Superwomen of EVA Foes #2: Sunset Bain
"The woman known as Sunset Bain, on the surface, is the technologically-savvy CEO of Baintronics International; behind closed doors, she is an underworld weapons and technology dealer supplying her wares to the highest bidder, be they master criminal, terrorist organization, or so-called 'revolutionary force', all under the alias of Madame Menace.
Bain's rise to corporate power began when she seduced a fellow MIT undergrad into revealing secure secrets of the young man's family company; the moment she gained those secrets, her private force of masked operatives broke in and stole several prototypes, from which she was able to reverse-engineer and create her own working models. Within a year, Baintronics International was born just as Sunset Bain herself broke things off with that same fellow student. To ensure Baintronics would maintain a clean, near-spotless public perception, Sunset created the Madame Menace alias as she secretly became a player in the world of the illegal arms and technology trade, to the point where she has a mailing list of recurring customers who buy from her specially-delivered 'seasonal catalog' found on the dark web.
One of her most frequent customers, as it so happens, was Gendo Ikari, supreme commander of the U.N. special agency NERV, should he require specific pieces of tech for the Evangelions or other NERV operations. She is not above also dealing with the cult known as the Light of the Divine, whom she has sold weapons to on occasion, but since it would be 'bad for business' if the cult actually succeeded in crippling NERV, every weapon she sold them had a built-in failsafe programmed to render the weapons useless at the last minute.
The arrival of Iron Maiden (secretly Mana Kirishima, the engineering prodigy daughter of Hiro Kirishima, whom Bain had also known from her MIT days) in Tokyo-3 piqued Sunset's curiosity, and she became determined to acquire the young heroine's armor to study and hopefully reverse-engineer it. To that end, she organized a team of super-criminals to engage Iron Maiden and test her abilities, a team known as the Neo-Enforcers, consisting of the Controller, Blitz, the Eel, and the Tangler. Meanwhile, Mana herself wound up being invited to participate in an internship with the Tokyo-3 offices of Baintronics, at the invitation of Sunset Bain herself, secretly as a means of gauging the young girl's genius for her own plans; Mana was eventually able to see through this ruse and get out from under Bain's grip, though the two foes reluctantly agreed to keep each other's 'extracurricular activities' a secret. In addition to Iron Maiden, Bain and her Neo-Enforcers have also squared off against the likes of Spider-Woman (NERV head scientist Ritsuko Akagi) and Ms. Fantastic (NERV computer tech Maya Ibuki)."
*Author's Note(s)*
For my first Marvel-themed SWOE addition on the villain end of things, I went with a lesser-known Iron Man foe in Sunset Bain, a corporate-raider-type villainess with beauty and brains in a deadly combination who's stood toe-to-toe with Tony Stark on multiple occasions. Reworking her slightly to fit within the SWOE environs was one of my main goals for this. As for which anime character to provide the visual basis for a SWOE version of Sunset Bain (see the Deviation), I was influenced by an old anime classic I'd watched for the first time last year, one of the least likeliest sources of inspiration...Golden Boy. Specifically, the first of the many beauties Kintaro Oe runs into, the head of an all-female software company simply referred to as 'Madame President' (real name never revealed).
Mana Kirishima (a character known mainly for her roles in the Evangelion videogame Girlfriend of Steel (aka Iron Maiden) and the spin-off manga The Shinji Ikari Raising Project) was turned into the SWOE's armored avenger first in the never-finished 'Superwomen of EVA: The Truth Is...' by author The Rei-Fan, before they handed it off to OrionPax09 to reboot it as they saw fit; Orion started to do so, with three chapters of 'Superwomen of EVA: Iron Resolve' having been published so far. If they ever decided to pick it back up, it'd be interesting to see a character like Sunset Bain being used as a tertiary antagonist instead of going for the usual pick of Iron Man foes like the Mandarin, Obadiah Stane, or Justin Hammer. My mention of my take on Sunset supplying weapons to the Light of the Divine (a cult exclusive to the SWOE stories) is, ironically, a nod to Mike313's Mana-starring SWOE story 'Girl of Steel' (in which Mana dons the mantle more associated with one John-Henry Irons).
Fun factoid: Madame President shares her English dub voice actor, Tiffany Grant, with both Asuka Langley Sohryu in the original Neon Genesis Evangelion series and films and her 'rebuilt' counterpart Asuka Langley Shikinami in the Rebuild of Evangelion movies.
