What is the 'Secret of Memoria' - Part 2: Inspiration

 

Secret of Memoria at its core is a culmination of childhood ideas, adventures, and memories, disassembled and then reassembled in a way that makes up a single living entity, something I doubt would have been possible had it not been for my freakish memory in conjunction with my tendency to document everything with my old VHS camcorder. Like seriously, I have so many VHS tapes with home movies of my games, be it stuff acted out with toys or voiceovers for video games. 

But going back to disassembling and reassembling ideas, I want to focus on the main character of the story first: Remy Niscent.

As I'll talk about in greater detail in an upcoming post, Secret of Memoria technically began in 1996 as—brace yourself—'Dragon Ball Village'. To sum it up quickly for the sake of this post, I stumbled across figures for the original Dragon Ball on an endcap at Wal-Mart one late January day in 1996. The look of the characters and the variety, in conjunction with their convenient size, made them immediately stick out to me, as I very clearly remember thinking "Chrono Trigger" upon seeing Goku and Bulma. Now this was America in the mid-1990s, so anime wasn't really a thing yet, nor would it be for a couple more years, so my only exposure to styles like that had been through video games.

As I said, I'll go into greater detail soon later, so for now, I want to refocus on our main hero.

(Prototype Design, circa 2014)

Remy Niscent is a twelve-year-old boy. Mysteriously orphaned at a young age and left to fend for himself and his talking pet cat, Purr. Remy wields a weathered-looking wooden sword that is not only unbreakable but also somehow magically linked to Remy, as no matter how many times bullies would try and take it from him it'd always find its way back to his bedside the next morning. 
Though Remy is an orphan, he lives with his cat in a small cabin just outside the village of Memoria. Many of the villagers protested the boy's choice, citing his age making him unable to care for himself, he has thus far proven to be more than capable of doing so and steadily shows the ability to learn new skills such as gardening and cooking. 

Remy is my main character and probably hands down my favorite creation. Rather than being a self-insert, Remy instead is a vehicle for which I get to live (and re-live) adventures and memories from my childhood via Secret of Memoria. He is what I always wanted to be as a kid, but could not because our reality bites or I was just simply too shy and withdrawn.

His final design(not reflected in the old pixel art above) is that of a young boy with black, spiky hair(sound familiar?). He has an impossible cowlick sticking up on the back of his head.
Sporting a two-tone blue tee shirt, with the main body of the shirt being sky blue and the sleeves being a darker, more navy hue. In Spring/Summer, he wears the shirt over either a black pair of cotton pants or shorts, depending on where in the spring season he is.

His weapon is the 'Unbreakable Wooden Sword'. Its design was inspired by my own childhood sword, which I had evidently at one time thrown into a bush in our yard and forgotten about it, leaving it to weather the seasons for close to a decade before eventually stumbling across it when we started to trim the overgrown plant back.

Pictured: The actual sword that inspired Remy's weapon

So, where does Remy's real-world origins lie? Allow me to share with you his humble beginnings:

The legendary child wonder himself: Goku! This, his fighting stance alternate figure, Puar and Emperor Pilaf were the first four figures I bought. As I had no idea what Dragon Ball was at the time, I came up with my own headcanon pronunciations and stories for these characters.

Battle alt figure

Goku, whom I pronounced his name as "Go-key-you", obviously became the main character of "Dragon Ball Village" because he was not only featured on the packaging of the figures, but also had two figures made of him. He wielded a staff which I thought was interesting because most main characters used swords. He also had a tail in one figure, but not the other, and THAT confused me.

The character I had Goku play in my world couldn't have been any more different from the actual Goku in the Dragon Ball universe, and to be honest, I'm glad it ended up that way because I probably wouldn't be here right now talking about him the way that I am had I known.

Inspired by Chrono Trigger and how the main character had a pet cat, I teamed Goku up with Puar, whom I pronounced as 'Purr' for some reason.

In Secret of Memoria, Purr is a simple grey and white house cat with the voice of a prepubescent boy. He acts as the balance to Remy's sometimes irrational decision-making. He is much more than he appears, however, and is yet another one of the secrets of Memoria.

as I previously mentioned, Purr was born from the Purr that lived with Goku in Dragon Ball Village.

Purr's design was based on that of a cat whom I raised myself from a very young kitten. The only survivor of a litter a stray had left under our front porch. I named him Simba and have various old home movies showing me playing with the cat, so I wanted to eternalize him with a memorial in my story while filling the role that the Puar figure had played.