, even if it meant he got punched out. But as I said, ultimately, he worked out well enough that I'm not fussed.

And to finish Act 1's analysis, the big man himself, Matthieu Rivaleux. The very first member of the Cardholders! That's right, once Court Cards began to take shape as a plot, Rivaleux was always here, the Green Jack from the word go. He was also always Bermuda-focused, but in earlier drafts, while Bermuda was a disconnected pre-Brawl plot segment, it wasn't as self-contained as it ended up being when it was Act 1 of 4, and it meant that Rivaleux was going to be even more involved! See, in the earlier drafts where it was shifting from Court Cards to Cardholders, but before I went big on collaboration and thus had fewer Numbers to work with, one of my ideas was that each member of the Court had a Number or two to assist them, and that we'd actually see Card recruitment onscreen by Rivaleux giving out a couple cards to new underlings. Ultimately, I decided to simplify Card distribution by saying only the Man in Purple or Pierrette could give cards out, and thus he didn't get to do that.

He was also always meant to be the arc villain of Bermuda, but his influence on it grew over time. Yao Zerr and Nue originally weren't really affiliated with him, mostly just lucky alliances, and it went from Rivaleux vaguely directing Act 1 and personally directing his own Number minions to Rivaleux being the major antagonist behind all of it, up to the point where he resurrected Panthalassa and it went according to his scheme. The big vibe I wanted to hit with his supermassive magitech warship was the concept of a first part of a megaplot feeling like it could have been a standalone plot with a big endgame boss to match! As a fun fact, the original version of the Bermuda Mystery answer was going to be a big portal to the House to set that up as a setting, and it got changed for very obvious reasons. Panthalassa was just me trying to string together all the weird things and realizing I could do so via making them all weapons.

It's kind of funny how little Rivaleux actually changed? Like, you'd think I'd have more for the First Cardholder, but he just kinda popped into his role fully formed. Sometimes an arrogant jerk is just an arrogant jerk who you know what he's gonna do!

Good ol' Josuke Higashikata. As I'd bemoaned many a time before, Josuke was the one Chaoprotag who just... felt like he hadn't taken off, and didn't have a future prospect to make up for it. He was there, yes, but he always felt like he was just kinda Present, nothing more. For years I'd mulled very idly about bringing him back.

Then my megaplot happened and I remembered how well a heel run did it for many JRM characters, so. There it was, I knew I was bringing Josuke in. He was a later addition to the Cardholders, hence jumping in perfectly at the 10 - by that time, I was already sure the Court needed to be properly plotted around, and I wanted to give Josuke some flexibility, because as soon as I added him, I knew I was doing two birds, one Brawl! In fact, there wasn't much planning for Josuke because of how he was very quickly slated for the Brawl. Namely, I wanted to respect adding my plot antag to the Brawl by leaving his post-Brawl trajectory up in the air, waiting to see what JRM did with him and how it went before I pre-set him to an event. Josuke's encounter during Bermuda was both to get him out there to the Kobbers, as well to get the chance to have a fight with him in case he didn't feel right to fight post-Brawl.

When I saw the Brawl and how he had a good resolution, losing to a fresh new face and seeing the spark that he once had, that pretty much decided for me that he wasn't gonna be fighting the Kobbers post-brawl. Thanks to that, I rolled him together with Giga-Man for his wrapup, and Josuke got out of it on his own accord. All in all, I'm happy with this comeback tour and no longer feel like he was a weak spot in my RP!

Did you know there's no superhero with a big G in the center of his chest? Or at least Cornwind couldn't find one, and I reasonably conclude that if Cornwind can't find a comics thing it doesn't exist. Thanks to getting a close enough guy and a Draco edit, though, I was able to give Giga-Man the four-color superhero look that was so important. He's one of the older Cardholders, dating back to the idea of the Cardholders as a group where the Court cards were a collective and not act-split... and he was, in fact, the Red King! He would have still been a mid-year fight, even if not mid-July, because at the time it was more about influence overall - Giga-Man would have been a grand superhero for Agama, appearing regularly in Season 11. As I said with Yao Zerr, I wanted to have a bunch of Season 11 minor characters who turned out to be Cardholders, to the point where you can't trust anyone! He also had the original concept of being a legitimate hero, where he actually was just being a real help to anyone who needed it, and the problem was that he was using the Card for it; he would have been asked to give up his card and he'd have attacked people at the demand that he give up his power and ability to be a hero. This didn't really flow well with the Season 12 version and his first scene, so I adjusted based on the reaction to his appearance in the Trainyard, and leaned hard into the GLORIOUS HERO FOR GLORY angle.

Once I both got over the concept of "kings need to be guys and queens need to be gals", and realized that King felt like a uniquely important rank, I bumped Giga-Man down to Queen... and then, as the ideas for Act 2 came together, he got demoted to 9. Not having that initial Season 11 plan take off (largely due to my momentum never really landing like I wanted it to), he felt a lot less significant now. And then the 9s as the Top Guests was coming into play, so in order to bump up Dannick, I demoted him down to 7, where he landed once and for all. Since he didn't have much going on, I didn't try to connect him to Act 2's overarching story, either, instead letting him just be a rogue dreamer who had no real concept of nuance or proper behavior. That ended up perfect for several characters, as well as bringing him in via Josuke, so while it was a bumpy road it was a good finish for Giga-Man.

Like with Yao Zerr and the original concept for Giga-Man, Mariella Lombardi was also the "oh my god how many of these minor Season 11 characters were cardholders all along?" angle. The main reason that angle ultimately didn't get a harder push was just how many Cardholder ideas I was getting that didn't fit into it; I think if it had been mostly Cardholders who it made sense to see in Agama I would have gone ahead and filled the setting with sleeper agents, but as more and more ideas clicked during Season 11 that basically had to wait for Season 12, I let that begin to fall off. 

Mariella herself was relatively straightforward, just a woman seeing her family business run into trouble and needing a quick deal to get out of it. Which reminds me, one concept for the original version of Cardholders was the Man in Purple having much more forceful ways to get people to join the Cardholders, it was very much "you owe me one, so you're taking this card". Mariella was one of the very few leftovers of that concept, with how the Card had been slipped in with a loan. I considered having her attacking the Kobbers because she was forced to, but ultimately that didn't feel as natural as just having her crack under guilt and thus attacking the Kobbers spontaneously. I really enjoyed the dominos this led to, so I'm fine with it!

Would you believe that Roger Retinz, guy who basically tied together Act 2 thanks to his actions, was one of the last Cardholders I came up with? Not counting the Ebon-Suited Astronaut, the only Chao cardholder finalized after him was Model Omega! In fact, he basically got in because I still didn't know my Green 10 after the Neptuneman switch, and I wanted to use Ace Attorney somewhere but I didn't know where yet. Combining the two in one go, I shamelessly just went through the Ace Attorney character profiles in hopes that someone would click. I wasn't gonna force it THAT hard, but I wanted to at least give it a try!

