Not Your Sayu-chan

[WackyMeetsPractical]

The revelation that Sayu chan was actually a character and not a player or even a random passer by was such an amazing turn of events. It did shake up some paranoia among us that there were plants amongst our midst, but it did make the scenario seem just a tad more plausable and made the ARG much more immerisive in the process.

I wonder if the GMs behind this character could describe her creation, and implementation. Also what inspired the bit with the angry mother? Why would she occasionally come back even when her story bit was over?

This might be more appropriate in another thread, but were there other ideas to have ARG-characters enter the game disguised as players or lurkers that never got used?

[Qara-Xuan Zenith]

Yes, just to add to Wacky's question here, what was the deal with Sayu's mother? Was that to make us seriously question whether she might be a real person, since we had gotten fairly confident by that point that she wasn't?
Would that have happened if no one had PMed her? How did PMing her change her storyline, if at all?

Seriously, Sayu's mother was scary, if only memetically so.

[Connor Fallon]

Sayu was a real person =/ Her mother called me to complain.

[JackAlsworth]

How'd she wind up in a comic?

[Connor Fallon]

Because she happened to be there in the event it depicted? =P

(Val needs to give the real answers to this one)

[WackyMeetsPractical]

How do you explain this post/confession?

[Dana]

How do you explain this post/confession?

Who's Suya?

[WackyMeetsPractical]

That's not my typo.

[Connor Fallon]

That's not my typo.

Not a typo. I was posting as someone named Suya. Never posted as Sayu.

[Qara-Xuan Zenith]

TROLLS TROLLS THEY ARE EVERYWHERE

[Val Reznitskaya]

I feel like it's almost a shame to answer this. =P Sorry, Sayu...

Anyway, here's the story. We had most of the tropes chosen for each character pretty early on, so Sayu started out as just a throwaway character in the comic. Later in the game, some of us realized that the schoolgirl rival trope might have been too difficult to guess from the context of the comic alone, so we started throwing around ideas about giving Sayu an actual travel blog. Since she's a kid, Connor and I were joking about the kinds of ridiculous things she'd post about, and somehow she evolved into a giant troll in the process.

We scrapped the travel blog idea because it would have been too much work for too little payoff, but we did like the idea of having her interact with Gulliver before the comic's reveal, so I started posting as her on his blog. You guys were so convinced she was a real person that you kept linking her to this forum. After the third time this happened, I decided to just run with it and made an account for her.

I thought about just having her troll everyone, including other characters, but that would have violated our own forum rules (and attracted attention from our very diligent mods), so I kept her posts limited to Gulliver's discussion thread. Connor and I were actually really surprised when you guys didn't see through her right away.

The angry mother thing was a fun bit of Connor improv. It was nice to have my Japanese minor be useful for something. =P

I honestly didn't expect such a strong reaction, but I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[Rick Healey]

To be fair, Val wasn't the only one who had a Japanese minor in college that suddenly became of use. When it came time to do Sayu's mom's post, we went back and forth, picking and tweaking at the wording to get *just* the right voice across. We were both certain that Poirot had some leeway, but the tiniest mistake on Sayu's mom's Japanese would have been ripped apart.

[Pixelmage]

The fun fact is that apparently, only Sicon, Mimsy and I have a somewhat usable knowledge of japanese... Which made that situation a lot more tense. Mimsy wasn't online at the time, I couldn't make complete sense of the message, just assess the general tone... And then to compose a reply message using Google Translate?

That was one interesting day.
Though admittedly I don't remember who else joined the attempts at understand and replying the message at the time... xD

[Qara-Xuan Zenith]

I was the one who google-translate-fu-ed a reply, because I felt like it was my responsibility to clean up a mess that I'd kind of started by PM-ing her.
I'm pretty sure my message made sense by the time I sent it... did that even matter, though? Or did Sayu's mom stop reading after she posted her warning?

[Rick Healey]

Indeed, Sayu's mom didn't bother reading the response. She just wanted trouble to stay away from her daughter, who is in big trouble for fooling around online with these weirdos instead of doing her homework, like she should!

Though Val and I did read the response, and were sufficiently amused.