of the contradictions of that time period, which Ubukata lists as "Wealth and poverty, faith and heresy, diplomacy and conspiracy, king and commoner, even the devastation of war and the flowering of culture." Ubukata also used this theme in conceptualizing the use of psalms as "dark magic". He said that he "hoped that the irony of using the abstract idea of 'prayers to God' to describe evil would be seen as equally tragic by people of many different faiths and religions." Production Creation and conception toi8 of Studio 4°C was initially asked to work on the series' character designs, but the job was passed on to his wife, Tomomi Ozaki, due to time constraints. According to Ozaki, director Kazuhiro Furuhashi requested that the characters "should not look like manga characters or too real; and not too anime-like," and that he wanted the designs to be faithful to historical details. Ozaki sometimes referred to historical portraits from the series' time period as reference for her designs, as well as actors in Western films, mentioning that she referred to Brigitte Bardot's hairstyles while designing Anna Rochefort's hairstyles, and used Brad Pitt as the reference for Durand. Writing Scriptwriter Shotaro Suga was contacted by Tetsuya Nakatake at the beginning of the project, and agreed to work with them when he was informed that Tow Ubukata and Kazuhiro Furuhashi were taking part in the production. He was unable to work on the project immediately, as he was also working on Eureka Seven at the time. Suga admitted to being nervous about working with Furuhashi, whom he described as an "experienced director" because the other series he worked on (such as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Blood+, Eureka Seven, and Casshern) were by first-time directors. He described the script readings for Le Chevalier D'Eon as "ever more intense" than his previous projects, and that they all "kept on debating to scrutinize each and every detail." Chief writer Yasuyuki Muto noted that their script meetings lasted as long as twelve hours. Muto was in charge of the script for eleven out of the twenty-four episodes. Ubukata and Furuhashi provided the ideas for the episodes, which the writing staff then adapted into the scripts. "Director Furuhashi as well as Ubukata-san, who is a novelist, both put a lot of weight on the dialogues", Muto said. Suga commented that "[c]ompared to other works, the script for