ダークキャット

Dark Cat (or ダークキャット) is a series by prolific author Naomi Kimura (木村直巳). The comic ran from 1988 to 1993 and was collected into 10 tankouban volumes, and later reissued in Sonorama bunko versions in 5 volumes. It had an original album in 1990. It was adapted into an OVA (Original Video Animation) in 1991, which is the origin of this LoRA.

Just a note: this is not really a basic or beginning LoRA. However, if you still want to play with it, I hope you'll enjoy using it!

Dark Cat is the story of two brothers who have both cat and human forms. Their family name is Kagesaki (影崎). They go all over to help address supernatural threats such as monsters, but they also help spirits to move on and try to protect the living from things they don't understand.

Hyoi (標意) is the older brother, with long black hair and blue eyes. In cat form, he is a black cat with luminous blue eyes.

Rui (留意) is the younger brother, with scruffy brown hair and golden eyes. In cat form, he is a white calico cat with green eyes.

How to Use This LoRA

I made this LoRA mostly to teach it the brothers, since I enjoyed the series. It was also important to me as one of the few stories that featured attractive male characters who were even drawn beautifully but still rather realistically when nude, though I haven't tried to do anything too H with the LoRA yet, so I can't help you with that. But I wanted to preserve the feel of the OVA, because the series is precious to me.

Look through the provided gallery images for some basic prompts. The darkcat tag should help influence the outcome with a palette much like the OVA. The tags hyoi and hyoicat should cover Hyoi's human and cat forms, though these are helped along by descriptions like his elegant blue eyes and long black hair for human form and black cat and blue eyes for his cat form. The tags rui and ruicat help with getting Rui as a character, and as before, you can help it along with descriptions of his brown hair and golden eyes, or white calico cat and green eyes in his cat form.

Since the only source was a video that hasn't been remastered, you'll probably want to use your fav upscaler for a nice finish. I wanted to show the capabilities of the LoRA, so that's all I used as far as extensions. The rest is pure prompting.

You can get closer results if you use ControlNet with the LoRA.

Sometimes a model will interpret their distinctive hairstyles as cat ears, which I found amusing. It's easy to correct this with inpainting or simply painting it by hand.

Feel free to make a better one!

I will provide my images, which were taken from the best available source. Unfortunately, as much as I like the OVA, it is a rather low-budget production and hasn't been a priority for remastering or a re-release. The Japanese voice acting is very good though, and the story is well done as a standalone feature.

I happened to have the energy to do this LoRA, but I'm sure there are others who could train these characters and the style better, so I welcome them to try.

I hope you will all have fun bringing Hyoi and Rui to the modern world! Or maybe you'd like them to go on retro adventures. Either way, please enjoy Dark Cat.