While I get inspiration for my stories from all over, from all sorts of different media that I consume, a great deal of the inspiration for Binary System came from my enduring and undying love for the Mass Effect series of action RPGs by Bioware, but also there was a little taken from a rather obscure little anime series, Soukou no Strain.
When I first started writing the initial draft of what would eventually become Binary System: Deneb and the eventually-to-be-released Binary System: Sirius, I was thinking a lot about ways the stories I had experienced and enjoyed wielded their tropes well, subverting them when necessary and taking them at face value when such a method would be more effective.
During the first drafting of the story, Rin's character was quite a bit different than she currently is in the release version of Deneb. The original version of Rin was a much more naive and childlike person, having only recently gained true sapience through excessive non-critical linking with Alisa. Much of the original interpersonal drama between Alisa and Rin was centered around her growth and development from a smart computer into an actual person, but I ended up scrapping this for a number of reasons, not the least of which was due to how common this "Pinocchio" story is.
Fact is, Rin even tells another character directly that she's "no Pinocchio." Becoming a human was never her goal. Being treated like a person rather than a thing, that was always what Rin wanted.
The current version of Rin, who has both always been extremely intelligent and is a considerably stronger and more dynamic personality, still carries the original inspiration for the character. The MIMIC system necessary for Reasoners to pilot their mech suits, specifically the alien "Emilys" from Soukou no Strain used by the protagonist to control her suit, were the first seed of the idea that ultimately evolved into the AI operators of Binary System.
Physically speaking, Rin's appearance is at odds with pretty much all the humans in the setting. There are no white people in Binary System! I'm not sure if anyone actually noticed that, but it's there. Since the humans who make up the current Sol Alliance are descendants of off-world colonists, most of whom were nonwhite and a large percentage of whom were specifically African, the vast majority of the current human population has darker skin.
Rin's exceptionally fair-skinned (though more in a north Japan sort of pale than a European sort of pale) while Alisa is considered on the fair side of average, but even she is a "dark skinned redhead" and doesn't really draw stares the same way Rin does when she walks among humans. I won't go into all the details now since this is addressed in a short story I've been working on here and there about Rin's birth, but her appearance is often described as doll-like by characters in the story. It's something of a plot point to Rin's origin story as the physical "self image" of an AI operator is typically extrapolated from the operator's counterpart during the mental pathway scan. Rin's isn't, though, and I can't really go into this more deeply without massive spoilers for the as-of-yet unreleased Binary System: Sirius.
Well, I can't really talk too much more without spoilers, so I'll end this little ramble here. Hope you liked hearing a little about the process that went into creating Rin's character. :)
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