Jun 22, 2025
Author's Commentary #478:
Time to talk about Chapter 478: Out of the way, catgirl.
We finally got a new catgirl dropping, and her name is Reisa Nekozuka. While she is one of Kuon's many catgirls, she doesn't live with her, and is representing Palau as she is half-Palauan. Now let's do her bio proper.
猫塚 玲彩 (Nekozuka Reisa) is how Reisa's name would be spelled in kanji. 猫塚 means "cat" and "grave", while 玲彩 means "sound of metal clinking" and "color".
(If I made any mistakes with the translations, feel free to correct me).
Her birthday is October 31st, which is Halloween.
Her favorite piece is the bishop.
I actually had no plans for any more catgirl characters, but when I decided to include the final batch of new women's teams which included, Palau, Uruguay, Moldova, and the Greater Federal Republic of Central America, I decided to have one of the new characters be a catgirl to make her stand out. I doubt she'll be going bald like Nyoan though.
Speaking of which, Reisa is likely to have the most prominent role in the story of the final 20 new women's team characters. Obviously this is due to her being a catgirl and having close ties to the major side characters of Kuon and Nyoan.
As for the game, it's a special one in the fact that I played it against Chess.com's 1000-rated level 6 engine bot with no assistance. It featured a Latvian Gambit, and I messed up, but so did the computer. I felt the game was satisfactory enough to include, and that I could justify a 2300-level player like Ilze playing so bad due to her being exhausted and worried about Gundega. It was also short, so that was a plus too. And it allows me to feature a game on a chapter releasing on Paul Morphy's birthday, which is also Peter's birthday, so Happy Birthday to Peter. I promise he'll be showing up again soon.
Now that I have some more chapters written behind the scenes, I can offer some more insight as to how things will play out. First up, I feel 6B itself is going to be rushed. This is largely due to the bughouse games just being so exhausting to make and heavily draining on me. I feel the more I focus on them, the less motivated I become to write them. That being said, even if I did write out all the games I originally had planned, they would only be showcased in 2 to 3 chapters max, as they'd be really short.
I also really want to move things along to round 9 as the pre 6B arc has just been going on for way too long. I blame that mainly on my daily upload mentality forcing me to crank out chapters daily. There will be some more 6B shave prep and Kisha chapters, but that Okisato backstory chapter will happen soon, and it will be important, so you won't want to skip that one. It also features a game, so that's another reason not to skip over it. I hope you're looking forward to that moment in the story.
That's all for this commentary. I hope you enjoyed it.
