#because it let's out a lot of stuff that 90s trigun and manga have

[lazer-cannon-deth-sentence]

I said something about trigun being lifechanging and somebody immediately asked "old one or new one" and I cannot stress enough how MUCH I don't want to start this conversation

[ais-n]

Hello! I love love love ICOS and was wondering if I could ask a few questions. Namely, what were yours & Santino's inspirations for the series? For example, the Neo-Tokyo setting in Akira strongly reminded me of ICOS, but that could be my own perception of the world in ICOS. Were there any books, movies, anime, manga, etc, that helped to inspire ICOS?

Aww, thank you! I’m happy you like it!

As for inspiration... hmm, I’m trying to think. Honestly, we didn’t really have a specific inspiration from what I can recall. I think a lot of things were just what made sense to us or sounded like fun, and then otherwise inspiration or ideas leached together from lots of sources or everyday living and we put it in from there. Sometimes it was real life stuff, sometimes it was maybe just watching shows and thinking, “That could be cool.”

I have examples beneath the cut of things that either inspired us in parts or else ended up having some cool similarities even if we thought of them separately, but one thing I did want to mention is I’m always on the lookout for characters in shows or movies who could be a nice media representation of ICoS characters. I had started compiling some ideas of that a few years ago and found the link in case you are curious or bored:

ICoS character inspirations: (note, not that the ICoS characters were inspired by these characters, but that these characters seem like cool representations of ICoS characters -- i probably should have said ICoS character representations instead of inspirations, come to think of it...) Anyway that’s here:  https://aisness.wordpress.com/2013/11/14/icos-character-inspirations/ 

And here are some adorable baby Boyd representations from Criminal Minds:  https://aisness.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/baby-boyd/ 

Inspiration examples below!

For example, I used to love the hell out of Fringe and I watched it every week. One episode they had this whole thing about how this one character was kidnapped and the way they found out where they were held or where stuff was happening was by finding out that there was an excessive amount of electricity that was being used in a seemingly abandoned warehouse. Also, that character wasn’t content to just sit there waiting to be rescued; they tried to escape but couldn’t due to reasons, but that came up later in the episode. I liked that it didn’t diminish the character’s strength even in being captured but it also didn’t make it like suddenly they were superhuman and could do anything. Then, completely separately from that and probably years apart, I was doing research on human experimentation and watched things like the documentary Philosophy of a Knife and did a lot of research on Unit 731, and I got some ideas from that. Also completely separately from that and years apart, I’ve always been interested in psychology and psychiatry and I’d also read the book Rape of the Mind by Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo which is a book from 1956 that talks about brainwashing of POWs and also whether or not brainwashing actually exists in reality or if it’s something else that’s happening with similar results. Plus I’ve done lots of research totally separately from all of that for trafficking etc.

All those things coalesced and then changed into inspiration for a particular situation that shows up later in the series that I don’t want to go into specifics of for spoilers for people who are earlier in the series, but you might know immediately what I’m thinking about. And if not and if you want me to specify with spoilers just let me know and I can do so behind a cut :) 

(PS: Philosophy of a Knife is violent as fucking hell--seriously, seriously graphic. Do not watch it if you are faint of heart. I say this so no poor soul is like “Oh yeah Ais mentioned something about this maybe I’ll watch it! :D” and then is traumatized for life. They went all out on it. It’s actually kind of controversial because of that...)

Then there was other inspiration like sometimes I would dream about something and then wake up and be like, “Oh hey, cool plot idea!” or we would just think through what is likely to happen for that character based on their story line or their personality or human nature or etc and it developed from there.

I would say probably the closest thing to ICoS I know of for a series is La Femme Nikita, specifically the TV show that was on 1997-2001. I had actually never seen it or possibly even heard of it when we started writing ICoS -- I didn’t see the first couple of seasons until years into us writing ICoS. Santino had seen it years prior, iirc, but he hadn’t thought of it for a while. Anyway there are some interesting similarities between ICoS and LFN, a lot of which developed separately and was not inspired by LFN because I hadn’t even seen it so I knew nothing of it and I don’t know Santino’s inspiration or not but we decided things together so I know there are definitely a number of things I suggested with no knowledge of LFN. 

