As I slowly continue to try to finish up my current story, I'll just post pointless trivia about old ones on the forums as I sometimes do.
So it's been asked a few times what exactly inspired Eternal, which I've probably answered "A lot of things."
Fairly certain at least one person in the past thought I was inspired by Ender's Game, but honestly, never even read the book or even remotely familiar with it until a lot later on in life. Obviously the whole Emperor/super soldier thing is pretty Warhammery, but that really wasn't the direct inspiration either.
Super soldiers being trained to kill since birth isn't really a new concept. It's fairly common even, especially in science fiction.
The honor of being the direct inspiration for Eternal belongs to a little known scifi movie called Soldier starring Kurt Russell. In fact it wasn't even the whole movie that inspired the story, but first a little about the movie itself.
If you're not familiar with it, that isn't really surprising. Even when it came out it didn't get much attention. I saw it in theaters because well it looked cool, and apparently Kurt was going to be killing a bunch of stuff. Didn't seem like something I'd want to miss.
The movie itself is okay. It's a simple plot, but then you're not expecting too much from a movie called "Soldier." Basically Kurt has been part of this government program called the Adam Project since birth and everything that goes along with being trained to be a killing machine for the military.
That is until he (and his fellow soldiers) get replaced by outright genetically enhanced super soldiers (as opposed to just being conditioned from birth). The commander of the old soldiers doesn't think too much of the new commander and his untested super soldiers since Kurt and his crew are battle tested and always gotten the job done. So they have a small contest.
Kurt goes against one of their best and loses only to be unceremoniously dumped on a garbage planet for dead, but big surprise, he isn't actually dead and there are others living on the garbage planet. They nurse him back to health, but they're pretty scared of him and he's unsure of how he's exactly supposed to act around so many civvies.
Meanwhile the new super soldiers need some combat practice (You can't go into battle with an untested weapon right?) so they're training on the garbage planet which is supposed to be uninhabited, but of course it isn't as we all know. Well the commander of the genetic freaks just declares them as hostiles that would REALLY be good combat practice.
The old commander protests since these people are civilians already living on a garbage planet, their lives are shit enough as is, and they aren't exactly going to put up much of a fight. Naturally the new commander does away with the old one.
Well as you might expect, the new super soldiers start running into trouble when they learn that Kurt's still alive and he's grown a little fond of the garbage people enough that he's willing to defend them. Of course while the new soldiers are genetically better, they again aren't really battle tested, so all of Kurt's years of combat experience makes short work of them. Things get even worse when Kurt's old platoon (Who have been relegated to support duties now) defy the orders of the new commander in favor of following Kurt instead.
And by the end of the movie, Kurt beats the chicken soup out of the genetically enhanced soldier who beat him the first time and he and his crew fly off in a space ship with the surviving garbage folk to a new habital planet. (And Kurt apparently refound a tiny bit of his "lost" humanity in all this)
As I said, the movie overall is okay. However it's the beginning that REALLY inspired Eternal.
They show how Kurt and others were trained and it cuts away to the years of specific moments. I could explain, but I'll just embed the clips in the next post.
I had the idea for awhile long before I actually wrote Eternal, and originally it was going to be science fiction, but then I went the fantasy route since genetically enhanced super soldiers aren't quite as common in that genre (Yes, I know they still exist in it) plus fantasy is just easy to wave away certain aspects of potential questions without even the need for technobabble. (It's magic!)
Anyway, I'll just post the first 4 bits that are relevant to the inspiration, but you can probably find the whole movie on youtube in clip form.
Extra Bonus Trivia: Soldier takes place in the same universe as Blade Runner.
