kradeelav | (no subject)

it's not *bad*, but i've been in an increasingly weird mood/vibe the last few years where i feel like i'm actively repelled by anything creative by a larger studio and up these days, and have just resigned myself to Making the shit i want to see for the rest of my life, and not expecting it in the wild elsewhere (unless if i dig into pre-2005 media).

(this may be part of the gamedev spree lately. at this point i'm genuinely more confident at actually making stuff i'd enjoy than i would be with other studios creating it.)

like I had a moment where i saw chainsaw man fanart and went all '...........yeah what happened to that? that was all over my dash about six months ago'. the way i watch/get into shows and fandom, i gotta .... be convinced into it, for at least a year. i gotta sniff the fandom contents like a red wine and see how it ages. and i didn't think i was picky, but while i liked original trigun, i watched the first episode of stampede and... yea no. nope. :v actively repelled by the body language in there lul. same thing with fire emblem engage.

there's specific story gimmicks, visual tropes, and vibe-y things more popular now that i could comment on that are strong repellants, but i feel like that'd be missing the forest for the trees, and would be bitching for the sake of it.

trying to think the last studio creative work i was actively into for a while (ie making fanart for WHILE the fandom was still red hot) .......... mass effect 3? oh! detroit: become human, that was probably my last Fandom. the slash fanart/fic for that fandom was sublime as hell. (kotor2 doesn't count since chronologically that was released before. and imo 3Houses doesn't count either since it was more my metaphorical balls being eaten by hubert for all of 6 months, and then abruptly dropped like a hot potato. ~~i was also in a decently bad brain depression episode right around the time 3Houses released, so~~.)

i feel like i've seen a lot of creators slightly older than me get into this kind of mood in their mid 30's and now i'm wondering if that's just a natural age progression thing. :v lua's post on Ao3's founders and their culture also kinda sparked this.

/grumpy lady yell at cloud etc.

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From:

corpsebrigadier

I do think there's something to it being an age thing. In recent years, the way a lot of media is always gunning for immediate/easy commercial success makes it easy to be cynical and cautious about new fandoms if you remember when things were a little more slow and a little less ephemeral--back when we weren't subject to an endless cycle of less-than-successful things being cancelled and successful IPs being rebooted. If you grow up with a sense that everything comes fast, is rapidly bingeable, and will quickly vanish, however, I think it might be easier to get excited about something new a big company puts out.

From:

kradeelav

you know, you raise a lot of excellent points there! tv series releasing all in one go without allowing fandom to "breathe" in between, netflix opting to release movies direct to digital without the run-around in the theatres as part of the hype ... fandom's like a complex plant organisim that needs the time to grow and flower and be cultivated. here's hoping the pendelum will swing back :o

From:

amado1

DBH, that makes sense. There's something off-kilter about it: unpolished metaphors, shallow but intriguing worldbuilding, a gameplay mode that DOESN'T appeal to a lot of gamers -- very story- and character-focused with plenty of gaps for fandom to fill ... all of those elements combine to make it strangely compelling. Other games are better, less problematic, more fun to play, but I couldn't care less.

there's specific story gimmicks, visual tropes, and vibe-y things more popular now that i could comment on that are strong repellants, but i feel like that'd be missing the forest for the trees, and would be bitching for the sake of it.

Consider this though >:) I want to hear the bitching >:)

From:

kradeelav

bwahahaha, you know, when you put it that way with DBH, makes total sense in hindsight. plus a slash ship where one of the gents is much older and not your svelte bishie and yet way more charismatic for it. (doesn't surprise me that you'd be familiar with that game too, in a good way! ;> reminds me of our shared love of old SW:EU in a lot of ways. there's a lot clunky and dated with it but that's part of the appeal in terms of transformative fandom work.)

LOL, i love you want to hear the goss there too. let me see, general visual tropes/repellants:

* body language! i mentioned this being the key point to trigun stampede that put me off a bit. the cgi animation was odd but i could have gotten used to it; the real kicker was that the gestures of the characters felt very ... stereotypically recycled, maybe? genshin-impact-anime-era-cliche? female characters doing the cutesy-arm-wiggle-jump, also there was a sense of, forgive me if i word this wrong, much more rigid gender signifiers in stampede - some of the old trigun female characters looked positively mannish/androgynous (in a sense i even try to emulate IRL), and vice versa with the dudes. i'm all for stampede transmasc vash headcanons (and think that's a great way to subvert those vibes), but it's a whole-cast limitation that grates on the gears a bit. (I feel bad because a good friend recc'ed it to me, and they have a point with it going full hardcore with some truly delicious brocon and body horror but just. augh, i think i'd rather read the manga.)

