The Count of Monte Cristo when he was young. When he read the full version as an adult, he saw that the story was far more complex and interesting. Maeda's initial draft was expanded upon by Kouyama, Takahashi and Yamashita. Faced with adapting a novel that was over 400-pages long into a 24-episode anime, Maeda struggled with including all the novel's key plot points within the anime while keeping viewers entertained. Originally intending to keep the anime firmly within a science fiction setting, his growing appreciation for the novel and its central human tragedy persuaded him to retain as much of the original's 19th century elements as possible. Maeda's first drafts had the Count as the main protagonist of a picaresque romance. As the project went through its draft stages, the focus shifted away from the adult Count and onto Albert, who was made much younger than in the original novel. The shift towards Albert continued the original novel's themes of changing times and clashing views, in addition to altering the dramatic elements by altering character perspectives and relationship dynamics. The anime's late night broadcast also allowed exploration of mature subjects like drug use and same-sex love, elements present in the original novel. When reworking the Count, Maeda drew from descriptions from Dumas's text of the Count's coldness being attributed to his being one of the undead; his appearance was also influenced by works associated with the circle of Lord Byron, who contributed to both Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein and early writing about vampires and whom Maeda assumed Dumas had been inspired by when writing about the Count. Early drafts of the Count had him as a far more eccentric character, with his alien nature being more overt and unsettling. The term "Gankutsuou" was originally used for the novel's Japanese translations dating back to its first publication in 1901, but Maeda took the title and turned it into something literal. The figure of Gankutsuou was a reimagining of Abbe Faria, a mentor figure to Edmund in the original novel. The change derived from Maeda's wish to examine the psychology of the Count and his need for revenge. Maeda later refused to define what Gankutsuou was, suggesting that it might be a manifestation of Edmund's madness. The removal of religious elements present in the novel allowed Maeda to create a narrative which needed no social or religious background to appreciate. Speaking