#i was trying to go for like a early 2000s art stylee...

[p-1-gsty]

WITHOUT TEXT VERS

BONUS

This is actually a redraw of an unfinished piece i did back on May 23rd

[petday]

your art is so so so so inspiring to me which is strange bc my style isnt very similar to yours at all. but it makes me happy to see your art, especially when you make art from things from childhood id forgotten about💫💫💫💫💫🩷🩷🩷🩷

Thanks. Your message and similar messages from others over the years inspired me to try to put into words why I draw 'nostalgic things'. I ended up writing a lot.

There was a period of time when I became cynical about being seen as an 'artist who reminds people of childhood' or a 'nostalgic artist'. I no longer feel that way but I will explain why. Some artists, who I like and respect, will sometimes mention 'nostalgia holding artist's growth back' and 'nostalgia causes learned helplessness.' But I feel differently.

Maybe I perceive time differently. I have lived long enough to witness cycles of 'what is valued, and what is not valued' repeated. For example, I loved what is now called 'Y2K' style, but during mid 2000s, for whatever reason it was derided as something to be left in the past, something embarrassing. "Aren't we glad we optimized things now, and they are 'sleeker' and less complex? Old things were childish, an embarrassing weakness for humans, we must advance and reach our ideal evolution." That became the common attitude. I felt pressure to have the same thoughts. I just couldn't make myself feel that way no matter what, though. Even with the increasing threats about, 'keep up with others or you won't ever develop positive social relationships!' I couldn't change my mind.

(If what is currently valued becomes devalued and then it becomes valuable after that… that's an odd cycle to me. For example, if we like bananas, even when bananas cannot be harvested, we still like them even though they occupy a smaller space in our minds but we don't deride them. Going even further, though, I sometimes wonder if it is possible for humans to eventually remove the 'devaluation' stage, particularly in art 'trends' as I am an artist. Whatever is considered valuable remains valuable. A counter arguement would be, 'no, the devaluation of the previous thing is exactly what causes the next thing to be valued, and then the cycle flows beautifully: X was valued -> Y is valued, X is devalued -> Y is devalued, X becomes valuable again. If you want X to always remain valuable, just develop better patience. Like we cannot pick fruit we like all year, we cannot simply keep adding onto the pile of things we like, something has to be seen as inferior by the majority of humans.' I disagree. I might explain my thoughts against this argument more in the future.)

Anyway, what people call 'Y2K style' or 'art that emulates how things commonly appeared in early years of 2000s' is popular nowadays. Even someone who did not grow up with it can become attracted to it. That 'desire' itself is a communication between past and present. Something can make someone feel 'lighter' [in sense of, "wow, the crushing weight of my circumstance feels not so crushing when I look at this'] -- a similar 'light' to how someone in the past was perceiving it when it was the present and not the past. So, even though two people were born in different eras and may not become friends or even meet, they're still connected by that 'lighthearted' feeling they both like. I know it will be seen as 'lower value' soon, but I truly cannot care because as I mentioned earlier, I might perceive 'time' weirdly.

When I started playing video games, a family member would point out, 'those games were made before you were born, interesting!' but that statement confused me at the time since my perception was, 'well, if these games are from before I was born, I don't understand why she is bringing attention to it. Why is it interesting? It's just regular. They're alive in the present now, because I'm in the present and so are they.' That was when I was a very young child. I subconsciously kept the same feeling even as I was reaching teenage and adult years. The feeling echoed when people liked to ask the question 'why are you still playing games from long ago?' as I got older but still played the same 'old' games. The answer: they are beautiful and will remain beautiful, and something made in the past is still communicating in the present, so are they really truly 'outdated inferior games'...? Just because the cycle of valued and devalued happened to be in a different position and those old things were seen as an embarrassment? (Now there are popular games inspired by the era of games many people ridiculed me for consistently enjoying, lol. Similarly, I was using 'crappy' old versions of programs even through 2017. Now people from wealthy upbringing and background use 'crappy' programs willingly. lol)

The present talks to the past all the time, nostalgia is not a dead end. In that sense I cannot see nostalgia as a death trap but rather a connection made from past to present. A string between the past and present that feelings can crawl across and communicate. Feelings such as 'I wish my life took a different direction. I can't make things like how they were back then, it won't ever be the same again, so I'll do nothing.' The criticism of 'nostalgia' is towards that last sentence. But there are things you can do with those feelings. 'Doing nothing is boring. And I keep thinking of that fun drawing I saw... I kinda wanna try to make something.' Making something while thinking of the past and present at the same time, so there is a communication between past self and present self. Pure bitterness communicating with slightly light-hearted view, the 'end result' is artwork/creation.

*I used light-hearted feeling as example, but nostalgia can exist for any feeling, and not just for people who were nice when they were younger. If someone was cruel as a child/teenager, after the person has been an adult for a while, they can communicate with their younger self about what was it about the cruelty that was enjoyable, and then extract a small part from the cruelty that they wish to bring back into the present -- example, the attraction to 'high speed activities, playful mischievousness' can be extracted from 'hurting people on purpose so they will acknowledge/react to you'. The dialogue could be something like, "'honestly, you and I both know spamming people with bad things felt pretty fun at the time, so let's just keep the 'high energy mischievousness' feeling and leave behind the crap that hurt people deeply, and let's make an animation while thinking of that high energy feeling.

^ I don't answer questions or reply to messages often because of giving answers that aren't too long or too short is tough for me. lol. Thanks for liking my art. I like a lot of art that doesn't resemble mine as well. It's fun! Like appreciating different flavours in the same meal even if you cannot make the meal yourself.

[jojo-schmo]

hi jojo! im just wondering but ive been wanting to make a comic for a little while but im not too sure where to start 😅. i really love your style of art and your forgotten land roleswap, and i was wondering if you had any tips for beginners?

Hello, hello! Thank you for enjoying my Forgotten Land Roleswap comic, it means a lot! <3

I'm very honored that people have been asking me for tips and advice. All of this is coming from a hobbyist who draws these comics purely for fun outside of my regular day job. Some of my methods would probably deal psychic damage to a professional, LOL. But I'm more than happy to share some things I've personally learned! :)

First of all, the book, "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud ROCKS. It literally gave me a new dimension to understand the medium of comics and how it presents ideas and emotions to readers! And I haven't even had the chance to finish it all the way! I'm very happy I own a copy and I recommend having one of your own if you can, but it's archived here if you want to read it :D

I also like analyzing other comics and thinking about how they get information across to me as a reader. It's helped me learn more effective ways to visually tell a story, like what to include in a frame, how zooming in or out affects the feeling from the panel, maybe building a scene by focusing on other stuff if someone is talking a lot... etc.

ANYWAYS-! Some other tips I've learned through my personal experience-

I had to overcome a lot of negative self-talk in order to tackle a huge comic project like this and stay committed. I was a pretty severe self-deprecator for most of my life so far, and getting help has allowed me to catch myself when I'm slipping back into those habits, look in the mirror, and go, "NO, JOJO! You pour your heart into what you make and that is a wonderful thing! You are appreciated and loved and you deserve to have fun making something you are passionate about!!" Some examples of the negative self-talk I catch myself in....

"I'm a noob at writing and making a story interesting... What's the point of even trying?"

When it comes to starting a project, whether it's 2 pages or 2000 pages, is to just jump in and start! It's okay to be a little insecure or nervous about your technical art skills, writing skills, etc... But writing a "bad" scene is better than no scene- because you can always edit a "bad" scene down the line, but what can you do with nothing? Nothing!! I also put "bad" in quotation marks because I am trying to use that term less, and instead call them "early drafts." or "works in progress."

The first Roleswap scene I fleshed-out was the first Bandee boss fight, in May 2022. I made this drawing on an impulse, getting my ideas down on the page without thinking about the technical stuff like comic panel borders. I consider it like a "pilot episode" almost, haha. The final project is going to be very different from how things play out here. But it got me interested in the concept and excited to see where I could take it, and I made the decision to commit to an entire game plot's worth of AU comics!!

Also, what's the point in trying you ask? The point is to have fun! Making a fan comic in my free time means I don't have restrictions like deadlines, nobody's telling me what I can and can't write, and I can make the story as long or as short as I want! I have full control, which means the world I'm writing is all mine to create! Yes, with a fan comic there is a pre-established world with existing characters. But a universe like Kirby has enough open-ended concepts for people to take basic concepts in the world and take them to whole new levels! I think that's why there are so many amazing fan interpretations of Kirby characters and OCs. The rules are so vague, you can just make up your own a lot of the time!! And it's a wonderful exercise to learn skills for someday building an original world with all original characters from scratch! Magical!!!

"I'm not good enough to make a comic. I don't understand perspective or color and other stuff. Anything I make will look bad.

I once read a two panel comic on here. I can't find it anymore but I remember most of it. First panel showed the artist looking at what they're drawing on their tablet, looking defeated and sad. "Man, I don't even know how to draw this....."The next panel was like them smiling and shrugging, I think rainbows and sparkles were coming out of their tablet, ".....I GUESS I'LL JUST HAVE TO DRAW IT SHITTY!! :D "

IF ANYONE KNOWS THIS COMIC I'M REFERENCING, PLEASE TELL ME AND I'LL LINK IT!!! Because it permanently and positively changed my brain chemistry.

No kidding, making the decision to just do my best even if it's not perfect, helped me a LOT. I was always waiting to "reach a certain level" to tackle a huge project because I felt like I'd never do it justice at my current state. Except I had been telling myself that kind of stuff for years and I still didn't start any projects!!

So the day I said, "Oh well! If I draw backgrounds shitty, then it is what it is! I'll learn from it and draw the next background a little better," Was the day I could commit fully to the project. I'll keep studying how to draw them better for my own benefit, but I won't let my skill issues stop me from even trying!

And for my limited confidence in full-color art, I solved that by making the comic in black and white with no-to-minimal shading lolol. Because I can only address one skill issue at a time before it takes me 25 years to finish this HAHAHA.

It saves a BUNCH of time to work with skill issues rather than against them! Because at least experience is gained in other ways, and who knows, maybe that new knowledge will help address the skill issues someday! So identifying your personal skill issues and deciding which one to try to grow stronger, and which one to work around, could help with big projects!

"Nobody will read this. I'm going to put months or years of my life into a dumb little thing nobody will even care about."

Learning how to draw for my own enjoyment instead of somebody else's was one of the biggest breakthroughs I ever made. Enjoying the feeling of being challenged artistically and just doing my best, even if it's not technically perfect, is the reason why I was even able to start this!

And just because someone doesn't directly like, comment or whatever on a post doesn't mean nobody saw it! I used to get really down on myself for the lack of engagement on my art on other websites.

