The industry, over time, found what sold the most merch and kept focusing on that, in a copy-of-a-copy practice that Miyazaki warned about. :miyazaki-laugh:
Bit idea: We become boomers of the anime medium and claim that the CHUDs into the lolis are just normies that only came in when anime became sanitized for westerners.
I could actually see something like this finally getting under their skin.
It's true. A lot of these shows aren't even anything like their source material. They're just commercials to sell merchandise. It's really depressing.
That was always what the industry did and tried to do. In the 70s to early 80s half of all shows were super robot shows with similar designs and stories. Its nothing new. The industry and production situations today are indeed much worse and ready to implode but not because tv animation became more comercialized
Old anime had Moe aesthetic, too, often in works written by women (like Naoko Takeuchi of Sailor Moon or Rumiko Takahashi who did moe characters in the 70s). One of the oldest known Yuri works Sakura Namiki has characters with softened, exaggerated features and an art style that that feels like an illuminated manuscript from the Arts and Crafts movement. And you can see the influence of this softness on yuri works like the Rose of Versailles and Revolutionary Girl Utena.
Harder "adult" looking characters were always a Seinen thing, for boys growing out of Shonen works. But shonen has become basically the "universal" genre that eats up everything else. It's killing yuri by recentering a formerly queer space around a male audience and their tropes, with shoujo and josei magazines going out of business or being absorbed into their shonen/seinen counterparts. Male artists borrowing moe art styles from their female inspirations use the style to infantilize their subjects for the male gaze.
Rather than writing stories about female power, subversion of gender roles, or even just a story about a girl challenging a boy to grow up (as Takahashi tended to do), new Moe stories simply write girls as objects to be visually enjoyed, with very little complexity otherwise, or having their complexity talked down by the everyboy protagonist.
Moe style is still extensively used in Shoujo/Josei content but, there are subtle differences in the style. The softness is still there to some degree in mainstream works and often exaggerated in niche works. There is also a greater prevalence of works centering around boys with homoerotic subtext (because straight guys won't take it over and make it theirs). It's honestly difficult to find good stories about women these days. There's only so many isekai prince charming romances one can stand. :pathetic:
There's nothing I'd say is wrong about this, but I'd argue that it's nowhere as dire as you make it seem. The mainstream certainly is following the trends you describe, but there's plenty of good women-centred/women-written series still running today. Some good yuri/josei/etc magazines have folded but webmanga has more than made up for them in volume. Anime is certainly dominated by isekai and other stupid genres, but there's more yuri series getting adapted than ever before.
Like a lot of media, anime and manga are suffering from a stagnation of mainstream ideas resulting from more and more risk-adverse investments. But also like a lot of media, the sheer volume and diversity of material being produced is still increasing. I hope you'll still look for new series that could interest you :)
You're not wrong. Webtoons/comics seem to be where most of the new content is being made and I do browse those spaces.
Tbh, I think part of the problem is that the sheer weight of shonen advertising causes women gravitate towards shonen works (like MHA), until there's a general perception of anime in general being bad at fem characters, when it's mostly just a mainstream male writer thing. I also think the overwhelming number of poorly written fem characters isn't doing us any favors when it comes to inflating the egos of incels.
We see that handbag, citizen. We know what that ententac... WHAT THAT ENTAILS. :volcel-judge:
She just likes jellyfish in a wholesome and mildly neurodivergent way :soviet-huff:
Police overreacting to innocuous things and tackling people anyway :surprised-pika:
Btw, that story is good if you want to read about a femboy who befriends a bunch of femcels to fight rezoning/property development.
That actually is tempting.
No matter what some particularly toxic treat defenders think of me on this site and what they might presume about me, I actually do like anime/manga as long as it has an interesting story and isn't cryptofascist propaganda, misogynistic incel wish-fulfillment power fantasy and/or kiddie creeping, or other kinds of hog feed.
bakuman is incredibly sexist, but i think it did provide some good examples of this. don't know if i'd go so far as to say it analyzes it, that implies too much criticism, but it seems pretty true to both what i've read and what you wrote
also i'd love recommendations for good yuri manga. any non-moe stuff would be welcome! (moe is also fine, but i can at least find some of that)
So, not Manga, if you liked Chinatop for the relationship dynamic, you might also like RAINBOW!. If you like the magical world related angst you might like The Greenhouse, which is one of the most emotional pieces of art I've ever read.
