Source code, documentation, 3D models and blueprints of parts for roller skates with electric motors, inspired by a fictional game called Motorball from the manga Battle Angel Alita and its live-action movie adaptation Alita: Battle Angel. Author of the idea is u/TechNotarius (@M0nteCarl0) who was almost immediately joined by u/dmitmel (@dmitmel).
u/dmitmel is also writing a series of posts on /r/Gunnm (and /r/AlitaBattleAngel):
Note: this part was written by u/dmitmel, so it's purely subjective and contains personal opinions
Let me tell you a story.
One day when I was walking home (this was probably on the last week of January 2019, if I recall correctly), I saw a poster of a movie called Alita: Battle Angel which I knew exactly nothing about (I won't include movie description, you can read it, for example, here). Being interested by the title and the fact that it was produced by the makers of Avatar, I googled it later that day, saw the trailers, and read the Wikipedia article about that movie. Then I proceeded to fully read the whole article about the manga which this movie is based upon, its world and characters, and usually I don't read entire Wikipedia articles. Well... I was geniunely intrigued by this fictional world: science fiction always was my favorite genre, cyborg as main character was something I had never heard about before, and I wanted to see the story of Alita. So, I waited for the weekends after the premiere on 22nd of February, and after 3 or 4 weeks of waiting (which is nothing compared to longtime manga fans) I finally went to my local cinema, alone. I had zero expectations for Alita: Battle Angel because I had never neither read any manga, nor watched any anime nor seen any anime/manga adaptations before, so obviously I didn't know what to expect. And then the movie started. It was... beautiful. Special effects were stunning, acting was superb, the world was very developed and the characters were very well-written. I was entertained during the whole movie. The only weak point I could indentify was the story, but I really had no problem with that. I'd give it no less that 8/10. And you know what? After I returned home and a few hours passed, I was reading scans (to all fans of the manga reading this: I'm sorry. I can't afford buying 9 volumes of original and 19 ones of Last Order, especially considering the financial situation in Ukraine) of the Battle Angel Alita manga I found online. This wasn't the most complicated story I read, but Alita was such a good and interesting character with flaws, weaknesses and strengths, her struggles and journey felt very relatable (regarding this: there's a very interesting video about why Alita is so relatable) despite the story being set in a distant future, 500 years from now. This story was definitely worth reading and it affected me very deeply.
And since I have a Reddit account I was constantly hanging out on /r/Gunnm (manga subreddit) and /r/AlitaBattleAngel (movie subreddit). And there were other passionate fans and people who simply enojoyed the movie and/or manga. And while reading comments of this post I found a comment by u/TechNotarius in which he explained that he had been working on electric skates. Since I was looking for open source projects to contribute to and this person said that the code will be open source, I really wanted to help because this one was combined two things I enjoy: programming and Battle Angel Alita. I was fortunate to join the project when it had just started, so we could discuss details of our final goal. And now, we, two complete strangers to each other united by common interests - coding, Alita and this project - are developing a small useless fan project. Not for money. Not for fame. But for experience, because we can, because of our love of the source material, because we want to take a small part of a totally fictional world with us into real life, and because we want to give back something to the community and fandom we belong to.