LAST EDITED ON Sep-12-14 AT 03:42 AM (EDT)
 
Dammit, Ben. You beat me to Ilyusha, who is my girl.

That said, you actually get pretty damn close to what I envisioned. Except for the hair. When I think of Ilyusha, I think of her most famous pilot, Anna Alexandrovna Yegorova (Анна Александровна Тимофеева-Егорова), who was a genuine goddamn badass and only passed on five years ago.

Look at that picture. Look at her face and tell me that's not Ilyusha's face. :)

I also envision Ilyusha as being one of the two or three Fly Girls who is visibly armed when not actually up in the air. Not with a sidearm, either.

No, Ilyusha carries her Volkov-Yartsev VYa-23 autocannon around with her. She hasn't, like, named it or anything. That would just be weird. But it's always there, slung across her back or propped against a wall.

You never know when you'll need to do a tank. They're wily, those tankers. Can't trust'em.

> Ilyusha is hard, in every sense of the word.
>There's no decorative padding on her anywhere, physically or
>psychologically -

That actually changed a bit as the series went on; Ilyusha was the darling of the Chairman of Rodina-Mat, and he constantly showered her with awards and accolades. As a good communist and good aviator, Ilyusha would, grudgingly, wear her ever-growing collection of medals in order to set a good example and inspire the other girls. She really could give a damn about any of them, though...

Except for one. Her Hero of the Soviet Union medal. (Twice Hero, actually, by the end of the series, and Three Times Hero in the manga.)

I'm sure most people recall episode 315, "Comrade 109." Ilyusha had been on the show before, of course; her first episode was "Red Beard of Treachery." But 315 was her first spotlight episode, and it was a doozy. Ilyusha gets shot down behind German lines while on recon; a common, even cliche plotline by this point. (I think it happened to Zero at least three times and 109 more than once.) In fact, it is 109 who lands near the impact site and starts nosing around.

Normally, what would happen after that is between ten and fifteen minutes of banter and/or drama, with a daring escape at the end. That is not the case with Ilyusha. Ilyusha walks right up to 109, kicks the shit out of her, and forces 109 to fly her back to the Russian lines since Ilyusha can't get into the air under her own power anymore. They both nearly get blown up by Yak-9 a few times in the process, and everybody is very confused when an unhappy 109 taxis up to the hangar at Rodina-Mat with Ilyusha on her back.

Wonderful episode.

Anyway, Ilyusha got the Hero of the Soviet Union for that, and it was really the only decoration she ever cared at all about, because she was damn proud of what she did that day.

-Merc
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