Discussion Inspiration from other media

[Saija Kwann]

We all know the story...Star Wars was an amalgam of various media when George Lucas conceived "The Star Wars." In interviews, Lucas said he grew up watching Flash Gordon. Another movie, The Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa, is said to also be another influence. I forget some others, but it was discussed in the SW documentary Empire of Dreams. And we see other media influences in current SW adventures as well; The Mandalorian is heavily influenced by American Western films.

In this thread, name some movies, books, etc. that have given you inspiration for character design, scenarios, and/or story arcs.

Part of what inspired me to create Saija Kwann as a fixer/slicer/mechanic type is that I love the technical people in various media, the guys (or ladies) who bring the hardware and make it work. One of my favorite ones was Lyle (Seth Green) from The Italian Job. Other influences include Q from the James Bond 007 series of films, the operator Tank (Marcus Chong) from The Matrix, and various allies of the anime/manga assassin known as Golgo 13.

One final influence I want to mention is Mission: Impossible, the TV show and films, though I prefer the OG series over everything else. Because unlike the movies which squares up the majority of its focus on Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), the OG series is a true ensemble cast and each person has a critical role to play to complete the mission. Bonus points for that boss theme song by Lalo Schifrin, I can put it on loop in the background while I'm plotting out the particulars of a given post or story.

 

[Dex Jusior]

Major influence for my character's overall demeanor and personality is Micah Bell from Red Dead Redemption 2. Dex is an untrustworthy jerk, but he is damn good at what he does. He will betray anyone to get what he wants, he doesn't care about anyone except himself, a lesson instilled in him by his father from a young age.

 

[Zaavik Perl]

In this thread, name some movies, books, etc. that have given you inspiration for character design, scenarios, and/or story arcs.

Joseph Campbell's 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' is an incredible book about The Hero's Journey that I find myself taking a lot of inspiration from with just about any character that I write. Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' has had a huge impact on all of my character writing. Themes of 'self-overcoming' are prevalent in just about every character I've ever written in both roleplaying and authorial contexts.

Music also sparks all kinds of inspiration for me. This goes beyond my insistence of naming every thread and to a lesser extent, factory submissions, after songs/artists/records. Several of my characters, including Zaavik were born as an idea received from a good jam. Coheed and Cambria's 'Three Evils (Embodied in Love and Shadow)' was the track that birthed the idea of Zaavik, for example.

Berserk is my all-time favorite work of fiction, and I find my writing alludes to that much more than I would probably prefer. I try to keep character from character influences either out of my mind or hushed in general at the risk of being reductionist to my own work, but they definitely exist. That being said, truthfully, if I told you there wasn't some inspiration echo of Guts (Berserk) and/or San Dan Glokta (First Law) in nearly every one of my characters, I'd be a liar.

Biggest of all, I think some of the best inspiration that I have gotten comes from looking inward. My only frame of reference for being a person is myself. As everyone's only real reference is themselves. Our experiences are some of the most visceral and potent things to draw from. This doesn't make a character a self-insert by any means (I loathe self-inserts) but I'm of the opinion it's impossible to write a character that doesn't carry a small piece of yourself.

TRY AS I MIGHT TO AVOID IT, I always see the smallest bit of myself peeking through the prose.

 

[Rusty]

My three primary inspirations are as follows:

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Proto-cyberpunk novel written in the Golden Age of SF/F, it tells the story of one Gulliver Foyle, an everyman catalyzed to his full potential as a human by the desire for revenge. It has a lot to say about the nature of humanity, the desires and impulses that drive us, and how they can both empower and destroy us. It's also impossibly cool, and invented from whole cloth a lot of the tropes that would later come to characterize the cyberpunk genre as a whole. You'll be hard pressed to find a better example of organic worldbuilding, and its influence reaches all the way to the modern day with things like The Expanse.

