Poppy Li is one of the main characters of the Apple TV+ streaming series Mythic Quest. She is the game's Lead Engineer who is constantly at odds with Ian Grimm over the direction of the game. Poppy is portrayed by Charlotte Nicdao, first appearing in the episode "Pilot".
Poppy is Grimpop's co-founder & Mythic Quest’s former lead engineer and co-creative director. She is equally as ego-driven as Ian, but doesn’t see it that way. She started working at Mythic Quest Studios right after she graduated from MIT.
Biography[]
Before Mythic Quest[]
Poppy grew up in Australia with her Australian mother, Olivia, Filipino father, Benito, and older sister, Tracy. Even at the young age of 10, Poppy had a big interest in video games--particularly Final Fantasy IX. She also had piano classes, which she did not enjoy, but still excelled in.
Poppy was closer to her father than she was her mother, as seen in Sarian. He knew about the fact that she was hiding her knowledge of Filipino from her mother & frequently indulged in her antics to game in secret.
After finishing her piano recital, Poppy received a bicycle which she then used to go and play video games in her local library. It is then when she found Sarian and started to idolize Ian Grimm.
Sometime after this, Poppy started to shorten her last name "Liwanag" to "Li" and went on to go to MIT. She also attended a lecture hosted by Ian where he talked about his game, Twin Daggers, and proceeded to collaborate with him.
Raven's Banquet[]
After two years of development, Raven's Banquet is almost ready for launch. Poppy believes that everything is perfect, but Ian has reservations about a new addition to the game, a shovel that can be used to dig and change the game terrain. Poppy wants it to be left alone, feeling that she should be able to have something in the game that is just hers but Ian begins noodling with the concept. While Ian is working, Poppy leaks the shovel to the influential streamer Pootie Shoe, believing that he will love it and force Ian into keeping it as is. The plan backfires though when Pootie hates the shovel since it will not even let him create a penis. Eventually, David orders a code lock to prevent the expansion from shipping late, and Ian angrily continues to work on it. Poppy gets notified via the version control system, and after coming to an understanding about the shovel, he helps him to make it work as a weapon as well. The shovel is a hit when the expansion launches.[1]
Poppy's comments to Brad Bakshi about him being a soulless money-suck and not needing his monetization efforts over his proposal to add a casino to the game led Brad to disappear from the studio, taking all his office furniture with him. David Brittlesbee was concerned about Brad's actions, but Poppy saw it as a tantrum that would blow over. The next day, Poppy was called by Sue Gorgon after Brad turned off the in-game store and set prices for items such as legendary lootboxes and high-quality gear to zero. As a result, overpowered players were ripping through Raven's Banquet quicker that planned. Poppy intended to throw up roadblocks by extending raids and buffing the health of bosses, but found that Brad had also sent the entire programming team home, telling them that without his monetization efforts, they would no longer be able to pay for a full staff. Poppy and David attempted to go to Brad's home, only to find David's car clamped and Poppy's Lyft account disabled. Eventually, they found Brad and Poppy apologised, asking him if he would turn the prices back on. Brad already had, having come to an agreement with Ian about staging the reveal of the Masked Man at the casino.[2]
After the shovel issue, Ian agreed to let Poppy have something of her own and she came up with the idea for a new social feature named "Dinner Party". The idea was not embraced by the programming team, and the name led to derision and the idea that Poppy had never actually attended a dinner party at all. Dinner Party was launched around the time that Kotaku found that white supremacists had gained a foothold in the game, and Poppy organised an in-game protest using the new feature. Unfortunately, her protest was attacked by an alliance of 4,000 Nazis. The unintended consequence to the protest was that it drew out all the Nazis within the game, allowing them to be isolated in their own server.[3]
Ian and Brad attended StreamerCon, hoping to find a new livestreamer since Pootie Shoe had announced he would no longer be streaming Mythic Quest. Poppy got Dana Bryant to drive her to the convention as well, believing that she should have a voice in the decision. Poppy had a hard time finding any candidates; the one Female Streamer she found who was promising had less than two hundred subscribers. During the convention, she met Dan Williams of Cold Alliance Studios who told her that they liked her work and if she was ever in the market for a job change, then to give him a call. The search for a streamer looked hopeless until Poppy watched Dana play the game and hold the attention of a crowd of people. She suggested Dana as the new streamer to Ian and Brad but they brushed her off. Later, back at the office, Dana gave an inspiring talk to a group from Girls Can Code, leading Ian and Brad to think she was the right candidate after all. Feeling like her opinion was not respected, Poppy made a call to Dan Williams, indicating her willingness to talk with him.[4]
The production of Raven's Banquet was particularly stressful on Poppy. Constantly having the office take her work for granted and undermine her, she was set on quitting her job at Mythic Quest Studios and taking a job from their biggest competitor, Cold Alliance Studios. After too much indecisiveness on her part, however, she was rejected by Cold Alliance Studios and stayed at MQ, being made a co-creative director.
