kokkuri3 replied to your post “Would you mind sharing your thoughts on the symbolism behind the VnC...”
Do you think that her left arm, specifically, be bound has any particular significance to it? Mochizuki's ABSOLUTELY used left hand symbolism before and especially with what's been recently revealed wrt Domi I wonder if the handedness specifically has any meaning
@kokkuri3 Excellent point! Yes, I do think the left hand being trapped probably has some symbolism to it as well. The left hand is traditionally associated with bad luck and evil. It’s also not the dominant hand for most people (including Domi). If we take both of these things into account, we could see her reaching for Louis as a weakness on her part, but we could also see her attachment as something dark, possibly with a nefarious edge we’re as of yet unaware of (not necessarily coming from Domi, though).
“shuuen is very funny to me bc obviously it’s rooted in very homophobic...”
ShuuenPro is sooo firmly rooted in homophobic tropes but it kind of commits to them too earnestly to come off as homophobic and ends up seeming more like a genuine depiction of what being a gay teenager is like
OH 100% ON THAT i was thinking about this the other day but shuuen would have been a VERY different series if it was a-ya + b-ko running away from those Disgusting Horrible Yanderes but instead the four of them are all just, like, fleshed-out people instead of being offensive tropes. like suzumu made that comment about throwing in CA simply as bait but then continues to show how they genuinely care about each other every chance he can
n, in the games, always speaks at the fastest possible text speed (even faster than the fast setting) and cheren points out how fast he talks when you first meet n. this is a fun detail that gets overlooked in both fan and official content and also reason no. a billion that n is autistic, bc weird speech patterns amirite
kokkuri3replied to your post“every time i publicly complain about an artist that isn’t japanese but...”
No I want to see your long post about this this is interesting
Okay this ended up being a lot because this is something i’ve been thinking about a lot so here’s too many words about me being too mad about anime
I first have to preface this by talking about a very deep uncertainty: i don’t know what i’m talking about but i only know what i’m talking about. everything i am about to say is based on what i feel are fundamental truths. everything i am about to say feels so deeply obvious that half the time i spend thinking about this is spent wondering if i’m just running in circles. But also like: every artist i am about to mention here has some level of large, clout-able, mainstream success but like, 0 substantial critique whatsoever(critique that isn’t just: hey check out this artist cuz i like them/we’re collabing), much less critique that even pokes at any of these deeply obvious truths. So i’m stuck here wondering if i’m a crazy person or if like, all the cool epic kids Whose Art I Personally Like already realise this, but like they comprehend it so thoroughly that such a thing doesn’t even need to be said. To some extent, the latter has to be true, cuz like, the Cool Epic Kids don’t usually fuck with a lot of the art i’m about to shit on, so on some level we must realise these same things about this art. But at the same time that kind of doesnt matter? because both possibilities (either that you already think of this in the same way that i do OR that you have a different understanding about what i’m about to talk about) BOTH have to end with the same conclusion: that by the end of this post, it will be deeply obvious that this has been an exercise in running around in circles. this post is the seinfeld of talking about anime.
okay so i get mad about this specific thing a lot but let’s just look at the specific studio that kicked it off today:
and here’s the thing i got mad at for good measure:
Okay so here’s the background info: local singaporean graffiti studio, they really like anime, and they were the source of that one dumb ass screenshot i posted earlier. and like just look at this
this literally just looks like youtube is recommending me a future bass playlist but in real life. This tells me nothing about anything that has ever mattered. This is a math equation. This is just: kitschy faux-retro aesthetics because they’re popular, rendered in a modern cel-shaded style cuz it’s popular, and with katakana thrown in because if cool anime art wasn’t enough to convince you that these guys were hip then maybe some fucking A E S T H E T I C S will. Nothing about this communicates to me that anybody who had any part in the creation of this actually wanted to be here. This goes beyond any idea of like, art competency, or even being good at art. if you want you can change the subject matter, make your art more dynamic, sure:
But even this piece, arguably the studiomoonchild work with the most energy to it, feels completely lifeless. Like yeah, i could say that it’s cuz all of their anime girls have like those weird dead eyes but that’s almost certainly a copout: the simple truth is that this thing and the earlier one with the robot are the exact same piece of art. they are both interchangeable, they both tell me the exact same nothing.
