Again, no one has to believe the "Graffiti King is Wreck" theory, and maybe it's not true, and that's fine, but this sentiment among the pushback has been bugging me:
"The studio just isn't that creative/they were cutting corners for budget/time/animation constraints etc., reasons, so reusing Wreck's design makes sense." Entirely possible, sure. But also...
Here we have a scene where a bunch of actors who made their own costumes to pretend to be one guy still has some visual diversity. You can see that a couple costumes are at best slight color swaps of each other, and some more closely mimic original E-Soul than others, but there's still some diversity of design. Longer chest pieces, off-center circles, a couple different helmet designs (particularly for the eye shapes), even entirely different color palates when you look at the yellowish-brown and pink one and the white/silver one.
You see this again when we have the final round. Three different designs. And this is ignoring that Yang Cheng's final armor against E-Soul and his armor after he joins MG, and old E-Soul's armor (and he has a couple of those if I remember), are also different. That's at minimum like... eight armor designs? For people all trying to be the same person?
Bug(?) Ctrl Alt Delete is clearly very close to the middle design, just yellow/orange. Again, potentially aping E-Soul. He's not, so far as we know, an actor: he works for MG, and has actual powers (or maybe he's a paid, superpowered actor like Nice and Wreck were). Maybe he also started as one of those E-Soul actors, like Yang Cheng did. Maybe, like folks have speculated, he's the E-Soul lookalike who won the contest, and that's why he looks like this.
Lin Ling's had three costumes - technically four, if you consider his Nice costume falling apart - now. Nice has three, considering he can take his usekh off, and he's got his dancer costume (four if you count his outfit in the flashbacks where he's a child). Smile's had three (his superhero costume, his biker costume, his Fear-dosed costume).
It seems extremely random to me that in a show that has rather different character costume designs (say what you will about character design, the costumes at least are decently different from each other; even though Nice and Wreck, for instance, share design elements, they are visually very easy to tell apart, same with Ms. Blazing Fire and Mr. Matchstick, and even Bowa and Queen, who are also both from the same company and have similarly designed costumes, are easy to tell apart) and so many for just one character, would replicate near exactly one costume design from a character for a different agency with a somewhat different powerset, for no reason other than, what, animator laziness?
Even Bowa and Queen looking similar kind of supports the theory that there is a reason when similarity exists. Bowa and Queen are both top heroes at DOS. But clearly Mickey doesn't have Little Johnny redesign his costume after Little Johnny goes to DOS, and Lucky Cyan's costume doesn't look like Bowa's or Queen's, outside the sort of tabard shirt that she wears resembling Queen's a little, and even then they're from the same company, and it's likely whoever designed their costumes did so intentionally, especially since it's already happened once with Bowa and Queen. If companies like Treeman, MG, and DOS at least sometimes have their heroes mimic each other (within the same company) visually, why does DOS have one of their heroes mimic someone from another company, and not one of their own heroes?
Does the animation studio cut corners? Oh definitely, you can see them copy-pasting certain characters in 3D crowd shots (and as some folks have pointed out, X's glasses keep changing shape). We literally start the story with one guy pretending to be another guy followed by an arc with another guy doing the same thing for a different guy, with a little kid who looks a bit like the first guy. Clearly some of the E-Soul actors are copies, but also they're supposed to be. But something like Wreck's costume, at least as apparently duplicated for Graffiti King, just minus the cape and physical crown, is so weirdly and unnecessarily detailed when, if the goal was corner cutting, they could have gone with something simpler that would have looked different and new (we've got multiple characters who are just dudes in capes with special hats/helmets, it's not like it would have been hard to be different), and most of which wouldn't have been lost to most of the audience who didn't pause the video. But the studio didn't do that. They chose to replicate Wreck's costume.