The one thing I know that was inspired by LFN was the term ‘valentine’ which Santino suggested and which I think he got from LFN, but I think everything else is pretty coincidental, which makes sense because they’re such similar themes that there’s bound to be overlap in ideas. What was really interesting to me was when I did finally watch it, I was like, “Hey!! Michael is how I imagine early Boyd to be!!” in terms of his seeming lack of emotion, the way he has such minimal facial expressions and intonation, the way he seems so cold and sometimes a bit ruthless but then other times is bad ass. But Michael is like what Fade-level Agent Boyd would be in skills but with early Evenfall Boyd personality. Anyway, that was super exciting finding someone who represented that minimal emotion I imagined. (Also there’s a character in an anime who fights like how I imagined Fade Agent Boyd fights... I forgot the anime but I can track it down if you want)

You should totally watch that TV show if you haven’t. I never finished it but I need to ^^;; I think I saw through Season 2, maaaaybe s3?, but I never watched all of it and always meant to. I liked what I saw of it from what I recall but I have no idea about how it ended. (I’m a spoilerphobe) I also haven’t seen the original movie it was based on (I don’t think? uggh can’t remember) and I definitely haven’t seen the reboot they did more recently. No idea how much ICoS and those LFNs are similar but the 1997 tv show might be fun for ICoS fans to watch, just keeping in mind it has all the cheesiness of late 90′s/early 2000′s shows lol

I guess the last thing I’d say is I’m generally always inspired in terms of storytelling by my absolute favorite series ever, One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. The layering of his storytelling is masterfully done, and I also really love as a reader/viewer the way he can make me fucking bawl my eyes out and then a page or two later burst out laughing. I’ve always really valued the depth and range of emotions he elicits in his story, and the way he layers super minute details that have massive impact later on the plot, interwoven with the usual character development and on-page normal plot development, so that when you’re reading the first time there’s plenty of interest but that series also makes a phenomenal 2nd, 3rd, 10th, 20 billionth reread, because I swear every time I reread I notice new things I never noticed before because I didn’t have enough information about that plot. 

I love to do the same thing in writing anything I have a hand in--for any sort of significant story at all, I don’t like to write for the first read; I like to write for the second, third, fourth reread. I mean obviously it needs to be interesting enough the first time around, but I personally like to add little details or character development or whatever which is more evident the second or more time of reading when you know everything you need to know, so when you go back to the start you can be like “OHHH! So THAT’S why--!” I got to do that a bit in ICoS but I’m going even more crazy with that in the book I’m working on now independently, because I am a nerd and it’s super fun to me. But anyway that way of writing a story over the course of the entire series rather than writing it solely book by book is something that definitely inspired me in writing Boyd for all of ICoS and all of my characters in it, and I don’t know what inspirations Santino has but whatever has inspired him also complements that inspiration of mine nicely, so that we both ended up being interested in writing that longer-form story built by shorters stories in between, rather than doing stories book by book with transitions in between but less of an overarching arc. If that makes sense? Hopefully it does. 

Also we had made Sin and Boyd and some other characters as RPG characters in separate RPGs so I think we pulled some of that stuff over too, so in a way the original characters they were in those original other worlds probably gave some inspiration for their initial personalities.

btw, Neo-Tokyo in Akira is really interesting as a connection you made in your mind! I haven’t watched Akira in foreverrrrr so I can’t recall it well enough to be able to say either way but my memory of it makes sense for why you thought of that, so that’s cool! I should watch Akira again, or maybe it read it this time... Thinking of Akira is making me nostalgic for all those series that are older but still great, like now I want to watch again Cowboy Bebop, or Trigun, or even Yami no Matsuei, or... Oh actually! Totally unrelated but speaking of! Recently I found the whole series for Kare Kano (Kareshi Kanojo no Jijou/His and Her Circumstances) and omggggg having that sitting on my shelf without me watching it all over again is making me diiiiieeeeeee I’m dyingggggggg but I know I’ll get super into it again for nostalgia’s sake so I’m trying to make myself hold off until I can devote time to it.

Wow I rambled like fuck in this, sorry XD I guess the tl;dr is it was getting bits of ideas or inspiration from random or various places and then other things just kind of developing naturally in our minds, and it all came together into the monster that is ICoS XD