Here's the problem with the current PV cast: Back in the day most of our posters were young males. All of them wrote young male characters. Many of these came with attached cast, mostly female. To further balance the gender gap and to give those young males some romantic plotlines, I introduced a whole shedload of female characters, starting with Laurie Leyton and Valeria of Carfax, then Miss Framlicker, and plenty more, and salvaged a few others after the posters who'd introduded them moved on (Amy, Jury, et al.)

But now most of those posters are gone and so are their characters. We don't have Jarvis, Enty, spiffy, Zemo, Finny, DK, Darkhwk, Xander, and about a dozen others. So we're short about 25 male protagonists who have left many female supporting characters around. Conversely, we've only lost five really prolific female posters - Lisa, Dancer, Sorcy, Ziles, and Troia, and none of them had major male supporting cast members.

So as of today, we have loads of interesting non-poster female protagonists (plus Jason's pantheon of female heroes and JJJ's Baroness) but not many male ones. Of the long-running male heroes who are either still "supported" by their posters or who I feel confident I have poster permission to continue developing, almost all of them are now matured into stable long-term relationships: Dream/April, Donar/Annj, Vizh/Hallie, G-Eyed/Laurie/Beth, etc.

This means that when I wanted a "bad boy" to turn up to ruffle Kara's world there was a pretty shallow pool to draw from. In the end it came down to Chronic or Tom Black, and Chronic requires less set-up. But the point is, our current cast gaps are an artefact of our previous cast surpluses and require a bit of managing.







I'm from a nation where most street vendors won't accept cards. I'm going to try and convince the local chip shop that I have an embedded microchip that I've paid them with, however.







I wrote that story and even now I'm not sure who was playing who.