Hammer's Slammers by David Drake. Hardcore military science fiction born out of the author's experiences in the Vietnam War, Hammer's Slammers follows a group of elite mercenaries as they perform difficult and dangerous jobs across the galaxy. The writing is brutal and uncompromising, and more than just about anything else I've ever read, captures what it's really like to be in combat. As an added bonus, the author is also a historian, so many of the stories take real world historical events and conceptualize them in the context of the universe. The short stories and books that comprise the Hammer's Slammers series are not for everyone, and I cannot stress that enough, but if you have the stomach for them, they make for a great read.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. These books serve as a reminder that it's okay to have fun while telling a story. Harry Dresden is, as one character puts it, "Gandalf on crack and an IV of Red Bull, with a big leather coat and a .44 revolver in his pocket." He's at once a huge dork and one of the most badass wizards in all of fiction. This is a man who charged into battle against necromancers and their zombie armies on the back of a T-Rex brought back to life with, you guessed it, necromancy. Some of the story beats are absolutely heartbreaking, soul shattering, and gut wrenching all at the same time, but even through all of that, the books are still the some of the most fun you can have sitting up. Just remembering that you can be goofy and more than a little nuts and still tell a compelling story has helped me grow tremendously as a writer.

 

[Ashin Cardé Varanin]

One big one that comes to mind is the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I've only read about half the series, it's huge, but it's been a huge influence in any number of ways.

The big one is how it handles power. Everyone has power, and the most powerful are prone to constant scrambling around. Fear and mistakes are endemic even at the tip-top levels. Ancient forgotten things and new random elements routinely throw everything for a loop in wildly unpredictable ways. Magic takes a hundred different forms. People of good intentions have conflicting motivations. It's like public threads turned up to eleven.

 

[Okkeus Dainlei]

ok i do this too

First off, I probably won't be linking stuff here, mainly because it is late and I'm being lazy. Secondly, I'm just going to bullet point this to make it easier.

• Marty McFly from BTTF. Marty is always longing for change in his family. His dad is a dork who can't stand up for himself, and this leaves Marty taking some of the fall from it. Marty gets his dad to stand up to Biff, changing the current timeline he is living in. Okkeus is always wanting a chance to change his past, and to see what could have been.
• Parzival/ Wade Watts from Ready Player One. In the OASIS, a person can live a complete different life. In the real world you might be small and skinny, but in the OASIS you can be big and strong. For Okkeus, he tries to appear like a confident, skillful Jedi Knight. While on the inside, he is actually worrying all the time and is constantly thinking he is always the worst.
• Fletcher from the Summoner book series. In the book, Flecther is shown as an outcast, these powers given to him pretty much by accident. He later goes on to become extremely powerful, but still has some doubt in his mind. Okkeus enjoys being strong in the force, but still thinks that he isnt worthy of it. Self-hate is kinda a recurring theme here.
• Spider-Man/ Peter Parker, mainly the one played by Tom Holland. When I originally created Okkeus, he was supposed to be this person that everyone knew and respected while he had his space suit on. Yet while it was off, no one knew him and they didn't care who he was. Kinda the same with Peter Parker. Also, "with great power comes great responsibility" is a thing I take from this as well. Okkeus has seen the power of the force, and realizes you need proper training to use it.
• Bandit from Smokey and the Bandit. Bandit tried to act like he is a lone-wolf type, only needing himself and his car to be happy. But in reality, Snowman and Frog are his closet friends, and are practically family. A theme I'm using now for Okkeus is that he tries to be this independent type becuase of what happened in his past, he know has trust issues. He wants to open up and make friends, but is always worried it will end up badly.
• MUSIC. There are so many great songs that I use for Okkeus, especially when posting. I'll only list s few of the main ones below.
  • Thunderstruck by AC/DC. One of the greatest songs ever created. There is a reason I named Okkeus's X-Wing after it. Anyways, the song talks about a person getting their world rocked, or 'Thunderstruck'. I like to think that when writing Okkeus that he leaves a remarkable enough impression for the reader to feel this way.
  • The Chain (cover) by Toothgrinder. This is just a rocked-up version of the song by Fleetwood Mac. So the song talks about never breaking the chain, or never breaking your ties. To me, it also means that someone has broken these chains, and are no going against that person. Okkeus has had many chains broken in his life, so now he is trying to strengthen the only ones he has left.
  • Can You Hear Me? by Korn. In his song, it talks about a person who has an inner demon breaking them and killing the person. He person is basically calling out for something, anything, to try and help them. Okkeus has a lot of inner demons himself, and is looking for help anywhere he can get it.
• And the final one for now, is me. Might be a little cliché, but Okkeus is so easy for me to write becuase it is how I would see myself in the Star Wars universe. A troubled young Jedi who is trying to find his place in this galaxy. To be honest, Okkeus is pretty much built like me as well. But a whole mess of my theme for him comes from me, and that is why I keep finding it harder and harder to write me alts...

