#Sylia Stingray

[rangertycho]

"Tinsel City" 1987

[astragifs]

[csarracenian]

Its Priss and Sylia.

Drawing in the Bubblegum Crisis style was fun, and got to draw the Knight-Sabers' Hardsuits, always a great joy.

[electric-purple-taco-adventure]

[aardwolfpack]

Concept art by Adam Warren for the 1994 Bubblegum Crisis limited series by Dark Horse Comics.

[tokyostreetlights]

[atomictiki]

Sylia Stingray in a suit for SuitTember, I know one of you has wanted this for years ;-)

[colio-art]

Knight Sabers, ready for action!

Been rewatching Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, it’s one of my favorite shows. If you haven’t watched it go and do it, I promise you will have a great time!

[cultofthewyrm]

by @AngryangryD

[jimmy3people0]

so, sylia, is there something else you wanted to tell everyone or is this just about the boomers

[idontthinkimokaymentally]

Hello there Sylia Stingray fans.

[rangertycho]

"Tinsel City" 1987

[astragifs]

[mechanicalinertia]

Saw this gif, and I couldn't help but be reminded of how good Sylia's introduction is from a storytelling standpoint. It's right at the fifteen-minute mark, it's two minutes-ish, and the dialogue is fairly minimal even while the emotional beats slam into place one after another. I wouldn't say it's my favorite sequence in OVA 1, because this is an episode where Konya Wa Hurricane dominates everything else, but it's still really good.

Think about it. First we have her swimming under the moonlight. Cool, calm, the only sound some surprisingly loud foleying of her swimming. Then: Okay, we know she's Saber White. We don't know her name, but we know who she is. Then, close up: There's something about her expression that suggests - concern. Depth under still waters. Then, as if to dispel the thoughts of what she's been doing, she flips around, floating on her back, hardly swimming at all. Her eyes shut. She remembers something else - and there's the audio bridge of the phone before we see what's going on.

Okay, flash back. She's a kid. She wants to know when papa's coming home. Mama's nowhere to be seen, so she puts on a brave face: "I'm all right, but Mackie's feeling lonely." Oh, she's not all right. Mackie waves happily - look, hi dad! How are you? - when she's the one who misses him. And dad just kinda brushes her off - 'be patient just a little while longer - and we see the prototype Boomer, all artificial muscle fibers and that same snarling visage of the 55C. And Boomers, at this point, are fairly monstrous. The only context we see them in are as skin-bursting murder-monsters Quincy happily sells for the Polar War. We haven't seen sympathetic machines yet.

Okay, another audio feed-in as Sylia plays the role of big sister and puts Mackie to bed - sirens. And Sylia watches as her father disappears from her life, and then she's disraught, and then we get the data unit, and then every memory seems to overwhelm her as music starts to build, and then that same shocked expression on little Sylia's face cuts back to her older self as music cuts out.

It's incredible. It tells us about how, for all that Sylia seems to be the cool-beauty type, utterly unflappable, there is some shit going on in her head, things even her little brother can never understand. She inherited the hardsuits and a revenge quest from a father that didn't seem to be there for her often, but who is she really? How much of Sylia is Sylia? Sure, she has her more straightforward moments when she says that her objective is to 'protect peace and justice and rid the world of evil', but this little sequence tells us a great deal about the character that isn't really explored much. We get that strange sad look on her face when she stabs Mason in the throat, and then her true motives around Dr. Stingray aren't really discussed until Crash, of all times. I wish we'd gotten to get more inside her head - especially if the theory that she's some sort of transhuman a la Grand Mal is true.

[electric-purple-taco-adventure]

Sylia & Nene

[aardwolfpack]