*TT/vtubers/genshin impact/fire emblem engage have this similar language with character design where it's, WILDLY disparate color and fashion choices (engage being particularly bad where one character has a ballroom gown despite being a .... war.... lol, the protag has like, half bright blue, half bright red floor length hair to the point it looks like a toothpaste brand). i can't believe i'm bitching about weird hair colors, like, you know my anime husbandu has silver-blue hair LOL, but i do feel like there was generally a vague 'this has to be ever so slightly practical or at least Make Sense with what the character's doing'. like you could read what the character does as a career/class choice at first glance, versus genshin characters who i'm all 'what are you LOL, you all look the same' (bard, fighter/etc vs just a bunch a twinks lol.)

*oh the twinks thing! love a good shota (especially if they're being wrecked), but there's a sense of, the beauty of age and maturity getting stripped from these character designs? the "modern anime characters are like pugs, where are their noses??" meme's half in jest but like, it's a little of that. where's the jawlines, where's the wrinkles, where's the variety in body types so it's not so sameface? (i wonder if this has to do with the rise of cutting corners on 3D body models, since it's easier to copypaste from the same model.

most of those are visual tropes, felt like i could speak to them more confidentally as an artist, but i bet we could trade notes on similar story tropes. ;)

From:

amado1

See, I'm not familiar with this show at all, but I knew I would enjoy hearing your criticisms XD Artists/writers just critique different and it's ALWAYS enriching to hear about.

I have a tiny folder of Hank/Connor fanart saved to my PC lmao. I missed the heyday of the fandom because I didn't have any kind of gaming system! But I watched Let's Plays of that one and "Until Dawn," the sort of similar butterfly effect horror game that came out around the same time. I forgot to mention another fun element, which is that the worldbuilding allows for so much fucked up tragedy and gore in fic. You can easily go places that a lot of canons don't allow for. In that sense it's really similar to Danny Phantom and Hellsing XD

From:

kradeelav

Oh gosh, absolutely yes for the worldbuilding in DBH allowing some truly tasty and crunchy horror, ditto with the idea of swappable limbs and body parts and that even being considered the norm. You know as well as I do how ripe it is for some delicious power dynamics ~

Will have to check out Until Dawn too! Somehow that one completely passed the radar but it's fun revisiting old gems. :)

From:

linky

I can relate to this feeling too, I've always joked about (in terms of anime) how me watching anything seasonal is a very rare occurrence these days. But this can also apply to various media. There's only been a small handful of currently made things that I want to check out, but I'm very picky. ...Though with tokusatsu I am watching what is currently airing! XD It's funny how brains work like that, but there is something I find refreshing about currently airing toku in that it's episodes air weekly. It gives ample time to theorize between episodes and talk about it with friends.

Which you don't see a lot of in the current media landscape right now. Everything is all a stream drop and binge-to-catch-up (and hope it doesn't get canceled, but it usually does 9 times out of 10) sort of deal now. I think this feeling feels especially fresh to me since a lot of the media I've engaged with in the past 10-ish years already ended by the time I got to it.

But outside of this I'm not really into fandoms of currently airing media except for said very rare exceptions, and even then my level of creation for those fandoms, besides currently airing toku, is a lot smaller in comparison. I'm just naturally drawn to pre-2000s anime/manga. (But there are early 2000s things I hold dearly to me.)

I really felt that with trigun too... I semi recently saw and loved the 90s original to death, but stampede just doesn't draw me in. I haven't seen an episode yet but there's just some sort of barrier that's preventing me from wanting to check it out. I can't really put it all into words for myself but there definitely is something in a lot of whats currently being made being a natural repellent. And also just hearing a ton of hype about something also is a very strong repellent for me too. Its why I haven't touched the currently airing Gundam anime.

From:

kradeelav

you're so right on with that fear of the current shows being canceled, on top of everything else; it's like there's no time for shows to "grow the beard" as it were. Thinking of how MASH, for some people, only found its groove around S4, let alone some star trek opinions.

