#bort posting

[saintelmosfirethemesong]

how it feels interacting with ENM couples on dating apps.

[tavrodeos]

he’s just a little guy. sometimes he commits atrocities and he threatens to kill lots of people but he is just a little guy

[tavrodeos]

i want mitsuki to talk about his feelings with boruto so much. i want boruto to know about what mitsuki said to sarada in chapter 69, he doesn’t know WHAT he would do to someone who tried to kill boruto. maybe this is leading to a confrontation between him and kawaki, or maybe, HOPEFULLY him and code, mitsuki has been such a downplayed char in the manga despite being really interesting. he’s a sweet little guy, he deserves to be gay and violent.

[tavrodeos]

the robotboy au is happening now i guess??? the superactivated delta design needs Work and the kk one could stand to be a little bit more him but idk how to do that without adding the cloak or his hair. the boro one is perfect though. yeehaw for inexplicable tentacles in every incarnation of him

also please appreciate the deactivated versions

[tavrodeos]

Breaking down the Boruto manga art style

When I first saw the Boruto manga style I thought it was ugly to the point of being unreadable. I have since come around to kind of liking it, but I think it’s interesting enough to kind of dissect, especially at this point in Boruto where the man is drawing key frames for the anime, whose style is morphing more and more to look like his with the introduction of more characters who were originally drawn in Ikemoto’s style (as opposed to a lot of the original gen characters and Boruto-age kids, who were designed by Kishimoto first.)

I want to make it clear that, other than point 5, none of these are supposed to be criticisms. This is ‘what makes this style different from all the other ones out there’ not ‘why it sucks’. Whether this style looks good or bad is in the eye of the beholder as my first statement proves. i am the beholder and i have thought it is both good and bad

1. There is a lot of definition in the eyes, and people generally have more eyelid than usual in anime. In a lot of anime, either the eyes are big enough or the irises are small enough that there’s white space between the iris and the lids on all sides. The characters who don’t have this usually don’t for a reason, like Kakashi, who’s meant to look bored and closed-off. Ikemoto really seems to favor a half-lidded look, as almost all of Kara, except Daemon most of the time, have half-closed-looking lids unless something extreme is going on. 

This is in the middle of him lunging at Sarada and his eyes are still drooping down.

(Having said that, half-lidded characters are almost always adults, to the point where it looks jarring on a lot of the kids who aren’t Kawaki. Think abt how Boruto is usually only half-lidded when Momoshiki is taking over.) And in addition to just having a lot more lid, they’re very defined. Everyone has a waterline if they’re drawn decently big on the page. There are often multiple lines indicating lid creases, and multiple lines in eyebrows.

^ this one is very zoomed in, the width of a whole page, and this one v is like a fifth of the page big

which makes eyebrow less characters like Jigen look even more uhh?? strange? It’s an inordinate amount of detail even for people who don’t have dojutsu. There’s not a whole lot of variety in shape either. There’s a lot of variety in pupils and irises, but the shape is generally the same within categories (men, women, children.)

2. Almost everyone has defined noses and lips too. Kind of an addendum to point 1, but I wanted eyes to be their own point because they get so much focus. I think that the rest of the face being as detailed as the eyes is a good thing, it’s more balanced, but I feel the need to remark on it because it’s another thing that’s different from a typical anime style.

This panel shows how the eye and lip detail is balanced by detail in the rest of the body. There’s a lot of thought put into how the clothing droops, to the point where it’s obvious that the shirt and the jacket are different fabrics. Fascinating. That is to say, the way Ikemoto draws faces goes well with the clothing he puts the characters in. In fact, take this Mitsuki too. 

Mitsuki doesn’t have nearly as much going on in his face: his eyebrows are very small, he doesn’t have a lot of eyelid definition, and his clothes are drawn much simpler. It’s all balance. (and admittedly this is a smaller picture of Mitsuki but I had a hard time finding a bigger one. He’s not a super featured character like he is in the show.) It should be noted that most of the time the only characters who consistently have upper lips, to my memory, are Delta, Eida and Yodo. Everyone else kind of only has them when they’re being zoomed in on, but most of the time most people have a bottom lip line.

3. The facial hair/shaved hair hatching. I feel like facial hair is hard to come by in general in anime/manga, but it tends to be either one colored shape, like Asuma and Shikamaru’s beards or Armstrong’s mustache in FMA, or scruff indicated by vertical lines, like Aizawa from MHA. Ikemoto puts a lot of hatching in his facial hair, and there are a Lot of characters who have light-colored beards and mustaches, and the one guy who had lambchops?? shojoji? it is such a bizarre choice. Looking back at pics of him all of his hair is very puzzling.

But all that extra hatching, at least to me, makes these guys look so filthy. You could not convince me that Amado or Shojoji have taken a shower in months. It’s a little less grimy-feeling with Boro and KK, for some reason, but maybe that’s just me. Kawaki doesn’t look unwashed so much as he looks like a raccoon crawling out of a dumpster, with the threads coming off his jacket. He’s very punk and I love it for him.

Point 3.5 there’re a lot of extra lines in people’s hair in general. I’m putting this in at the last second so I’m just going to let you notice it as you go through the post instead of providing specific examples because it’s there for everyone with light hair longer than Hinata’s.

4. There’s not a lot of mid-tone shading in this manga. If there’s any shading it’s done with hatching, which isn’t bad, but somehow a lot of manga feels really stark.

I’m having a hard time finding an example of something this pervasive, it’s just everything.