Luckily for me and for Act 2, someone very much did. The sleazy TV producer clicked in my head as soon as I was reminded that he existed, Retinz a great way to really show how much Spades Slick wanted to extend his influence over all of Agama. It did mean Agama TV ended up a station of sin, but that's how it goes. Ahu. Though he didn't actually get that much screentime, Roger here did what I wanted him to do and showed that Spades really wanted to own Agama, and between his role and his surprisingly effective powers (even if he was useless without them), he really ended up earning that 10 spot I gave him!

When I started really pulling the Cardholders together, I knew for a solid fact that i would want to do stuff about golf. I went through my Golfplot characters, trying to figure out which one had the right temperament for a heel turn to feel plausible. Lara, the Golfer, Marcelot, even trying to come up with a new one... then I remembered that I had never done anything to remove Bambietta Basterbine from the board, and there she was. I put her in, freeing the Greenskeeper, in part because the original plan was to have Bambietta golf match while backed up by the Greenskeeper and be more of a full antagonist.

As we all know, that didn't play out like that at all. Something about how I wrote her as a golfer just made it feel like it worked better if she just kinda went for everything on her own, and I still wasn't sure of how to do the Greenskeeper's event, so those things combined meant I split off the Greenskeeper for later and was left with just Bambietta and her manager. Then I realized the PHB would be the only one smart enough to actually manage the situation, so we got the stubborn Red Queen. As shown by her debut with the Red 8, she got promoted instead of demoted! Specifically because she felt like more of a cornerstone than the existing Red Queen, Golfplot was a full-blown aspect of Spades' plans.  

I can honestly say I did not expect Bambietta would be the character who got the big promotion for Season 13, there were a couple others I would have definitely assumed over her. But I'm not complaining. Look forward to more Bambina in Whalestrand!

Everyone's favorite cultural appropriator, from Great Britain... Neptuneman! While he came second in the planning after Mammothman, as the guy who eventually ended up with the higher billing, he gets to be talked about first. Neptuneman was always intended to be added with Mammothman, his magnet powers and everything, but the specific details changed over time. Originally, when Mammothman was the Red Queen and I had no real concept for the two of them and their plot role, the idea was that Mammothman was the real power behind the two of them, with Neptuneman serving as more of a hype man and booster to help Mammothman along.

What changed this was, unsurprisingly, the Eidolon Fights plotline. That one came about largely due to seeing the significance of the concept with both Julia and Val, and going "hey I could make a plotline out of this" now that Act 2 was becoming solid with its "take over all of Agama by hook and by crook" aspect. It felt more natural for Neptuneman to be the lead there, the man who knows glitz and glamour and thus the guy who put together the promotion, and thus when I revealed him on the forum I went "wait a second" and swapped him with the slot that would be Roger Retinz. After that, it was really just smooth sailing. He was a big jerk who wanted to turn the Eidolon Fights into a vehicle to make him money, and he was punched so hard he became an unmasked wrestler.

Oh, and originally his magnetic powers were either wholly innate, or going to be a result of the Queen of Masks card. Once I solidified him as an Eidolon fight master, it felt natural to give him an Eidolon rather than making him completely an outsider - helped explain why he could get people to agree to go with him. That's why I repurposed his magnetic powers for it, and named them [Uncrowned Emperor] after his character song from the Kinnikuman anime.

And here's Neptuneman's partner in crime, Mammothman! Like some of the others, Mammothman took a long, strange journey to get where he was. One of the very early, pre-Season 11 picks, he was originally part of the "wildcard" concept of Court Cards' Aces, where he would have been the Red Ace as a guy who was basically just a point at things and get out of the way warhead. Unlike Witterel, though, he stayed the Red Ace through the second concept! The second idea for Aces was that it would all be characters with major past Kobber connections - this locked in for a while with Mammothman as Red, Sylux as Blue, and the AI ZF-05 as Black. Additionally, this was when I was going to focus more on little groups of Numbers led by Court Cards, and one major idea I had was that Mammothman would be flanked by members of Fite Club. I only ever had one solidly picked out for that, but we'll talk about him later.

Over time, that concept faded to be replaced by the Acts, which did a couple things. First, it caused me to drop the Numbers backup aspect, which resulted in me discarding Mammothman's fite club backup. Second, it became more focused on the groups, and no matter how I tried to spin it, Mammothman just felt out of place next to the others who would become the focus of what became the Spacewar! act, which resulted in me shifting him to be the Red Queen as I worked out what Act 2 would be. And third, I got the idea to pair him up with Neptuneman. At the time, it was still Red Queen and Green 10, but it was putting down both Bambietta and Neptuneman on forum that made me realize Mammothman was more of a follower here than a leader. 

His focus as a Cardholder was always trying to understand the nature of the Kobbers and how they coped with always winning and the resultant lack of fulfillment, but in the original drafts where he was the Ace and the leader, it would have been much more of a barrier and he would have been much harder to convince. Since he wasn't the main focus of the event anymore, it felt more reasonable to just let him be easy to talk down, allowing him to find new paths in life. Sure, that involved getting wrecked by Harlequin, but if anything, Mammothman might appreciate having a clean L on his record in the future!

And look, another Cardholder who I came up with very early! Act 2 was just full of these, huh? Baron von Eisenbahn being a confirmed cardholder from early on as well played a big part in the buildup of Grand Worldwide... though you might be reasonably asking, well, why if he got all this buildup did he not appear in Season 11? The answer will be explained in more detail when we talk about his three top executives later on, but suffice to say it was mostly because the third one took forever to pick and I didn't want the Baron to appear until after all three.

Beyond that, his role was largely unchanged over time, the Baron always going to be a guy simply trying to modernize Agama with some rails. However, while the Baron himself was static, things around him weren't! First was his card. Originally, when they were just Court Cards and ranks didn't matter, he was the Green King, since Heidegger had the Black King even back then. As I decided to make the Kings more the ringleaders (and also got over myself when it came to gender roles), I bumped him down to Green Queen, because Black Queen was taken by Agent Hal at that point. I eventually moved her up to an Ace because she felt more like an Act 3 character, and with that, the Black Queen of Rails was born at last!

The other big thing that got cut when it came to the Baron was a subplot about two rail possibilities for Agama. There would have been a second railroad group with different methods and less destructive plans for building a railroad for Agama, and the Kobbers would have watched the two of them compete, with the Baron ultimately being the one that was the worse choice due to his disrespect for the environment. I ultimately decided this was overcomplicating matters, and trimmed it down to just Grand Worldwide Railways. In fact, this was the original hook to bring John Putnam Thatcher back, and scrapping it was what led me to make the Thatcher, Dollar, and Anelace trio to take on Ebisuwaru!

