Story of Me

Ripper's Journey II: The History Of Nemesis

If you've read through my story Ripper's Journey II: The Son Of Ripper, then you'd already know about the main antagonist of the story, Nemesis the super raptor.

However, the super raptor species name is not the true name of Nemesis' species since later on I do end up revealing the truth that he is in fact an indoraptor just like Ripper.

And now I am going to show you the creative process that went into making Nemesis, from his design all the way to his personality I'm going to give you guys a run down on Nemesis the indoraptor.

Now first we have to discuss his name, now unlike some of my dinosaur characters like Luna who I named after her white skin, I only thought of Nemesis' name as I was writing the epilogue of Ripper's Journey I, I never really knew what I was supposed to call him back then.

His original name was "Crimson" mostly because back then his design was quite different, he would have been a raptor with multiple spikes on his back and his underbelly would be cream colored, but the top part of his body would be filled with red and he would've had a boxy shaped head as opposed to his more narrower head in the final draft.

The interesting thing about Crimson was the fact that he wasn't supposed to be that big, in fact he wasn't even supposed to be an indoraptor or a super raptor, but just a regular velociraptor though I changed his species name later on to separate him from being just a normal raptor.

You may be asking how I thought of the name "Nemesis" for him since it's obvious that the reason why Henry Wu in universe named him that way is because he was supposed to act as a counter to Ripper, but there's a different reason as to why I named him Nemesis.

While writing the epilogue for Ripper's Journey I, I started to think of a threatening sounding name, then I tried to look for one in the most unexpected place, transformers.

Yep, the franchise about the heroic autobots fighting the malevolent decepticons, I've always been a massive transformers fanatic so I tried to look for inspiration there since their villains had quite threatening names.

I of course started to check the main villains, the decepticons themselves, though I wanted to pick specific decepticons since there's no way I'm naming the main villain Megatron, or Starscream.

I didn't have much luck since most of the names really did just relate to those specific characters, names like Thundercracker, Skywarp, Soundwave, and Breakdown really weren't fitting in my opinion and I was about to give up on trying to get inspiration from transformers until I remembered something.

Instead of naming the main villain of Ripper's Journey II after a decepticon, why don't I just name him after their ship?

The Nemesis was the ship that the decepticons used to intercept the autobot's ship known as the Ark, after the attack though, both the Nemesis and the Ark landed on an unknown planet, but it would be later be revealed that they landed on earth during it's prehistoric days.

So yeah, I got Nemesis' name from a freaking spaceship of all things, it's funny now that I think back to it, and I know that in some universes the Nemesis is actually Trypticon, a gigantic Mechagodzilla looking decepticon, but the one I'm more familiar with is just the ship that doesn't transform into Trypticon.

So now that his name is out of the way, let's talk about how I got inspiration for his final design and species name.

I first learned about the super raptor name through watching some YouTube videos and apparently it would have shown up in The Lost World, then I watched gameplay of a seemingly forgotten game called "Jurassic Park: Trespasser" which was released in 1998 a year after The Lost World: Jurassic Park had roared into theaters.