… and people get mad at me when I say this now bog standard, seemingly literally standardized anime art style is uninspired, boring, and fundamentally problematic.
I don’t hate anime, but it takes a really good story and unique characters to actually drag me in. The art style is an immediate turn off for me.
Same thing with some western animation. If it looks like the animator learned their art by tracing Family Guy, but with a slightly different nose, I won’t watch it.
I mean, fair enough, you understand your own tastes, I just personally am not generally turned off by cartoons.
But yes you bring up another good point re Western Animation, which is that much of it has also homogenized, more or less around the Family Guy art style.
I find that to be even worse frankly, but that probably has more to do with my visceral disdain for the entire show.
Out of curiosity, do you have a preferred art style in video games? Or like, a set of acceptable ones, and then a set of ‘nope’ styles?
I am of course also presuming you play a fair number of video games, which could also be incorrect.
Anyway, I totally understand what you mean in the sense of… some particular art styles are just so unappealing/off-putting, that whatever media it is that they are in, it would have to outperform a similar bit of media in a different style, in other aspects, to roughly be counted as equivalently enjoyable.
I guess we just have different sets or categories of those styles that are off-putting to each of us.
Funny you bring that up, as I avoided expounding too much.
It will sound terribly xenophobic, but I also avoid JRPGs and interactive novels for the most part. I played a few back in the nes/SNES era but found them all to be kind of copy/paste jobs. It could also be that I find turn based combat boring. I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there, but I don’t really have the time.
I’m somewhat of a Luddite and enjoy low res pixel graphics, or hand drawn painterly stuff (think Disco Elysium).
I also mostly play puzzle/mystery oriented stuff. Old school style point and clicks, Myst-likes.
Honestly, I find the gameplay of older JRPGs generally insufferable as well.
Give me Chrono Trigger or at least Golden Sun, where we have a bit more complex and interesting actual game mechanics, as well as very very good plot lines, characters, soundtracks, etc.
But uh yeah, sounds like you are probably about 10 years older than me? And/or just … don’t really play too many games?
I dunno, thats the ‘vibe’ I’m getting, but hey I also think Disco is phenomenal.
I dunno uh, ever seen or played Windwaker?
That game was pretty controversial when it came out, for shifting Zelda into a very cartoony art style…
… but now its generally remembered as a very unique and basically timeless art style, that a lot of people sort of use as a foundation for their own styles, when trying to make a game.
Yeah, I’m an old bastard. I had a stretch from around 2000-2012 where I barely played anything aside from Counter Strike and Team Fortress.
Chrono Trigger was great, I’ll admit. As you said, great characters and engaging gameplay, not just tapping A and healing occasionally.
I played the first two gens of Pokemon when they came out, skipped a bunch and returned for Arceus and Scarlet. I’m sounding like more of a hypocrite with every sentence. Heh.
Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and try a Persona game or a Final Fantasy that was released this millennium.
DBZ was definitely a thing when I was a kid. I liked the character design, and the huge attacks were cool, but the way that they stretched out thin scripts with repetitive, pointless, easy to animate dialogue. I understand that they did this because they had to crank out an episode every week or so. I gave up on it the third time half the episode was a hero sweating in a rocky canyon with minutes of internal dialog with the only animation being eye twitches and the occasional camera shift.
I probably would have been more into it if I was a year or two younger. I also briefly got into Power Rangers the first season it aired, but aged out of it immediately. Like I said, I’m old.
I get the fandom for the various things I’ve nit-picked on, and don’t judge those that enjoy them.
In conclusion, Parasite Eve was rad as hell and should have had two sequels and a remaster.
I also completely agree that the way DBZ stretched out episodes was quite annoying, but…!
I would suggest you maybe look into something like Xenoverse 1 or 2, if you want to basically play through a kind of alt-history version of DBZ, with all of its uh, greatest hits, and much less filler.
I loved Power Rangers as a kid, and this is basically cementing that I was quite close with my guess that you’re about a decade older than me, haha!