Alright I'm done for now. Thanks for this thread, it was really fun to write all of this out.

 

[Jacen Nimdok]

Out of all my characters, the one people know the most here on Chaos is Nimdok. He also happens to have the most interesting and detailed answer to this question, so we're in luck!

After extensive self-reflection while trying to figure out why he's worked out the best of all my characters, I've come to the conclusion that he's just an updated, more mature version of a character I created when I was a child named Thel Hahn. Like Nimdok, Mr. Hahn was an alien shapeshifter who went on bizarre adventures throughout the galaxy with his half-human daughter. Much like Nimdok's daughter Miri, she was kidnapped by a recurring villain who conducted experiments on her that gave her strange and/or superhuman abilities. Thel rescued her, but after their escape they still had to move around constantly in order to avoid being recaptured or worse. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? The difference is, Thel was a former starship captain, not an archaeologist; his daughter Tali was older than Miri (they even have similar names!), and all of their stories were told from her point of view rather than his. The thing is, I didn't consciously decide to bring all of this stuff back, it just sort of happened as I was writing and trying to come up with interesting storylines and ideas for threads. Does this mean I never outgrew my childhood? Idk lol, I'm just here to have fun.

Knowing that Nimdok must have come from Thel, I can better see what his influences are. He’s very much an amalgamation of all the alien characters I've liked and identified with in various media. Off the top of my head, Martian Manhunter (shapeshifter alien with telepathic powers, seemed kinda scary but actually was a huge softie), Mammon Hoole (an incredibly irritable and stressed-out Shi'ido who had to cart his niece and nephew around the galaxy while being chased by the Galactic Empire), Max Tennyson (if you didn't watch Ben 10 as a kid you were probably a normal child, I wasn't), Elfangor (brb got to abandon my human son to go fight a space war, tough love kid, now take these shapeshifting powers and go lose your innocence fighting off an alien invasion), Garrus Vakarian ("Can it wait for a bit? I'm in the middle of some calibrations."), and of course Mr. Spock (Nimdok's avatar is somebody's fanart of Spock, for one, but I've always loved that pointy-eared hobgoblin and his inquisitive, logical nature) all spring to mind, but I’m sure there’s more whose influence was more subtle.

 

[Jsc]

• Ghost in the Shell - Pretty much pure cyberpunk hacking gold.
• LotR - For scale, history, and the prime english fantasy archetype.
• Harry Potter - For magical whimsy and youthful adventures.
• J.J. Abrams Behind the Scenes - His direction taught me a lot about having SW as a job and still loving the game.
• Final Fantasy - For wild monsters and high fantasy themes.

• Two Steps from Hell - For music while writing.
• Narnia - For how NOT to do Christianity.
• Metal Gear Solid - For how to "Tactical Espionage Action" and also oversexualizing women.
• Star Trek - For episodic nonsense and carpeted spaceship interiors.
• Mass Effect - For aliens, architecture, space tech, and The Commander Shepard.

• Starship Troopers - For fascism, propaganda, Denise Richard's unforgettable lips, and brain-sucking bugs.
• Artstation - For art in a hurry.
• UK Modeling Companies - For avatars in a hurry.
• Youtube ASMR - For writing while frustrated, angry, blocked, or museless.
• Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - For spirit.

 

[Cyran Vaas]

Cyran when was very much inspired by a legends Star Wars character. Playing a character who took advantage of the legacy of Mandalorians in order to get more notoriety. Which he suffered the consequences of pretty early on in his bounty hunting career when a real Mandalorian beat him but too him under their wing to make them more legit.

For more recent stuff I've taken some inspiration from Star Lord/Peter Quill from the MCU. Playing a relative dork who plays themselves off as a cool dude. Cyran think he's badass like Han Solo or Boba Fett, but is more akin to a cosplaying C-List bounty hunter. And also like Star Lord he'd related to a pretty influential/powerful family. That being the perls, but doesn't really know it considering that he was orphaned and taken in and raised by a group like Star Lord in the MCU. Fortunately for Cyran it wasn't a rough gang of pirates and more of a positive influence in his life.