During this expansion, she added a new mechanic into the game with a shovel and a new party system called Dinner Party. One of the last bits of major coding she did for Raven's Banquet was to introduce an in-world virus called Blood Ocean and its vaccine into the game.
During Quarantine[]
During the COVID-19 quarantine period, she swiftly had to remove Blood Ocean from Mythic Quest (game), since it was obviously in poor taste following the rise of the COVID pandemic ("Quarantine"). Once she had finished this task, she found herself with little to do and completely isolated in her apartment. It was revealed that her mental state had completely deteriorated during the pandemic through a video call from Ian. When Ian unexpectedly showed up at her house one night when she was particularly down, she found his non-sexual companionship a buoying force.
After Quarantine[]
In the early aftermath of her being made a co-equal to Ian, she presided over the company's Everlight festival as queen. In Titan's Rift, she was soon thereafter faced with the challenge of coming up with the name for the new expansion, when Ian skipped town for a "sabbatical". To arrive at the new name, she had to go through several tortuous sexual dreams that largely involved Ian ridiculing her sexual prowess.
Personality[]
Poppy is an expert coder who connects better with her computer terminal than her co-workers, employees, and fellow humans. Poppy just wants to contribute creatively, and she knows how to make a good idea cool, but struggles to procure cool ideas herself. That Ian excels in this very thing only serves to further her frustrations. She seems to lack an understanding of social cues and normalities.
As time goes on, Poppy become just as skilled at manipulation as Ian. This is seen in the way she "inspired" Ian and Dave to help her with her speech at the Women for Gaming event ("Grouchy Goat").
She's Australian and Filipino. She frequently uses Australian slang that other people at the office don't seem to get.
Trivia[]
- Poppy's last name, "Liwanag", is a Filipino word that directly translates into the word "light".
- This could be a direct representation on how Ian and Poppy's dynamic is; Ian's last name being Grimm, "grim" meaning mirthless or dark and Liwanang meaning "light".
Appearances[]
- Season 1
- "Pilot" (First appearance)
- "The Casino"
- "Dinner Party"
- "The Convention"
- "Non-Player Character"
- "Permadeath"
- "Brendan"
- "Blood Ocean"
- "Quarantine"
- "Everlight"
- Season 2
- "Titans' Rift"
- "Grouchy Goat"
- "#YumYum"
- "Breaking Brad"
- "Please Sign Here"
- "Backstory!"
- "Juice Box"
- "TBD"
- Season 3
- "Across the Universe"
- "Partners"
- "Crushing It"
- "The Two Joes"
- "Playpen"
- "The 12 Hours of Christmas"
- "Sarian"
- "To Catch a Mouse"
Notes and references[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "Pilot"
- ↑ "The Casino"
- ↑ "Dinner Party"
- ↑ "The Convention"