#roseiii

Pokémon: From Red/Blue to the anime to Ono’s manga series, I consumed pretty much every single form of Pokémon between 1999-2004. Toshihiro Ono was one of the primary artists whose style I first learned to draw from, the others being CLAMP, Yun Kouga, and Kohta Hirano. Back when I was in my hard tracing phase, 99% of my altered tracing art was from Ono’s manga; to this day, I can’t reread them without the imprinted memory of exactly which panels were “choice” tracing material. (Without a name resource, I often took pieces of names from artists, Toshihiro and Keiji being those that come to mind immediately.)

Animorphs: Probably *the* TF series for kids of the Nineties. Shapeshifting, genetic augmentations/collection, aliens and alien technology… It’d be remiss to think the whole Elfangor-Loren thing didn’t influence stuff either.

Cardcaptor Sakura: This one gets a big square because the settings and a lot of clothing design came from here. I recall harvesting lots of names from CCS as well early on. I was obsessed with light-dark duality, and I ate that Yue-Ruby Kero-Spinel stuff right the hell up.

Hellsing: I restrained in letting myself get entrenched in it, but ended up in the last book of RoseIII absolutely flipping exploding at the seams with “HOU?” and the master-slave imagery Integra holds. Contrary to what you’d expect, I know in my gut the million eyes crap did not come from here (*or* Thousand-Eyes Sacrifice honestly). I’ve had trypo and million-eye nightmares for decades, and it’s one of the things that got me smitten with both Hellsing and Yu-Gi-Oh!.

Christian Iconography & Religious Fetishism: Honestly? I can’t remember what the seminal spark was for the technology in RoseIII to be jewelry, but it’s always held a meditative mechanism and deep identity politics. Many types of jewelry were very much fetish-icons, especially the brooches. Most aspects of jewelry were a metaphor for scarring and branding, especially with the motif of surviving traumatic situations which don’t typically leave physical scars. The eponymous brooch was the opposite role-wise, since it damaged most people who had it instead of healing or otherwise improving them. (There’s a lot of Christian imagery and reference made, from C.S. Lewis to I Corinthians 13. And then that crucified Umbreon…….. wheeze)

Dracula: Both Coppola’s and Stoker’s. I was obsessed with every element of the story, most meticulously Renfieldian shenanigans. I can’t honestly tell you where the body horror in RoseIII started shifting from “disturbing mutilation” to outright bloodthirst and cannibalism, though.

Disney’s Gargoyles: Winged TF sequences with heavy magic lore. Who didn’t wanna be a gargoyle or meet one when they were a kid I mean really

Body Piercings: Piercings carried heavy significance in RoseIII, especially the ones that weren’t simple earlobe piercings. This was back when Western culture was just starting to get a niche appreciation for body mods.

Night Walker: I really couldn’t tell you what the series is about, but I know I used to rent it from the anime rental place down the street from my house. Among my hard drive archives, I always run into saved caps of the green bat-fairy character, and bloodlust caps like the one I used. A lot of my art style tried to imitate this one and Earthian for a while. Also… this is where I got into Buck-Tick from, and I named the final chapter “MONA LISA” like a jackass.

Batman Beyond’s “Splicers”: It moreso impacted the Kuraitenshi side of the series, where I did a lot of pseudo-scientific genetics imagery, but the spirit was still there in my second and third drafts. ESPECIALLY the "Terry you're killing him!" flavor. Though I try to cite things like Cuvier Institute for me evolving a “mature” perspective on furry rather than a cartoony one, I started RoseIII in ‘99 and I don’t think “Splicers” aired until mid-2000? It *might* be more accurate, now that I’m thinking about it, to speculatively cite Bluth’s animation style, especially in NiMH. I really haven’t navelgazed my furry origins, and it’s difficult to pinpoint despite being a Disney-Ducks-Etc addict as a kid. (Tl;dr, I cited the BB episode here not for the furry thing at first, but definitely for the genetics imagery once I needed to call upon it. “Splicers” did definitely impact subsequent rewrites in its posthuman/entheogeny conceptuals. Iirc the original handwritten rough draft had it that people and Pokémon had simply been *mating,* or that it had been a weird-ass Moreau-style Rocket experiment, that caused the anthros to exist. The Rheshes were still hunting them either way for sport)

Digimon: Some of my humor came from here, but Digimon was probably my biggest name harvest source. This cap from Book 3 of Kuraitenshi says it all…

Earthian: I mostly have just watched the anime, but I was hardcore obsessed for a long time. If I recall correctly, Keiji and Toshi’s dad was Kagetsuya Itoh, lel

Honorable mentions:

zelgadis was probably the inspiration for the “base look” of tenshi lmao

there was a lot of x-men 90s/live-action/evo stuff woven in eventually