#i haven't fleshed her out she's basically the stand-in for a female character in the comic

[mashirodayo]

[rockybloo]

About that Nova and Pluto height difference picture (this is gonna be a long post y'all)

I deleted the picture I drew of Nova and Pluto kissing on every one of my social medias save for Tumblr because people have been expressing their discomfort with how Nova looked like a child compared to Pluto who looked like a fully grown adult.

And I completely understand all the upset reactions since Pluto makes everyone look way more tiny than they truly are. It definitely didn't help that I was being lazy when I sketched and lined everything since I dread full bodies sometimes and tried to cheat by hiding most of Nova's with her big gamer jacket.

So that, mixed with Nova's height in comparison to Pluto, and me not focusing more on her anatomy led to a picture that, if you are already familiar with the characters, looks cute and fluffy. But if you are new to them, looks a lot less cute and more gross.

After talking to a friend as well as a mutual about the picture, I decided that deleting it and fleshing Nova's design out more would be the best.

Unlike Jack, Nana, Sweetheart, and Bitterbat, I've been slacking on drawing Nova and Pluto. And the latter couples have had whole make-overs and an established way I draw them that makes my brain go "YEP THIS WORKS". But Nova and Pluto have been neglected in my head so I haven't been updating their looks alongside my art style like I have been with the others. Which means I still draw them based off the designs I made of them back in like-2020 or 2021???

BASICALLY THEY'VE BEEN LONG OVER DUE FOR SOME TINKERING.

Specifically Nova. Pluto I am very happy with. But Nova's design needs more lovin' in it.

I won't be completely overhauling her since I love her current look-I just want to do a better job at her design.

When I first designed Nova and Pluto, they were meant to be based off retro anime designs for a cute girl and handsome boy (even though Pluto is nonbinary). Sadly, cute anime girls often look very less mature than their male counterparts and so Nova suffers the same problem by default. I also wanted Nova to stand out from my other adult female characters and have her lack the same amount of curves and basically be flat.

This is something I will still be keeping because the idea that "curves=adult" is genuinely a shitty concept. Same as "short=child" since there are PLENTY of shorties out there that are grown adults. I am one of them-it's why I keep making my girls so short. I need some representation down here 😭.

When it comes to Nova's current default outfit-I will technically still be keeping her gamer jacket in her wardrobe closet but I'll be giving her a new jacket that will serve to be her new default one that shows her build more so she won't look so "childish" compared to Pluto. It'll help to avoid a repeat situation (I hope) as well as solve my constant frustration at having to cover up good ass anatomy with clothing (I DO IT ENOUGH TO JACK-I PLAYED MYSELF WITH NOVA'S JACKET)

OVERALL-Nova just needs the same love I gave to Nana and Sweetheart when they went through their original tinkers.

I will continue to draw Nova and Pluto together because I care about them and their story a lot. But with the themes that occur in the story and the relationship Nova and Pluto have together, it's definitely important that I make sure that cat girl looks more like a cat woman in future art I draw of her.

As for why I didn't delete the Tumblr post of the original picture-this entire site is an internet archive which means if someone reblogs something from someone, and then that someone deletes the original post, the reblog doesn't go down with it and remains. So it'd be useless to delete it. I just settled for turning reblogs off.

In the future I definitely want to redraw the picture but I'll hold off until I give Nova the touch ups she very much deserves.

[cina-full-moon-xanadium]

This is a genuine question as I haven't watched Ex-Aid or 01, but in what way is Yuya Takahashi writing women that they're somehow notably badly written in his shows despite him giving us a decent chunk of our female riders? Geats is my first brush with his work and I feel like they're alright here. I really can't stand certain brands of misogyny and I want to know what I'd be getting into if I watched his other work.

Hmmm thinking about it it has been a LOT less present in Geats than his other works. Perhaps he's been put through the Inoue Re-educator...

I feel his brand of misogyny is similar to what you'll usually see in Rider but like to an even further extent. Major female characters frequently find themselves without any of their own agency without the aid and guidance - or, often, the command - of a man and are very often turned away from very obvious plot beats that would capstone their story (which would have been special one-episode things so it's not even like Bandai's need to sell toys to boys would likely get in the way of it).

He also tends to just never let them transform (I think you can like count on one hand how many times Poppy actually used her belt after her evil arc), or flesh them out in the same way as male characters (it took until the post-series V-Cins for Valkyrie to get even the slightest hint of a backstory), or even just write them in a way that's natural? Like, just, he seems to have this thing of not recognising women as people who have just as much autonomy and complexities as men, and constantly they get shoehorned into having no personality or very one-note tropes? Not like Kamen Rider has a track record of perfectly-written women or anything, but even looking at adjacent examples like Ghost's Akari, or Saber's Mei, or Build's Sawa and Misora; there's absolutely criticisms you can have of their treatment and how they don't get to transform but they're all very well-realised characters with their own personalities and ambitions and have their own journeys and interesting character dynamics in the show and their place in the themes and... and I just look at someone like Izu or Yaiba and I despair? Or maybe that's just a Takahashi problem in general actually, I don't think he ever figured out a second character trait for guys like Tycoon or Snipe