I was a lurker for pretty much my entire teenage years and never posted my own stuff or commented much. But that didn't take away the fact that I really enjoyed the things I saw online. Those positive feelings were real to me, even when I didn't know how to articulate it in words. Granted, I grew up into a Words of Affirmation main, and I use words to tell people the positive things I think about them as much as I can! But I know not everyone prefers words to express themselves. So I think about the people that I don't know enjoy my work- that just because I don't see it doesn't mean I didn't make a positive impact on someone by sharing my stories.

THIS IS GETTING LONG-- UHHH, STORY TIPS!!

If you work best on technology, start building the story in a Notes app, or a Google Doc! If you work best with pen and paper, start a notebook and rearrange stuff as you need to!

Or if you're chaotic like me, a mix of tech and paper!! I bought a notebook with ring binding so I can remove and rearrange pages of drafts as much as I wanted to! Like here's two very rough concept pages of one Chapter 1 scene made months apart.

I'd say planning out the biggest basic plot points and then filling in between as I went was most helpful! I also have separate notes for character motivations, important story-changing events, etc... So I can have my own reference when I'm writing new scenes!

Okay this was a lot, sorry about the yapping! Hopefully it helps even a tiny bit. If you have any specific questions I'm happy to talk about my experience in the creation process! Or elaborate on anything I said above.

And finally, because I'm not a professional there are probably plenty of other tactics that could work better for some people. My ADHD probably doesn't help with the chaos of my process either, HAHA. But thank you for reading this far and enjoying the peek into the rainbow glitter and soap bubbles that inhabit the right side of my brain, heehee.

[bumblekastclips]

KYLE CROUSE: Alright, we got one last question. It’s from JediPony. [chuckles] Love that name, I don’t know why. It makes me laugh. [reading question] “How would you write an 06 adaptation in Sonic X?” Here’s the question, would you write the 06 adaptation in Sonic X the show, or Sonic X the comic?

IAN FLYNN: [laughs] KYLE: It’s very— two very different things. IAN:Very different things. I don’t know, if we’re gonna be true to the source material, then Elise doesn’t really have a role, and Chris is the one who has the Flames of Disaster sealed inside him. KYLE: [laughing] Oh no! Oh! IAN: “Chris, whatever you do, you can’t cry!” [as Chris, weepily] “But why?!” [Iblis roar] KYLE: It’s all he does! [laughs] No! IAN: Oh, man, now I’m imagining Mephiles with, like, that really bad early 2000s CG effect. All these awful filters flyin’ around. KYLE: Oh, God, no! [laughing] This would be awful. IAN: You’d have, like, the budget episodes where Soleanna and New City are just, like, these flat, grey urban textures that have like, no depth, but then you get to the final episode where they’re doing the Super fight against Solaris, and the animation bump goes through the roof, and it’s glorious. And you forgive the last 26 episodes of your life that you’ve wasted watching it so far. KYLE: Mhm. IAN: [choking the words out through high pitched, wheezing laughter] This means Chris is the one that kisses Sonic back to life! [fit of maniacal laughter] KYLE: [frantic, horrified laughter] No! No! No! No! Ian, no! Ian! No! IAN: [prolonged cackling laughter] KYLE: The worst timeline! Oh, no! IAN: Oh, and Eggman has to be as close as they can get him to photorealistic Eggman in the Sonic X style. KYLE: No! IAN: Which does not work at all! KYLE: No, no, no! No! This is not going on the thumbnail! No! IAN: [wheezing laugh] KYLE: No, do not put this on the thumbnail! [laughing] IAN: Oh, my goodness, just imagine the art errors for Silver’s head alone… KYLE: Oh… no… oh, no… at least Dan Green could still be the voice of Mephiles. IAN: Oh, yeah, that’d be fantastic. [microphone glitches] That’s the only reason to do this. KYLE: That would be— yeah. Oh… IAN: Oh, would they try to hand-animate Omega? Or would he be like, early 2000s CG? KYLE: Just crappy CG, no! IAN: That you just composite into each shot… oh, man, it’d be awful! KYLE: [pained sound not unlike he is receiving a fully conscious appendectomy] Oh! IAN: Wait! [microphone glitches again] They did the weird thing with Sonic and Shadow’s spines when they would turn their heads. What would Silver look like?! KYLE: [resigned groan] IAN: Would it just be like, one giant spine, depending on the angle? [bursts into laughter] KYLE: [groans as if he is dying] Ian… what are you doing… why are you— IAN: [microphone glitches again as if resisting] The Iblis monsters would have the terrible CG effects, too! KYLE: Why am— why am I the reasonable one!

IAN: [laughs] KYLE: Why am I the one who’s being… [gives up on finishing this sentence] IAN: Forget the comic, the comic can’t hold a candle to this idea! KYLE: Oh, no… IAN: [in awe] What a glorious trainwreck! KYLE: What’s even funnier is that your mic is trying to stop you. IAN: [cackles] KYLE: It’s not working. [laughs] So cursed! IAN: The whole thing would be so awful… KYLE: Yeah? IAN: But then there would be, like, this incredibly well-written and poignant subplot about Elise dealing with her emotional trauma, and how Soleanna as a country even works. And it’s like, maybe an episode, maybe two that really gets into it and fleshes out this world in a meaningful and robust manner. KYLE: [chuckles] Yeah. IAN: And that’s it. That’s like— that and Dan Green are the only redeeming things out of this season. KYLE: [sigh, reading chat] Ian, in the chat… IAN: Yeah. KYLE: In the Bumblekast Discord server, open it up. There’s a little piece of art there. Someone has, uh, sketched Silver. [chuckles] IAN: [seeing it, delighted, evil] Yes! KYLE: [laughing] IAN: Cursed Toucan Sam! KYLE: [cackles] Oh no! Why do you…? No! Awful! Toucan— IAN: [as Silver] “Just follow my nose, wherever it goes!” KYLE: [horrified, amused] Toucan Silver! No! [emits the world’s most drawn-out, pained cry of defeat] IAN: Psycho-beak-nesis! KYLE: [laughing] Bumblekast was a mistake! IAN: [laughs] It was, but at least we’re over with it for today. KYLE: [laughing] Oh… I guess so.[outro music fades in]

EPISODE THUMBNAIL by the incredible @nintendoni-art

—— TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE: Please remember that nothing that is said on BumbleKast is canon! It’s just some guys and their opinions occasionally spitballing ideas. If you don’t like an answer, you don’t have to take it as Word of God or anything like that. It’s all just for fun!

[theresattrpgforthat]

Any ttrpgs with a distinctive “grunge” aesthetic?

THEME: Grunge

Hello friend, I’m really glad you asked this question! Grunge feels like it fits indie ttrpg design so well, because so much of it emphasizes low-budget, DIY and messy styles. As a style of music, I understand grunge is about being dissonant, dark, and “ugly”. As a theme, what I understand about grunge is that it’s about alienation, isolation, and disenchantment with how society is right now, which is so so relevant to how we feel about our current quality of life right now.

That being said, there’s so much that can be explored in grunge, I feel like there’s a lot of different pieces that could make a work “grunge’. So while I think the games that I’m presenting here all fit some element of grunge, some of them might not fit the elements of grunge that you’re looking for.

Games by Adam Vass.

Adam’s games are often nihilistic, horrific, and creatively designed with mixed media, visual distortion, and a focus on the grotesque or the weird. This includes No Future, a time loop game about punks throwing one last party, Born To Die, a pamphlet ttrpg about anthropomorphic animals in a post-human waste world, and Cybermetal 2012, a lo-fi metal cyberpunk game about surviving in an isolated city of warped technology.

If you love horror as well as a bit of a dystopian edge, you’ll probably want to check out Adam Vass’s work.

Here, There, Be Monsters, by wendi yu.

No matter what they tell you, there’s still weirdness and wonder everywhere. You just have to know where to look. At the edges and cracks of ‘normal’ life we exist, we persist, and we resist: the monsters, the magicians, the anomalies, the freaks, and the outcasts. We gather in the shadows, trying our best to live our lives in a world that, when it doesn’t exactly fear or hate us, doesn't even believe in our existence.

But we’re still here. We’re not going anywhere. And we fight back.

While the layout and art direction of Here, There, Be Monsters is purposeful and cohesive, the goal of this game feels very grunge in the sense that it is meant to acknowledge the messiness and unapologetic anger present in the monster characters. There's a lot of bodies in this art, and these bodies are meant to challenge you - if you find them difficult to look at, that's a you problem, and that feels in tune with the spirit of grunge.

I feel like this game is probably more on the border of punk and grunge, but if what you’re looking for is a game that feels chaotic and embraces the dark and “disgusting” material that grunge is known to celebrate, than this might be worth checking out.

Dead Mall: The Last Great Beast, by Hunter J Allen.

They built us altars only to abandon them. Now they sit as dying, empty relics. No matter what they tell you never forget: These are our relics, not theirs. Don't let them pass gently into that sweet goodnight. They were made for profit but they remain as our playgrounds. If we choose to let them.

This here is a mini-zine and Bingo card about the American shopping mall and its relationship to us, our collective nostalgia, and the significance of cultural ruins.

This is more of a solo bingo game than a roleplaying game, but I think it might be an interesting way to build a modern “dungeon” for something like Liminal Horror. The zine also re-contextualizes a piece of American architecture that was so ingrained into the middle-class experience of the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s. I’m intrigued by how you could use this idea of decay and neglect in other urban fantasy and horror games.

MÖRK BORG, by Ockult Örtmästare Games.

MÖRK BORG is a pitch-black apocalyptic fantasy RPG about lost souls and fools seeking redemption, forgiveness or the last remaining riches in a bleak and dying world. Who are you? The tomb-robber with silver glittering between cracked fingernails? The mystic who would bend the world’s heart away from it’s inevitable end? Confront power-draining necromancers, skulking skeletal warriors and backstabbing wickheads. Wander the Valley of the Unfortunate Undead, the catacombs beneath the Bergen Chrypt or the bedevilled Sarkash forest. But leave hope behind - the world’s cruel fate is sealed, and all your vain heroic efforts are destined to end in death and dismay. Or are they?

This is a black comedy style of game that I think has a lot of overlap with the grunge aesthetic. It’s received a number of awards for its art style, which is chaotic, monochromatic, and as best as I can describe it, “sludgy.” Then again, you might look at Mork Borg and feel like it’s more metal than grunge: it’s not casual, but rather designed for shock value. The world is destined to end, and your characters are futilely trying to make a difference in it; a lot of the cues seem to point to your own characters being not necessarily good people.

The Prophet, by The Punk Theologian.

The Prophet is a solo-journaling role-playing game. It requires a tarot deck and can be played in as little as 30 minutes or over days.

Receiving Revelations: Turn over a tarot card and let the prompts and the card image be the revelation from the deity that called you. Navigating through visions of struggle and cries of despair, following the guiding flames of insight, to help turn your people’s trajectory towards justice and equity.