And finally, yes, I also agree that Parasite Eve was a very interesting game that deserved more love, but at this point, I’d guess you’d say its roughly the video game equivalent of a cult classic.
I also feel that way about Bungie’s nearly entirely forgotten game ‘Oni’.
Its… essentially a better ‘You are Motoko Kusanagi from GitS’ game than the actual official GitS games, at least in terms of actual gameplay.
Unrelated: did you know that the term “bog standard” comes from the term “box standard” which means, essentially, vanilla. No modifications or additions, just the basic version in the box. This used to be on the boxes for things people bought.
Now it basically means the same thing but to a none native speaker bog standard would likely not make much sense, where box standard has the context in the term.
BOG: “Board of Government”. Apparently the durability and other characteristics of toilet seats had to be standardized by a board, otherwise people would suffer accidents while on the throne. Thus, we got the BOG Standard.
… and yes, English is a ridiculous nonsense language, we can and routinely do things like verb(ify) nouns, we have tons of idioms and slang that well… barely even make sense to many native speakers… we have tons of homophones like threw through, their there they’re… etc…
yeah ok but boring and problematic are two different things.
when you say “anime art style is […] fundamentally problematic” i assume you mean “it caters too much to the male gaze”.
i’m sick of people saying “anime is creepy because it displays women in a way that are attractive to men”. typically, it gets connected to “patriarchy” and “creepiness” through the lens of mainstream social discourse today.
i say the only damage done by creeps is if they are in real life and pester other people around them. people are not gonna change their nature. creeps are gonna be creeps. but at least you can shift them to the internet, to fictional and non-personal media, away from real life. and that’s a good thing, and only possible if anime continues to exist.
So, I don’t think that it ‘centers the male gaze’.
I barely even know what that actually means, these days.
I’m not generally worried by the idea of trying to convey people who are attractive, in their own right, when viewed by men or women or anything else.
You can do that in a bad way via characterization or plot or whatever, but I’m just talking about the art style of the drawing.
I do find a lot of the relationship archetypes/dynamics in a lot of anime problematic, but I’m again trying to just talk about the art style.
I’m also not saying that like, “all anime presents bad socialization examples and standards.”
Sure, some kinda do, some really do, but there’s tons of great anime that doesn’t, that doesn’t showcase that, or if it does, that character is bsd because they do that, or its a flaw, where it is good when they overcome it.
It is just a fact of human beings that we basically all judge each other as beautiful or not, to some extent, so… it would be ridiculous to just completely eliminate that from shows.
What I do think this style does, for both boys and girls, though the effect is usually much worse on girls…
Is that it fundamentally promotes unrealistic beauty / self-image standards, if you don’t actually have a parent explaining some of this kind of stuff to them.
If you had an actual human being, approaching any of the body forms in OP image, well you are basically descibing an anorexic person.
Well ok, other than what is here labelled ‘full figured’, which, if you just replaced the head with a human proportioned head, would be probably what I’d call a skinny or skinnier person, but probably not so skinny that its like, de facto medically concerning.
But this is still bad, because now, if you are in reality skinny, you may think you are basically chubby.
Its exactly the same critique I’d have of older Barbie dolls.
Also, real people have noses, anime characters basically do not.
You should not be ashamed to have a nose.
I really do think that a lot of more vulnerable people get some kind of body dysmorphia complex from being overly immersed in this, if they don’t have a parent who like, checks in on them from time to time, actually explains that some elements of a characters style are reasonable to try and emulate, others are very unrealistic and unreasonable to try and emulate.
Girls compete so, so much amongst themselves over who is the prettiest, most desirable, and if you have unrealistic standards for that, it can create self image problems, especially in households that already are not doing a great job of raising their kids.
There, that’s the angle by which I find this style ‘fundamentally problematic’.
Not really even a feminist, social dynamics angle, more of just a healthy young mind / child development angle.