Mortimer Cain had a very funny development history. His concept and his face both came into Cardholders completely differently! The concept of the Card of Spirits was born very early on, with the idea of an event all about resurrecting a set of dead Chao villains who didn't get that much focus - in fact, I even had all nine of them picked out in early Season 11, since I already knew Sengoku was going to be murdered by Takashima for the trial plot. I had a faceclaim all set to go, and I was ready for Season 11 to unleash my necromancer, who would have had a strong emphasis on the grudges of the dead and believing the transient nature of life vs. the eternal nature of death meant that the hateful grudges of the dead were more powerful than the living. She would have been a zombie herself, but hidden it well, having died years ago and risen up even more dangerous.

Theeeen Harpy used the face claim, because I was planning to use Hu Tao from Genshin Impact and Harpy used it for Hakra. So I was left without the face I had, and spent a LOT of time trying to think of who to use for it. They started as the Blue Ace, bumping down Witterel, until I came up with the Past-Attached Characters and moved them down to the Blue Queen, and later the Blue 10 once I went from "any card at any time" to "court cards at certain times". The idea at the time was they'd show up in October, but that was when there were still a couple Numbers left during King's Reign, so once I decided Act 4 should be merely four kings and two jokers, I knew I needed to shuffle that number somewhere else. The Blue 10 eventually ended up in Act 2 as a result, and I still didn't have a faceclaim for them... 

On a note that started out unrelated and then became very related, I had a concept that the Cardholders would have their top secret base underneath a bar in the Agama area, and the Bartender there would be a Number Card. And the face for the bartender... well, you're looking at them! Mortimer Cain's faceclaim would have been used here instead. The bartender would have been a very polite man, but the kind of polite where if you ignored his requests to not go into the back room he would very politely shoot you for it. The perfect guy to protect the Cardholders' secrets, even with Raiko growing to enjoy the bar. Ultimately, when the plot developed further, the Cardholders ended up not having a fitting secret base, both because of becoming more separated and because of moving their main operations to the ZFS, which... why would it be buried under Agama? I did vaguely consider keeping him as a non-Cardholder ally (think the Baron's subordinates or the E.M.M.I.s) but he just didn't work out.

And then I needed to scramble together the Card of Spirits at the last minute. Nothing was clicking, but Mr. Crabstache here jumped out at me as "good enough" and I was able to reveal him and have the fight against the zombies he unleashed. As mentioned, I considered having him zombify himself, but people weren't a fan of the idea so it was dropped. Honestly, for an event that I had planned for so long it didn't go quite as well as I wanted, but I chalk that up to me not settling on an appearance until I absolutely had to. Appearances do a lot to make a character, y'know?

To round out Act 2, the man behind it all. The mastermind who organized it, Spades Slick. And the funny part is, when I first planned to add him to Cardholders... I was actually kind of wavering on him! I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to pull him, even though it'd be excellent payoff to the Midnight Crew running plot thread after we did Clubs, Diamonds, and Hearts. The decisive moment came from none other than Gooper Blooper - I don't even remember the exact context of the conversation anymore, but Goops theorized that Spades Slick was going to be part of the Cardholders, and that made me go "yeah I should go for it for real" and added him in. And boy, did it work out!

Spades was literally what pulled Act 2 together. Building him up along with his casino was what made it click to have Act 2 be his domain and his attempt to gain control of Agama, rather than my original vague idea of "a bunch of sympathetic queens I guess?", when before I added him it was just a disconnected pile of businesses that I wasn't really sure where they'd go by the end of it. The common thread that it was Spades with some help from Ebisuwaru let me really give a huge finale to the Midnight Crew's RP arc. Nothing much changed with him - I picked him out early 2022, and was pretty confident from the beginning what I'd do with him - but as a fun fact, he was originally the Queen of Knives, and later became the Queen of Chips when I focused more on his casino stylings.

BLOOD FALCON, HEAR HIS REVENGE. Used mostly as a way to overcomplicate one of my plot events in Season 8, and before I really got into F-Zero, I always somewhat regretted how I misused Blood Falcon. Guy's got a lot more potential to him than being an afterthought to Weavel, the Federation Colonel, and Captain Arjard - speaking of which, those latter two would have absolutely been the types of pulls I would have made for Cardholders if I hadn't had their satisfying returns back then already. So it nagged at me, but for a while it wasn't a big deal.

Then Cardholders began to come together, and I decided I just really wanted to make Blood Falcon one, give him a proper event spin. Talking with JRM, he was fine with letting this prison springing happened as long as I didn't invalidate the security (which I didn't, Sylux-as-Ian released Blood Falcon through totally legal means), and bam! I had Blood Falcon and the Blood Hawk back on the menu. I considered making him a recurring goon before Act 3, but wanting to avoid too many recurrers after Act 1 meant I just focused on his plot day, and what a plot day it was, with all that chaos and shenanigans involving the Blood Falcon legion. All in all, by the time he was arrested, I was satisfied with Blood Falcon's run. He won't be getting out of jail this time!

If there's one character who took off far better than I thought she would, it was Malin Freiberg. Born from me listening to some music and thinking of the original draft for Adelaide - where she was a completely willing cyborg actively hacking off pieces and bits to replace them with metal - Malin took some time, but as soon as I happened to look up Soul Hackers 2 while talking with friends I went "oh! Yeah that's it." So that's how I got Malin's look.

Her being such a recurring character was actually not intended to make her feel as important as it did, especially not to the point where I couldn't help but swap her up to 10 instead of 8! It was just a desire to make it clear that she was actively changing over time, rather than showing up as a human for her debut and then coming back and going full robot, while the connection to Doyle was a combination of Doyle having the same focus and a quip about the concept - I wasn't gonna bring Doyle back a third time after how thoroughly he'd be wrecked (and besides he never seems to work out) but a fangirl of his was a different story. As for the cable-based non-centralized mind, that was just because I love the concept of someone who simply refuses to die no matter what, and it was the perfect justification to let people blast her head apart too. Ironically, though she was one of the Cardholders I most expected to kill off, she ended up coming out of it alright, except for the lack of the body. We might even see her again down the line...

To answer the obvious question: yes, even in her debut, even when I first commissioned that art, I knew that Agent Hal would be a Cardholder. She was pretty straightforward in the same way as the Baron, her overall plan and storyline (Space Police officer who disagreed with Kotohime and took a card out of stress) about the same, but with one crucial difference. Originally, she was the Black Queen, and by now I had the basic category ideas - she was going to be in Act 2, and the main idea for her there was that failing to catch Sylux had been what made her take a Card, with the dramatic irony that she had no idea that she had joined the same organization Sylux did. 