Overcome Events: Flip coins to find out if the people heed your warnings and are aided by their deity in overcoming enemy invasion, surviving a great earthquake, or a raging fire, or are crushed by the weight of divine condemnation reaping upon themselves the consequences of sewing the seeds of inequity.

When it comes to aesthetics, The Prophet feels very DIY-inspired, and when it comes to design, I think the fact that it’s a solo game contributes to the feeling of isolation: your status as a prophet may separate you from your peers, and if your predictions go unnoticed, you could feel even more alone. The inspiration of the creator is defined as “punk,” but since punk is a genre that grunge pulls a lot of inspiration from, I don’t think that this necessarily disqualifies The Prophet from being a “grunge” - style game.

#iHunt, by Machine Age Productions.

#iHunt is a story telling game about killing monsters in the gig economy. In it, you play millennials scraping by paycheck to paycheck to make ends meet. A gig app called #iHunt offers them more money than they've ever made to hit the streets and kill vampires, werewolves, demons, and anything else that goes bump in the night. 

The base game of #iHunt centres around the soul-crushing nature of the gig economy, which in and of itself I think is a great focus for a grunge-style game. The supplemental zines created by the designer have a very chaotic and collage-like look, taking photos or public domain art and re-mixing them to create something new. If you want to get really grunge, you might want to check out The 90’s Sucked Ass Or Whatever, which is focused on the specific events and details that would affect your disillusioned monster hunters during the height of grunge.

[thedreadvampy]

fwiw if you want to introduce more variety to how you draw faces I strongly suggest thinking really hard about noses

noses give you so much information about someone! they're usually one of the first things which define how we think of someone's face (after all - they're by far the feature that takes up most of it).

They change as we age - they take up more of our faces and move away from our mouths. babies almost all have round little tips of noses with no definable bridges, while depending on the type of nose an adult has they may get bonier and sharper or softer and flatter with age. nostrils widen, skin creases, eyes drop back from the bridge. I think often people try to age faces by putting wrinkles around an unchanged nose and it throws stuff off.

They're also a really racialised feature. like there is no one Black Nose or East Asian Nose or Desi Nose or White Nose, obviously, there's huge variation within and across ethnic groups, but there's a lot of overlapping trends in nose shape for different ethnicities and it's often a big contributing factor to people drawing characters of colour that kind of look like palette-swapped white people? like there are so many nose shapes that are super common but because they're relatively uncommon for white people, they're just not the noses people often learn to draw as standard.

but also a diversity of noses says so much about a character, the same way that their build or eye shape or face shape does. like. a long sharp narrow nose in a bony face? a round, slightly flat nose on a face full of smile lines? an upturned, softly rounded nose with freckles and no bridge? a long hooked nose with a curved tip? a crooked, broken nose? a bulbous, reddened nose? noses can imply strength, weakness, innocence, experience, childishness, wisdom, suffering, whatever you want to get out of a character design. don't neglect the nose!!!!

and like. obviously depending on how stylised the art is there's going to be information lost, but that's the thing - there's a real upper limit on how much variation you can put in eyes or mouths or face shape in simpler styles without making it overly realistic, but you can go really nuts on nose shapes! even with just one or two lines or one simple shape you can imply so many different noses by changing little things!

and yet really often I look at people who are trying to broaden variety on faces and they mix up everything except the noses, which stay like a circle or a triangle or a line or whatever their standard noise is, and as a result there's still this sameness to all the faces.

bc eyes and mouths and jawlines are all very well but noses are, in my opinion, the most varied part of the face. I can't think of any two people I know who have the same shape of nose except maybe me and my identical twin.

(and I'm not talking big Vs small, or hooked vs snub vs straight vs flat. really look at people's noses in real life cause there are so many variables)

(some leading questions under the cut)

how big is it? how long from the front? how far away from the face does it sit in profile?

does it have a rounded tip? how round? some people's noses have a profile that's basically a triangle point, some people's are basically a round tip with no visible cartilage above it, and everything in between.

What's going on at the bridge? in profile, is there a clear dip in between the brow and the bridge of the nose, or does the brow come straight down to meet it (or, if you have a kind of striking profile like Hangman Adam Page who looks like an early 2000s DreamWorks character, is your profile one line from brow to the top of your nose)? from the front, is there a clearly defined edge to the bridge of your nose or does it curve out? how much of the space between your eye sockets is nose, on a range from 100% to 0%?

What shape is the top of the nose in profile? Is it a straight line from bridge to tip? does it curve down? does it curve up like a ski slope? does it come to a sharp stop and angle out into a round tip?

does it have sharp edges? does it look bony, with a pronounced ridge? or is it all soft lines? Does it meet the cheek at an angle or at a curve?

does the tip come to a sharp point, or to a curve? does it angle up (so you can see the nostrils from the front), or down (so you can only see the line of the nose)?

how big is the base of the nose compared to the bridge? from the front, does it flare wide across the face at the bottom, or is it almost a straight line down? is it broader higher up the nose?

what are the nostrils doing? how big are they? are they round, or slit-shaped? do they sit behind the tip, with the noise all contained in a single pyramid shape, or do they sit to the sides? do they sit along the face, point forward towards the tip, or point up higher than the tip?

how does the nose interact with the other features? does it dominate the face? is it a tiny wee thing? does it sit over a very long upper lip with a pronounced philtrum, or is it almost touching the mouth? How much of the space between the eyes is taken up by the bridge of the nose? do the eyebrows curve towards the nose, or meet them at a hard angle? if they wear glasses, where on the nose do they sit?

colouration - is it all the same colour, or pinker at the tip or over the bridge? are the insides of the nostrils visible, and are they pale or dark pink? does the top of the nose get more sun - is it darker?

surface details - are there creases at the bridge or around the nostrils and cheeks? are they from scowling (vertical) or laughing (horizontal)? does their nose scrunch up when they smile, or flare when they're angry? is there hair? freckles? piercings? scars or breaks?

like the nose, jaw and brow are the structure around which the rest of the face is built. if you get to a place in your art style where you're comfortable playing around with that then you immediately add so much more diversity and life and verisimilitude to your characters!

also noses are just great. like they're so fun to draw and there are so many different gorgeous noses! I'm so into noses that usually the way I find how I want a character to look is to draw the eyes, draw the nose, then redraw the eyes and build the whole face around the nose.

(this advice is coming from the fact that the most common compliment I get on my art is the diversity and believability of characters and I would say that's like 50-60% in the nose/brow)

[ribbonstrawberrysurprise]

Possible Mia Ikumi Doujin Penname

First off, thanks to @berrychanx who found the initial doujin listing and @kuro93 who I know also looked into this and bought some of her works! Second off, warning for some suggestive doujin covers and other art, although there's nothing truly explicit.

First things first, I want to say that I sat on this information for a little bit considering if it was appropriate to speculate since Ikumi never chose to make this connection publicly. Ultimately I've decided to go through with it since imo the artstyle is instantly recognizable, so it'd come out eventually. I also found some still-up online accounts associated with this penname, and I know that's a thing the fandom has wanted to see for a long time. I'd ask that you please be respectful with this info and keep in mind it is NOT confirmed and that Mia Ikumi has passed away.

I'd also like to make clear that I'm totally uninterested in trying to figure out her birth name or track down any other personal info on her life that she didn't choose to share in doujin, her website, manga notes, interviews, etc. That feels very out of line. Finding other pennames can help us fans catalogue more of her work, but finding her real identity does nothing but violate her privacy.

So that's kind of where I'm at right now. If you feel differently about whether it's right to speculate on Ikumi's doujin works, or if you don't want to see anything even a little suggestive, please turn back now.

We know for sure that Mia Ikumi was a penname, since that was confirmed in ads for Re-Turn when she changed one of the characters.

征海美亜 ＊征海未亜よりペンネーム変更されました Ikumi Mia *Ikumi Mia yori penneemu henkou saremashita Mia Ikumi (征海美亜) *[Her] penname was changed/altered/revised from Mia Ikumi (征海未亜)

Prior to her return to Nakayoshi with some TMM anniversary art and then the 2020 Re-Turn short, the last work she published under that name was Koi Cupid, way back in 2005-08.

There's always been speculation as to whether she continued drawing manga under a different penname, but there was never any official word from her once her website went down, since she was not active under that name under any social media or on Pixiv. We also had no idea how her art might have evolved in the years since her last official release, so there was no guarantee we'd recognize any work of hers if we saw it. The first anyone saw of her art post-website was back in 2015 when she drew some art of Ichigo and then Ichigo, Mint, and Lettuce for the 60th anniversary of Nakayoshi.

https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/132481043559/more-nakayoshi-60th-anniversary-mew-mew-art-from https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/118704238761/ichigo-momomiya-in-her-cafe-mew-mew-uniform-drawn https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/130755109662/new-picture-of-ichigo-minto-retasu-drawn-by

As you can see, this art featured a pretty different art style than she'd had 2 decades back.

(Sidenote: it seems she also did some art for the 55th anniversary, back in 2010, but this is much closer to the dates when she was working under the Mia Ikumi name and has roughly the same art style as OG TMM: https://hikayagami.tumblr.com/post/151430694480/doodles-of-ichigo-and-berry-drawn-by-mia-ikumi )

Obviously, starting in 2019, she then went on to release the two-shot manga TMM 2020 Re-Turn, some miscellaneous promo art (Blu-ray bonus comic, Alice in Wonderland merch, Smewthie fanart, etc.), and finally new covers and bonus comics for most of the rereleased manga volumes before her passing. Between the works she published in the 90s-early 2000s and all of this new art, we have a pretty good sample size of her artstyle over time. So it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled on something familiar looking…

Berrychanx found a listing (https://jp.mercari.com/item/m11046282201 ) for an Idolmaster doujin called Room Fight! created as a collab between 2 doujin circles/artists: Nameless Color (ねーむれすからー) and Komomo+ (こももぷらす), published by Poco Poco in 2014. The seller specifically noted that the style looks very similar to Mia Ikumi's, and it's very hard to argue! The hands especially look the way that Ikumi has always drawn them, and the eyes, facial expressions, and hair shading is pretty much one to one for Re-Turn.

Nameless Color has some other works, but they aren't in this same artstyle at all. Therefore, the one whose style matches Mia Ikumi's is Komomo+.

https://doujinrepublic.com/product/tag_page.html?tags=85361&ref=product_page&type=rel_tag_circle

As far as I can tell, the doujin circle is named Poco Poco, and the artist's penname is Komomo Kozakura (小桜小桃) or later Komomo (小桃) or Komomo+ (written as こももぷらす). There's a lot of variation in which spelling is used across doujin sites, and sometimes Komomo is listed as the circle name rather than Poco Poco, but I'm unsure as to whether this is a change in how presumed-Ikumi branded herself or just a lack of organization in the websites. Also, the Room Fight! doujin is categorized under komomo+ (https://www.suruga-ya.jp/product/detail/ZHORE153927) and under Komomo Kozakura (https://ecs.toranoana.jp/tora/ec/item/040030276511/ ), so I’m sure they’re the same person and not just 2 people in the same circle.

