There's something strange about looking back at Katarine now. Not because she's bad (I know she isn't), but because she feels like she belongs to a different creative lifetime. When I first wrote her, the medium itself was different. Roleplay wasn't about depth or long arcs or carefully constructed character psychology. It was fast, reactive, and alive in the moment. You wrote to keep up, to respond, to stay in motion. And at the time, that was the magic of it.
Katarine was built in that space. She was shaped by scenes, by interactions, by whatever was happening in the moment. Her story moved forward, but it didn't necessarily dig inward. There wasn't time for that, and honestly, there wasn't an expectation for it either. It was enough that she felt consistent, that she could respond, that she had a presence people recognized. That was what made a character "good" then.
But now the medium has changed, and maybe I have too. Stories feel slower, more intentional. Characters aren't just vehicles for interaction; they're meant to carry meaning, to evolve, to reflect something deeper. And when I look at Katarine through that lens, I don't see a failed character. I see a character who was never given the kind of space where that depth could form.
That's where the sense of loss comes from and why the deep struggle I've endured with this character for so long exists.
It's not that she had bad stories. It's that she had different stories, ones that moved too quickly to leave lasting marks. Big things happened to her: the cult, the separation from her brother, the Jedi training, even things like marriage. But they exist more like events than transformations. They happened, but they weren't fully processed. They didn't reshape her in the way I now expect characters to be reshaped.
And I can feel the gap between what she is and what she could have been.
It reminds me of those earliest moving pictures, the ones made in the era of Edison. A train pulling into a station. Workers leaving a factory. A dancer twirling in place. They were astonishing, not because of narrative depth, but because they moved. That was enough. The spectacle was the story. You watched something happen in real time, and the novelty carried it. There were no arcs, no internal struggles, no long-term consequences. Just motion, presence, immediacy.
That's what Katarine was built in.
She was part of something alive and collaborative, where scenes unfolded quickly, and meaning was created in the moment rather than carefully constructed over time. Each interaction was like one of those early reels, complete in itself, exciting while it lasted, but not necessarily connected to a larger, cohesive narrative. And at the time, that didn't feel like a limitation. It felt like a possibility.
But storytelling didn't stay there. Film didn't stay there, and neither did roleplaying.
Now we have sprawling cinematic universes, stories that stretch across years, across characters, across interconnected arcs. Characters are introduced with intention, their histories layered, their decisions echoing forward into future narratives. A single moment isn't just a moment; it's setup, payoff, consequence. Emotional beats are revisited, deepened, and reframed. The audience is invited not just to watch, but to track, to remember, to feel accumulation over time.
And that's the language I think in now.
So, when I look back at Katarine, it's like holding one of those early film reels up against the expectations of modern cinema. Not to judge it, but to realize how much more the medium can now do. How much more I want to do. And suddenly, all I can see are the spaces where something deeper could have existed. The quiet moments that were never lingered on. The emotional shifts that were never fully explored. The consequences that never had time to settle.
It creates this strange sense of missed opportunity, not because anything was done wrong, but because the framework itself didn't allow for more.
And yet, I don't want to completely discard her. I still like who she is, her temperament, her empathy, the quiet way she moves through the world. There's something there that still feels true. But so much of her life is tied to people and stories that no longer exist or exist only as fragments. They shaped her once, but they don't actively live anymore. And without that living context, they start to feel hollow, like sets left behind after filming wraps, or characters written out of a franchise before their arcs could be completed.
So, I'm left with this tension: she feels incomplete, but not disposable and certainly not over.
Early films didn't cease to exist when cinema evolved. We didn't discard them, but we built on them. We learned how to take motion and turn it into a story, how to take spectacle and give it weight. And maybe that's what this is. Not a failure of the past, but an invitation from it.
But there is another way to understand this evolution, one that feels even closer to what I'm trying to do now.
In modern storytelling, especially in comics and expansive fictional universes, the past isn't erased when something new is created. Instead, it's preserved in something called a multiverse. Every version of a character, every timeline, every interpretation continues to exist somewhere, each one a reflection of the era and creative lens that produced it. The older versions don't disappear; they become part of the mythology, archived, remembered, even revisited.
What separates one version from another is often a single moment, a divergence point sometimes called a nexus event, or a flashpoint. It's the instant where the story could have gone one way, but instead goes another. One decision, one realization, one failure, or act of courage that reshapes everything that follows. From that point forward, the character is still recognizably the same person, but their path, and therefore their meaning, changes.
And I think that's what Katarine needs.
Not to be erased, but to be split.
The version of her that exists now, the one built in that earlier era of fast, reactive storytelling, can remain intact. She becomes something like an archival timeline, a preserved version of what storytelling looked like at that moment in time. She is the "moving picture" version of Katarine: immediate, alive, collaborative, and real in her own way.
But alongside her, there can be another.
A new timeline. A version of Katarine born from a different storytelling language, one that allows for reflection, consequence, and transformation. And the difference between them doesn't have to be everything. It only needs to be one moment. One choice is made differently. One experience that is finally felt instead of just passed through.
That moment becomes the nexus.
It could be the first time she truly allows herself to feel the bond with Daxium instead of suppressing it. It could be a case where she fails and cannot rationalize away. It could be a moment where she chooses attachment over doctrine or questions the Jedi and doesn't let the question go. Whatever it is, it marks the point where Katarine stops simply moving through events and begins to be shaped by them.
From there, everything changes, not because her past is gone, but because it finally has weight.
Seen this way, I'm not discarding Katarine or correcting a mistake. I'm doing what storytelling has always done as it evolves. I'm creating a new branch, a new continuity, a new space where she can become the character she was always capable of being, but never had the structure to fully realize.
The old version remains. The new version begins.
And for the first time, that doesn't feel like loss. It feels like a possibility.
For the first time, I think I fully understand the scope of the struggle and may be finally ready to address it head-on. To me, that is tremendous growth as a writer and a cause for jubilation. It may upset some people to see this, as it does when any film gets remade or updated, but there comes a time when a creator wants to play with the new technology, medium, and creativity that a new era allows.
For me, that time is now.