All the same it's so lovely to see there's somebody else that feels the same way. <3 putting toku on my watch list as well, I've really enjoyed your enthusiasm from afar there! :)

From:

sodium_amytal

same though? It could be an age thing, combined with an exhaustion of keeping up with the fast-paced cycle of media nowadays. If you don't binge a show within a month of its release, you're out of the loop and people have stopped talking about it by then, probably. Or you get invested and it gets cancelled and never gets a second season.

there's specific story gimmicks, visual tropes, and vibe-y things more popular now that i could comment on that are strong repellants,
OH that's a mood. I'd also like to hear them, seconding a comment upthread.

Idk if I can really describe it but for me there's this sad sense of transparency in why things are made today (optics, "let's churn out a crappy sequel/reboot so we can keep the rights to this otherwise ancient franchise", "hello fellow kids") that just turn me off of things. Even the way a show/movie/game is praised can turn me off if I'm not already interested or invested in it ("much representation!!! very wow!!!" "omg so ~feminist~ so ~progressive~"), even if the piece of media itself isn't necessarily marketed that way or catering to those demographics (I enjoy diverse media, but there's just a ~vibe~ when something was made primarily to *be* diverse and progressive rather than tell a good story or create meaningful characters beyond their race/gender/sexual orientation).

So I end up gravitating toward older media, which, while it has its problems, generally feels more authentic and artist-driven than the focus-group-driven, "charts charts charts!" stuff we're getting lately. Like, sure, stuff got remade and rebooted a lot in the '90s and '00s (10 Things I Hate About You, The Addams Family movies, the Flintstones live-action films, Romeo + Juliet, The Fugitive, etc), and there are tons of acclaimed movies based on books (The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump), but idk they just feel *better*? Like they were made because someone really cared about the source material or thought "yeah this would be a good movie" and wasn't just pumping out a film based on whatever BookTok is raving about at the moment?

I can't speak on anime/manga, since the most recent anime I've seen was Attack on Titan back when it was first dubbed, but the absolute insanity of modern anime fandoms has pretty much turned me off from the genre entirely.

idk maybe i'm just an old man yelling at cloud. I do like some modern things, but I enjoy my old media bubble. (Maybe I'm drawn to things that have less of a fandom presence because of past harassment? who knows)

From:

kradeelav

You raise a suuuuper good point with the optics of why something being made being especially apparent these days with reboots and all that. Was just reading an article last night about how as the years go on in the last two decades, the less and less original films and movies make it to the box office. Definitely an issue, and unfortunately one with no easy fix and a lot of reasons.

(And oh boy, also feel you with leaning towards old/in hibernation fandoms since they tend to attract less harassers and/or skew older in age. they can have their own issues but sometimes that peace is worth it all.)

And haha, you asked re: visual tropes that are repellents, copying a few off the top of my head:

*body language! i mentioned this being the key point to trigun stampede that put me off a bit. the cgi animation was odd but i could have gotten used to it; the real kicker was that the gestures of the characters felt very ... stereotypically recycled, maybe? genshin-impact-anime-era-cliche? female characters doing the cutesy-arm-wiggle-jump, also there was a sense of, forgive me if i word this wrong, much more rigid gender signifiers in stampede - some of the old trigun female characters looked positively mannish/androgynous (in a sense i even try to emulate IRL), and vice versa with the dudes. i'm all for stampede transmasc vash headcanons (and think that's a great way to subvert those vibes), but it's a whole-cast limitation that grates on the gears a bit. (I feel bad because a good friend recc'ed it to me, and they have a point with it going full hardcore with some truly delicious brocon and body horror but just. augh, i think i'd rather read the manga.)

*TT/vtubers/genshin impact/fire emblem engage have this similar language with character design where it's, WILDLY disparate color and fashion choices (engage being particularly bad where one character has a ballroom gown despite being a .... war.... lol, the protag has like, half bright blue, half bright red floor length hair to the point it looks like a toothpaste brand). i can't believe i'm bitching about weird hair colors, like, you know my anime husbandu has silver-blue hair LOL, but i do feel like there was generally a vague 'this has to be ever so slightly practical or at least Make Sense with what the character's doing'. like you could read what the character does as a career/class choice at first glance, versus genshin characters who i'm all 'what are you LOL, you all look the same' (bard, fighter/etc vs just a bunch a twinks lol.)

*oh the twinks thing! love a good shota (especially if they're being wrecked), but there's a sense of, the beauty of age and maturity getting stripped from these character designs? the "modern anime characters are like pugs, where are their noses??" meme's half in jest but like, it's a little of that. where's the jawlines, where's the wrinkles, where's the variety in body types so it's not so sameface? (i wonder if this has to do with the rise of cutting corners on 3D body models, since it's easier to copypaste from the same model.

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