Yeah, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread that is now too complex for me to keep track of:
An actually distinct art style is usually, not always, but usually, an indicator that many other aspects of the manga or anime will be of higher quality, try to do something more unique, or less common.
I don’t think “people get mad” at that, so much as they get mad at you saying “turn off the anime, I hate the anime, don’t you realize everything in anime looks the same” when someone else is trying to enjoy something.
I mean, I don’t broadly say ‘all anime is bad, i hate all anime’.
I very much like a lot of anime, some of my favorite characters and plot lines in all of fiction are from animes and mangas.
It… just seems that a lot if anime has largely stylistically homogenized lately.
And a lot of that is because most anime is produced by a well oiled, unforgiving capitalist machine that optimizes for profit, not what I would call real creativity.
The exceptions where that is not the case… animes with more distinctive visual styles… tend to be a pretty decent indicator the overall show is better, in aspects beyond just art style.
Oh, and, I am always going to, on at least one level, judge people based on their taste in art, and also judge art based on itself.
Its fine, broadly speaking, for people to like things I don’t.
Its also fine, broadly speaking, for me to think that people who enjoy art that I find boring, uninteresting, … to themselves be boring and uninteresting, to having boring and uninteresting taste.
Its not really that hard to walk the line between objective critique and analysis, and subjective preference… if you are honest with yourself, and take care to deliniate these things when talking about them.
… and people get mad at me when I say this now bog standard, seemingly literally standardized anime art style is uninspired, boring, and fundamentally problematic.
I don’t hate anime, but it takes a really good story and unique characters to actually drag me in. The art style is an immediate turn off for me.
Same thing with some western animation. If it looks like the animator learned their art by tracing Family Guy, but with a slightly different nose, I won’t watch it.
Huh!
I mean, fair enough, you understand your own tastes, I just personally am not generally turned off by cartoons.
But yes you bring up another good point re Western Animation, which is that much of it has also homogenized, more or less around the Family Guy art style.
I find that to be even worse frankly, but that probably has more to do with my visceral disdain for the entire show.
Out of curiosity, do you have a preferred art style in video games? Or like, a set of acceptable ones, and then a set of ‘nope’ styles?
I am of course also presuming you play a fair number of video games, which could also be incorrect.
Anyway, I totally understand what you mean in the sense of… some particular art styles are just so unappealing/off-putting, that whatever media it is that they are in, it would have to outperform a similar bit of media in a different style, in other aspects, to roughly be counted as equivalently enjoyable.
I guess we just have different sets or categories of those styles that are off-putting to each of us.
Funny you bring that up, as I avoided expounding too much.
It will sound terribly xenophobic, but I also avoid JRPGs and interactive novels for the most part. I played a few back in the nes/SNES era but found them all to be kind of copy/paste jobs. It could also be that I find turn based combat boring. I’m sure there are plenty of good ones out there, but I don’t really have the time.
I’m somewhat of a Luddite and enjoy low res pixel graphics, or hand drawn painterly stuff (think Disco Elysium).
I also mostly play puzzle/mystery oriented stuff. Old school style point and clicks, Myst-likes.
Honestly, I find the gameplay of older JRPGs generally insufferable as well.
Give me Chrono Trigger or at least Golden Sun, where we have a bit more complex and interesting actual game mechanics, as well as very very good plot lines, characters, soundtracks, etc.
But uh yeah, sounds like you are probably about 10 years older than me? And/or just … don’t really play too many games?
I dunno, thats the ‘vibe’ I’m getting, but hey I also think Disco is phenomenal.
I dunno uh, ever seen or played Windwaker?
That game was pretty controversial when it came out, for shifting Zelda into a very cartoony art style…
… but now its generally remembered as a very unique and basically timeless art style, that a lot of people sort of use as a foundation for their own styles, when trying to make a game.
Yeah, I’m an old bastard. I had a stretch from around 2000-2012 where I barely played anything aside from Counter Strike and Team Fortress.
Chrono Trigger was great, I’ll admit. As you said, great characters and engaging gameplay, not just tapping A and healing occasionally.
