Too many fricken influences from Fullmetal Alchemist is in Centauri, especially with the “second Prime” character.
And it’s unintentional too.
Dammit, Hiromu Arakawa, why did you make such a great comic book series?
Welcome to Thoughtnami, a strange blend of commentary and instantaneous dialogue written by Jeff Harris, webmaster of The X Bridge
Posts tagged Centauri.
Tried something different tonight. I did a one-layer drawing. No extra layers and such.
Using one of my characters from Centauri (BTW, if you’ve known me for a long, long time, you know I’ve been developing Centauri for a good while now. About 13 years to be precise, and my skills have improved since I began, not to mention my software/hardware situation has dramatically improved), I did an ink glob and built it up a bit.
Still practicing, but it was a good exercise to try tonight.
Scared To Death About Centauri
II am scared to death about what I’m preparing to do on my main site.
The web stuff like Gephyrophillia and Thoughtnami, I can handle.
The Legacy Project? No worries, I can do that with my eyes closed.
It’s Centauri that has me completely panicked.
I have never done anything like that before in my life. Wait, no, that’s a lie. I did Pinto Future for about a month and a half, but I got no response, and almost no reaction about it, So, I felt it’s a story that people just wasn’t interested in, and I put it aside.
And that fear is about to consume me.
I know I shouldn’t let it bother me, but it does. The fear of failure hovers over me. The fact that my writing and artistic skills could be seen by some as flawed or uninteresting also pounds the back of my head. It’s a cycle I always go through. A sickness really.
But you know what?
What if, instead of failure, this thing might actually be a good story? Something people might actually want to read week after week? Could this be actually good?
I hope so. They say you should try something once in your life that scares you, and I’ve known these characters for over 12 years. I’m just now ready to introduce them to the world.
I’m going to have fun with this.
.
Something I did for Centauri.
Centauri is something I’m doing for The X Bridge later in the year.
More stuff too.
Here’s a step-by-step on how I did it in Muro.
An Influence Map I did many moons ago for Centauri. I originally posted it over at deviantArt, but nobody reads that thing.
I’ve been working on Centauri off and on for well over a decade now. It began as one kind of story (essentially a mecha-oriented series with seven main human characters) but ended up being a completely different tale. I haven’t revealed much about the story itself publicly.
Until now. Here’s some of the influences from the Centauri series:
1. Gundam Wing - It was the Toonami broadcast of Gundam Wing that inspired me to create Centauri in the first place. Young heroes (or would they be considered terrorists?) determined to free their colonies from the control of the Earth government using giant robots known as Gundams. The original idea was to invert that idea making the young heroes on Earth taking on the alien invaders who nearly destroyed the planet, killed billions, and rebuilt the planet in their image (though the planet largely is unaware the new leaders of the planet engineered the attack in the first place). It’s the base of the core of Centauri.
2. Religion - Faith. It builds us. It divides us. It makes us strong. It makes us weak. We understand it. We question it. We accept it. We deny it. Two of the heroes are on parallel ends of the religious spectrum. One’s a son of a preacher who, despite all the hardships around him and all the losses in his life, retains the faith. Years after the “Dawn,” he has become an avenger of the skies, a wingless angel. The other’s a daughter of a seer, who has also seen many losses in her life and questions why a benevolent being would allow such agony and sadness around her. She’s the one who assembles the heroes together and serves as a guide. Two equal forces.
3. Akira - Destruction. Chaotic destruction centered around that epic manga title, and similar events help create the world of Centauri. I will say nothing more.
4. My Chemical Romance - Welcome to The Black Parade. I wrote a prologue about one of the last happy times in the life of the main hero of Centauri. It was a St. Patrick’s Day parade he and his father went to. His father asked him to serve as a protector in this land, and do anything to help those that can’t help themselves. A few years later, this song came out. It freaked me out because that was the mood I was going for in the scene. Needless to say, it sets a mood for the entire series.
5. Batman Beyond. Another futuristic tale helped form a basis for another hero. Dubbed the dual-faced avenger, he combines the self-destructive nature of Gundam Wing’s Heero Yuy and the cocky, yet slowly maturing heroic nature of Terry McGuiness, the Batman of the Future.
6. Emm Gryner - Symphonic. From the Asianblue album. Listen to it. And you’ll understand.
7. Daft Punk - Da Funk. The main chords are an important leitmotif associated with the main hero of the series. It’s a signature of the character.
8/9. Ghost in the Shell/Dark Angel. Two biopunk series that explore human genetic experimentation, eugenics, cybernetics, gene manipulation, and other biosciences. This is the core of the two sides of the story. The Centauri project began with the genetic experimentation of humans, including human cloning and other sciences in a futuristic world. The other side are the children of an experiment that began long before “the Dawn.”
10. The Tomorrow People. Before Heroes, there was The Tomorrow People, the next step in human evolution. Youngsters with powers and abilities beyond those of regular people. As I mentioned before, the heroes are the result of an experiment that was meant to emulate warriors of a forgotten heroic age. That age … is another story.
11. The Matrix. The world of Centauri isn’t what the people think it is. Only those who have awakened are aware of what the world really is. The people don’t know about what’s really going on, have been forced to forget the events of the “Dawn,” or live in the desolated areas, a dieselpunk world created by those that refuse to conform to the new order. It’s the desolated that have become the heroes ready to restore what was lost.
12. Gendo Ikari. He’s a bastard. He believes that what he does is right. He’s willing to destroy everything he believes in to get what he wants. He’s flawed. He’s a perfect template for the antagonist. My antagonist will grow to become the destroyer of the world and eventually become the god Ikari wished he would have been. There will be a final battle between the protagonist and the antagonist. Essentially God vs. Man.