This is also a studio that actually has designed a lot of extra side characters. I can't say all the designs are the most original things in the world (and one is clearly just a Cardcaptor Sakura reference, but I assume that's intentional), but the costumes don't look identical or near-identical without reason, as with heroes aping E-Soul from MG, or Lin Ling pretending to be Nice. DJ Shindig, Firm Man, Enlighter, Nine, Mr. Matchstick, Vortex, Ah Sheng, the Ruby-Sapphire Masters, Crash, Blankster, Phobiaclone, Magic Shadow... these are all side characters who have rather unique costumes, and what, for whatever reason, the animation studio fumbled real hard in an episode they presented five entirely new character designs for the Ruby-Sapphire Masters, Sparkling, the Constructor, and Dreamy Granny? They screwed up specifically for the one they spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on? Graffiti King is a centerpiece of the extras attacking X and he got the allegedly least amount of work just because the animation crew ran out of steam and creativity in the final episode of the first season? The same studio that stuck that poster of Smile shattering in the first two minutes of episode 1, visually between Lin Ling and Nice, right before Lin Ling sees Nice apparently kill himself?
In a show where they love referencing and interweaving other things, foreshadowing, and teasing fans into coming up with theories and thinking about what's happening? Like with X confirming in Episode 24 that he was the guy who gave that coin to Lucky Cyan when she was singing on the street in Episode 9?
Ah yes, in this superhero show, a genre known for secret identities, reboots, reimaginings, and superpowered people taking on new identities (e.g., nearly every Robin, Ms. Marvel, Bucky, Falcon, Wonder Girl), and generally about public life versus private life and the demands of celebrity and fandom, which involves:
Starting with Guy 1 whom we knew pretty much nothing about seemingly killing himself for no given reason and his agency forcing Guy 2 to pretend to be Guy 1. Guy 2's arc concludes with him becoming himself but also with a new alias.
The first arc with Guys 1 and 2 included a fight with Guy 3 who was holding a fake version of the woman Guy 2 was in love with hostage
A second arc where Guy 4 does stage performances as Guy 5 along with a ton of other actors, and Guy 6 hires some other guys to assassinate Guy 4, but they fuck up by killing Guy 7, and then Guy 4 ultimately killed Guy 5 and takes Guy 5's place, while Guy 6 is revealed to have been some other guy in disguise this whole time
A third arc involves a girl having to fight between living her own life and being pushed into the saint people want her to be, whose best friend struggles with the role he was given as one who brings calamity
A title character who has seemingly one of the few secret identities... who is Graffiti King's nemesis
Yes, that show, which clearly loves fucking around with secret identities and personas, would definitely never have one guy with a secret identity/other identity take on a new one/pretend to be someone else. Yup. Truly impossible. Especially when it seems like a crewmember actually shared some behind-the-scenes stuff that showed that Wreck's original phone profile photo was a purple squiggle arrow, like Graffiti King's main color and squiggly arrow power?
Is there some hidden Wreck lore I'm missing that's making people believe this isn't Wreck? (as someone who adores Wreck, and has searched everywhere, I know of literally nothing that goes against the theory, we truly know very little about him to oppose it). Most of the backlash was before we even knew that Wreck and Graffiti King have different English VAs, and none of the opposition I've seen references that at all. It's just people being mocking about how it's not real, like it's so obvious and self-explanatory. It's just become accepted that it's not true and anyone who believes it is desperate and/or otherwise being ridiculous.
I've seen bad fan theories. I've seen flimsy ones. This is neither of those. That doesn't mean it's true, it just means it lacks a lot of what makes weaker theories more open to not being true.
Is the reason people are against it just that people assume Wreck is dead and that's it? As if the whole idea behind Phobiaclone isn't that he died and Shang De revived him? As if that's not potentially also what happened in some form to Nice, based on his appearance? Do people not know who Red Hood is? Did people sleep on the Young Justice animated series with Roy Harper's story in particular? Or Superboy's? Do people not remember when Robin went to work for Slade in Teen Titans? Did everyone forget one of the better-liked MCU films, Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Most importantly, Li Haoling, To Be Hero X's director, previously worked on another donghua that adapted a book that stars mostly a bunch of characters with secret identities (Heaven Official's Blessing), including the protagonist and love interest, who both have multiple secret identities, which is central to the plot.
I don't know, be coherent in your arguments. I've repeated that I wouldn't be shocked if the theory is wrong, but even the easiest way to "disprove" it is never used, and the rare times people cite "evidence" against it, it's things that are easily explained.