I played the first two gens of Pokemon when they came out, skipped a bunch and returned for Arceus and Scarlet. I’m sounding like more of a hypocrite with every sentence. Heh.
Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and try a Persona game or a Final Fantasy that was released this millennium.
Hey you know Chrono Trigger!
Ever heard of maybe… Dragon Ball (Z)?
Same artist, at least for the concept and promotional art, character portraits.
RIP Akira Toriyama.
DBZ was definitely a thing when I was a kid. I liked the character design, and the huge attacks were cool, but the way that they stretched out thin scripts with repetitive, pointless, easy to animate dialogue. I understand that they did this because they had to crank out an episode every week or so. I gave up on it the third time half the episode was a hero sweating in a rocky canyon with minutes of internal dialog with the only animation being eye twitches and the occasional camera shift.
I probably would have been more into it if I was a year or two younger. I also briefly got into Power Rangers the first season it aired, but aged out of it immediately. Like I said, I’m old.
I get the fandom for the various things I’ve nit-picked on, and don’t judge those that enjoy them.
In conclusion, Parasite Eve was rad as hell and should have had two sequels and a remaster.
I also completely agree that the way DBZ stretched out episodes was quite annoying, but…!
I would suggest you maybe look into something like Xenoverse 1 or 2, if you want to basically play through a kind of alt-history version of DBZ, with all of its uh, greatest hits, and much less filler.
I loved Power Rangers as a kid, and this is basically cementing that I was quite close with my guess that you’re about a decade older than me, haha!
And finally, yes, I also agree that Parasite Eve was a very interesting game that deserved more love, but at this point, I’d guess you’d say its roughly the video game equivalent of a cult classic.
I also feel that way about Bungie’s nearly entirely forgotten game ‘Oni’.
Its… essentially a better ‘You are Motoko Kusanagi from GitS’ game than the actual official GitS games, at least in terms of actual gameplay.
Unrelated: did you know that the term “bog standard” comes from the term “box standard” which means, essentially, vanilla. No modifications or additions, just the basic version in the box. This used to be on the boxes for things people bought.
Now it basically means the same thing but to a none native speaker bog standard would likely not make much sense, where box standard has the context in the term.
BOG: “Board of Government”. Apparently the durability and other characteristics of toilet seats had to be standardized by a board, otherwise people would suffer accidents while on the throne. Thus, we got the BOG Standard.
At least, that I what I heard anecdotally.
I genuinely did not know that.
Makes complete sense though!
… and yes, English is a ridiculous nonsense language, we can and routinely do things like verb(ify) nouns, we have tons of idioms and slang that well… barely even make sense to many native speakers… we have tons of homophones like threw through, their there they’re… etc…
That has been my problem with many Animes for many years. There is a boring sameness in many designs that just drive me away.
everything is fundamentally problematic if you want to see a problem in everything.
Are you implying my tastes are a result of intentional cyncism?
They are not.
I just get bored of looking at the same thing all the time.
Thats not like, an active choice I am making.
yeah ok but boring and problematic are two different things.
when you say “anime art style is […] fundamentally problematic” i assume you mean “it caters too much to the male gaze”.
i’m sick of people saying “anime is creepy because it displays women in a way that are attractive to men”. typically, it gets connected to “patriarchy” and “creepiness” through the lens of mainstream social discourse today.
i say the only damage done by creeps is if they are in real life and pester other people around them. people are not gonna change their nature. creeps are gonna be creeps. but at least you can shift them to the internet, to fictional and non-personal media, away from real life. and that’s a good thing, and only possible if anime continues to exist.
Ah ok.
So, I don’t think that it ‘centers the male gaze’.
I barely even know what that actually means, these days.
I’m not generally worried by the idea of trying to convey people who are attractive, in their own right, when viewed by men or women or anything else.
You can do that in a bad way via characterization or plot or whatever, but I’m just talking about the art style of the drawing.