Over time, Act 2 took a more thorough shape as the act of businesses and of Agama itself, and Hal no longer felt like she fit that the way she did the act about outer space and heavy tech. That was what led me to shuffle her back to become the Green Ace instead. She was always going to have her showdown with Kotohime, but her motive about Sylux no longer worked, so instead I made it that she knew the Cardholders were the threat but took a card with the plan to infiltrate them and take them out from the inside. Of course, over time that weakened as temptation grew, and it became less of a motive and more of an excuse with her actual actions much more malicious. Relatively, that is! 

Hal will come back next year, because she had an arc that it feels like I'll cut off if I don't let her finish it up properly. She won't be in the Space Police anymore, though. Taking the advice of separating herself from Kotohime to heart. As for Inspector Chrome, we'll see more of him someday! He's one of those Intentionally Hanging Plot Threads, the kind that you leave lying around and pull on when the time feels right to use them. Someday before RP ends, it will be time!

Wario and Waluigi, just the sound of them makes me queasy. Which is completely untrue, I like these two guys! I thought it was fun to see them in Fite Club, and I thought it was fun to have them show up as the masterminds of Fite Club Plot. But also, I wanted to do more with them! They've always been a major highlight of the Mario series for me, after all. So I asked Goops if I could use them, he agreed, and I made the Red and Blue 5s. The funny thing is that I had several plans for them at first, and then they all got undone by more fitting choices coming along.

Probably the most notable example in that regard is that they were slated for Big Bar Brawl 12 at first! I know JRM loves it when really major plots get directly involved in the Brawl, and I was going to reserve these two for it, after which their future trajectory would be determined by how they performed and what happened in the Brawl. This one was undone for them by the addition of Josuke to the Cardholders, because while Wario and Waluigi would have been Brawling Cardholders, Josuke would have been the same but also had the advantage of knocking someone off of JRM's wishlist, which I always love to do. 

Their second major concept was that they'd be Ebisuwaru's personal gofers, and they would be knocked off the list in Act 4, like the 10 of Spirits. This one was eventually excised because of both the decision to make Act 4 entirely the Kings, as well as the growing concept of Ebisuwaru making sure nobody knew who or where he was, which made it impractical for him to have his own personal Numbers. Pierrette existing didn't help either, since she already served that job for him! So they just hung around in limbo - I considered using them in Act 2, but I felt that Act already had enough going on, and I tried to find a way to work them into Act 3.

And I did! And I'm fine with it, it might have been a late-game stitching together to make sure that I didn't run out of room to use them, but I think their appearance running interference for Hal was a good plot and it worked out well for them. Oh, and the reason for making them sympathetic? I just thought it was a good surprise angle, plus it plays into the fact that Ebisuwaru is good at manipulating desperate people. He saw these two being unfairly picked on, and rather than help he just used them to take more cards and then go "I ain't no helicopter papa, sink or swim bitch". Thanks, DBZ Abridged.

Oh man. I have a LOT to say about E.M.M.I. Model Omega, as well as the E.M.M.I.s themselves in general. They're among the standout stars of this plot, really, which is not at all bad for something I didn't even expect to see get much traction! When I first played Metroid Dread and I saw these super murder robots attempting to commit some murder, I knew then and there that I had some excellent material for Cardholders. Originally, they were even going to be a Cardholder! Collectively. There was a concept early on that Cards could be divided physically among beings with very deep connections and still retain power, so each E.M.M.I. would have been installed with 1/7th of the assigned card they had. This was later on dropped, and after that there was the addition of the requirement for sentient and sapient beings to be the Cardholders, so I knew they wouldn't be a Cardholder... until they were. But I'm getting to that.

I recognized very early on that if I just had seven Cardholder events backed up by E.M.M.I.s, they would get very old, very fast. I felt like variety was the spice of life, so I instead mixed it up by having the E.M.M.I.s be used by other people as well, in order to change up the plots and concepts they were going for. The addition of their upgrades was for a similar purpose, me wanting to make it more interesting than just using the same tactics on the robots every single time. As for Model R's creation, that was because I felt like seven was the right number, especially for eventually super-mecha-combining them, but I wanted to have a proper full E.M.M.I. instead of that tutorial wrecked chump. So we got the red mech, and me making sure to tie into the concept of them all using Metroid upgrades by giving it the Hazard Shield. 

For some absolutely asinine reason that boiled down to "surely people will enjoy an event that's just rematches with no progress, this cannot go wrong", originally Seven E.M.M.I. Assault and Mega E.M.M.I. Combination were two separate events entirely. The assault would have been some time during Act 3 and consisted entirely of fighting off the seven murder robots in their rematch, and then in a later event - the big one I considered for this was Millaarc's plot day - the Version 3.0s would have been called in and combined together to form the massive mecha. Thankfully for all of us, I realized that was stretching them too far and combined them together for the event day we ended up getting.

Model Omega was actually the very last Cardholder to be finalized! For a long time, the plan was that the Black Ace would be on the same plot day as the E.M.M.I. finale, but as a separate Cardholder who was combined with it. The main one considered for this was the Zoofights AI, but by the time I actually got around to revealing that it was a Cardholder, it didn't feel like it had the gravitas to carry this, so I left the Black Ace slot open as I tried to figure out who to use. I actually owe a lot to Draco for me picking the simplest solution. It was Chris's huge rivalry with the E.M.M.I.s that helped play them up as major threats and dangers, to the point where I ultimately felt that they might be able to carry the plot day themselves - and Model Omega demonstrated that it absolutely could! It was easy enough to work around my prior limitations by saying only the core body held the intact Card and that the process of linking all seven had given it full sentience, and from that the Black Ace of Weapons was born. These murder robots added so much to this season, and I'm very happy Dread gave them to me!

From very early on, I recalled how much fun people had with the Garbage Curse and Garbage Salvagers events. I wanted to give it to them again, but it's a lot harder to do on the plot where you have every single antagonist carefully selected and determined, and with only a small limited number that can't have like 7 of them burned up in one event. Goops once suggested a bunch of losers trying to scramble for it after all the cards were handed out, and I went "say..." and promptly worked that into the idea we did get, the scramble for the Blue 10. Originally it was the Black 10 slated for that, but after the AI and Malin's reshuffling, it landed on Blue. Probably for the best, the ones I ended up with would have fit Blue pretty well.

As for the Ebon-Suited Astronaut themselves, at the time of the scuffle, I had literally no idea what their deal was. None whatsoever! Just "silent spooky astronaut in all black that creates a bunch of weird space stuff". Luckily for me, I had a few weeks to think on it, and think on it I did until it a night walk at one point made it all click together - the fascination of space, and the dangers of it as well. Having Captain Vladmir's theme from No More Heroes 2 helped as well, that theme being exactly the right vibe. So thanks to that, we had the low earth orbit fight rather than any other form of space fight, and the conceptual entity representing the human fascination with space. Thanks in part to only being finalized so late, once I knew what the Astronaut's deal was, there was no need to change it. So off I went!