Here are the titles I could find under all of these names across various websites in approximate publishing order:

https://www.suruga-ya.jp/search?category=&search_word=&ck=true&inStock=On&person_id=1051050 https://www.suruga-ya.jp/search?category=&search_word=&ck=true&inStock=On&person_id=2874482 https://www.suruga-ya.jp/search?category=&search_word=&person_id=2864627 https://ecs.toranoana.jp/tora/ec/cot/circle/LUPA2D6P8476d16Qd687/all/

The main fandoms are Idolmaster, Kantai Collection, and Strike Witches. It's immediately obvious how much they look like Ikumi's style, from small details like the faces to larger things like how she tends to pose characters on her covers. They range from 2008-2016, and you can see that earlier works look a little more like her TMM-era art while later stuff is way more Re-Turn.

So is that all the new info? Do we need to track down and buy these doujin to get any more new info on Mia Ikumi? Well, that’s definitely a thing you can do! But there’s one other avenue.

You see, the title page of Girls Fight! does lead to a now defunct webpage: pocopoco.sblo.jp

https://web.archive.org/web/20081201000000*/pocopoco.sblo.jp

The Wayback Machine has 5 captures for this website: 12/31/08, 2/25/11, 6/3/13, 4/25/16, and 3/14/23. The latest one just shows the same error page not found message as if you try and go to the site now, but the others all have blog entries ranging from 2008 to the end of 2015 (i.e., starting RIGHT after the end of Koi Cupid/Mia Ikumi's professionally published/official manga career).

https://web.archive.org/web/20090103031628/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/article/20797588.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160425011557/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/article/170290508.html

Mostly these posts are either drawings or advertisements for a new book she's selling at a con or online by mail order, so there’s a whole bunch of new art. (Warning: there's nothing outright nsfw, but some of these images are probably the most suggestive ones I link in this post, moreso than even most of the doujin covers. Use your own judgment!) The rest of the posts are personal diary entries.

(Sidenote: I am NOT going to translate this whole blog because there’s a whole bunch of text! I looked through the available pages, and the auto-translated version is fine for getting a basic understanding. If you have questions about a specific post, feel free to ask, though! Right off the bat, the text on the big image at the top of the earlier captures, the one with the green-haired catgirl in a red outfit, is just a paraphrasing of the post where she explains her categories/tags to help you navigate the site https://web.archive.org/web/20090103030651/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/article/21376253.html )

This website, crucially, also links to Komomo's pixiv account (Username: 小桃/Komomo), which is still up!

https://www.pixiv.net/users/3966440

(I was logged in when I accessed the page, so it's possible you may need an account to view it. Please do keep in mind this is not an account publicly associated with Ikumi/TMM and that the owner is likely deceased. We don't need to leave random comments and messages.)

The oldest picture is from 2012, when she created it (she posts about this), and the most recent picture is from 2018, so you can really see the artstyle shift here as well. There is no reference to TMM or Mia Ikumi anywhere.

The blog also links to her NicoNico page (Username: 小桃/Komomo), where she posted a few Vocaloid covers from 5/16/10 to 6/4/11.

https://www.nicovideo.jp/user/16890918/

She talks about uploading these covers on her blog under her utattemita/”I tried singing” tag: https://web.archive.org/web/20160425011607/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/907578-1.html

So, the art definitely matches with what we know of Mia Ikumi’s art, both from published works and stuff posted online to her official website, ikumimia.chu.jp (Hika posted some of the website art here and here if you aren’t familiar)

(As a tangent, that website seems to have been created at or before 5/7/07 and gone offline sometime between 7/1/10 and 7/27/11, so there was definitely a period where she was working under both identities at once…)

But is there any other info linking Komomo and Mia Ikumi?

The site doesn't give much personal detail about Komomo irl, but it does say she was born in spring, and Mia Ikumi's birthday was March 27th.

プロフィール 名前小桜小桃です。 一言:春生まれです。 Profile My name is Komomo Kozakura. In a word, I was born in spring.

There's also a diary entry about her getting a Scottish fold kitten for her mom in 2008 after the family cat passed away 2 years back. We know from the bonus comics in the TMM manga that Mia Ikumi had a Scottish fold.

スコティッシュフォールドという種類のキャリコなお嬢さん。 A calico lady called a Scottish fold.

https://web.archive.org/web/20081231223544/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/627816-1.html

Komomo also says she’s interested in gothic lolita clothing and that she dresses up at events. We know Mia Ikumi also dressed up for events, since that’s in her bio, and she drew her outfits in manga bonus page.

＊ゴスロリの部屋＊ 小桜小桃の趣味のページです。主に持っている服やアイテム、欲しいモノの紹介、ゴスロリに関する事とかも書いていこうと思います。 *Gothic Lolita Room* A page about Komomo Kozakura’s hobby. Mainly I’ll write about clothing items I own, stuff I want, and things related to gothic lolita fashion.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160425154652/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/627812-1.html

今回のコミケはカゼのため、コスとかせずに防寒重視でいったのですが Because I had a cold at this Comiket, I went without any kind of costume to focus on keeping warm

https://web.archive.org/web/20160425154658/http://pocopoco.sblo.jp/category/627816-1.html

Between the art, the timeline of when things were posed vs Ikumi's public career, and the small bits of overlapping info on the artists' lives, I'm very confident that Mia Ikumi and Komomo Kozakura are two pennames for the same artist.

As for why, we can only speculate. I will say it's pretty common for artists to use a different penname for doujin work vs professional work, although some keep it more secret than others. It's especially common if the doujin work is more risque than the professional, which is the case here. I'll also say that almost all of Ikumi's post-TMM works were fairly short. Only One Wish may have been imagined as a one-volume anthology from the start, but it seems like TMM a La Mode and Repure may have been canceled early based on rushed endings with a lack of follow-up on plot points. Comi Digi +, the magazine in which Koi Cupid was published, got discontinued in 2008, presumably ending that series early as well. Ikumi also seems pretty annoyed with her editor in the a La Mode bonus comics, so possibly she was frustrated with baggage of the Mia Ikumi identity and wanted a fresh start.

Possibly she stopped putting out work around 2018 or possibly she started working under another penname. Maybe that was when Nakayoshi got in contact with her to begin planning for ReTurn, Ole/Au Lait, New, the TMM Blu-ray, the manga re-release, etc.

In conclusion, it seems like there are many more works by the artist known as Mia Ikumi than we'd thought previously, plus slightly more of a web presence, although this seems to have ended years before the TMM 20th anniversary renaissance. It's possible there are more accounts under the Komomo/小桃 name or under another penname that might be found in the future.

[egophiliac]

Um…hello! Your art is like a HUGE inspiration to me how you draw everyone is so unique, I love it! So I just wanted to ask what inspired you and your art to what it is today?

(hopefully I explained that correctly ;w;)

oh my gosh, thank you! :D :D :D I've been feeling pretty down about my art lately, so this was a super nice message to wake up to! one of the easiest traps to fall into is forgetting that other people are seeing your art without all the baggage and hangups that your brain has given it, and sometimes...they might actually like it? hmm. 🤔 (seriously though, that really is incredible to hear, thank you! 💕)

inspiration is really really hard to put into words. so I apologize if none of this makes sense! :') a lot of it comes from looking at things I like, trying to break down what it is that I like about them, and smooshing all those pieces together into some kind of amalgamated homunculus. I'll see something that uses a lot of straights vs curves, go "ooh", and then just start throwing those in there until it is fully absorbed into the gelatinous mess that is Developing An Artstyle. or I'll see some pretty soft-style shading, go "ooh", and then decide I'm not meshing with it and try something else. just, like, being open and trying different things and seeing what sticks, I guess!

overall, I would say I was mostly shaped by the Western media landscape of the early 2000s, when anime was becoming more mainstream and starting to show influence on Western cartoons; I think particular works that influenced me were Sailor Moon, Utena, the works of Takahashi Rumiko, Samurai Jack, Batman Beyond, and Bone. (there's also the French movie Princes et Princesses -- which is itself a homage to The Adventures of Prince Achmed -- which...yeah, you can basically take one look at it and see the effect it had on me.) and there are probably a lot of other things that I didn't consciously realize!

on a more philosophical level, one of my teachers once said to me that "the art that you like to look at isn't necessarily the art that you should be doing". which is something I try to hold onto! I had been trying really hard at the time to be, like, a more realistic traditional-style painter, and was getting really frustrated because that kind of art isn't fun for me to do. it wasn't until I gave myself permission to actually try out different things and not lock myself into what I thought was the kind of art I should be doing, that I realized I actually just like drawing little dudes making weird faces at each other! (I definitely still have some hangups about this, but I am getting better at it! ...I hope!)

[highfantasy-soul]

Ok, here's my breakdown of Jessie Gender's video on NATLA. I decided not to post this as a comment on the video because I just don't feel like it would be productive, but I needed to refute the points she was making as she's a quite respected (at least, I really respect her opinions on things) video essayist and I felt like this video was...wild.

So, I guess it's best to just watch along with her video and read my commentary side-by-side because I don't give much context for my points, this is just a stream-of-consciousness style response.

To be perfectly clear - this is not intended to be a 'hate post' about her, this is just me feeling very strongly that the interpretations of things she had in her video needed to be talked about and another perspective given.

I shift from saying 'you' to 'Jessie' like halfway through (when I decided not to post this as a comment) but I don't feel like going through and changing all those, so yeah, just ignore it.

1) you insulted a martial arts kata as 'a mildly choreographed dance' - it shows a complete lack of understanding of other cultures and a desire to take a quick dig at something you didn't like in a way that insults a cultural practice. I really didn't expect to hear that sort of comment from you so it was pretty jarring when you said it. Ironically, you say that Sokka was wrong to assume the Kyoshi warrior's kata was a 'dance' because that's 'a girl's place' when...you literally made the same insult with not a hint of recognition just a few minutes earlier about a movie you didn't like…

2) I felt that the live-action really deepened a lot of the themes from the OG - take Iroh's storyline for example, fleshing out Suki's character so she's...you know, her own character and not just there to teach Sokka a lesson, and delving into how hard of decisions you have to make during a century long war. Idk, I'm just really curious as to how you felt quite literally the polar opposite of me

3) Sokka's sexism: the animated show handled it one way, but Sokka's treating women as 'less than' wasn't a core part of his character - in all honesty, it doesn't actually make any sense as he was raised by Hakoda (who we never see being sexist), Gran Gran (who left the NWT due to its sexism), and was surrounded mostly by older women. The sexism storyline in the cartoon was to teach a very blatant lesson to kids "don't be sexist, boys!" while the live-action made Sokka's struggles much more realistic and in line with the world building: he struggled with non-traditional masculinity and if he was 'allowed' to be that way while they were at war. For me, it's a much more important message for young men today than the very dated 'women can fight, too!' message that was needed in the early 2000s. It's very odd to me how you claim that Sokka always taking charge isn't ever challenged when...in literally the scene you're showing when you say that, Katara challenges him.

