About the star system

The stars are my characters who live in and around the fictional city of Shinano. Each page in this part of the site shows the personal data, personality, history, appearance and illustrations of each star, as well as the relationships between them. In the future, if I feel like it, there could also be pages about places and other pieces related to the worldbuilding around Shinano.

Multimedia projects with large casts of characters (like Touhou or Madou Monogatari) have always been attractive to me and this Shinano project of mine is my way of having a big cast of my own. Osamu Tezuka's star system is a big inspiration, too: He treated his characters as "actors" or "stars" (hence the name of this section) and, like a film director, he reused his actors in different roles in different works. Each Tezuka character has an established appearance and personality that is explored in the context of the work in which he or she appears: for example, Astro, the protagonist of Astro Boy, appears as a supporting character in a chapter of another Tezuka manga, Black Jack.

The idea then, given all of the above, is to build a large cast of characters that also forms a star system, so that I can use and reuse my stars in different situations, stories and projects; to design base characters that can be adapted to the work that needs them. Thus, the pages in this section describe the stars in their "canonical" forms, backgrounds and relationships, but if they appear outside their "canon", then, despite looking the same and having the same personality, their circumstances might be different.