Ah, the AI known as ZF-05. What a strange part of my RP this was, one that was more subject to changes and tweaks than anything else. Originally a direct lift of the Mad AI from the Metroid Prime 1.5 pitch document, the AI would have had four personalities with four faces like in the document, and would have directly aided Palparepa in Trillion Starlights, as well as the true leader. I've spoken before about how much of a mess Trillion Starlights was in some ways, and that led to the AI getting cut as an active element, instead being repurposed for Daltonplot. There, the four personalities would have each helped one of his four minions - the curious one for Sally, the caring one for Enzo Bron, the determined one for Valon, and the murderous one for Death Gun. While I liked the concept, it never really appealed to me when I was actually writing out plot stuff, and thus I instead just made it Death Gun's objective that he failed to reach.

But I know when I came up with Cardholders that I really wanted to finally do something with this dang AI, rather than leave it floating around in space forever. So I had my Black Ace at first, because this was when the Aces were the Kobber-connected callbacks. Unlike Mammothman, this one actually stayed for a while, since it fit the new concept I was coming up with for the Aces, until such time as I approached the late part of Act 2 and the upcoming reveal. I felt like with the greater emphasis the E.M.M.I.s had gotten, I wanted their combined form to be more than just controlled by the AI but instead be an active partner to the Black Ace, so I shuffled it down to Black 10 for a while... and then Malin came along and stole the show enough I made the AI the 7. The actual foes for the two-day not-quite-finale were in flux for a while. One format was the Astronaut and AI on day 1, for example, while another involved just fighting the AI while Sylux was a solo venture. Another possibility was giving it this as a final form, which got scrapped in favor of combining with Mecha Ridley once I brought it into this part.

Additionally, the concept for the AI's purpose changed over time. One possible backstory I had for it was just a weird Zoofights experiment with no deeper meaning, while another was actually as an anti-Zoofights weapon; an AI created that would go active if Zoofights ever reached reality-warping chaos levels like with SNAKEFIGHTS again. Ultimately, I settled on the motive and position it had and went for it. And I'm happy with it, it was a solid conclusion to the years of this thing hanging around in the background.

Sylux had always been a big part of Cardholders. Not quite first Cardholder level, but for a while! See, while I had his death be unclear and uncertain in Season 8 because Prime 4 was real and I wanted to see what it did with him in case of inspiration, by the time of the Anti-House League's conception, I was growing impatient and starting to get my own ideas. Even back then, I knew the answer was going to be Ian Malkovich under the armor, and the survival would have been that he got sucked into the House during the fight aboard the Delano Infinity. 

When the Anti-House League plot got scrapped, it didn't take me long at all to decide to add Sylux to the Cardholders, though he didn't start as the Blue Ace! For a while, I thought of him as instead being the Black Jack, and Sylux and Mecha-Ridley appearing in Bermuda instead. I went back and forth between them being the big finish for Bermuda or Rivaleux being it, but once I finalized Panthalassa as the grand answer to the Bermuda Mystery, I decided Sylux didn't really work as just Rivaleux's goon, and moved him up to the Blue Ace due to the past-Kobber-ties principle, and he retained it as I shifted gears - in fact, Act 3 being Spacewar! was largely built around Sylux and the AI as the Aces!

One big idea I had that ultimately didn't go off, in part because I created it before Dread gave me even more ideas than just this year, was that he would be a big climactic opponent for Samus solo. They'd have a big fight where they both pulled out every weapon they had, gradually bashing bits and pieces off of each other until a finish where Samus blasted Sylux with the Zero Laser, blowing up her own suit (and her gunship would have also been destroyed, leaving her without any way to restore it) and destroying his armor so that the final round was just two nomal people fistfighting. This take on Sylux would have also been more honorable - the concept there being that the Red Ace was uncontrollable, rather than unleashed by him. 

This got harder to justify for a few reasons as I went on. The desire to use Raven Beak for more Metroidplot that would involve Samus in a major role was one, as was making Sylux a major part of the creation of the E.M.M.I.s, but the final nail was that people just didn't like it! They wanted to punch Sylux. So I gave the people what they want (which was punching Sylux). Beyond that major change, the other thing that changed about Sylux was that I was going to play up the Samus-Ian connection a lot more. That's one of the things I regret I didn't have time and energy for, since I think it would have added a stronger dimension to the reveal that he was Sylux all along, but I still think he worked well as an antagonist. So while I'd change that if I could, it didn't ruin the plot that I couldn't. And if Prime 4 comes out with sweet new Sylux lore... welllll, it's gonna get used some other way!

The new equivalent of taking silly Chatzy jokes and making them canon: taking silly Discord jokes and making them canon! The origins of Heart Star Utsuho were born when I showed Pitohui a screenshot of a line from A Hat in Time - Hat Kid standing on a massive lava reef, and someone else saying "Hi! This is clearly a safe place for a child to be!" This got us joking about Utsuho and Tenshi as parents, and from there the idea of what if they adopted Shirabe instead of Tsubasa and Yoshiko adopting Shirabe? Over time, we came up with a bunch of cute and fun ideas about how Utsuho and Tenshi would be as moms, taking Shirabe to incredibly dangerous places for family vacation 'cause hey it's safe for them and giving her very skewed perspectives on daily life. "What do you need a jack for? My mom just lifts up the car when we need to get under there."

On a related note, I spent a lot of time thinking about classic Chao villain the Yatagarasu. When she was killed in Season 6 it was in a way that kept me from bringing her back, but I kinda wanted to! So I thought of ways to work around that - Mecha-Yatagarasu, or the idea of a giant Yatagarasu-themed robot. Then one day, Goops made a comment about Utsuho and Tenshi or their alternates being opponents, or something like that. I honestly can't remember what, but it gave me an "oh shit" idea and it let to me making Heart Star Utsuho my Red Ace. From there it was easy to bring in Heart Star Tenshi as her wife, and once I asked Pitohui for permission, I made sure to make it fully canon that Heart Star Shirabe is their adopted kid!

While in the original draft, the Red Ace would have been an out of control danger that Sylux would have demonstrated his change of heart by warning about, in this version, the big dumb fighter wasn't gonna go out of control. She just likes to fight. So that led to me taking the different angle where Sylux tried to summon her out of petty spite and rage, and it didn't even lead to much as she just biffed people and got biffed back. She enjoyed it though, so it all worked out! Also, I originally had a cool finisher idea where Prime Utsuho and Tenshi would have beaten her with some wild combo move. Then Draco rolled up with a frogge and a much cooler finisher so I gave it to Suwacky instead.