"You got to try this new anime series, UlyssesT, yes, there's a part at the beginning, and most of the middle, and at the end that you might complain about but once you understand in context that it's actually subverting what you'd typically expect from isekai moe yandere loli fanservice by making it empowering because she manifests epic powers when she fights for senpai... why are you looking at me like that? Do you even like anime at all?!" :so-true:
For real, when "Goblin Slayer" was recommended to me, I was told to ignore the (CW: sexual violence, genocide apologia)
spoiler
rape scene at the very beginning that was supposedly necessary to establish that goblins are beyond reasoning with and there is literally no other way to deal with them other than wacky fun genocide hijinks
and if I did that I'd totally enjoy the wacky fun aforementioned hijinks, yes even me. Totally. :pathetic:
A while back, I got so many personal messages full of frothing rage spewed at me in defense that particular treat.
I stand by what I said back then: making the plot-contrived-mandatory genocide into sequences of wacky hijnks after the plot-contrived justification for genocide does not make it okay by me.
I don't remember the "unusually progressive" part though. It's been a hot day, some of my Joker makeup may have washed off already, so feel free to remind me. :jokerfication:
Lmao I think I started this “struggle session”, or at least one with the same topic. I called Goblin Slayer gross and disgusting, and some treat defender tried to debate lord.
As for the anime being “progressive”, I remember they tried to argue that it represents class struggle because in the anime the nobles didn’t care about the peasants, or some other contrived bullshit that demonstrated a complete nonunderstanding of what class struggle is. It was a kneejerk reaction to the poster’s precious treat getting badmouthed.
The whole premise of that show is fascist. Unless there's some backstory that I'm unaware of where the goblins are waging a national liberation struggle against humans encroaching on their indigenous lands, it's just the usual "Asiatic locust swarm horde in human form that only knows how to rape and pillage" fascist trope, except with green humanoids instead of (European) humans.
Even if one could somehow set aside all the hog feeding in the first episode and thecryptofascist genocide apologia in Goblin Slayer, the "these nobles are bad actually" trope is very tired old :LIB: cliche when it's usually seen, especially when the implied subtext is "if only we had better nobles, ah well. Revolutions are silly and/or hypocritical and/or just as bad as the bad nobles and/or doomed to fail!"
Gambo's setting also is pretty much that. I don't buy the "this is actually leftist because it shows nobles as bad actually" take because the only alternatives or prospects of change are shown as silly or hypocritical or otherwise doomed to fail, and there was a good monarch this one time that the setting and its narrative voice express nostalgia for on top of that. :sus-soviet:
Wait someone didn't get that Goblin Slayer was just legit old time "all goblins are evil" DnD-ing with the most lightest of fucking character "development" (if you call not wanting to address PTSD a character trait)?
edit for clarity: i.e. it's a really bad tropie mess similar to most old school fantasy schlock with additional sexual violence against women
i remember that... i gave them too much credit in the moment i think. probably should have just reported and moved on
Oh, I do not dare enter the magical realm of
spoiler
plot-contrived cannibalism
and that's just the start of it. :nyet:
Based on no qualifications, but I've taken up drawing as a hobby:
-Bottom has eyelids
-Bottom has more attention given to the nose
-Bottom has lips and a hint of a chin
-Bottom has highlights and shadow in the hair
-Bottom has more proportionate eyebrows
These 5 things give an implication of a form. You probably also don't like the centralizing focus on Rem's iris. Rem is probably 5x easier to animate and 10x cheaper if she had to keep a form and be part of sequences up to industry standard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_51cahT1NY (TW: Everything you hate about an*me). I just watched that video. The only shading Rem has is her neck, back of her hair, her maid frills, and under her bust. I have to imagine the woman on bottom either loses 90% of her detail when she fights (see the 1st Valley of the End in Naruto) or doesn't fight. She's more picture-esque. I spent roughly 2 minutes watching this one from Jojo's (another one with which I am unfamiliar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxwU6sSPpRk . It looks like the shadows don't move except between key frames, but they have relatively bountiful shading all around the face and body.
In short, watch Jojos and watch One Piece
-Bottom has eyelids
-Bottom has more attention given to the nose
-Bottom has lips and a hint of a chin
-Bottom has highlights and shadow in the hair
-Bottom has more proportionate eyebrows
It's cheaper to churn out slop that panders to otaku than to do any of the aforementioned above, and it's therefore more profitable especially considering who buys the merch. That really is all there is to it for why the above is far more common, especially now.
Over half of all anime has been made after 2009 if you want an idea of how fast they churn series out now. 1970 to 2009, less than half of all anime produced in about 40 years. 2009 to 2022, over half of all anime produced in about 10 years.
