#tl;dr answer

Have I mentioned that I love Pokemon Special?  I love Pokemon Special.  I’ll admit that my fondest and fuzziest memories are of the first seven volumes (of which I still have the original Viz printings, including the original Volume 3 where Blue and Sabrina have a very interesting conversation in Silph Co.).  Great manga.  A+ would recommend yes.  It’s my personal favorite, though I don’t get rabidly obsessive about it (as you can tell just by looking at my Red muse).

As weird as it might seem, my bio class and Pokemon Special actually worked hand in hand together on this.  In Volume 1, while Red and Misty are making their way through Mt. Moon, they run into a band of Rockets looking for Moon Stones.  They get into a fight, and Red manages to take out the Rocket leader’s Rhyhorn.

So what does this guy do?  He whips out a syringe, injects it into the Rhyhorn, and it evolves into a Rhydon right then and there like holy shit how does that even work.  That shit doesn’t happen in the games.

And then in biology we started talking about hormones and it was like the light suddenly dawned on me and I knew that I had found the answer to evolution. 

…that is less of an exaggeration than you might think.

Basically Pokemon Special coupled with my biology class really got me started on thinking about Pokemon in real-world terms.  A lot of things make sense from the scientific context of our world’s mechanics, so I just started putting them together, bit by bit.

Now, going into college I had a few…very bad OCs.  We won’t get into the details, but they were experimental humans that had been spliced with Pokemon genetics and although it was very bad, there was a motherly sort of figure who helped to guide them, and who as I recall made them what they were.  And that was probably the very first inkling of Diane.

Fast forward a few years to what was I guess my Junior year of college.  Those really bad OCs had, in the intervening time, gone through a pretty drastic makeover, and formed the core of Project Elements.  Project Elements was conceived originally as an art experiment during one of my first New Year’s art challenges, and kind of grew out of a random set of pictures of these boys and girls with Eeveelution features (tails, ears, the usual Eeveelution cues).  From there, it grew and developed along the lines of if these kids are spliced with Eeveelution DNA, obviously they were aiming for all the good parts of having Pokemon powers — now what are the consequences?

The answers, by and large, were very bad.

Diane got her first real development as a character rather than as a sort of vague figure here.  She was the brains behind the operation, and she was always intended to be a Rocket Scientist, because Project Elements was designed to be a Rocket project.  The thing about Diane is that she had a heart.  Rather than treat these kids like experiments, she treated them like kids as much as possible; instead of letting them be brainwashed into weapons, she helped them paint their rooms in pretty colors and bought them souvenirs when she left the base.  Total sweetheart with the kids — but she’d verbally rip anyone else a new one if they tried to give her shit.

Since Pokemon Special’s world is really how I see the Pokemon universe, it wasn’t hard to slip Diane in on the Pokemon Evolution experiments and develop the scientific method there.  Her constant companions since the outset have always been Koko the Gardevoir and Tama the Gallade — both low-level, since Diane has never been a trainer in this scientific incarnation.  Even back then, Koko was an experimental evolution gone right, and was a level 20 Gardevoir.

Bringing Diane into the HQ, I decided to take a slightly different tack on the personality aspect, keeping the outward softness of her and hiding the badass side of her.  To get that, I borrowed the personality of a very closely related character — basically, a Diane as a trainer AU.  Her rival was a miserable jackass, and she starts out the story very shy and reserved, having been beaten down by bullies through her formative years and trained into complacency by her parents; going on her trainer journey is her first real act of rebellion, and the story is about her growth and how she breaks free of that cage that’s been confining her for so long. 

For the HQ, she never had that opportunity for character growth: she never went on that trainer journey, got sucked into a really poisonous friendship, and stayed emotionally stunted in certain regards, leading to a very smart, very sweet lady with a lot of hidden depths that I am bound and determine to explore mark my fucking words it will happen and I’m going to thank Archer and Mercede in advance for being my facilitators because seriously you guys have done so much in regards to exploring her character it’s awesome owo ~ <3