The Man in Purple. The man behind the slaughter. Yutaka Ebisuwaru, the mastermind of Cardholders and the Chao villain most representative of Season 12 - Harlequin may have been the true creator of the cards and the final boss, but Ebisuwaru is THE Cardholders antagonist, no ifs and or buts. And like Green Hecatia five years ago, he came from a dream! I had a dream during my big Yakuza kick in 2020 about Yakuza 7 Starring Kiryu, where it was a game where all game long, Kiryu had been dealing with the effects of someone's mysterious machinations, a loan shark staying in the shadows and using his pull to play people off each other, to achieve his own ends. Eventually, Kiryu fought the man in purple alongside a riverbank, the latter's jacket removed to reveal his tattoo of an intricate constellation.

So I had to use him in RP, right? My brain came up with the idea of him being the one handing out cards pretty quickly along, and thus I assigned him the Blue King and never looked back. His card was originally Stars, though, before I decided that was more fitting for Sylux and gave Ebisuwaru Dreams. Which played much better to his strengths, so I'm glad I changed it around. He was always meant to not be the grand finale - from the very beginning, I knew that I wanted the twist reveal that the mastermind was not the final boss to lead into the true creator of the cards.

Ironically, for someone who was so iconic and important, there actually isn't that much to say about his changing role, because not much did change! Ebisuwaru basically popped into existence fully formed, like Zeus. Outside of the change in his card, the only real other tweaks as I went along were that he went from having a tiger tattoo to a dragon tattoo to avoid too much overlap with Shimano once I made the latter the Red 6, that he was originally fought in the Grand Market and Chimata was one of his opponents until I felt like it made more sense for him to bail out when Sylux lost, and that originally he was just summoning his dragon but I felt like it made sense for him with the sheer level of opposite he had to actually turn into a dragon. Beyond that, he was the same man he was when I introduced him, and I'm very happy with him - the man in purple will be iconic for years to come.

Millaarc Cranstoun, a great example of me putting things in RP for catharsis! In Symphogear itself, she's a villain with a sympathetic motive, but who tonally clashes massively with that motive. The show tries to say she puts on a brave face as she does things that tear her up inside, but she only ever shows hesitation when doing things like "killing one guy who's a huge jackass", and not when she commits a mass murder of innocents just to get at Tsubasa. And then she and her allies get the usual Symphogear resolution of heroic sacrifice and forgiveness, except without any effort to make it feel earned. This utter failure of Season 5 had me and Pitohui spiteful forever, so I decided to fix that in RP!

In fact, she was another of the characters originally slated to be a member of the Anti-House League! Her role would have been part of Part 1 of the Huge Finale for that plot, where the Kobbers would have stormed the League's base- the ZFS King of Beasts, in fact - to help Carlos and his allies take it back and open the way to the Heart of the House. She would have battled some Kobbers on one front, likely in the old bar as a callback and fallen there. When the League had taken it back, they would have used the ZFS to break open a path, allowing the Kobbers to fight the Heart and then the God. As I write this, I also remember Sylux would have been in the finale too, fought on the bridge of the ZFS. A bit hard to go back and reedit all this in so I mention it here!

When the League plot was scrapped, Millaarc was someone I knew I still wanted to see get her deal in RP, so she was added to the Cardholders as the Red Queen because well, *waves hands in gender role adherence I didn't break out of yet*. Once I got past that and realized she was a much better fit for a high-ranker, because she was always planned to be endgame, I swapped her up to the Red King role. In fact, she was originally going to be part of Day 1 of the Finale! The concept there was that Millaarc would have carried out the other front of the false flag operation - while Olympia's flagship (Heidegger's) razed Agama to the ground, Millaarc would have been sent to assassinate Deathborn and Plague so that Olympia would have been in no condition to dispute any charges, with the chaos coming from the murders of both of its leaders. She was both considered to do this on her own, and to do it in a massive Yatagarasu-themed mech, built using the leading principles of all sorts of Chao mechanists such as Nitori, Nesbitt, and Doyle. This was more a Court Cards concept - as the plot got more Mega, I decided each of the Kings should get their own day, and made Part 1 of the finale entirely Heidegger.

Also there's something in my notes about considering the concept of Millaarc backstabbing Heidegger and taking the King of Cogs card from him, but Heidegger still getting a Kobber showdown? I'll be honest guys, I have literally no recollection of this idea and I'm just listing it here because it was in my notes and more info is better in this kind of a blog.

Anyhow, once that concept was ditched, I went for the idea of emphasizing her desire to run away. The Kings really ended up less of a leadership group than I implied, but that was due to Rivaleux, Spades, and Sylux being much more hands on than I expected, and the lack of big setup that made it work to keep them onscreen consistently. Plus, as I mentioned, most solo Millaarc ideas boiled down to "murder!" The running away concept dovetailed nicely with our tendency to pick settings way in advance, so I chose to make her event in Whalestrand instead, liking the idea that it influenced ZF Corp's pick of their next destination. It also made a fun showcase of future characters, even for me! And with the level of payoff it gave both me and Pitohui? Yeah, no resets no regrets for the Red King!

Unlike the other three Kings, decided very early on (even if Millaarc took a while to get that label properly), The Curator was a late addition! He was decided in large part because I wanted to give the Cardholders healing functionality, and because that felt like the best angle for a big leader-type. This was before I had made them fully loose, you see, but it was still a useful angle post-Brawl. Just not otherwise. Beyond moving around as their medico, the big thing that got added for the Curator was the Jester Chao angle. 

Funnily enough, that was actually added entirely because I needed an excuse to get him killed! Originally, Harlequin would have directly pointed the Kobbers at all three of the remaining Kings, because she specifically needed things from them and it was what was preventing her from going final boss form. I had the dagger for Millaarc, that was easy. The Phantom Ruby for Heidegger, great! But what about the Curator? Since I already knew I planned to rope Jester Chao into the grand finale, the idea clicked to make it a lot of interesting research on him, which also led to me finally giving the answer to what's Jester Chao's deal after all this time. A resolution that honestly ended up more interesting than I expected for the King I was most worried about. What's not to like?

The man who would be king! Or was king. Gareth Heidegger pretty much just stood out to me in late 2020 when watching FF7 Remake videos, and I immediately poached him for the Anti-House League. He also came to mind for the big finish, which I know is putting the card before the horse has even been born but we got a huge armyplot out of it. He would have been fought in the engine room of the ZFS... exactly like he was in the end!

His role in the plot was one of the most completely fixed from the beginning, really. I wanted to do the giant armyplot finisher, and I had a guy with a huge army theme and a big ol' spaceship to do so! Bringing back the ZFS was just my way of finally giving it proper acknowledgement and wrapup; it would have been the abandoned and colonized home base of the Anti-House League for a similar reason, because that gives it a proper ending rather than leaving it to sit and rot forever. But if anyone ever wants to give it a nice finish now that it made its comeback, I won't complain! Not much to say about Heidegger himself, though. I slammed him into the Black King slot at the start and it literally never changed. That simple.

And to contrast, the Jokers. Pierrette and Harlequin went through so many changes, even before they were Pierrette and Harlequin! I think the simplest way to cover everything I want to say will be just to talk about the whole history of Joker cards as I went through with changes!

