Let us first start by apologize that this is not an update to The Illusive Emperor.

Let us next say that this is because we've starting rewriting it, and have already published the prologue of that rewrite on this account, under the name The Illusive Empire.

Now, if anyone's left who cares to learn the reasons why we started rewriting it, well, here you go:

As much as we have come to love the idea of The Illusive Emperor, we have been unhappy with its overall direction for some time now. Most of this unhappiness lay with the relationship between Lelouch and Kallen, but also how we presented the politics and characters therein. We approached this story with stars in our eyes, and quickly became jaded in the fact that we overreached on what we wanted.

As a result, this is a notification that The Illusive Emperor, as a story, is dead.

However, as you know, this note isn't all bad news. As a result of our dissatisfaction with TIE, we have quietly—on and off—been working on a rewrite. It's for multiple reasons, most of them problems we intend it to fix:

1. Kallen and Lelouch: In TIE, the relationship was an unrealistic and quite frankly insulting presentation for both of them. In fact, looking back upon it, it was nothing more than cringe-worthy.

2. The story's direction: Quite frankly, it had none. We had an idea of how it began, and that was about it. We had no middle, and we certainly didn't know how it was going to end.

3. Characterisations: We had our ups and downs with this – not only of people, but also organisations, political entities, and even species. Some of them were reasonable. Some of them were pretty awful, the Turians especially (we'll ignore Kallen and Lelouch, that's an entirely separate problem we've already discussed).

4. Presentation: Starting the story with a timeline was a big no.

In general, we think The Illusive Emperor was a series of mostly good ideas failed by their execution. So we've decided to give it another go: we've discarded some of the old, brought in some of the new, and we'll be doing our best to polish up everything in between.

It was a fun ride, but now it's over – here's to the rewrite surpassing the original!