OS-tans: Marin Concept

So! Nineteen years ago, my parents bought an IBM PC for use as the family computer ... and today marks the day when that PC arrived at our doorstep: a P5-120 from Gateway (back then, still known as Gateway2000), running Windows 95. Over the years, my family traded up for new family computers (and eventually, after high school my own personal computer) but we still held on to that P5-120.

In fact, it's right here in my apartment bedroom, and I continue to use it for legacy computing (mostly DOS and Win9X games). Following the naming scheme I'd devised in which all my computers are named after winds, I've named the PC after a mild and very humid southeasterly wind in France that blows between autumn and spring, the Marin (originally I used the name Mistral, but as with my main desktop I changed the name after Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance came out).

Marin's personification and character design here actually dates back to 2007-ish, when I was toying with the idea of making a miniseries exploring what things would be like if OS-tans were made flesh, as it were. I had cooked up a method for character design: their base appearance would be determined by the operating system, but would differ from the OS-tan upon which they are based depending on the design of the computer's case, any modifications to the OS (like GUI mods and such), the computer's hardware, what the computer was used for, and any quirks about that individual machine.

In short, personalized OS-tans. That's why Marin here looks like a clone of 95-tan: she is one, in a sense. Where 2chan personified 95-tan as wearing a Meiji-era student's kimono to convey the fact that she's literally from a bygone age of operating systems, Marin is wearing a set of plate mail that takes after several examples of French armor I'd found, as well as design elements from the actual P5-120 computer case (the circlet looks a bit like the front panel, gold stripes and trim resembling the Gateway2000 logo, etc). Overall I tried to convey the same "bygone era" feel with the plate mail ... as well as the fact that, like other computer cases of the age, a P5-120's case panels are about as hard to remove as putting on or taking off actual plate mail!

Speaking of which, a bit of odd trivia! A Japanese artist, Simuro, created a series of OS-tan related strips, two of which feature 95-tan and her male counterpart, 95-kun. The reference 95-kun makes to "an autumn sky and a woman's heart" seems to be a proverb of some sort, since that was also used as a title for a song in Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen.

Now the fun part: the Marin is often associated with thunder and is known to produce heavy rain and thunderstorm supercells.

And it blows during autumn.

I swear I did not deliberately pick Marin's name based on that serendipity.