Though I’m not going to tell Mike what Link ought to look like for anything he draws, I wanted to talk about where he came from.
The Brave series was a toy-and-anime line created by Takara and Sunrise, following the Transformers franchise (probably much more familiar to American audiences). It consisted of eight shows and some spin-offs: Brave Exkaiser, Fighbird, Da-Garn, Brave Express Might Gaine, Brave Police J-Decker, Brave of Gold Goldran, Brave Command Dagwon, and GaoGaiGar. A couple of the shows took shots at themselves or their franchise, like Fighbird’s light-hearted heroics and Might Gaine’s overt attack on the “toyetic” nature of the franchise, but it was still all in good fun.
All shows had a few key threads of narrative: “good” vs. “bad” energy, human-robot relations, responsibility to planet Earth, a team of heroes working together. Many included specific common elements like energy beings of a “space police force”. Roles in each show were shuffled around: the Hero, the Kid, the Main Robot, the Support. Half the time, the Hero and the Main Robot were the same person, for example. The importance of the Kid fluctuated, from being the one to give orders to the robots (Da-Garn), to tag-along sidekick (Fighbird) to vital plot element (GaoGaiGar).
A long-time fan of anime relayed to me some basic wisdom: “people in the shows with superpowers are basically samurai, ronin, or ninja”. Virtually all mecha designs follow this rule, specifically presenting the giant robots as elaborate metal samurai. The heads in particular, with their fins, wings, mouth guards (on a robot!), and so on, call to mind the kabuto of Japan. Animal motifs - lions, birds, even dinosaurs - featured prominently.
Mobile Suit Gundam’s color palette (strong primary colors, red/white/blue for the hero robot, black and gold highlights) carried through to the Brave series’ robots, and to their human protagonists as well. Here’s a gallery of the lead characters in each show:
So yeah.
You’ve already seen Dagwon’s En Daidouji - I’m using him as Link’s avatar.
Of course, there’s some overlap with the live-action tokusatsu genre, where the “Ranger” characters wear their colors in civilian mode. Aside from letting younger viewers immediately recognize a character, the colors themselves have associations. Red is strength, passion, and self-sacrifice, so these are typically assigned to these leading characters.
Sunrise played around with the art style in each series. Though the mecha were often very similar, the human characters went from highly stylized to reasonably well-drawn (particularly in Dagwon, where “pretty boy” appeal was offered to draw in female viewers, similar to Mobile Suit Gundam Wing). You could watch any of the shows and tell immediately who was the main character by this common palette.
I chose white instead of red to avoid too many comparisons with Iron Man (and let’s face it, Spider-man) when Link is in his armor. Still, Leo (the Lion) Snow (the bastard son of a Stark - in this case, Tony) is meant to come from this line of red-jacketed, big-haired fighters for justice.
author: Bill G.
url: Community Forums: Art Thread | Roll20: Online virtual tabletop
But why?
