Everyone's got an inspiration behind their work, so let's hear it. It could be the entire reason for your story's existence, a funny thing that happened to you in real life that you included as a part of your plot, or how you came up with the idea for a certain character.
Give me any fun or interesting way that your real life colluded to bring about the ideas in your head that you're now sharing with the world.
I'll start us off:
Back when I was a kid, I, like most boys my age, thought Power Rangers was just about the coolest shit in the universe. I had tons of toys, watched the show every afternoon after school, I even asked my mom to make me a custom christmas ornament (she made one for me and each of my siblings every year to put on the tree) that had the Gold Zeo Ranger's staff weapon on it.
Around age 12 or 13, though, I began to lose interest. I entered puberty and decided that I was, in fact, a complete and total grown-up, and no longer had time for children's toys or childish tv shows. I liked cool, grown-up, mature stuff like Naruto and Gundam now. Power Rangers was for little baby children. I was above that. I liked blood and swearing and boobies.
This attitude remained throughout high school for the most part: many of my friends were also anime nerds, and we liked discussing the cool edgy new anime that came out, often trying to one-up each other on who had read the bloodiest, most violent thing recently.
Once I hit college, this attitude started to erode a little bit: I met more people who had held onto their love for pokemon. I was reminded of Kirby's Air Ride and Super Smash Brothers. I even started to see some of the edgy, violent, bloody stuff that I used to love for the surface-level shock value schlock that it was. Additionally, I started to rediscover some of those 'childish' things I had once thought beneath me, and realized there was a lot more complexity and nuance to them than I ever would have admitted to myself during my teenage years.
Ultimately, this culminated when a new friend of mine told me about this amazing new TV series he was watching called Kamen Rider: Decade. He came over to my apartment and put on a few episodes, and I almost immediately recognized the rubber-suited monsters and spandex-wearing heroes with crazy over-the-top biker helmets on.
We discussed the series and I found out Kamen Rider is, and always has been, a sister series to Super Sentai, the japanese property that our beloved childhood franchise that Power Rangers is based on.
A few more episodes of Kamen Rider passed, and not only was I getting invested in the world, the lore, and the characters, I was also starting to recognize that the goofy, overly-choreographed martial arts fights were part of the fun. The stuntwork, the special effects, and the cinematography were pure 'rule of cool', and that was the entire point, and it was awesome.
I sort of had an epiphany: I can like what I want to like. For some reason I had developed this internal social structure in my head, that I was only allowed to like things that were 'for' me. Kid's media was for kids and it was somehow 'wrong' for me to derive genuine enjoyment from them (I had a similar realization about 'girls' media when I caught a few episodes of that My Little Pony show everyone was shitting their pants over last decade.) That was all stupid and garbage and I can enjoy the things I want to enjoy, regardless of... well, of everything.
So I went back to re-watch a few of my old favorite Power Ranger series, and while I definitely liked them, I found them lacking in ways I never had before: It wasn't the goofy costumes or the rigid episodic structure or the cheesy messages about friendship and doing the right thing. It was the villains.
Now listen, I adore Rita Repulsa as much as the next guy with a nostalgia boner for the late 90s, but even as a child I recognized she was little more than a plot device. She, Lord Zed, Divatox, Astronema, all of them were just 'evil because we're evil' characters. They had no motivation beyond 'death and destruction because I am bad guy'.
So I asked myself: What would Power Rangers look like if it had some more sympathetic villains? Ones with actual motivation for doing what they're doing?
At the same time, I had also re-discovered my love for Star Trek, and was for the first time discovering my appreciation for The Green Lantern, so I took a few elements from those stories and grafted them on to Power Rangers, creating a story with a far more complex and realized technological universe, and some ancient magic-technology lore that gave the villains a very legitimate reason for revenge.
After putting all of that together and tweaking things little by little as this story rattled around in my head for years, I eventually came to create Interstellar Hero: Nova Ranger as we know it today, and I am so excited to be exploring this universe with you all.
give it a read if you're so inclined:
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Jul '21
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Jul '21
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