By popular demand, let’s talk about everyone favorite moth – Miko! Miko started off as an intersection of two things:
- In some TTRPGs I run, I’ve been having fun exploring friendships between people who experience time differently.
- In a game about meeting people and developing relationships, I thought it would be cool to have a character that removes all the anxiety of starting a friendship by just over-the-top being excited about you.
On a personal note, *I* get very excited about new friends and often worry that I get too excited, too quickly. Miko was an attempt at a character that says, “Be as excited about me as you want, because I’m at least as excited about you!”
She went through a couple revisions, playing with her relationship with high school friends and how central to the game’s main story she was going to be. Elements of social anxiety, neurodivergence, and connections to memory loss all emerged as I got a better sense of how she experiences the world.
Miko was one of two characters where I needed to do a pass to find natural opportunities to raise the spice level. She has strong “must protec” vibes, which can lead to infantilization. We wanted to make sure to balance that out with her being a young adult, especially regarding romance.
I had fun playing with the idea that Miko is a little shy romantically, but she’s had visions of the future where she definitely isn’t. And she’s always thinking about who she is right now vs who she wants to become.