I do find a lot of the relationship archetypes/dynamics in a lot of anime problematic, but I’m again trying to just talk about the art style.
I’m also not saying that like, “all anime presents bad socialization examples and standards.”
Sure, some kinda do, some really do, but there’s tons of great anime that doesn’t, that doesn’t showcase that, or if it does, that character is bsd because they do that, or its a flaw, where it is good when they overcome it.
It is just a fact of human beings that we basically all judge each other as beautiful or not, to some extent, so… it would be ridiculous to just completely eliminate that from shows.
What I do think this style does, for both boys and girls, though the effect is usually much worse on girls…
Is that it fundamentally promotes unrealistic beauty / self-image standards, if you don’t actually have a parent explaining some of this kind of stuff to them.
If you had an actual human being, approaching any of the body forms in OP image, well you are basically descibing an anorexic person.
Well ok, other than what is here labelled ‘full figured’, which, if you just replaced the head with a human proportioned head, would be probably what I’d call a skinny or skinnier person, but probably not so skinny that its like, de facto medically concerning.
But this is still bad, because now, if you are in reality skinny, you may think you are basically chubby.
Its exactly the same critique I’d have of older Barbie dolls.
Also, real people have noses, anime characters basically do not.
You should not be ashamed to have a nose.
I really do think that a lot of more vulnerable people get some kind of body dysmorphia complex from being overly immersed in this, if they don’t have a parent who like, checks in on them from time to time, actually explains that some elements of a characters style are reasonable to try and emulate, others are very unrealistic and unreasonable to try and emulate.
Girls compete so, so much amongst themselves over who is the prettiest, most desirable, and if you have unrealistic standards for that, it can create self image problems, especially in households that already are not doing a great job of raising their kids.
There, that’s the angle by which I find this style ‘fundamentally problematic’.
Not really even a feminist, social dynamics angle, more of just a healthy young mind / child development angle.
True, my favorite manga all have a distinct art stile. But also a unique style in story telling and pacing.
Yeah, as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread that is now too complex for me to keep track of:
An actually distinct art style is usually, not always, but usually, an indicator that many other aspects of the manga or anime will be of higher quality, try to do something more unique, or less common.
Makes sense. If one is run-of-the-mill budget production, then the other is too. Right?
And at least in most of the better ones, you can feel that the story writer and/or mangaka are with the heart behind it.
Well, I would say this does not work in reverse (converse?).
Show has a fairly standard style?
Total crapshoot, could be great in many ways other than style, could be awful, could be mid.
If all A are also B…
That is not the same as ‘all Not A are also Not B.’
So, if you see a unique style (A), decent chance it is also good in other ways (B).
But, if you don’t see A… that just tells you nothing, really, about B.
It does not mean that B is less likely to be present, simply because A is not present.
I don’t think “people get mad” at that, so much as they get mad at you saying “turn off the anime, I hate the anime, don’t you realize everything in anime looks the same” when someone else is trying to enjoy something.
I mean, I don’t broadly say ‘all anime is bad, i hate all anime’.
I very much like a lot of anime, some of my favorite characters and plot lines in all of fiction are from animes and mangas.
It… just seems that a lot if anime has largely stylistically homogenized lately.
And a lot of that is because most anime is produced by a well oiled, unforgiving capitalist machine that optimizes for profit, not what I would call real creativity.
The exceptions where that is not the case… animes with more distinctive visual styles… tend to be a pretty decent indicator the overall show is better, in aspects beyond just art style.
Oh, and, I am always going to, on at least one level, judge people based on their taste in art, and also judge art based on itself.
Its fine, broadly speaking, for people to like things I don’t.
Its also fine, broadly speaking, for me to think that people who enjoy art that I find boring, uninteresting, … to themselves be boring and uninteresting, to having boring and uninteresting taste.
Its not really that hard to walk the line between objective critique and analysis, and subjective preference… if you are honest with yourself, and take care to deliniate these things when talking about them.
You are more than your consumer preferences.
Tourist detected, opinion rejected.