4) I'm sorry, but I cannot possibly see how Suki is her own person more in the animated version than in the live-action. She was literally created solely to teach Sokka a lesson and have no character traits other than 'I'm a strong woman warrior' where 'woman' means 'I like romance' rather than...I'm a whole person with my own wants and desires and fears that have nothing to do with a love interest as is shown in the live-action. You keep comparing the animated and live action as though they were trying to tell the same story about Sokka's journey with his role in the world, but they weren't. Of course Suki's attitude toward him is going to be different, of course he's not going to need to tell her 'you're right, I'm a dumb, terrible man, pretty please could you teach me', because it's a different dynamic they're going for in the live-action.

5) When Sokka pinned her in their lesson in the live-action idk how you got that she was 'demuring herself' to Sokka? Just as in the cartoon, he managed to get the upper hand - which she promptly took back, teaching a lesson along the way. She didn't make herself less so Sokka could feel secure in his masculinity - it's a bit odd you feel that showing respect to someone and helping them learn is 'demuring yourself'. I much prefer them respecting each other than the animated version of them seeing each other as less than and then...her giving him a kiss to prove 'see, I'm a romance-loving girl, too'.

5) To me, Suki beating Sokka in the live-action when the first sparred wasn't her being mean, it was her not understanding how much less experience Sokka had fighting - she genuinely thought he would be able to hold his own against her because he had told her he was the best warrior in his tribe. Her face clearly shows 'I have no idea what I did wrong - I thought that type of sparring is what everyone did for fun, why was he uncomfortable with it?' Not really sure why you made the connection that us seeing Sokka's abs was meant to indicate that his insecurities are unfounded when...literally the whole season shows us that Sokka's struggles aren't "end goal = big strong warrior" but rather "you don't have to be a big strong warrior to help, you are allowed to delve into other aspects of who you are and those are just as important". Just because he has muscles, also doesn't mean he's a competent fighter - those two things aren't the same.

6) It feels like you took certain scenes and made wildly left-field interpretations of them and then claimed that that's what the show was intending you to take from it. It's like saying that the scene that cuts from Sokka saying he bets Momo tastes like chicken and cutting to the scene that shows people cooking meat actually means the showrunners are saying Sokka is going to cook and eat Momo this season and that will then give him the powers of the Avatar. It's very clearly not what the showrunners were saying, but if you interpret it in the least forgiving way and then make a wild leap off that, then yeah, you might get upset with that made-up interpretation. Same with the reasons they didn't put Sokka in the Kyoshi outfit - there is 0 evidence of them nixing that part due to transphobia. I didn't see it as any malicious intent, just a streamline of the plot so Sokka doesn't have to go change before running away on Appa.

7) I feel that the live-action DOES challenge the Fire Bender's colonialist rhetoric in the Kyoshi Island episode, but the animated...doesn't? At all? It's solely about girl power - and as we see with Azula and all the women fire nation soldiers, the fire nation doesn't seem too caught up in sexism. You know what they are caught up in? Which you mention? Bender supremacy. And that's what the live-action directly addresses with Sokka being so surprised that Suki is able to hold her own so well even though she isn't a bender. He's seen just how powerful benders are (they destroyed his home, killed his mom, and beat his ass last episode) and it's in line with the worldbuilding that he feels like he's already several steps behind in being a good enough warrior because he doesn't have bending (a storyline that isn't brought up until an episode in season 3 of the animated show). To me, the live-action Kyoshi storyline refutes the Fire Nation's imperialistic themes much better than the animated show does.

8) The live-action's lesson wasn't that might makes right - Suki never did any strength training exercises with Sokka, she taught him how to control his body and use his opponent's strength against them. Fight smarter, not harder. Know what you're fighting for, not just that you want to fight. Even if you don't have the resources of your opponent, it doesn't mean you're doomed from the start. That last one is particularly poignant when we look at how much stronger the Fire Nation is than the other nations they're subjugating: it's the classic 'oppressed rising up against their oppressors and not winning because they just punched harder, but because they used what they had to fight for a righteous cause and didn't just give up because the other side was more powerful'. That's quite directly what the live-action was saying - the exact lesson you thought it should be saying. You have to do some serious extrapolating from the animated episode to get to those themes while the live-action drew that concept up to the forefront immediately.

9) Aang's journey to accept his Avatar responsibility and the previous Avatar's enforcing this is directly from the animated series. Like, directly. It's not the live-action show saying 'colonialism good'. Showing the Avatar power wasn't the showrunners saying 'see, this OP is good and cool', it was to show the magnitude of it - something the animated show does too. The live-action does talk about how terrifying and damaging that power is - literally the previous episode has Aang almost toss Katara and Sokka off the mountain and they mention it. Just earlier in that episode, Sokka talks about Aang almost killing them and Aangs major hang up about embracing it is that he might hurt someone. Kyoshi argues that not learning to control it will hurt more people and - y'all, individuals are allowed to have their own views of the power that everyone doesn't have to agree with. What happened to 'make strong characters with flaws in their world view?' did you all of a sudden decide that's NOT actually good writing? So having the Avatar who used her powers liberally, and as the video states, used them maybe too much, telling Aang that he needs to use his own powers a lot is…consistent characterization? Which is then challenged by Roku later as he tells Aang that all the Avatars are different and have different views on the power of the Avatar. Why is Kyoshi's opinions suddenly taken as wholly accurate in representing what the show overall is trying to say? She's giving her opinion to Aang - an opinion that has some truth to it, but also some flaws that Aang will need to navigate on his own journey. Kyoshi and Roku's stories are not compressed all into Kyoshi - only the aspect of Roku taking control of Aang and using his body to fuck shit up in the Avatar state is compressed - not the ideological aspects of it

10) Sokka supporting Katara's fight against Pakku is a culmination of his arc to let go of obsessively protecting her and actually letting her decide her course of action herself - because his arc was different in the show than in the animated series. Trying to say that the reason he told her to kick Pakku's ass didn't fit because he was never sexist wasn't the reason - it WAS a culmination of his arc, you just refused to see it by clinging to the old one.

11) The whole argument as to 'why show genocide' I already made a post about, but to condemn the depiction based on the way you interpret the showrunner's quote is disingenuous. Again, it's taking something and making up a narrative around it so you can feel justified in hating it. It's important to show a culture before they are killed because they deserve to be seen as people, not just martyrs. They had lives. They lived and were happy and had a rich culture. They were not just 'fated to die and be told of in history books'. Genocide is disgusting and hard to watch - it's calculated and brutal. Showing that drives home just how awful the actions of the fire nation are in practice rather than just theory. Yes, the airbenders fighting was 'cool' to see - in the way that all action is 'cool' to see. But no, the genocide wasn't played as 'look at neat fighting!' in the live-action. It was shown as brutal and terrible, horrifying and surprising, and the airbenders didn't deserve what happened to them. It also gives you a direct view of what the fire nation is capable of when they come to the south pole and the northern water tribe: you've SEEN the devastation first hand and you DON'T want to see it again. The threat isn't theoretical, it's very real.

11.5) To take a CHILD'S quote about the sequence being 'so cool' is absolutely WILD to me. GORDON IS A CHILD! No, he's not going to have the most sophisticated and politically nuanced sound bite to say about the action sequence in an interview. HE'S A CHILD! Holy mother of god. To use that to bolster your point that 'that's the way it was intended to be viewed and how everyone is going to view it!' is just…..holy shit. You're taking media interpretation from A CHILD??????? Do you think, if we interviewed a child about the OG show, they'd talk about the fucking colonialism??? How Azula was abused too and didn't deserve her fate?? Or do you think they'd say "The fight between the Fire Lord and Aang at the end was so cool!" Honestly thought Jessie Gender wouldn't try to bolster her interpretation with a quote from A CHILD, but I guess here we are…

12) It's wild that she makes the point that conservatives are incapable of reading deeper than just the surface-level visuals of a story while…she's doing literally the same thing just in the opposite way. The live-action depicted the genocide, therefore they MUST just want to 'cool' visual of firebenders fighting airbenders! There can't be any other things at play here! No story being told whatsoever because all it is is spectacle! That's all I see! Ironically, she's falling into the same trap of not looking deeper at why one might depict the horrors of genocide and the battle against people with no army.

13) Aang actually treats the genocide as more immediate in the live-action than he does the animated show. Most animated episodes, you can forget that it even happened, while in the animated show, it pops up a lot in some unexpected ways like when he's uncomfortable waterbending because Gyatzo had always been his teacher, when he yells at Bumi for making light of the genocide, his desire to get to the north to keep it from happening again, when Zhao proclaims that he can wipe out an entire race of benders and Aang says he knows exactly what that's like, when he constantly stays to help people because 'I couldn’t help my own people, but I can help them'.  Not only through Aang, but also through every child in the series - like with the animated show, the live-action shows how kids are shaped by the generational trauma of the war plus the immediate effects of it: Teo ready to fight, Jet making compromises to fight back, Sokka shouldering too much responsibility so young, Katara's trauma around her mother's death and her waterbending, Bumi losing his faith, Zuko and Azula being shaped by their father to be the perfect weapons to continue the war.

14) Interpreting Zuko's comment of 'sometimes the weak can become strong' right after his father mutilated him for showing compassion is not meant to be taken as a thesis that 'Zuko just needs to get better at fighting, this is what the story is saying, I am very smart'. It's showing HIS CURRENT view of the world - the idea that his father has taught him that he needs to be strong and Zuko has bought that and wants desperately to earn his father's love. Zuko's story through the series is showing that 'strength' isn't what his father defines it as (or what Jessie defines it as in her video) but rather it's strength of character - compassion is not weakness, it's strength, and no, that doesn't mean if you have compassion you punch harder.

15) The live-action show makes the Fire Nation MUCH more nuanced than the animated show - we see how Ozai and Azula aren't just maniacal villains, but we see the pain and torment their upbringings deal out to them, and in turn, deal to others. It shows the cycle much more clearly and showing fire nation citizens who disagree fleshes out the culture even more.

16) Jet was much more nuanced in the live-action as he's RIGHT about the mechanist being a spy and the king being lax in his duties. He's created a community of people to try to heal from the harm the fire nation has caused them and he gives actual good advice to Katara, helping her emotionally heal and remember the good aspects of her mother.

17) The argument that 'the live action is trying to ignore the past' is a massively simplified narrative. The live-action is showing Aang stuck in the past, unable to take large steps into the future. Pain, trauma and loss can anchor us in the past - it's HEALTHY to keep moving forward rather than only thinking about the pain in the past (ie Jet's advice to Katara). Aang was continually trying to avoid the genocide happening again while simultaneously trying to get past Avatars to do the big hard work for him. His lesson is not to 'forget the past just live in the now' but rather, don't let fear of what has happened in the past stop you from making a difference in the future. Yes, war is loss and suffering, but if you get paralyzed by not being able to prevent that, the fire nation will just keep marching across the world. It's about not letting the past immobilize you to the point where you stop fighting back against oppression - or getting together with a community to help you fight for fear they'll die just like those in the past did.

