Pretty much all of my characters are expies. The entire concept behind Re:Apotheosis is a spiritual sequel to Re:Creators, which is about fictional characters coming into the real world and being able to say "what the hell?!" to their creators. So, most of what I'm doing is taking a character from a genre or story, using them as a writing prompt, and going in some new direction with them (making enough changes that it's not just the equivalent of a palette swap).
So, here is my cast for the current story, The Odyssey of Daiki Yamato, via the front cover:
And, their inspirations, going from left to right:
On the farthest left, we have Captain Infinite. He's a 102 year old superhero who is bulletproof, can fly faster than the speed of sound, is strong enough to toss somebody into orbit without raising a sweat, doesn't age, and no points for guessing that his inspiration is...
Cap started out as a thought experiment of what it would be like to actually be inside this man's head as he is right now - superpowered to the point of being a god among men...and then adding that time has flowed normally in his world. So, as he grew more and more powerful, he also began to outlive the people he cared about. His life is very empty and hollow, and while he puts out a friendly face to the world, the people who get to know him in the story can't help but notice that his smile almost never reaches his eyes.
Next we have Daiki Yamato, an isekai hero who was torn from his world to become the Legendary Hero of the Sword in a fantasy realm where he was supposed to protect it from the Devil King...but instead was falsely accused of theft, spent the better part of a year as a fugitive hunted by the other heroes, rescued a half-wolf girl named Athena from slavers, who then became his shield and later his fiancee. Then, he fell into the world of his creators, fought in a war over them, and is now doing an impression of Odysseus as he makes his way home. And he is inspired by characters like...
Naofumi Itwatani, the Cardinal Hero of the Shield from The Rising of the Shield Hero.
Daiki started out asking the question "What would happen if somebody like Naofumi actually met their creator and found out they were in a 20-volume plus light novel series?" There are also a few "take that"s to Japanese isekai stories in my characterization of him and Athena, including the lack of a harem, the lack of Athena being a slave, and the fact that the two are actually going to close the deal and get f---ing married.
To the right we have Aquila, who makes her debut on Friday. Aquila is a sensitive girl who hates suffering and just happens to have all the powers of a god of destruction. When she went into the real world to meet her creator, she discovered that Kasumi (who is to the far right), had committed suicide, went mad with grief and rage, and waged a bloody and brutal war against the world of her creator to take all of their precious stories away from them, going into the story worlds and making examples of their heroes by ensuring they died screaming in front of all of their fans. After doing this over a hundred and forty times, she was convinced to stop by her right hand man, and used her once-in-a-lifetime miracle power...which brought Kasumi back to life in front of her, ended her war, and broke her out of her grief and rage. We meet her and Kasumi on a world of their own creation five years later. And she is an expy of/heavily inspired by...
Altair from Re:Creators.
(And from here on in, there are major Re:Creators spoilers.)
Altair's war is considerably less bloody than Aquila's. She only kills 4 creations, and only two of them by her own hand. But, she is trying to destroy the world of her creator by colliding it with the story worlds. But, Altair needs to be experienced, not just seen...so here she is in action after they think they've finally found a way to stop her:
Aquila is not nearly as powerful as Altair, but in her war she was considerably more lethal - Altair will showboat and make a performance of it, while Aquila would just kill you, and then mock you as you die after the lethal blow. But, I can't talk about Aquila's inspiration any further without also talking about Kasumi, as they are very much a pair in every sense of the word. Kasumi is Aquila's creator, and she is inspired by...
Altair's creator, Setsuna Shimazaki, whose suicide set Altair's war in motion, and whose miraculous resurrection (NOT by Altair's doing) brought her war to an end. The reasons for the suicides between Setsuna and Kasumi are VERY different. The thing is that Altair was never a psychopath. She was a hero who became so lost in grief that she became a villain. And the starting point for both Aquila and Kasumi were these two scenes:
What happens to somebody who cares so much about justice for her creator that when she is lost in rage and grief she will go to war against the entire world that took that person away, and once the rage and grief are gone all she is left with is the reality of the suffering she has caused? What will she do to atone for the horrors she has committed but can never be forgiven for? And what happens to the creator who she saved and who loves her hero as she goes through this?
And that is Aquila and Kasumi.
...and that story starts here:
