[Hero Concept] Crash Test Bunny (VOLATILE - HAZARDOUS - SCREWBALL) 🐇⚠️☢️

[ponyvonchristmas]

Hi all, I've finally snapped! I created this character for an illustration portfolio apply to school with, but ended up liking her so much that I turned her into a hero concept as well. Today, we're working with the spirit of the Acme Corporation personified into a cute-adjacent girl. Enjoy!

Crash Test Bunny ​

A chronic burnout and underachiever in school, Bunny took her first grown-up job at Fairfax Industries as a human crash test dummy before she was old enough to buy booze. It was a simple job: clock in, test products, get reconstructive surgery done by Fairfax's top recommended surgeons, and then Fairfax covers the bills. For years, it was enough to keep a roof over her head, and that was all she needed.

Now though, over a decade later, Bunny finds herself growing dissatisfied with her working conditions. Her job has left her with injuries she'll never recover from and side effects that can't be cured, and worst of all, her pay has barely risen the entire time. Most recently, doctors discovered that her blood has turned caustic, and that she has less than six months left before it eats her body from the inside out. If she quits, Fairfax will stop paying her medical bills, which leaves her with only two options: demand the company fix the problems it's caused for her, or make a wish at the Maelstrom to stop her body's corrosion. Plan A was a bust; her reckless protests around the factory only ended up endangering her coworkers, which Fairfax readily ignored. With no other options, she finds herself at the ritual to enact plan B, armed with the stolen prototype gun 16 Field Cel and a corrosive body that can explode at will. Potential casualties of her crusade are of no concern to her; for the first time in her life she has an actual, concrete goal, and that means more to her than anyone else's life.

Hero Concept​

Bunny is a highly visible, mobile, tanky hero who specializes in creating distractions on the map. Her kit revolves around baiting enemies to her location, whether to set up an ambush or make room for her teammates to push. She's an obnoxious pest that, when pointed in the right direction, can lead enemies to a dangerous spot to waste their time at best, or punish their overextension at worst. Her gun, 16 Field Cel, is a short-range shotgun with an alt fire that sends a signal straight up to broadcast her location to both teammates and enemies.

1: Reactive Blast
Upon activation, the next burst of damage above 10% of your max health is dealt back to nearby enemies within a radius as spirit damage that knocks them backwards. If they hit a wall, they take additional spirit damage.

2: Bounce
Upon activation, your momentum carries through your next jump, dash-jump, or fall, giving you a second leap of equal height and distance after bouncing off the ground. Enemies near the point of impact take spirit damage and are knocked up.

3: Corrosive Prints (passive)
Dropping below 50% health leaves a trail of corrosive bloody footprints behind you that slows and deals damage to enemies that walk on it. The lower your health, the wider the trail and the faster you move.

4: Cardio-Detonate
Explode on the spot, dealing spirit damage within the blast radius, leaving corrosive blood on the ground, and deafening nearby enemies for a brief period, muffling all incoming sound cues.

Personality​

Bunny is a loud, offbeat troublemaker with a fast mouth and a general disregard for others' safety. She's learned that the only way her thoughts are ever heard is if she pisses people off, and as a result, she's gotten very good at it. There was once a sweet, smart girl under all that lead makeup, but she's been corroded away by years of harsh conditions and mistreatment at the factory. Her protests consist of putting herself and others in danger, with no care for the fact that she and her extensive plastic surgery are much more equipped to handle it than the average shift worker.

That said, she has an unmatched eye for slapstick comedy and observational humour, and she knows a lot more than she lets on. If she'd been pushed in a better direction when she was younger, she might have found out that she's both clever enough and funny enough to have made it as someone, but it's too late to go back on her bad choices now. This might be the end of her life anyway, so she may as well go out with a bang.

Additional Ideas & Sketches​

Just a few assorted things to note:

• Bunny is thematically inspired by WHMIS and other standardized industrial safety symbolism. Her abilities mirror hazardous properties of household and industrial substances.
  • Her design reflects this as well; there's the obvious hazard stripes and heavy rubber gloves and boots, but she's also wearing an asbestos suit, and I chose her makeup (dark eyeshadow and Kohl + red lips) because those products would have had a lot of lead in them in the 1940s.
  • Her bracelet and pigtails are obvious no-nos in a factory setting where they could get snagged and cause injuries. The back of her pigtails are also starburst-shaped, like little explosions, and her hair has a greenish cast to it from chlorine staining :3
• Visually and in terms of personality, I took a lot from Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, particularly Tex Avery and Chuck Jones' respective runs. This is definitely more obvious in the concept sketches, but I am not an experienced digital painter, so bear with me please, lol.
  • Her gun is named for an animation term that sounds vaguely like a military term.
• There's a bit of an animal testing motif in there as well! Wabbits are commonly experimented on in lab settings for such things as development of cosmetics, etc. (They're also prey animals, and as a hero who wants to initiate a chase sequence...)
• Her footsteps, gun, and voice lines should be louder than most other heroes to enable her deliberately giving her position away. Please enjoy the Mel Blanc Screaming and Yelling at the Top of His Lungs Compilation for no particular reason
• I wanted her to have a broader, blockier silhouette than most of the other women to indicate that she's a tank and to make her more visible, hence the suit. She isn't all that interested in looking snatched right now; she's more interested in making sure she can easily be seen (and shot at) anywhere on the map.
• I main Shiv and Abrams myself, and this is how I often find myself playing in my rank (high Emissary/low Archon.) Oftentimes our games start getting dragged out because no one will commit to a fight and the enemy carries start racking up scary amounts of souls, so I end up playing increasingly dangerously just to disrupt their farming rotations and try to make something happen. It works, but it doesn't feel like either of those heroes are explicitly designed for it. I made her to fill a gap in the roster that I'm trying to make work with my other heroes, and to torture McGinnis add a little of the 1940s TV animation Warner Bros flair that we currently seem to be missing.

Thank you for reading! This is very silly and self-indulgent, but I had a lot of fun making her. I will continue to update this post with sketches of her abilities and/or her terrorizing the citizens of New York, but for now I just wanted to make a complete post with everything I have so far ♥

 

[ponyvonchristmas]

Bonus: Dracula Flow (Yoshi please do not blow me up, I'm putting this in a comment so that you can nuke the comment instead of the main post if this isn't allowed by forum rules lol thank you)