Sunday, April 8, 2018

The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets: Origins & Illustrations


Enjoy this Sunday with a description of each Guardian’s origins and an illustration you can use as a bookmark.

Amaranth & Loto

The protagonists of my novel The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets are two vagabonds named Amaranth and Loto who live in planet Twinmortal. Amaranth is an innocent girl who just survives stealing food from the markets and moving from place to place. In a way, I designed her personality based on the manga subgenre called Shojo, or manga for girls.

Amaranth promises the half machine and half human woman Hanshin to search for the mysterious castle in the map. To help Amaranth in her journey, Loto immediately joins her. He is a vagabond just like her, but with full knowledge of how to defend himself and how to kill people and evil creatures. An archetype of the manga subgenre Shonen for boys and adventure films from the 90s.

As the novel develops, the two Twinmortal adventurers advance and grow up as they try to find out where the castle is and the hidden secrets of their past in the defunct planet Mortal. Somehow, the two move from the original idea of one dimensional manga like characters to round characters like in coming-of-age stories.

Now, back when I started to write this novel The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets in 2007 until I published it on April 7th, 2014, a lot happen that made me decide to evolve the characters.












Hanshin
 
Hanshin was one of the first characters for my novel The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets. She is half machine and half human: Her own technology allows Hanshin to use her body as the ultimate weapon using her hair to destroy anything that comes on her way. This mysterious woman is the one who gave the map to our protagonist Amaranth so that she could start her journey in planet Twinmortal.

My inspiration for Hanshin comes from many sources but I wanted to recommend a few that were the best TV series and movies that my generation watched having artificial intelligent beings or halves just like her:

The Terminator (1984, Dir. James Cameron)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991, Dir. James Cameron)
Dragon Ball Z (1989-1996, Dir. Daisuke Nishio)
The Matrix (1999, Dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski)
A. I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Dir. Steven Spielberg)
Chobits (2002, TV series Dir. Morio Asaka)
The Matrix Reloaded (2003, Dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski)
The Matrix Revolutions (2003, Dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski)
The Animatrix (2003, several directors and writers)
I, Robot (2004, Dir. Alex Proyas)

Apart from this, to think about artificial intelligence life it motivates me a lot The Complete Robot (1982, Isaac Asimov) and Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, Philip K. Dick).

Enyo
 
Enyo was one of the first characters I created for The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets! She is a vampire from planet Mortal who now lives in planet Twinmortal and joins Amaranth’s journey. It was only natural to include vampires in my science fiction novel to add a spice of fantasy in the adventure! Here are some of my favorite movies and a TV series that for me were quite motivating:

Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994, Dir. Neil Jordan)
Blade (1998, Dir. Stephen Norrington)
Queen of the Damned (2002, Dir. Michael Rymer)
Underworld (2003, Dir. Len Wiseman)
Moonlight (2007-2008, created by Ron Koslow and Trevor Munson)


Banyan

Banyan was created as a forty year old black woman, with short tousled cut black hair with silver layers. She is blind, her whitish violet eyes are covered by a bluish transparent nictitating membranes which function thanks to her implanted cat like titanium machine called Gib-cat. That way she can see artificially but not in detail.

Her mission is to protect the memories from the extinct planet Mortal which are hidden in Mimisbrunnr, the center of the continent Hekademia. Thanks to her, Amaranth and her companions recover the memories from the defunct planet and get new clues to find the castle in the map.

 



Doron

Doron is a machine that accompanies Amaranth in her journey to find a castle drawn on a map. The machine was designed similar in form to a Nao created by Aldebaran Robotics. As the illustration shows, the body is colored orange butane gas cylinder with certain parts black body. The face was simple, being just three light dots, two for the eyes and one for the mouth. With respect to the size, is as tall as a human knee.

Along with Nao, in order to create many machines for my science fiction novel, I researched the personality traits of artificial intelligence portrayed in movies and novels but particularly from The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov (1982) which I recommend to everyone!


Sun Wukong

Sun Wukong was created in the second part of the novel when Amaranth, Loto and Enyo are travelling together in planet Twinmortal trying to find the castle in the map. Therefore, apart from personal sources, he is based on the Ancient Egypt that arose an interest in me because I always liked movies like The Mummy (1999, Dir. Stephen Sommers) and videogames set in Egypt like Tomb Raider The Last Revelation (1999, Core Design) but also he was combined with my fandom for Shonen manga characters especially Son Goku from Dragon Ball (1984-present, Opening 2 which is one of the best songs “We Gotta Power” by Hironobu Kageyama) created by Akira Toriyama.







Extra bookmark with illustrations of the four seasons to enjoy my novel any time anywhere!

I am looking forward that you have your own journey with The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets! Check out my new trailer The Guardians of the Earth Type Planets:The Journey on Planet Twinmortal!

No comments:

Post a Comment