I'm trying to describe things in more general terms here but I think taking basically any of his female characters under a microscope is much more telling because they all have their own specific issues. For me and a fair few others Izu's treatment in 01 (from being a subservient robot secretary who wants for nothing more than to be Aruto's subservient robot secretary, has no more character development or even really character interactions beyond that, gets fridged for easy character drama, and then in the finale Aruto just builds a new Humagear from scratch with the intent of molding it into Izu) was the breaking point that made us realise he has a pattern of how he treats women in these shows. Na-Go scared me at first because, wow, he sure is characterising a woman purely by how she wants to fall in love with a man... and actually some of that is starting to come back now with how Weird her supporter feels. But she has certainly been a marked improvement over her predecessors so maybe the guy's learned something

[kurozu501]

so i'm rewatching UBW and i'm curious, bc of your posts the other day about mentioning how it's not good and how it doesn't give closure to anyone other than like, shirou and rin, and i'm curious what you mean like that? i haven't played the game bc i've had a hard time figuring out how to download it so my only real exposure to fsn is through the anime.

i guess i should clarify that when i wrote this post i was mostly joking. there was a funny post on twitter that talked about advent children in a similar way and i thought it’d be fun to use the flawed ubw anime for a fate version of that post. i do think that ubw’s core, the stuff with shirou and archer, the ideals, their struggle, was done well. the show looks good and its fights are a ton of fun to watch. 

however, the show is deeply flawed because while that main core is done well, they basically failed with the entire supporting cast. Some of it comes down to them following the vn too closely when the anime really needed to stand on its own, some of it is their own baffling adaptation choices. ill put the rest of this under the cut since it got long

Lancer is a good example of the former. They adapted all of Lancer’s scenes pretty much exactly the way they were in the visual novel. But the result is that the audience never really gets what his deal is. A lot of people were confused when Kirei was revealed as his master. In the VN there was no confusion bc you had to read fate route first and it revealed that lancer’s original master, Bazett, was killed by kirei. lancer then reluctantly became kirei’s servant while hating him. The ubw anime could have added in scenes explaining that. they could have had lancer mention Bazett as he lay dying in the fire, at least. (fate/unlimited codes has some excellent dialogue they could have used) But instead what we get is that flashback mentioning “Lancer’s female master” and then actually its kirei with no explanation. They followed the VN to the letter, but failed to take into account that this anime isnt the second chapter of a three route mega story. it needs to stand on its own, and they should have made changes to accommodate that.

moving on,

Caster’s a great example of the latter, a character who they just utterly failed with some deeply confusing adaptation choices. In the VN, after she’s captured Saber, Caster gets a really compelling flashback to her original life as Medea. How she was charmed by Aphrodite into loving Jason and betraying her family, how jason used and mistreated her, how the public came to hate and blame her for everything as a witch. We get this really moving tale of someone who was wronged, labeled “villain” “witch” and then finally said “fuck it, if no one’s ever going to see me as anything but a witch then i’ll be a witch.” The stuff in the present with the grail war is just the final straw breaking the camel’s back. Just when she hopes that she could have a new life and things could be better, the mage who summoned her mistreats her like everyone else. Meeting Souichiro is basically the one good thing she’s ever had in a life of utter misery, and we see that that’s why she’s so desperate to win the war.

In the anime we see nothing at all of Medea’s original life in ancient greece but spend nearly an entire episode on the pointless details of how shitty her summoner was, and how she eventually killed him. And none of that matters. The fact that Medea’s first master was a bastard was not supposed to be the focus of her story, he was just one more shitty person in a long line of shitty people going back to her youth. I can only think they assumed their audience already knew Medea’s backstory and figured it’d be fun to flesh out her first master? a very baffling choice. They also make her motivation confusing and unclear since they bring up this idea that Medea wants to “go back to her home country.” In the VN she’s long since accepted that will never happen and just wants to be able to live a peaceful life with Souichiro. The anime adds this stuff about her “wanting to go back,” but then has her death scene be the same as the VN where she implies just being with him was “making her wish come true this whole time.” Its extremely incompetent.  

I could go on. I could talk about how they amped up Rin’s tsundere scenes + physical violence towards Shirou (the part where she pointlessly twists his arm and slams him into a tree, the part where she shoves him into the dirt during the confession scene, both of which weren’t in the VN) while also still not really giving her any character development other then “becomes shirou’s girlfriend.” I could talk about how they bring up the interesting idea that Iri’s grail remnant has been haunting Illya and helped make her into the murderous unstable girl she is today and then do nothing with it before killing her off. But this post is long enough. 

Suffice to say, ufotable is good at nailing the core of the story, but aren’t good at handling the supporting characters. The heaven’s feel movies have been the same, with the films doing a really good job with Sakura and Shirou while cutting tons of other characters scenes.