Azure the Robot Rabbit is one of the earliest characters in Electric Hearts. This picture was created in 2007. Perhaps due to luck, or my mental state being better at the time, the picture still looks okay today. There would be many years before I could reliably nice-looking robots like this.
Azure’s old name was Hazel, which came from the rabbit protagonist of Watership Down. I also created a few other rabbit robots named after Watership Down characters — Blackberry, Dandelion and such. Unfortunately, a later Gundam title called Advance of Z (AOZ) used the same idea to name their robots, and I found it distasteful to pay too much homage to unrelated works, so I dropped the idea. I renamed my character to Azure, while using Hazel as his family name.
Azure has a twin sister called Amber. She was a humanoid robot in early iterations, but the idea went nowhere, and I decided to redesign her as a rabbit robot. Azure’s color scheme is black-white-blue, Amber is black-white-yellow. The twins were supposed to be the main characters of Electric Hearts for a very long time. They were special police officers, perhaps inspired by Ghost in the Shell. And thus, they were equipped with heavy firearms. On paper, Azure is good at shooting, while Amber is good at close-quarter combat.
I wrote dozens of stories for the twins, but all of them felt like derivative of existing animes. Then Zootopia happened. Judy Hopps being a rabbit police officer clashed with the twins, so I decided to drop the idea.
As Alice and Cloud slowly became more developed characters, they replaced the twins as the main characters. Maybe I should change the jobs for them, too.
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