Introductory ramble (c2004)
I never thought I'd write some outright fanfic — especially for tricky subjects such as the Lovely Angels, but here it is. The stories started out in the action movie/comedy thriller mode, when, one evening, inspiration struck — Let's entwine them in a movie that involves property damage on a moderate scale, and have them take over the plot And from there, things snowballed.
The thought had earlier crossed my mind of maybe writing a homage involving an alternate universe set of characters as a homage to the Lovely Angels (they — with obvious mappings — would be Kay Black and Julie Silver, aka Team Heavy Metal aka Disaster Area). But that went nowhere. The problem I realised is that my usual run of female character is very much the "neutral heroine" modelled closely on Jim Schmitz' Telzey Amberdon, whose gender is very much a secondary aspect of the character; whereas much of the broad humour in the Lovely Angels is their head-on assault on feminine stereotypes — girly Yuri, tomboy Kei — and the fact that they are interested in men. Tricky.
But then I stumbled across some of the more poignant DP fanfic out there, and its intensity seems to have worked its way into my writings. And resolved some of the other problems.
I first discovered the Dirty Pair way back (1988) when the first comics by Adam Warren were published by Eclipse — not being in the US, I'd not had obvious access to any of the earlier Japanese material — and I'd remained a quiet fan since, picking up all their later comic-book adventures. Since I started running a dual-boot Windows/Linux box, the two different hostnames for the two aspects were always kei (Linux) and yuri (Windows). Then in autumn '03, I finally gave in to watching DVDs on the home computer and picked up the first Dirty Pair Flash region 2 DVD to add to the — then small — collection. And it's all been downhill from there — Amazon has a lot to answer for.
The Dirty Pair are, of course, creations of Haruka Takachiho, (copyright to him and Studio Nue) without whom none of this would have been possible; this blatantly derivative work is offered up as a humble acknowledgement that he hit on something wonderful.
Index
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Die slowly — this is the one that set the ball rolling, and sprang from watching Die Hard on DVD not that long after the Dirty Pair. And I thought "this has enough gratuitous property damage that is seems just the sort of things the girls would do. And wouldn't it put Bruce Willis' nose out of joint to be upstaged by a mere slip of a girl (or two)". So the girls wander into a transposition of that plot — and actually end up with a lower body count than in the movie. It probably helps if you remember the original.
Here the Angels are from about Sim Hell stage, or maybe a bit later, in the Adam Warren comics. I'm rather partial to the cool tech — ok, let's not beat about the bush — the cool firepower that he gives the girls. But the costumes are much closer to the Biohazards or even the Original Dirty Pair OAV [not the Run from the Future Emma Frost style spray-ons]. As to the rest of the look — well, I do find the Flash version of Kei appealing — enough so that I may have to betray my original loyalty to the Biohazards version of Miss Yuri...
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Best served cold... — another "Dirty Pair go to the movies". This time the source material is actually a Jacobean revenge tragedy (economically named The Revenger's Tragedy) of uncertain authorship (probably Thomas Middleton). At the time, nearly 400 years ago, the play was condemned as the work of a diseased mind — with a full quota of rape, incest, some unnamed quasi-necrophiliac perversion involving a skull and a mannequin, fratricide and just plain murder, it just goes to show that what twenty-odd years ago would have been termed a "video nasty" is not a modern invention.
I encountered the play when it was filmed by Alex Cox (also responsible for Repo Man) in 2002 (and now available on DVD). He had transposed the film from the default mythic Italy of much Elizabethan/Jacobean writings to Liverpool in a dark near-future.
On the face of it, it doesn't seem promising material for the Lovely Angels, but one of the throwaway bits of Cox' transposition gave such a tempting opportunity for a truly characteristic disaster that it cried out for being so used.
This is Yuri, probably not that long after Biohazards given the restricted technology I allow her, solo. Kei may be absent from the story (to balance the canonically Kei-centred previous work) but is never too far from Yuri's thoughts.
All other parts are played by members of the movie cast.
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All by myself — this is a short mood piece, that came out of my trying to get a deeper grasp of the dynamics between the two characters, and teases on the edge of the yuri genre.
This is Kei in the same time frame as the previous story, while Yuri is flying solo.
Spoiler/behind-the-scenes exposition ahead — go read the story first
There's a question of what is canon. I take Daatiipea no daibouken — or at least the English translation that's on-line as the purest source, the Adam Warren version next (though I ignore the internal dates and assume that the tech escalation implies a correlation of time passing in both real and story worlds — it's probably well after the 2141 of Biohazards by Run from the Future), then the OAVs and finally Flash. Those I'll use stuff from it it fits the need at hand — or fills a gap in the previous sources; the rest of the existing source material I've not seen or found in a language I can read according to the medium. There is one big glitch in the list of sources listed as canon — the girls' clairvoyance — which can't be smoothed over; and I'll tend towards the original on this one, and have them be psychically linked, that on occasion gives them some sort of added insights even though having psi powers as well as high tech does deal them what could be too powerful a hand (Why hello, Nancy!)
At that level there has to be an attraction between them, that keeps them together despite their stormy relationship. And that — or rather Kei's experience of that — is what this piece covers. Why is their relationship so stormy? Well, I don't try to analyse that in this first-person account. But the idea I have in mind is of the relationship between Chris Kinnison and any one of his sisters in Children of the Lens — that when they are together, they rub each other up the wrong way because their psychic fields overlap so much.
And holding that thought — there are some implications in that latter which are pretty blatant when one stops and thinks about it. And in the present context there is some wriggle room for parallel developments too — while the canon does make some yuri relevant statements, it does not affirm that the Lovely Angels are exclusively straight. While we do see Yuri fending off Carvalho in A Plague of Angels, Kei's behaviour towards Yuri at the end of Fatal, but not Serious — especially in that very last scene — is consistent with the mood of this little piece.
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After the Fire — following on from the thoughts above — Kei attends Yuri's funeral. Fits in before the last two pages of Fatal, but not Serious. More unrequited yuri.
Characters are drafted in from the OVA and Flash series (the Chief is more Garner than any other holder of the role) to perform some supporting roles. There's also a strong streak of Flash in how Kei turns out. She's drifting a bit towards being Vinga Red Woman in SF clothing — the woman who can't take the demands of a woman's role and has settled for the lesser effort of taking on that of a man, but is none the less a fierce protector of those she cares for.
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Identity — Yuri around the same time and after. yuri. And maybe I've managed to get that out of my system now — certainly I can't really see any need or occasion to take it any further.
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Burn-Up/Angel —[UNFINISHED] Intended as a return to the comedy thriller mode when the Angels get to cross-over with the Neo-Tokyo police Special Circumstances unit. Intended as an excuse for a Kei/Maya gun-fest, I sort-of ran out of good lines after doing the set-up.