The first idea for a Joker that I had was back when it was just Court Cards, and there would have only been one Joker because I wouldn't have needed two when the plot was that small. She would have been a narcoleptic who was a caffeine addict and had some very powerful water manipulation, and she would have been a twist villain reveal, where part of the concept was that she had the same personality as a hero and as a villain. No sudden mwahahaha, just "oh yeah I'm working for those guys". One major idea I had - which actually vaguely made it into the final draft, huh - was that she had just started a small thing that quickly spiraled out of her control, and she was unable to stop it. This version was neat, but just didn't feel like it clicked with the full-size Cardholders plot, and got scrapped.

The next major concept was the idea that the Joker was someone who took on a card specifically to stop the ritual. By this point, the ritual had already crystallized as Human Sacrifice Does Something (I wanted to explain WHY it was important to give magic cards to people, and power source made sense to me), and I had the idea of someone taking on the Joker card to specifically stop the mastermind, their friend, from going through with it - I also had the idea of doing a twist (I wasn't actually sure on the details) that would have relied on the character having little experience with card decks and thus buying that there were only 53 cards. This one never really panned out in any way, and got cut to move on to the next Joker idea.

The next one was actually pretty close to the final form - we had the Red Joker and the Black Joker, who would have been split from the same person into two people. Like the Twin Statue split of Elsa and Pitohui, for example. They had the unique position of two Jokers, a card that was both one and two, and the big twist was gonna be that one of the Jokers was going to betray the other, and eventually it'd just be the one alone for the final boss. This one ultimately morphed into the idea of using memory to hide Ebisuwaru and then to hide herself, and that's how we got the final dynamic of Pierrette and Harlequin.

Fun fact: Originally, I considered using Pierrette as a red herring! She would have been a weirdo who studied under Jester Chao, and seemed suspicious, but then I went for making her the actual clown.

Other fun fact: The basic idea for the finale started with just the timestop, perfect preservation. I wanted to give the clown an actual reason she wanted to timestop everyone, and then remembering the Phantom Ruby was actually illusions and never wrapped up because Spy cut Bigplot short, I had the perfect way to tie it together and make it a true attempt to save everyone!

Third fun fact: Originally I had a different song for the final part of the finale, but then Hibiki Duet dropped at exactly the right time. A nice change from Tachi solo song showing up after Tachi's big moment.

A quick rundown on a few of the minor characters! Maurice and Abraham Nelson were both going to be Minor Cards during the earlier forms where it focused a lot on condensed groups, with Maurice as the Black 3 and Nelsen as the Blue 4. I also wanted to have a Head Workman, but the only idea I ever had for that was Momoyo, and when Draco took her I had no backup plans. By the time I came up with Tetsu Shima next year, they were now Cardless helpers.

Antonio Lombardi had the same deal, where he was originally also a Cardholder alongside his daughter, but I ultimately felt that plot event didn't need two, so he was just "how dare you attack my family".

Heart Star Tenshi had a very brief chance at being the Green Ace instead of her wife as the Red Ace, but I flipped back to huge bird and stayed there. Heart Star Shirabe, on the other hand, was always going to play support. It got settled so quickly Tenshi never got an icon, so here's Nelson's to look at instead.

The Pointy-Haired Boss was also considered to be a Cardholder proper at one point, rather than just Bambietta's sidekick - he was one of many attempts by me to fill the Green 2 before CKR did it better than I ever could have. Similarly, the Greenskeeper was considered as a Cardholder when he was going to be an Act 2 problem, but he lost that when I decided I wasn't sure I wanted to handle him that early.

The Blue 10 Candidates! Kamen Rider Galaxy was strongly considered as the Black 8 of the Cardholders, but while I liked his design, he didn't feel like he had enough going for him to get it over Malin Freiberg. Alien Red was just me having a goofy Brawl dream where he killed Annie and Komi, while Sagittarius Ice was me re-inventing my Star Force OC from when I was 15 in classic RP tradition, and while I liked them both they just didn't feel like they had enough to plop them into cards on their own. Metroid actually had a considered plot role where he was working for Sylux and would have caused some sort of interference, but it never really panned out so he was relegated here.

With all the characters talked about, time to discuss about the also-rans and never-weres!

CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

Probably my biggest one on this list - there was an entire scrapped Raiko subplot! Originally conceived of in 2021, Raiko would have been affected by the twin statue and split into two. It would have turned out she actually had two very unbalanced sides to her, which kept each other in check and gave us the chill wanderer we met in RP. The two evil Raikos would have been an id-fueled woman with no consideration for others and a complete nihilist who was hardcore "nothing in life matters". Thanks to not really feeling like I had a natural way to fit it into my 2021 stuff, I delayed it for 2022... and decided it should be a Cardholder deal!

In this case, the Green Ace, to round out the Kobber-connected Aces concept. Ebisuwaru would have met the two of them post-split, and convinced them that even though they didn't like each other they should share the power of the Green Ace of Beats. What started to make this rattle was finalizing Harlequin's motives and realizing Raiko was a great thematic counter to her, and not wanting to be unable to use it because of Raiko getting temporarily killed for Harlequin's final form. I still might have gone through with it, though, just with them not being Cardholders, but it didn't feel fitting to Raiko's personality and trajectory as shown in Season 12, so I dropped the idea outright.

Other Touhou possibilities for Cardholders included Chimata! For like six hours on May 3rd, 2021, where I conceptualized her being a Cardholder who showed up in Season 12 to take over the market. Then I got too hype and decided I had to use her in Season 11. Additionally, Felipe Andino, the guy she threw out, was considered for Cardholders before I made him Paul's last goon.

Saki had also been considered as a Cardholder, as a roaming horse connected to Miko, before I decided to make her established pre-season and focus on the rivalry between her and Futo instead.

To round out the Touhou Zone, Iku Nagae was very strongly considered for a Cardholder role! I went back and forth between her being outright mindcontrolled and her not being mind controlled, just thoroughly convinced by Ebisuwaru's words that this was the way to go. I even had the basics for an event - we'd fight her in a massive Las Vegas electrical plant, and she'd be using the grid of Sin City to empower herself and fight with, and it would also involve charging up the ZFS to let Heidegger launch it. While I liked the fight concept, never being able to settle on Iku's level of complicity made it hard to finalize it, and then Draco asked if he could adopt Iku for himself. I was down for it, so I cut Iku from the Cardholders.

You  know how I mentioned Doyle and the Yatagarasu earlier? In my consistent efforts to bring them back, I actually considered combining the two. Somehow, Doyle's mind would have returned from his second demise, and taken hold of the Yatagarasu's body - likely all machine by now - creating a deadly foe. I couldn't get past the stumbling block of that "somehow" so I chopped them from the plot and we got Heart Star Utsuho and Malin Freiberg as close enough.