There are also specific animation shortcuts to computer-based projects, like how the highlight on Rem's hair is just a gradient. In 90s-00s anime they would have to cut the framerate somewhere in order to have detail where they wanted it - for example by having long panning shots over a still image while characters with their back to the camera talk.
A good animation director would know where to use money saving shots and where to spend the budget making the important things look good, but modern productions come out so fast and often involve studios on different continents speaking different languages so everything has become increasingly standardized.
I think the difference is they're now choosing to focus on character development over aesthetics :bunker:
Kazuma develops more debt and that really stuck with me
Beyond the point that the bottom one if from an OVA so the comparison to seasonal tv anime is unfair, believe it or not they are both probably equaly hard to animate. Rem and similar modern designs have a noticably increased line count in clothing, accessories and most importantly eyes and sometimes hair . Senior Animators that have animated in the 80s/90s and today have been on record saying that in TV anime designs have arguably become more labor-intensive to draw and animate
Also Jojo's has unworkably hostile to animation character designs for any era. They are cool for the type of style Jojo's has but there are so many lines and shading that it can barely move 95% of the runtime and when it tried it often looks stiff and melty. I wouldnt wish for more designs to be towards that drection . Flat shading and less lines are often much more appealing and preferable for tv animation if its stylisticaly driven and your character designer is good
Yeah, it's like showing a screenshot from the 90s Xmen cartoon and one from Adventure Time and lamenting a decline in quality.
Both are just different styles of animation, neither inherently better than the other.
Idk you got any, like, men?
Though, Rem's eyes are like :bottom-speak:, big eyes are always adorable. Just wanna ruffle their hair
isekai trash, re zero trash. In communist yurt_owl land all isekai will be destroyed and banned. Uncle from another world can stay though cos its funny.
I remember several years ago, reading something on Fanfiction.net, that was structurally indistinguishable from an Isekai Light Novel (I think it was written when they were starting to get popular, but before they really took off), but it involved a WH40k Black Templar getting teleported to fuckin Azeroth from World of Warcraft.
And the main, or really the entire joke of the work really was largely that the entire world around this dude treating him as if he was some kind of weird Isekai protagonist goon who got given superpowers in another dimension; and people trying to like bribe, flatter, and seduce him on that basis into doing what they want him to do. But actually no he is just a mentally broken & severely brainwashed living murder-machine with barely any personality, and is probably going to try to kill the "Good Guys" too, when doing so becomes more convenient. The joke admittedly eventually collapsed, on account of going on for too long to really keep hitting right, and also because the author themselves eventually descended into Matt-Wardian Marine Wankery; but it was mildly amusing for like 5 chapters.
There was that web novel about a chinise mexhanical engeneer who gets isekied and tries to build a chinise style bureaucracy. When nobles rebel he whipes them out mercilesly because "a backwards class will opose progress" unfortunatley it was very long i dont think i made it 1/3 in.
If you like that, you'll really like the other character that is the same as her but flipped horizontally and red.
I do think the bottom one looks better but I also think people get way too hung up on stuff like this. I care infinitely more if the story is good or not.
Fine. I'll admit it. I'm the one guy who actually liked Berserk 2016.
Look better? Look at that little girl on top. She looks scared as hell. Like, wtf
And yes I do mean little girl. They’re all drawn like children so old men on the internet can beat of to child porn legally.
And we all just gotta overlook that because “the story is so good” Like, No it’s, not, half the time it involves putting cartoon kids in weird sexual situations with adults, I mean it’s all just right there but people look the other way.
And you can say, that’s different, that’s this, what you should be watching is that.
It all looks the same!
No it’s, not, half the time it involves putting cartoon kids in weird sexual situations with adults
That stuff was happening in the 1980s already. Go look at the stuff that happens to Bulma, a 16-year-old, in the first few volumes of Dragon Ball. Almost every male character is constantly trying to sexually exploit her in some way which is played for laughs (and for titillation)
Though I suppose she wasn't drawn as an embryo and had a personality that wasn't just saying "onii-chan"
Dragon Ball is way hornier and goofier, at least in the start. It starts to resemble Z a bit more in the very end. I still have a massive soft spot for the Dragon Ball portion of the manga
yeah Dragon Ball is my favorite because its just a fun adventure
tbh Golden boy is an OVA and it had one of the most visualy appealing character designers ever ,Toshihiro Kawamoto, so its not fair to compare with a seasonal tv anime with bellow average production value. I still like the character designs of 80s and 90s tv anime more than more modern trends but modern tv anime being massively more homogenous design wise is somewhat of an overstated narrative