17.5) Letting go of the past is a buddhist philosophy that is a lot more complicated than Jessie is making it out to be here. Just as in the animated series, characters can come to realizations about lessons they need to learn while still taking seasons to fully learn the lesson - just because Aang said he's ready to let go of the past doesn't mean he's now ignoring it and all will be smooth sailing. It means he's ready to start taking steps to do that and approach life in a healthier way. It's wild that Jessie took the direct quote "I need to let go of the past to focus on my future" and then states that the show is saying "the character's aren't seeing future possibilities and hope, they're focused on the now" when, quite literally, the quote she just referenced….is talking about building a better future.

18) Then, she references later seasons (Aang in the fire nation school) a lot to indicate that the live-action is ignoring those concepts from the OG when….we're talking about season 1 here - not season 3. Why is the world not allowed to organically grow? Why would you make the argument that 'season 1 didn’t explicitly deal with these concepts that aren't brought up until season 3, so therefore they are ignoring them'?

19) Jessie uses a lot of clips from a Daily Wire (conservative talkshow) guy as if that has anything at all to do with the live-action ATLA. She's trying to draw a line between that ideology and the ideology of the show and I feel like she had to bastardize the NATLA show in order to do that so horribly, her interpretation of the story and themes is completely unrecognizable to what is actually shown on screen.

I usually agree with her takes on media, but this video was not it. Every interpretation she had, I interpreted the scenes/lessons in the exact opposite way and, I believe, I interpreted it closer to what the showrunners intended.

Oh no, i just had a thought: this is The Last Jedi all over again! I saw so many negative interpretations of that movie that I just sat and scratched my head over like "How in the WORLD did you get to that conclusion??" when I thought my own interpretation was just...the obvious way to view the movie. I had no idea my views on it would be so controversial. Here we are again. Time is a flat circle. Life is a meaningless cycle of disappointment and confusion, neverending.

[genericpuff]

You mentioned multiple times that Persephone is a self insert of Rachel, how is that so?

Also, I love Lore Rekindled

So obviously it's not like Rachel herself has outright stated that Persephone is a self-insert, but there's a lot of narrative and visual evidence that points to this being so.

Disclaimer before I continue: a lot of this is speculation, take it with grains of salt, but understand that all of the following evidence is why so many people subscribe to the idea that Rachel is using Persephone as a self-insert power fantasy, myself included. This is going to be a long post.

First, the most obvious - Rachel and Persephone look virtually identical, especially when Persephone's hair is short. In a way that's not even reaching at this point, like there are times when Persephone literally looks like she was traced directly off Rachel's face. It's panels like these where you don't even have to squint or fill in the blanks with your own interpretations, Persephone literally looks like Rachel.

There was also that time she dyed her hair pink and her own audience called out how she looked like Persephone (unironically for the most part, which goes to show how much the implications of Persephone being a self-insert of Rachel has gone over their heads, sigh)

She's also made absurd claims in interviews that Persephone and Hades were her "muses" since all the way back in middle school.

I say these claims are 'absurd' because frankly I just don't think that's true, there's nothing from her early-mid 2000's online presence (which is still accessible via the Wayback Machine) that suggests she was into Greek myth content, most of her stuff from back then was medical fetish and lolita art and not a single piece of Greek work is mentioned on any of her profile bios, favorite book lists, or interests, not even once you get to the 2010's when she started shifting away from blatant medical fetish art and more towards marketable storybook-style art.

(she definitely mentions Lolita though 😒)

I firmly believe she's just making up that whole "Persephone and Hades were my muses" thing the same way she's made up her 'folklorist' label to hide the fact that she has no connection to Greek myth whatsoever and was just creating LO on a whim during the era of Hades x Persephone shipping prompts that were popular on Tumblr at the time. It just so happened to become massively popular so she stuck with it and tried to pretend like she always loved Greek myth as a way to justify her success when really it was just luck and circumstance.

But we can go further back than that.

You see, Rachel also really... really likes Mads Mikkelson. Like, beyond just enjoying his work and entering teenage girl obsessive cringe territory. I wouldn't be calling it out if she was a teenage girl or even a young adult, but she isn't - she's thirty seven years old.

Mads Mikkelson is, of course, her dream cast for Hades, and when you see how she views Mads Mikkelson, the rest practically writes itself.

But we can go even further back than that.

Because, you see, Rachel has old art accounts from long before Lore Olympus. Normally I try to avoid posting a lot of this stuff because it's very much old skeletons that we usually understand to leave buried, but this particular piece is very relevant to this discussion.

'Madame issue' was the screenname of her account where this drawing comes from. You may also notice this is very likely where the name 'used bandaid' came from. This character is meant to be Rachel. It was very common for her to draw herself with short pink hair back then and it seems that's barely changed now.

Just wanna also throw it out there real quick that Rachel's birthday is March 21st. Guess what date Rachel chose to make Persephone's birthday? Oh yeah, the first day of Spring, literally March 20th. Which shouldn't even exist yet as Lore Olympus is based on The Hymn to Demeter which outlines the creation of the season. But I digress.

Now, this may be a little irrelevant and nitpicky, but to circle back around to the point I made earlier about her not having any genuine connection to Greek myth, Rachel seems to have always behaved like this, in a way that tries to 'hide' the fact that she's not 'legit'. There are old FAQ's from her art pages that answer questions she's asking herself in a very arrogant "how dare you ask me this" kind of way. Like, she claims to have imposter syndrome, which I'm not saying is a lie, but if she does, she definitely uses blind arrogance as a way to cover up for it. It reeks of early 2000's 'mean because it's cool to be mean' energy and that seems to be an attitude that she hasn't left behind in the early 2000's where it belongs - she's just channeled it into 'girl boss' Persephone instead.

It's become abundantly clear after going through old LO asks/livejournal/flickr/etc. posts that Rachel herself 1.) romanticizes purity culture (again, like the Greek myth 'self-proclaimed folklorist' thing, she's trying to claim she's 'deconstructing' purity culture when her actual beliefs are the exact opposite), 2.) values naivety and youthfulness vs. experience and wisdom, especially with how she talks about Persephone and 3.) constantly tries to act like a 'boss babe' similarly to Persephone.

There's also the fact that the time skip perfectly aligned Persephone's age to be in the same range as Rachel - she's now 30 to Rachel's 37. The time skip didn't have to be exactly ten years, if it was purely to retcon the age gap problems then she could have made it far longer, but she made it specifically 10 years and I feel like it can't be a coincidence when we consider how close in age Persephone and Rachel now are. Recalling that earlier point that Rachel seems to be obsessed with naivety and youthfulness, she probably didn't like the idea of making Persephone 40 because that would be too "old".

That's not even getting into the actual way that Persephone is written. This is the part where I say there's nothing inherently wrong with writing self-inserts, even famous authors do it, but the issue lies in authors writing them as power fantasies and not actual fleshed out characters. Persephone is not a fleshed out character. She does not have flaws - at least none that are recognized as flaws - and she never loses. She does whatever Rachel wants her to do on a whim even if it contradicts previous actions or information we've been shown. Sometimes she's an inexperienced "uwu" teenage girl, other times she's attempting to be a 'boss babe' (but really it just comes across as her acting like a Karen.)

All that said, it's not uncommon for poorly written self-inserts to lack consistent characterization because the author is too hopped up on writing them to fulfill their fantasies, even if those fantasies don't align with pre-existing information. There's also the fact that Persephone herself never suffers any consequences for her actions, even when she's in the wrong, and terrible things that happen to her are more for the sympathy of the audience and less for actual character development, depth, or underlying meaning. The comic's universe and the characters that reside within it bend around Persephone and her wants and needs, and this is something that happens with poorly-written self-inserts a lot especially when they're being written purely as power fantasies and not actual character studies or reflections. Nothing bad will ever happen to Persephone, she'll never suffer real consequences for her actions, and she'll never make any real sacrifices, because Persephone is Rachel and Rachel can't write Persephone separate from herself.

This kind of goes hand in hand with the whole "she didn't make Persephone 40+ because then she'd be too old" thing, but I'd also like to mention real quick that Rachel has never written a female character who isn't like this. All of her main characters from all of her works are women, which is perfectly fine in isolation, but they're all written as the exact same woman, sharing traits of naivety, inexperience, youthfulness and innocence. None of her female characters are over the age of 21. Making Persephone a "doesn't know she's sexy" 19 year old who's often drawn very childlike was very intentional as it's the exact same kind of character she's been drawing for years now, and the fact that she's 30 now is simply Rachel trying to retcon the problematic age gap that she got called out on; with the added bonus that it makes Persephone even more like Rachel.

No, Rachel has never directly confessed to Persephone being a self-insert, but I don't think someone like Rachel - who already speaks with a veil of disingenuous arrogance - would admit to it anyways. The writing is on the wall: how she's written Persephone and every female protagonist who has preceded her is a deliberate choice based around Rachel's own beliefs and values - that women are only desirable when they're young and thin, that the "ideal man" is someone who's above everyone else in power, wealth, and status and will and should use that power, wealth, and status to get what they want, and that women should be as cute and innocent as they can be until any degree of opposition or questioning comes their way, in which they are justified in exercising outright cruelty and abuse towards those in their way, with no in-between.

And that's all I'm gonna say on that.

[havendance]

heyy, i was thinking to get some good nightwing/batman comics, like ones w good art that i can show off to my friends but also good story lines?

a friend suggested that i ask you, as you probably know more about this topic and own some physical copies yourself.

thanks if you answer and have a wonderful day!

So this was a tricky if only because hitting that trifecta of art, story, and easily obtainable as a collected edition can be hard, but I'll do my best to give you some recommendations here. I would also say that a lot of my favorite Dick and Bruce moments are less storylines, and more single moments or issues. (Unless you want Nightwing OR Batman comics, in which case I will try to give you recs for both.) This is going to be mostly post-crisis stuff because that's what I've read the most of.

The Bruce and Dick storyline that first comes to mind as hitting most of your points is actually Robin: Year One which does not feature Nightwing, but does have a good story, a fun, more simplistic art style, and has been collected multiple times so it shouldn't be too tricky to find.

I believe it's getting a box set soon with Nightwing: Year One and Batgirl: Year One soon which should also make it easier to obtain.

Nightwing: Year One on the other hand, does feature Nightwing and Batman focusing on Dick's transition from Robin to Nightwing. As such, it doesn't require a lot of previous reading, but story-wise it's, hmmm, not my favorite take. Additionally, it has Scott McDaniel on the art which is a bit of an acquired taste and if you're trying to get your friends into comics, might be a bit of a turn off.

