MMD Ani's Road Safety Tip for Japan

I liked the model of Ani-Chan by Digitrevx ever since I first saw her a had wanted to develop a character/personality for her to use in my skits. But so far the effort, when compared with the other characters in my stable has been somewhat lackluster to be perfectly blunt. Developing personalities for the mainstream characters was fairly easy; they were just built on top of the "standard" memes for them. The only ones that were perhaps a major departure from that group was Chibi IA, Chibi Gumi, Queen's Gate Alice and to a lesser degree, Galaco.

But I was still stuck with what to do with Ani-Chan and part of the issue here is that she's has a "cyber-girl" design. I didn't really want to go the sci-fi route with her as that's hard to reconcile into my Vocaloid universe as it is being currently built and to a degree, my portrayal of GLaDOS more or less has that covered anyway. So I put her into the Gekido Action News environment as more or less a technical assistant but recently I found that that idea has some limitations. In developing her persona, I knew all along that I didn't want her to be a "baka". That's too cliché and its been done so many times before and with so many Vocaloid characters. Neither did I want her to be smart-assed as that's not going to make her very likeable. Also I still had the problem of how to reconcile her mode of dress within the Vocaloid universe that I was building. On closer reflection I felt that this could actually be ignored. Some things can be just "accepted" without a necessary raison d'etre. If this were not true, how would one reconcile Miku's green hair with any world logic?

So I did this cartoon in an attempt to rectify some of my past mistakes and to give Ani's character a little more depth and complexity. Here, she's being presented as being a little smarter perhaps than the others but with a degree of innocence that makes her far more appealing. A bit of a juggle between my own cynical view of the world at times pasted against Ani's own pragmatic, but more simplistic world view. This won't make her into a LOL type character to be sure, but that's not something that her design really lends to. Rather, by the end of the 4 panel sequence one should get at least a small chuckle and a different way of looking at our world. I think in developing her persona in this manner that she will become more interesting as the dialectics inherent in her world view in themselves are funny.

Credits at bottom of panel.