The tragedy of saiyan women not landing on earth instead of the sausage fest we got in DBZ, unrealized, continues. I did the original image in February. I decided to do some sketches of the left girl, whose name I decided was Imoya, in May. Since I had originally only planned on the one girl in the original image and cooked up the one on the right faster than I should have, I was never too happy with her final design. So, I set about to rethink her.

The first sketch was the one on the bottom right, so most of her personality started to show up on that one. The original girl had a… I don’t know if there’s a word but there probably is… cliche proper/demeaning Japanese personality. I sort of wanted to retain some of that, but less dumb. Less princess, more personality. So several sketches later, I ended up with a girl who loves fashion, singing (and eating of course), is a bit of a Roshiesque pervert, and doesn’t understand the mysteries of watermelons. I imagine she thinks she understands earth culture better than Imoya, but still has no clue what she’s doing half the time. She was honestly pretty easy to physically redesign. I just had to get her hair right, which I wanted to look unique, sort of natural for a Saiyan, but probably styled. Toriyama style hair is kind of oddly difficult to design, since it’s so focused on those big strands. As I feared, I couldn’t resist getting even more complicated with the image, and ended up making less of a bunch of sketches and more of a wallpaper. Oh well. But look at that assssss. I wanted her colors to be more vibrant, but also wanted to avoid looking too much like Seripa/Fasha/Kon. S’alright. Yes all Saiyans have black eyes, fuck you. FUCK YOU. RED.

Ah, the naming part of the character creation. I could spend hours thinking about it, and then realize how empty my life really was. Again, it had to be a vegetable. Either English or some Japanese pun. I don’t speak their moon language, so I’m always afraid since so many of their words have double or triple meanings that I’ll end up making some sort of racial slur pun about spinach. Given her somewhat firey but playful personality, along with her colorful character, I decided to go with the loyal pepper as our vegetable.

For a long time I was trying to get the word “togarashi” (red pepper) to work for me, especially since there are also phrases like “-toga-ru” that mean “[whatever] girl,” like esukotogaru (escort girl). I could envision toga-ru-shi, but knew it was dumb. Togaru on its own also apparently means something like “sharp, to be angry.” It was maddening, because all the pieces for a stupid name were there, begging for pun upon pun to spurt all over the room in a violent interlinguistic climax.

Instead I decided to just not overcomplicate it. “Pepa” doesn’t work too well since that’s literally how you saw ‘pepper’ on the moon. Time to get insipid clever. Chile pepper. Chile. Pronounced “chiri” on Third World: Subordinate//Luna. Kirei: Japanese word for pretty/beautiful. Chirei. No, shut up. ALL HAIL CHIREI AND IMOYA