Overall: Your mileage may vary.

Other recommendations for Nightwing and Batman (together):

Bruce Wayne: Muderer/Fugitive -- This is a larger event that chronicles that one time Bruce Wayne got framed for murder. It features the entire ensemble of Bat characters (more or less) reacting/getting involved, but Nightwing plays a significant role (alongside Bruce obviously). Also Batman #600 which is part of the event is probably one of the THE Bruce and Dick issues to me. Art wise, it's a crossover event so there are multiple artists with multiple art styles (one of which is Scott McDaniel) so I can't really give a definitive answer, but it's probably pretty for the course for early 2000s comics. This event has been collected a few times and there's an omnibus announced as coming out at the end of this year. Omnibuses do make for less convenient reading and they tend to be more expensive, but in terms of collecting convenience and also getting lots of comics for your money, they're pretty good. Maybe see if there are any omnis at local bookstores or in your library system just to see if physically it's something you're interested in owning. I personally do have some omnis for the collecting convenience, but I prefer trades because their easier to read.

Batman: Gotham Knights: Transferrence -- In a similar vein to Bruce Wayne: Murderer/Fugitive, this is a ensemble book focusing on Batman's relationships with his extended cast. It does have several good stories featuring Nightwing in it. This probably would work as a good book to share with newer readers. I wouldn't say the art is standout, but it gets the job done and won't burn your eyes out or anything.

Recommendations for Nightwing:

Tomasi's run on Nightwing is a fan favorite (I too enjoyed it) and it was collected in the Nightwing by Peter J. Tomasi trade fairly recently (2020), however due to it being a fan favorite, I think it's in the category of you'll have trouble tracking it down.

A solid chunk of Dixon's run on Nightwing was also recently collected in the Nightwing: A Knight in Blüdhaven Compendium which I believe came out in May which should make it easy to get your hands on. It collects the first 25 issues of his solo, plus some other stuff. Dixon's run is considered to be foundational, but personally while there are some stories I liked in there, Dixon's Nightwing is not my favorite. Also, the majority of it has Scott McDaniel art which is, as stated previously, an acquired taste. As a compendium, it's chunkier sized like an omni, but paperback which makes it cheaper than an omni, but still a little chunkier than convenient for reading. Very good bang for your buck in terms of the number of comics it collects though. I'll put this also under, your mileage may vary. I'd recommend trying to read some before just buying to see how you like it.

Recommendations for Batman:

In terms of solid comic that can be read without context, and has been collected a million times so you should be able to find it easily, I'll recommend The Long Halloween. This follows Bruce earlier in his Batman career in a case that brings him in contact with most of his rogue's gallery. It's a fun read. Tim Sales' art is stylized in a way that I really liked. I have not read Dark Victory, which is the sequel to this story, but I know that it features Dick Grayson as Robin.

I also really liked Paul Dini's detective comics run, but it's looking like that's only collected in 15 year old trades and an omnibus (released 2020 so you should be able to find it if you're interested), but see my note about Omnis.

In Conclusion:

My biggest piece of advice for buying collected editions is to buy comics you know you'll like. If there's a storyline you really like, check if it's collected! If you're getting started, I recommend checking if your library has comics. In my experience tend to ether be in the non-fiction section (I know, but it has to do with the dewey decimal system) or in the teen section. Mine has a really good comics selection, so if you have access to something similar, flip through them and see what looks cool!

Newer comics also tend to be easier to find collected editions for just because of how DC's business model has evolved, so if anyone has recommendations for newer comics, please feel free to add them on!

(Art examples below the cut.)

Robin: Year One

Nightwing: Year One:

Gotham Knights:

The Long Halloween:

[loafbud-wc]

im sorry if this has been asked before but where do you get your art style inspo? like where do you get the inspo for diverse designs?

and how do you do colors so well!?

thank you!!!

my artstyle gets heavy inspo from jet set radio, the persona series, panty&stocking, Y2K, early 2000s cartoons, and (recently) the game umbraclaw! when i go about coming up with designs for warrior cats, i take A LOT of inspiration from my hero academia and pokemon!

my warrior cat designs fall into the more exaggerated/stylized side of things, with some characters having parts of their fur exaggerated to resemble accessories (e.g., tabby stripes look like a suit, long neck fur resembling a hero's cape, etc) or having colors not naturally in a cat's fur irl (e.g., lime green, purple, etc)

for colors- i like to keep the 60-30-10 Rule in mind! For colors in a character design, I try to use: 60% of it as the primary color, 30% secondary color, and 10% for any accent colors!

I also keep in mind about color theory, so the colors can feel somewhat harmonized, even if the colors contrast! i mostly use the Tetradic method for choosing colors haha

[miraculous-metamorphosis]

Hello all! We're Mod Ladybug and Mod Chat Noir!

This blog is like, super last minute, buuuut we think we've discovered lost media???

Mod Chat Noir here, I was like, fucking around on the wayback machine a few days ago, comparing and contrasting Adult Swim's website vs Cartoon Network's website, when I found a stray link to this page and like- Huh?

Here's the image blown up for y'all:

Hey, this is Mod Ladybug! So when Mod Chat told me about it- I didn’t know what to make of it at first but… now I feel like we’re going to go into a rabbit hole. Hope we make it alive on the other side but I feel like there’s going to be a lot more than meets the eye here… god it’s only been 2 years of being into this show and look where I am now uncovering stuff with my friend. And documenting it too… We'll try to keep searching for any more content about this series.

So far our speculation is that this was an error on adult swim's part and no one was supposed to see this.

Yet.. why was there an early draft of Miraculous with a 2000's art style?

Why was it on Adult Swim's website when this channel didn't exist in France in 2007?

What else is there?

[oddygaul]

Zenless Zone Zero

Well, I’ve been playing the shit out of this game, so fair warning, there will be significant brainrot ahead.

Overall, I really dig it. I’m a huge mark for character action games, and well-done life sims tend to suck me in; Zenless Zone Zero is nailing both those aspects pretty damn well. In fact, it’s nailing them well enough that… how do I put this… it starts to slip into the territory of being A Good Game Generally, rather than just a gacha. And while this is a big accomplishment for ZZZ, this also puts it into direct conversation with other full-price games, resulting in its gacha elements causing more friction than Honkai Star Rail’s ever did*.

*I’ll be comparing this to HSR a lot, because I play way too much of both and they’re made by the same developer. I recognize that it is pretty odd and potentially even problematic to A / B compare them when I could be looking at the game through the lens of, you know, Gaming At Large. But hey, that’s why this is a subjective journal and not a holistic review blog! It is what it is.

So, the aesthetic of this game fuckin rules - it’s like, late 90s to early 2000s VHS-core. The main characters run a Blockbuster, for Christ’s sake. Presentation-wise (and systems-wise, and, hell, music-wise), ZZZ is obviously borrowing a lot from the Persona series, but like… great? I’d love it if more things cribbed that style and made it their own, from the confidant hangouts, to the small but comfy explorable areas, to the dynamic menus with edgy character poses. The character design itself is all superb, all the way down to the crowd NPCs - some the shopkeepers here have cooler designs than the main characters of some other games. Even aside from the designs, ZZZ is doing a lot with lighting and color desaturation that really lends it its own unique vibe. They actually have a cohesive artstyle in here! wild.

The presentation of the story is also killer. Sure, a decent chunk of the conversations are just models lip-flapping at each other - although they at least emote and pose a bit here, unlike the Star Rail dialogue scenes with their demure princess waves. In the main story, though, we get not only a heap of fairly lengthy cutscenes, but also this really cool comic panel-style presentation.

I feel like there was a bit of a trend in the PS3/360 era of games to present a game’s story in this comic panel / storyboard style. I understood the motivation: games increasingly demanded a more involved, consistent storytelling approach, rather than the ‘One big rendered cutscene at the beginning and end’ they used to get away with, and the generation’s increased visual fidelity meant that doing even basic, in-engine cutscenes took a lot more resources to make something half-decent. In Spyro the Dragon on PS1 you could get away with a fun little 15-second gag with a barely animated polygonal yeti or whatever; in the PS3 era, you were going up against tryhards like Metal Gear Solid 4. Amidst this landscape, the pitch of having your illustrators pretty up some storyboards and put them in the game sounds like it’d save a lot of work - plus, consoles were finally outputting a high enough resolution that this sort of flat image wouldn’t be compressed to hell.

Thing is, I always kinda hated that approach. In some cases, I think that’s the popular opinion - I fuckin love Bayonetta, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone defend its weird slideshow cutscenes. Even in games where the execution is perfectly fine, though, it rubbed me the wrong way. I think of Infamous - objectively, the art’s solid and fits the tone of the game, and the motion graphics aim to capture some of the dynamism typical cutscenes would provide. Despite all that, it still feels cheap to me - all of the panning, effects, and graphic imagery feel like they’re trying to polish up something that inherently doesn’t fit.

In ZZZ, though, I’m loving every one I come across. It’s obviously still done for efficiency reasons - there’s already a handful of characters that exist only in these panel scenes, saving the team the effort of having to model and rig them. But the freedom this allows for staging and storytelling is huge; the characters are more expressive here than anywhere else in the game, and we’re able to see situations with huge crowds and new locales much more often than would be possible in typical cinematics. And the illustrations are genuinely good, too - full of character, cool poses and creative compositions/angles.

if everything actually had to be modeled, there's no way we would've gotten Legally Blonde Nicole

Plus, the cutscenes are constant, and boy do I love the animation here. It feels so rare nowadays for a high-budget game to do stylized 3D animation of this ilk. Your biggest budget games are all going for the cinematic look, and pushing realism as much as they can - and while I know an immense amount of work and craft goes into animating something like The Last of Us, boy, I just could not care less about something so lacking in flair*. Even bigger properties that use a stylized artstyle these days, like Breath of the Wild, still tend to lean towards fairly naturalistic animation. Zenless Zone Zero’s cutscenes, on the other hand, spin and stretch motherfuckers around like we’re back on the PS2, are filled with forced perspective, and I am absolutely living for it. It’s not even reserved only for bombastic action scenes, either - we get honest to god character acting-focused conversation cutscenes.

*Seriously, take me back to the Naughty Dog that animated Jak & Daxter. Jak’s hero animation is top tier to this day

Of course, the combat animation slaps too; each of the playable agents is absolutely dripping with character. Even characters whose designs initially left me cold won me over once I saw the amount of care put into their movement and combo strings. It’s honestly shocking to me that this is the same studio that made Genshin Impact, a game I dropped after about 2 hours because of how lifeless all the animation felt*. Unique run cycles for every character, actual non-human designs, the flourishes everyone has when stopping mid-combo to snap them back to idle, the absolute synergistic audiovisual bliss of the parry… it’s really impressive stuff from a young team.

