Do I feel embarrassed about making a Precure OC based on my vtuber persona as a grown woman? Yes. Will I still post about it anyways? Absolutely. I freaking love magical girls.
Design notes and more lore yapping under cut
Kayari's story is all about... Well, stories. As Lilianne, she was taught that stories are something to be overwritten by the King in Yellow's own one, that besides the King's all other stories are at best irrelevant and worthless. But when she was taken in by the good guys, she was shown how people's stories are expressions of their souls. She became attached to The Little Prince in particular, because it was the first one Sleep and Marvel read to her.
Sleep and Marvel are also based on characters from my Vtuber lore. Marvel, I still can't talk much about, but I will say, the name's a pun. Sleep, however, is based on Hypnos, it's very obvious lol, in fact, his name in this Precure au is just Yumeno Hypnos (he adopted Kayari here, that's why they have the same last name).
Kayari's time as a villain left her without much self-worth, so despite wanting to share all the stories she loves with everyone, Kayari's still rather shy and withdrawn, even after becoming a Precure. She will easily push past these feelings in order to protect people she cares about though. That's why her eyes and poses as Kayari and as Wonder are so different.
I didn't put much thought into her civilian tbh, just something simple with the color palette picked straight from my model's. On the bright side, it did have the unintentional benefit of providing visual contrast between Kayari and Wonder.
Cure Wonder though... Oh boy, she went through so many changes!! The only thing that stayed relatively unchanged was the hair lol. I wanted her Cure form to have references to The Little Prince, and that ended up in the form of her vaguely Ouji-style costume, the secondary colors, the crown pattern on her hat, and the neck accessory that I used as a nod to both the Prince's scarf and bowtie!
The ribbons, I'm especially proud of, because when combined with her ponytail, it looks like an upside down Yellow Sign! Once again, it wasn't intentional, but it certainly became a happy accident.
While having her main color be green would help sell the Little Prince reference a lot, I decided against it, because I wanted her to remain mainly blue, since that's the opposite color of yellow.
Speaking of, there's still a lot of yellows in her design, the reason I came up with is because her past as a minion of the king is still a big part of how she became who she is. But honestly? It's just because yellow was a good color for this lol.