5. And then there’s the way that almost all of the female characters, at least at some point, look like preschoolers, with big chubby cheeks and gangly stick legs, especially when contrasted with the overly-mature clothes the children wear. Sarada and Sumire look like little children trying on their big sisters’ clothes. Hinata yo-yos between looking like someone in her mid-twenties and looking like a strange baby-faced teenager. 

adult!

14 year old??

(these examples are not the most egregious, but those are in the very first chapter when sasuke had curly hair so I’ve decided they are no longer part of the art style and part of the growing pains.)

Yodo suffers the opposite; she looks like she has the face of an adult on a child’s body.

Her bellybutton also doesn’t seem to be in the right place in either of these.

Cho Cho isn’t that bad except that one splash page with Sarada, and Himawari is spared by being an actual little girl. As well, sometimes the 12-13 year olds and Kawaki have proportions that make them look very young, but that’s common for anime and manga styles so I’m not going to gripe about it. I’m not going to get into the clothes right now, that’s for the fashion rating post I have in the works. I’m just going to say that the way Sarada’s thighs are drawn sometimes is concerning. 

That is a grown woman’s leg. Why is it attached to a child?

this is nauseating. Ikemoto if you want to quit Boruto and draw pinup calendars I support you, but please make the figures adults. This is a 13 year old and you know it.

And something I had forgotten during drafting this post, this phenomenon is not girl exclusive!

why is boruto so cut here? i know that 13 year olds can be that muscular, because my former therapist had a 13 year old son who was a bodybuilder and for some reason she was okay with that, but is it still suspicious that, with all these other offenses, Ikemoto’s drawing Boruto with a defined hip line and abs? I think yes. From the neck up this is such a sweet picture of him too.

6. Time to wash your eyes out! The colored splash pages are almost all at maximum saturation. I don’t know why. Often people have different colored versions of the same clothes too, which I think is kind of fun. Very Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

In looking for an example of this I notice it’s died down a little with the most recent chapters.

7. Also like JJBA, the characters on the splash pages, especially Delta, Code and Eida, are often posed like fashion models. I just think that’s neat, esp with the really distinctive fashion going on in this series.

8. Often in fight scenes the entire background turns to motion lines. I don’t actually know how common this is in manga. 

This is the seventh uninterrupted panel of motion line background. There’s one panel with mountain and tree background, then six more with just motion lines.

9. I can’t believe I almost forgot about this; there are lines on almost every page that are just the slightest bit wiggly. It has a pen-drawn feel, which in this world of digital drawing and stabilizer-smoothed lines creates a distinct look. Check out the lines on Code’s sleeve here, and the whole way his hand looks. It’s just a little fucked up!

You can also see it in his eyes (even professional mangaka struggle with the other eye.) Lines are also not the same width from one end to the other, especially thicker lines like glasses. As well, sometimes solid lines will not be filled in all the way.

I think that’s all the thoughts I have right now.

[tavrodeos]

i know tumblr isn’t the place for questions about like ‘who would win x or y’ but this is the place i’ve got. i have been thinking about how the boruto crew will be able to beat daemon and eida (assuming they don’t just become pseudo-citizens like amado) and the most obvious answer i have is shino

1. if someone is not in the same room as eida, they don’t get affected by her powers, seeing as naruto and sasuke didn’t have any ill effects when they were very close to her but separated by the door. if they trap eida somewhere again shino could put his bugs in there and drain her chakra if they don’t want to kill her, or poison her if they do.

2. even if he does come under eida’s influence, i think that if he told his bugs beforehand to attack her they could probably carry out that order against his will.

and as for daemon, his reflection powers revolve around intent. things will get reflected if there is an intent to kill. if the intent was to make him pass out by taking enough of his chakra, it might not be reflected at all, or again it might make shino pass out but the bugs could act on their own volition. and as for his taijutsu, i don’t believe even as fast and strong as he is he could squish all the bugs before they have time to take his chakra.

maybe it’s a topic for another time to talk about how much chakra the sibs have, considering they don’t use any ninjutsu but seem to be able to have their dojutsu on for any length of time (assuming daemon’s reflection powers are dojutsu and that’s why his eyes look like that) but i feel like shino could take them out. at least long enough to put them back in suspended animation or whatever was the deal was before code freed them

[tavrodeos]

i want to think that the abundance of piercings in kara is about finding a little bit of self-expression and bodily autonomy in a place where there is none otherwise

the ones who don’t have them are kashin koji, who has no interest in bodily autonomy, and boro and amado, who exercise their autonomy in other ways (hiding eida and daemon, getting up and leaving, putting self-destruct codes in all his creations). and daemon doesn’t have piercings but he is five and he might just not be interested in them yet

but kawaki, code, delta and eida are experimented-on-to-hell capsule kids who would want the little bit of control involved with stabbing a pretty little bauble through their ear or their eyebrow. eida is the outlier here, bc as she is now she seems like she’s used to being in control of everything all the time, but she might not have always been like that.

and if you wanted to include jigen in this, you could have him threatening isshiki with a new hole in his head every time he does something stupid with his body, eventually running out of possible ear piercings and getting others on his body and other modifications (no face piercings tho he would look too much like pain)

[tavrodeos]

this is the UGLIEST OUTFIT I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE AND IT MATERIALIZED ON HIM BETWEEN THE LAST PAGE AND THIS ONE!! JUSTS UDYKJGNJKH FUCK 

my brain just fucikgin caught on fire when i scrolled down and he was wearing the mackelmore jacket from thriftshop but worse and low-waisted pajama pants... fucking gghfnjg no wonder kaguya tried to fucking kill this guy IF THIS IS HOW HE DRESSED