And thus we finally reveal the name of Annie, who played Shmi and is now playing Anakin.

It is long overdue in one sense, but it's come about this way through various contrivances and happenstances. We knew all along that we wanted Annie to end up playing Anakin. But we introduced her as playing Shmi, because Shmi had a meatier role which lined up better with how we wanted to characterise Annie initially. Then we went through the whole bait-and-switch ploy where Annie began playing Anakin during the pod race, but then didn't show up for the next game session. Throughout this, we didn't want to give the game away that she would eventually end up playing Anakin. And of course giving her name as Annie would have been a complete give-away. So we had to obscure it.

(Okay, there was another option, which was to give her a different name. But, in all of our discussions of the story background from day one, we had always referred to her as "Annie", so using another name would have seemed strange to us.)

We had originally planned to reveal her name in strip #117, with the line, "It makes sense if you play Anakin from now on, Annie." But before that episode went to air, we wrote this episode. And we realised that the introduction of Anakin to Obi-Wan was a much more natural place to drop in her real name.

There is one small objection that might come up with the name "Annie". It's clear that the names of Ben and Jim are related to the names of their characters, Obi-Wan ("Ben" as he is called in Episode IV) Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn. However they made up their own character names, so it's not unreasonable for there to be some connection. But the GM invented Anakin's name, before he even met Annie (strip #61). So the fact that Anakin's name is similar to Annie's is something of a strange coincidence.

We know that in the story this is a coincidence. But it's a fairly minor one, and coincidences actually do happen sometimes, so we're okay with that.