Ryk E. Spoor
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All-Patron Reward: Less-Obvious References 3
🕑 Added 2020-01-08 02:39:55 +0000 UTCI'm still getting positive feedback on these posts, so let's do a few more of these references!
1) In Challenges of the Deeps, we meet with the mysterious and sometimes frightening Vindatri. He is described as a tall, pale-gray skinned,, silver-haired, red-eyed, pointed eared humanoid who wields the same powers as the Shadeweavers, only vastly older and more powerful. Eventually, Ariane and her friends are forced to fight him; after their initial duel, when Vindatri becomes serious, there is this paragraph:
Vindatri's hooded gaze swept the three of them, Wu Kung gathering his own golden power inward, DuQuesne bracing himself with his right arm raised across his chest and a multicolored glow beginning to shine, and Ariane, preparing another strike, wondering how she could draw on the power that she'd felt on her Awakening and release, and behind Vindatri she saw a streaming of ebony and smoke, heard the building howl of a wind from beyond any sky. "But you wish to try these powers against me? Come, then – if you are prepared for what awaits!"
If you combine his appearance with the clues above, one can see that Vindatri's biggest inspiration was Janus, AKA Magus, from Chrono Trigger.
2) In Phoenix in Shadow, the land of Kaizatenzei is directly inspired by the land of Gensokyo from the sprawling Touhou franchise, and specifically from the (often short) glimpses of this beautiful land when at peace and not being levelled by ridiculously overpowered young women. in the Memories of Phantasm series of fan-made videos. This has been mentioned elsewhere. What may not be as well known is that Master Wieran's mad scientist persona and imagery were based on Doctor Gero and Doctor Wheelo from Dragonball Z. The little teleport escape pod Weiran uses looks very much like a Saiyajin miniature travel pod spaceship. And those who know Dragonball may also notice that, like Son Goku, the adventurers destroyed his life's work...
3) In Legend, one might think that the appearance of Loki and other Norse elements might have been inspired by Marvel Comics' recent cinematic success. However, this isn't really the case except in the most partial and indirect way. Legend's story traces back to my work with Wizards of the Coast on The Primal Order supplement Unorthodox Strategies,in which I had a few short story fragments, one of them showing a god, Loki, in a superhero world, facing off against a team that called themselves the Enforcers, and with a number of familiar faces (The Rat, Impact, Admiral Twilight, Fireflux, the Steel Sentinel) and one new one, Windlash. That, in turn, had been drawn from several RPGs, and both Windlash and Loki from the Saint Seiya-based campaign that had inspired the fanfic Wild Card. The Loki and Thor and Odin seen in those stories were neither the original mythological versions nor the Marvel modern ones, but a sort of combination which evolved from the way in which gods and humans interacted. The Loki of Legend is very similar, in both appearance and personality, to the one in that old fanfic. I may post a couple of the pictures done for that fic, because they were pretty good.
4) Demons of the Past: REVELATION opens with a prologue that starts:
The Atlantaean Empire was falling.
It was a colossal empire, stretching across uncounted millions of worlds from one side of the barred-spiral that would one day be called the Milky Way to the other, one hundred thousand light-years and more under a single, never-changing dynasty for as many years of time.
Its fall was colossal, too, for every one of those millions of worlds had to fall as well, and for such a vast and ancient empire to fall would, in the way of all such things, take millennia.
This is a direct reference to the prologue of Foundation and Empire... and a setup for the immediate inversion of its assumptions.
5) In Polychrome, the final battle between Erik Medon and the Usurpers is fought with three hundred years of preparation on the Usurpers' side, and with improvisation and imagination on Erik's. Viertually every single action that Erik Medon takes is based on some character in some medium of fantastic fiction -- books, video games, TV shows, movies, anime, comic books. Some of these references are to very well-known and obvious (even TOWERINGLY obvious, like Godzilla), but some may be very subtle or obscure. Perhaps the most obscure or hard to recognize is Erik's final attack against Ugu, which starts with him saying "here I come" when surrounded by a sparkling aura, dashing forward to perform a series of strikes and kicks, ending with "and that's all!". This is the ultimate finishing move by Ellis in Battle Arena Toshinden.
