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DIRTY PAIR: FATAL BUT NOT SERIOUS design sketches pt.4

Behold, s'more character-oriented design sketches from my 1995 miniseries Dirty Pair: Fatal But Not Serious. (Previous series post here.) 

Kei butt cleavage ahoy! Not a fan of the rendering, though, which was just a bunch of fairly lazy and unimaginative high-contrast riffs drawn off the top of my head.

Rendering on the Y**i dress is still fairly hacky, but I think the dress design was based at least in part on photographs of fashion in the the early-90s "sexy bodikon" style.

No recollection as to why "bad Y**i's" initial outfit was so goofy. Were Sleet and Ng Mui just being wacky pranksters? 

The "Yotaku" dude above was clearly based on Dark Schneider from the manga Bastard!!—whose name was, in turn, derived from the German metal band Accept's lead singer Udo Dirkscheider by the metal-loving mangaka Kazushi Hagiwara. (Note also that obvious knockoffs of both Udo and Rob Halford from Judas Priest appeared as goons in the miniseries Dirty Pair: A Plague of Angels.)

Alas, these were the last Fatal But Not Serious design sketches I could unearth. Next time on "Design Sketch Tuesday," we'll move on to another project, such as my earliest Bubblegum Crisis sketches or something from my mainstream comics efforts.

TOMORROW ON THIS HERE PATREON: As usual on a Wednesday, time for yet more "damsel-in-distress" content of some sort for the $5+ tiers!

DIRTY PAIR: FATAL BUT NOT SERIOUS design sketches pt.4 DIRTY PAIR: FATAL BUT NOT SERIOUS design sketches pt.4 DIRTY PAIR: FATAL BUT NOT SERIOUS design sketches pt.4 DIRTY PAIR: FATAL BUT NOT SERIOUS design sketches pt.4

Comments

Wasn't a huge fan of the green color for Kei's dress. That design somehow looks better in B&W. (The colors overall for FBNS were awesome, though.) And any dress that shows Kei butt-cleavage is a good one. Yuri's black dress was pretty sweet too. Yuri2's outfit always made me think her cloners were just emptying out their closets of old crap since she couldn't object. Easier than a Goodwill dropoff run!

Strypgia

Well, presumably she would have come up with some other passphrase otherwise, and in any event, she had no need to wear a stupid jacket as well even if the hat was essential. It is a great passphrase, though.

Burninator

James

Makes sense, but there are a couple of things I have to point out there. If you believe the internal dates, SimHell actually takes place AFTER Fatal(November vs September of 2141), meaning that in 'verse, it might well be that the Fatal business might have been what inspired Kevin's interest in "cloning and playing with the image and nature of the Pair". Also, the events of SimHell are quite ambiguous in terms of what's real and what isn't, and Adam confirmed to me a while back that that ambiguity is entirely deliberate. Hell, there is an entirely plausible theory of SimHell where Kevin wasn't actually doing anything evil at all in that book. He might have been conducting a legitimately sanctioned "red team" exercise as part of his own evaluation in order to test defenses and evaluate the Angels' abilities to react to unexpected situations and his own planning and strategic abilities. All the intro stuff might just be part of the sim, the evil plan essentially playacting, and the whole harem thing just an attempt to goad/motivate Kei and Yuri and gauge their emotional responses. I know Fatal pins him down as pretty unambiguously a Bad Guy, but given that cloning is very explicitly A Thing, how do we know that SimHell Sleet and Fatal Sleet are even the same person? Oh, one more thing. Sleet claims that his "work" is conducted on behalf of his bosses at the BTR; he isn't running the show. If I'm his boss, and I find out that he's jeopardizing missions and blowing agency resources to indulge his fucking fetishes on agency time, I'd clone him to supply a replacement so we aren't short-staffed, make the original wish Kei and Yuri caught him red handed, and make the clone watch every minute of his predecessors fate/upload the sensory feed from Kevin 1 into his brain to make goddamn sure that Kevin 2 isn't tempted to pull any idiotic stunts. Heck, for all I know, that happened between Fatal and SimHell, which would neatly tie everything together.

Burninator

The idea Sleet had a solid plan and theory he was working off of may not be accurate. SimHell shows us he clearly has A Thing for cloning and then playing with the image and nature of the Pair. That could have been why he took this particular approach, consciously or subconsciously.

TF Commando

Oh, also, I think your second Kei theory is probably closer to the mark. I suspect she'd probably end up more traditionally depressed, rather than violent/bonkers.

Burninator

Makes sense, though my original thought was more about why they messed with her psyche to begin with if they wanted predictability. Best guess I have for that is that they figured that if she was thinking rationally, she'd eventually figure out she wasn't really in a sim, but that wasn't the reason Sleet gave. Also, if the whole point of the experiment is to see what happens with a Dirty Trio, doesn't messing with your addition mentally screw up the quality of your results, since the person you are adding is effectively quite different?

Burninator

Two ideas, diametrically opposed: One is that if you make a bomb *too* explosive then it goes off early, before it gets to the right place. Psycho Kei would be batshit berserker before she even got off the table. The other idea is that maybe Kei *knows* she's an impulsive hothead and has developed too many mental strategies to control that, meaning that Psycho Kei would be, paradoxically, *less* likely to go bonkers--because Kei Prime had spent her whole life learning how to *not* do that. (as opposed to Yuri, the Good Girl, who never had to develop those mental skills.)

Mike Powers

Hmmm, my theory for Yuri's outfit is that Sleet & Co once again muffed their planning for their little stunt(Seriously, Sleetykins, coming from the perspective of someone who's done strategy and planning work for dubious organizations, why didn't you lay out a cleaner "sim" scenario in advance? Why did you pick Yuri for her mental stability, then deliberately destabilize her? Why didn't you put in a hardwired terminator(contractile wire wrap around brainstem w/ timer/receiver to trigger, dissolvable-shell toxins in blood, etc) instead of relying solely on a highly uncertain disturbed mental state? What exactly was the theory you were looking to confirm?(The only one I can think of that would fit the circumstances would only be confirmed if the attempt failed to wipe out the Lovely Angels, but Sleet hoped for simultaneous success on both fronts)) and forgot to buy clothing that would fit Yuri and look plausible. Yuri's thus probably wearing janky castoffs from Sleet and or Mui, hence the loose fit on the coat and boots and the ratty pants.

Burninator

I'd love to know how you designed naked/heavily tattooed Evil Yuri from FBNS

Ross Fisher-Davis


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