If you like go through all of their work it’s basically the exact same thing through where like everything they do has this exact feeling of “nobody really had to be here”. even the way this art is produced reflects this because studiomoonchild and their contemporaries are all part of the same sycopanthic surge in the popularity of “”legal graffiti”” in singapore that’s all just this problem repeated for infinity. nobody doing legal graffiti in singapore actually really cares. there is so much art that is absolutely nothing other than like, 1. YO IS THIS HIP? 2. YO DOES THIS TOE THE LINE OF BEING EDGY? 3. YO IS THIS IMMEDIATELY SAFE ENOUGH TO NOT ACTUALLY CHALLENGE OR COMMUNICATE ANYTHING? all of this is literally just stock music but with extra steps i don’t want anybody to tell me how much they fucking hate kevin macleod ukeleles while liking this its all the same bro!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But here’s the kicker: studiomoonchild actually has art that pulls away from this i mean look at this!!
it’s definitely still pulling on that same vein of like, youtubebait anime art, but there’s an undeniable sense of PRESENCE that doesn’t exist in any of their other work. It feels like the people who drew this actually WANTED to draw this, and it’s vibrant and fluid in a way that no amount of weird katakana placement and anime lo fi hip hop girl playlist thumbnail type art can convey. AND LIKE even then, it doesn’t shake off the gender thing, where in the world of studiomoonchild, the female subjects can only ever be pretty and silent and cool or cute while the dudes are actually allowed to have flesh in their face, to have big defined noses and cheekbones and laugh lines, and perhaps most importantly, to transcend the flesh by being a cool robot that gets to shoot all the laser beams and like how apparently this is their entire conception of anime. OH WELL we can’t hit it out of the park every time i guess.
CONCLUSION
conventional thinking about art and the way it exists in society suggests that it is better, perhaps even more virtuous, to be technically skilled but stylistically conventional than it is to be unique but unrefined. think about every single “ohhhh i could draw that though???” type comment ever. Like, there’s this buzzfeed draw-off video ive posted about before where hae-joon and jonni phillips redraw superman
the comments are basically what you expect:
this is just two of them but like its sooooo much worse literally every single top comment is some version of shitting on jonni but like heres the thing; all of these bitches will, without a shadow of a doubt, remember jonni’s superman before hae-joons’. A single look at jonni’s superman already communicates so much. we understand that it’s not supposed to be a literal 1:1 depiction of the truth of superman as he appears in the cartoons or comics or movies but rather a rendering of her own emotional truth on the subject of superman: he’s literally just kinda whatever!!! he’s just a strong cool man who wins fights epicly and has all the powers and loves his wife and has Logo That Makes Grown Men Spend 27 Dollars On Mug. Jonni understands this and is able to use this to her advantage, creating this single drawing tgat is apathetic, disdainful, and playful all at once.
You kind of can say the same thing about hae-joon’s art, but you kinda can’t? There’s the same core idea here: that hae-joon also has no strong feelings on superman apart from “i know of him, and i know you know of him”. But the thing is that like: he knows it, but he doesn’t Know it. hae-joon cannot take this fundamental, deeply funny, truth, that one of the biggest fictional characters ever mainly exists as the emotional, narrative, and aesthetic equivalent of white bread, and bring it to its logical conclusion.
@kokkuri3 replied to your post “sad 2 say none of the ph men are himbos bc they are all built like...”
Easily defeated by a hairdryer on high but would willingly and easil.y2 1cause me MASSIVE psychic damage
i point a hairdryer at mr pandorahearts and he flails around like an inflatable man at a car dealership but the rancid vibes he gives off kill me instantly
