Btw, if you saw Girl Funko's mouth is a little bit green, that's because she ate green tea cookie which Usagi-Haji made. And don't worry, about that blood from Lars, it's juice his juice. While Yana is tea.
Since I have been satirising this series, I’m gonna talk about a few things I hate seeing in Gacha Life videos and stuff:
1) The Hated Child
If the Gacha comic I was making wasn’t already a good enough indicator, The Hated Child vids are one of my biggest pet hates. What happens in this video? Well, a mother gives birth to two or more children. She takes a look at each baby and suddenly decides that she hates one of them. From the moment it is born. Throughout the entirety of the hated child’s childhood, they are abused and tortured by their parents and siblings. Eventually, either through sheer luck or pity, one or more of the following occurs to compensate for the child’s suffering:
- The Hated Child becomes royalty.
- The Hated Child gains superpowers and/or becomes a hybrid.
- The Hated Child becomes popular at school.
- The Hated Child finds love.
- The Hated Child’s family realises their mistakes and atone for their wrongdoing.
Why do I hate this trope: It’s completely unrealistic, overdone and throws logic right out of the window.
What to do instead: Make a more realistic story about child abuse! Maybe the parents are already assholes and all the kids are abused. Maybe the Hated Child has a proper disability (e.g. Autism, ADHD) and the parents are ableist little shits and/or don’t know how to take proper care of a disabled child. Maybe the child themself is an asshole and had it coming. Maybe the parents don’t even know how to take care of a child and/or cannot afford to raise one. There are many cases of child abuse irl and although they are unfortunate, you can take inspiration from them.
2) Text-to-speech
This isn’t something I have covered as of yet in my comic, but I plan on doing so with my animatic. Text to speech is when you put a bunch of words into a generator and it generates audio of a person speaking the words. Since the good old days of Go!Animate, this has been very grating.
Why I hate this trope:
- The result is an emotionless robot speaking. It cannot convey emotion. It cannot sound happy, sad or angry.
- TTS cannot deal with misspelt words, drawn-out words (e.g. “NOOOOOOOO!”) or made up words, opting to spell them instead.
- TTS voices can often sound unfitting of the character they are used for, possibly due to a lack of variety.
What to do instead: Do the voice acting yourself! Many decives nowadays are more than capable of recording your voice! Find a quiet room to record your voice. You can twist your voice to sound like someone else, or put on an accent. If you’re that unconfident in your voice acting skills, combine grunts, shouts and giggles with speech bubbles or subtitles a la Glitchtale, OFF and Fire Emblem. Or don’t use voices at all. My animatic teaser already uses voice acting done by ME.
3) One frame for walking
What I mean by this is only using the first frame of the walkcycle to indicate a character is walking, like this:
Why I hate this trope: It’s just very lazy and sloppy. It looks awful.
What to do instead: Use all four frames of the walkcycle! It’s not THAT hard. It only adds a few clicks to the video-making process!
4) Speech bubbles cropped out
Speech bubbles, since they appear directly above a character’s head, can end up being cut out by the view if the character is too big, too high up on the screen, or if there are too many words.
Why I hate this trope: Should be obvious. It makes things harder to read and understand.
What to do instead: Make sure your speech bubbles can fit within the screen. If you can’t do that, adjust your character, speech bubbles, or get rid of the speech bubbles and either use your own speech bubbles that you draw yourself, or use subtitles.
5) People believing the most ridiculous of lies.
Imagine being as school as normal... but then out of nowhere, your best friend runs up to you, accuses you of attempting to murder some random person you didn’t even know, and immediately stops being your best friend. You ask them where they even got that from and they say “BECAUSE [insert school bully’s name here] SAYS SO!”
Why I hate this trope: Any sane person would take such things with a pinch of salt. An example using FE Fates characters: If Azama told Hinoka that Ryoma tried to murder Tsubaki, would she believe him? No, she would slap him hard in the face and say “My brother wouldn’t do that!”.
What to do instead: Use more subtle rumours. Something that is easy to believe, and maybe have the bully use a mole, someone who is close to the victim, to deliver the message so it’s more believable.
6) Slow walking/acting.
Yeah, you’re probably familiar with this one.
Why I hate this trope: It wastes time, makes the story boring and I just want to scream “GET TO THE GODDAMN POINT”
What to do instead: Use a variable framerate! Even the most basic of movie makers should allow you to make pictures show for a mere 1/10th of a second, which should be good enough to get an okay animation. Shotcut, for example, has a default 30fps video, which should be MORE than enough to make a decently-paced Gacha vid.
7) Assuming that every student with glasses is a NERD.
...Because apparently, glasses = nerd. Looks tell all.
Why I hate this trope: Not all people who wear glasses are actually nerds. Some people might NEED glasses to actually have a normal fucking life! What about short-sighted people? My mum wasn’t even good at school and she always has to wear glass because she is short-sighted. My dad isn’t much better - being the long-sighted person that he is, he needs glass to read things. Reading isn’t nerdy, it gives you essential fucking information! Like how to cook a meal in the oven! Gods!
What to do instead: Use better, more realistic indicators about whether someone is a nerd.
8) Self-defence being a crime
Imagine that two kids decide to physically bully you. You fight back. You win. Guess what happens next? The principal gets involved and calls your parents, who ground you for a week, treating your reasoning of self-defence as a pathetic excuse.
Why I hate this trope: You’re basically being forced to choose between being beaten to within half an inch of your life and being punished to within half an inch of your sanity.
What to do instead: Have people listen to the person who beat the others up. They should hear their side of the story and consider it. If you really want the defender to suffer, give them a lighter punishment than if they started the fight themselves. If you really want to paint this person as the bad guy, have them obviously go too far (such as bashing up someone smaller than them who was simply poking them with a stick).
9) Skimpy clothing.
Sometimes the girls tend to wear skimpy clothing, as in, wearing short shorts or baring their midriffs, even as students in school.
Why I hate this trope: They’re usually KIDS, FFS! And THIS IS IN A GAME MADE FOR KIDS! Also makes no sense considering the school’s dress code - even on non-uniform days, my school NEVER allowed skimpy clothing.
What to do instead: Show feminity ANOTHER way! Dresses, skirts, pink and frills are just a mere handful of ways to convey this, or failing that, use feminine facial features such as pretty hair and eyelashes. If you really must show some skin, save it for outside of school: At home or at the beach are some acceptable places to expose oneself. But don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean that everyone has to dress like Muslims, though.
10) No one noticing a character’s problems.
In other words, people so blinded by lies and/or hate that they actually cannot tell that someone is being abused, bullied or suffering in any other way.
Why I hate this trope: Because it makes everyone look like unempathetic assholes and only serves as a plot device for the character’s suffering.
What to do instead: Have the character push people away, or be unable to recieve help due to circumstances other than no one offering it to them.