I also considered using the Behemoth as a source of machines, like having a massive mecha that was rebuilt from the wreckage of the Behemoth or something. It never really got beyond the "it'd be cool if" stage.

Maple Sugar! Maple and Lanterby ended up in a weird position this year, huh? Sometimes you do a character duo and then it turns out they don't really work as a duo, that's just how it goes. Learning experiences. Maple was another possible Green 2 (get used to seeing that), with the idea of making Act 2 have something of a restaurant theme. She would even have been in the same event as Mariella and Antonio, funded by the non-Cardholder Lanterby. This didn't really click with me so it got sliced out.

I considered Gina Morita for a while for Cardholders, mostly due to outright forgetting that she was killed off in Season 8. Then I remembered she was dead and I dropped her from the plot.

You know how the huge armyplot was composed of lots and lots of past Kobber armies? You can thank the Red Ribbon Army for that! As a plot element I was strongly personally involved in back in the day, I wanted to give them a spin without invalidating them getting broken up during Spy's plot in Season 5. This ended up handled by me thinking there'd be some loyalists left, and going from there to combining them with others. This counts as cutting room floor because the idea of the RRA being uniquely important got scrapped in the evolution.

Remember that bit where I talked about how Mammothman would have had a couple Fite Club number cards with him? The one that I was always very sure of was Le Quack, while the other slot was consistently in flux due to me not feeling like my pulls were really all THAT fitting - in retrospect, maybe I shoulda asked Goops if I could pick one up... anyway, he didn't have much going for him beyond "fite club, works with Mammothman" so when the concept of card groups was discarded, so was The Quack.

I thought about having Maria show up because of an event tied heavily to the Council of Thirteen. While Maria did get to show up thanks to an event tied heavily to her past stuff, it sure was not the Council!

One of my ideas during Court Cards was that Ebisuwaru had the ability to reclaim and redistribute Cards - he could erase a Card's current connection and give it out to a new owner. We would have seen this onscreen, when for some reason he got fed up with a Jack or Queen (likely due to them discovering secrets he wanted hidden), killed them, and then handed out their card to someone new in a swerve. This ultimately got cut when I became certain Ebisuwaru didn't create the cards and thus wouldn't have the power to do this.

Just like miss Maple Sugar, Emilia Lanterby was also considered as a potential Green 2! Much more thoroughly than Maple, actually. Her deal would have been one where as the Green 2, she tried to get stakes in restaurants that she thought would be successful, though I don't recall if it would have been supernatural or just normal investment. Either way, she would have definitely worked with Maple and the Lombardis at a minimum, as well as working with Spamton like she did in the final draft. While I tossed this idea around for a while, it ended up not clicking properly with me in the long run, so I tossed it out and just made Lanterby an acerbic food critic with no ulterior motives. And now we're keeping her. Sorry.

One character who I regularly considered for Cardholders was Vasu from Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. He had a lot of magical rings, and would have used those to help him in a fight, but he never really got all that much traction in my mind. When I ditched him for a full Card, I also considered him for a Blue 10 (then Black 10) candidate, but he was cut thanks to the evolution of the space theme.

Another who was considered for a short time was Agent 47 from Hitman. I didn't go through with that one because I didn't want him to be decisively defeated by the Kobbers, but I couldn't think of a satisfying way for them to lose or tie, so ultimately I didn't go for it to avoid having an inconclusive scenario like that.

This fine fellow is Yuji Endou, from Kaiji. A debt collector and loan shark, he was considered as Ebisuwaru's surprisingly low-ranking right-hand man, the Green 2. He would have been both the gofer for the Man in Purple and a guy who monitored other Cardholders to make sure they were all behaving properly. He stayed on as a possibility for a while, but as Pierrette took that role for Ebisuwaru, Yuji was left without a niche, and lost his Green 2 spot as a result. He was made a possible candidate for the Black/Blue 10, but then the space theme ensured that he was scrapped from the plot entirely. Ironically, he was the Card of Debts, which meant I was worried for a second when JRM wanted to change Victor Rochefort to that until I remembered Yuji was double-cut.

Another character who was considered but not used was Neo Payne. Way back in Season 1, when I was reading Season 1 of RP, the two characters I had in my mind were Tom Turbine and Winston Payne. Since this was when everyone needed revival plots to come back rather than just a dose of white magic, I thought about how they'd return after losing in the Brawl, and my idea for Payne was that he would be the cyborg Neo Payne, represented by a sprite edit where he wore a futuristic visor. Like so, as you can see. I thought for a while about making him the Green Queen, but I couldn't really think of either why he was like this or what he was doing, so it didn't make it to the actual forum.

Fruitas LTD was tapped for a comeback at one point! A classic corporation in Chao RP, the idea was that whoever had bought it up was now making their own moves against the Kobbers. It didn't get very far in my ideas, and I ended up channeling all my Tropico energy into El Presidente instead.

Cole Phelps here was ALSO considered for the Green 2 for a while. Thank you CKR from saving me from all this indecision by letting me just use Don Clawleone, he was better than literally any of the picks here would have been. Phelps would have basically been a gag character, his gimmicks being that he drives like crazy, doubts people a lot, and has a completely inexhaustible supply of new cars. While I still might use him at some point in the future, I think it's for the best that it's not in Cardholders.

Here's a quick rapid-fire list of some character concepts I had that didn't go beyond basic concepts!

-A military-styled honorable duelist, similar in design to Juan from the Garbage Curse last year. Would have been a green card.

-A ninja, because lel and nin nin nin. Would have been a blue card.

-An evil capitalist, a true Chao Classic, so I could run a business plot. Would have been the Green Queen.

-An AI that would have joined the Astronaut, separate from ZF-05 (this was back when ZF-05 was still tapped for Model Omega). Would have been the Blue 7, and fought by jumping around and moving from satellite to satellite to turn them against the Kobbers.

-A super science person, who would have used and fought with chemicals and concoctions. Would have been the Black Queen.

And to finish it all off, here's an icon for Jester Chao. One possible plot line I had was him showing up as the second Joker, apparently Harlequin - inconsistencies would have been clear, and people were supposed to realize over time that he couldn't possibly be Harlequin, which would lead into the reveal that the first Joker was two clowns in one. This one was mostly scrapped for timing purposes; I wanted the reveal of the second Joker to be after every other card, and since I had two cards that were only officially confirmed VERY late and very close to Ebisuwaru's defeat, I didn't have the timespan to really make this double reverse swerve have the effect I wanted it to have. So ultimately, it remained as originally planned, with two Joker cards for the two clown personalities. 

CONCLUSION

Cardholders is a plot I put as much of myself as I could into. All these ties to Chao RP place, all these series I like, and the message of the final event being one that's very close to my heart. Thank you all for sticking with me all these years and for this entire megaplot, and I'm looking forward to years more of ZFRP to come!