*Same studio in name only, totally different team, I know, but still

Mechanically, I have some mixed feelings about the combat as a whole. Zenless Zone Zero is, without a doubt, aiming to present complexity and depth as a team battler - that is to say, it’s more about team synergy, tag combos, and knowing who to use when, rather than soloing as any particular character. Nonetheless, I really would’ve appreciated individual characters having a bit more depth to their movesets; a jump, a launcher, cancels, anything. As outstanding as all the animation work is, there’s some characters that only have a normal attack string on square and one special attack on triangle. Like, sub-Dynasty Warriors level of complexity here. It’s rough.

This is where ZZZ’s gacha nature gets a bit ugly: so far, more complex kits and skill expression are mostly locked behind rarity, which is kind of scummy. In Star Rail, for the most part, 4-star characters are defined as such due to their numbers: they still have mechanics and complexity, they just aren’t tuned as high as the limited characters. Hell, in some cases they have more complexity. Ruan Mei is an almost incomparably stronger unit than Asta, but Ruan Mei’s play pattern is fucking boring: you use skill every three turns when it runs out. Asta, meanwhile, basically has her own risk & reward minigame that demands more thoughtful SP management.

In ZZZ, on the other hand, the lower-rank characters straight up have less going on in their kits. Nicole has like… one tech, sorta. Anby has one single animation cancel to chain her normal into her special quicker. Lucy’s only skill expression is choosing whether to tap special or hold special. Meanwhile, Zhu Yuan, a limited character, has a normal string that bounces between melee and ranged attacks, can be dodge-canceled at any point in the combo to branch into variations of the string, and a hold-normal attack string that’s completely different and has the same branching dodge-cancel tech.

It’s one thing to lock raw damage and meta viability behind a gacha, but locking the characters that are mechanically more interesting to play straight up sucks. If I hadn’t been lucky enough on the standard banner to pull exactly the two characters I find the most mechanically satisfying, I don’t know that I’d still be playing - and this is the point where ZZZ begs comparison to other, non-live service character action games. Sure, it’s probably not fair to compare a random A-rank’s moveset to Devil May Cry V’s iteration of Dante, a feature-creeped nightmare of a kit 3 console generations in the making. But what about Sengoku Basara Sumeragi, my personal character-action GOAT? By all accounts a mid-budget title, yet it offers 40 full characters chock-full of more unique mechanics and animation cancels than you can shake a stick at.

Fuck, can we please get a new Sengoku Basara? Please? I’m desperate out here. I’ll take anything, y’all.

There’s also the inherent issue that plagues every action RPG (usually deftly avoided by the character action genre), which is the delicate balance of player success depending on the numbers vs actual mechanical skill - a balancing act made even more noticeable due to the gacha genre-standard of characters taking weeks of grinding to level up. This is a topic for another day, but suffice to say, a big part of the reason Honkai Star Rail works for me as a very pretty version of Cookie Clicker is because of the Autoplay option. In Zenless Zone Zero, if you’re not willing to grind out the same mob fight for a week or two, you’re gonna hit an endgame roadblock of doing chip damage to a boss you’ve mechanically mastered because you’re underleveled, and boy, that never feels good.

For all those issues stemming from the gacha, I will say, it’s great that the story missions let you use the characters that are actually supposed to be present for those missions, even if you don’t own them. Aside from how nice it is to have an opportunity to put the whole roster through their paces, it goes a long way for actually getting invested in the story. Honkai Star Rail’s storytelling is a hot mess for many reasons, but it’s always particularly jarring rolling up to a sidequest at like, a local theater troupe with a wanted space criminal, the sitting president of a completely different planet, a ten year old child, and a shirtless cyborg cowboy, none of whom have canonically met each other; ZZZ’s approach sidesteps this issue. The proxy angle even provides a pretty valid diegetic explanation for why agents that don’t know each other might be working together.

Now that we’ve sort of meandered back to the story after talking about animation led us on a long detour - the story is surprisingly solid. In particular, I really appreciate how straightforward the writing is. I don’t know if the issue lies with the original text or the localization, but Star Rail’s dialogue, even in simple missions, tends to be incredibly meandering and overstuffed; ZZZ is a lot better about letting all its characters talk like actual humans. It also helps that the plot so far is a lot more grounded, and spends more time focusing on each faction’s group dynamics rather than the overarching plot. These games live and die by their characters, so leaning into those strengths is a smart move.

Zenless Zone Zero is, unfortunately, fully in line with Hoyo’s weird conservative politics - in particular, 1.0 and 1.1 are absolutely stuffed full of copaganda. With how many safety regulation jokes they made at the construction company, I initially hoped they’d lampoon the police faction a bit, or make a commentary on how comically heavily armed New Eridu’s police force are. In a vacuum, Zhu Yuan shouting combat lines like “Stop resisting!” or “Freeze, hands up!” while blasting someone with her gigantic, ‘JUSTICE’-emblazoned rocket launcher shotgun feels like it ought to be satire. Every time we talk to the officers, though, it’s just line after line about their solemn duty to protect the people of the city, how essential and important they are for the community, and so on and so on.

This wholehearted embrace of the world’s current power structure is something Zenless Zone Zero approaches in nearly the exact same way as Star Rail. In both games, your playable character is someone that’s sort of operating outside the law - in Star Rail, as the maverick organization that is the Astral Express, while in ZZZ you work as an illegal proxy. Despite this setup, any time the protagonists come into contact with a governing body, they are no less than thrilled to help them enforce the will of the law.

In Star Rail, you aid the local governments (one of which is an undemocratic monarchy) in committing massive cover-ups to hide their failures from the populace not once but twice. In ZZZ, you aid the police to an obsequious degree - playing along with them to not arouse suspicion is one thing, but helping them organize a fucking community day on Sixth Street? Fuck that. Hell, said community day is even shown to initially be DOA because none of the local residents trust the police - and you best believe we get two full scenes of the MCs changing the resident’s minds, resulting in them spouting shit about “Oh, it was our fault for judging the police too harshly - they really do have our best interests at heart!”

is it tho

There’s an argument to be made that the N.E.P.S. are a little different, given that they exist in a post-apocalyptic world with monsters popping up every day - and ZZZ’s copaganda is certainly a little less flagrant than something like Spider-Man helping the NYPD install civilian surveillance networks in Insomniac’s Spider-Man. And, sure, perhaps this can help excuse why they post fully armored, rifle-wielding soldiers in the Lumina Square DMV, and provides some justification that their existence is more helpful than the real world’s civilian-murdering property guards.

Thing is, though, at every turn you’re hit with dialogue and situations which make it clear that, no, they’re the normal cops. Every other sidequest seems to involve calling the N.E.P.S. in on somebody or helping with an investigation, and for every time we see them handle ethereal activity, there’s two instances of them being called in for petty property theft or something similarly minor - even the playable character has heaps of dialogue choices threatening to call the police on someone*. Much like Star Rail’s reactionary politics were strangely at odds with the ‘blazing a new path’ ideals of the trailblaze, Zenless Zone Zero’s obsession with the police puts a damper on its underground, counterculture aesthetic.

*Including a case where both options threatened this, leaving me without a non-narc dialogue choice.

illustration by Lv01KOKUEN

And finally… I don’t know where to fit this in, so I guess it just goes in its own little section at the end here. Lots of people, myself included, have touched on the Persona inspirations - and they’re certainly significant. One thing I’m surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention as a huge influence is Yasuhiro Nightow’s Kekkai Sensen / Blood Blockade Battlefront. From its sense of style to its worldbuilding, ZZZ damn near feels like fanfic to me. Hell, it’s right in the name - BBB? ZZZ? And this is on top of the dimensional crossover / big city vibe, the retro fashion, the different factions. Victoria Housekeeping might as well be Libra 2.0 - Von Lycaon is a damn near perfect 50/50 expy of Klaus and Stephen Starphase. And then Belle / Wise, who assist these powerful fighters in a noncombat role just like Leo, also turn out to have some sort of special magical eyes granted to them by untold powers from within the dimensional rift??

I’m here for it, don’t get me wrong - love Nightow. But that can’t be coincidence, right?

[cookinguptales]

just saw someone online talking about don hertzfeldt's "rejected" like it was just some "lol so random" youtube video from the early 2000s and like... yeah, it was funny! and I'm sure the randomness and memeability were a lot of what made it go viral. but I'm sad that it's been remembered that way.

like, that short film was about creativity and capitalism and how imagination is stifled and destroyed when it's forced into the box of "marketability", leading to mental anguish on the part of the artist. it's a message that's only become more and more poignant over the years as all art has slowly been reduced to "content" on the internet, particularly youtube, and I still rewatch it regularly.

yes, the fake ads in it were silly and random and violent and weird, but that's because he was purposefully trying to create the least marketable art possible. it has sex and violence and grotesque imagery all wrapped up in a cutesy art style, and it's the exact opposite of the glossy animation you get in marketing. moreover, the point was that the animations became more and more disjointed and "random" and awful as they were forced to exist in a corporate vacuum devoid of any real meaning. that's why the very world they were living in fell apart in the end.

the whole thing! was a very blatant commentary on the damage that commercialization does to art!

and, in a bout of tragic but entirely predictable irony, the art style that he used for "rejected" was immediately stolen, made more palatable for mass consumption, and used for pop tart commercials. it's not so much the death of the author as it is greedy companies shanking the author and then looting their corpse, y'know? it's completely cleaving any marketability from the shambling corpse of their art and leaving the rest for the buzzards.

it's also odd that they listed the short as being something you'd only know about if you hang out on the weird part of the internet because like... y'all know that short was nominated for an oscar, right? that seems about as mainstream as recognition for animated shorts can get. I have literally gone to showings of don hertzfeldt films at major film festivals. he's well known in the animation field.

idk man! I don't have anything against the lol random style of humor from the early days of youtube (I miss it, actually) but to just boil a painfully earnest short film about the devaluing of any creativity that is not palatable to the mass market and the way that artists' souls are slowly killed as they create art solely for corporate interests down to the gifs and memes that emerged from it has me like

man, media literacy really is getting bad these days.

[cherryflavoredprettyboy]

My 2024 Trend Predictions

Disclaimer! Trends are bullshit!!! What’s “in” and “out” is totally subjective and fashion is an art form, public opinion and new crazes have no impact on the real art and following trends is your choice. Trend cycles are sped up so violently by capitalism and fast fashion as a beast, fashion is supposed to be fun.

This list is my opinions as a 19 year old boy who spends too much time online and read too much vogue as a kid. I am not an expert, I just like to talk.

Indie Sleaze

I’m already seeing this one happening, the colored tights under shorts, the fur vests, I think especially with the popularity of saltburn and it’s aesthetics we’ll see a lot more of this in the beginning of this new year. Graphic t-shirts with ironic phrases were already big in 2023, glitter and silver makeup especially is on the rise, this is already happening and I am excited. I fucking love indie sleaze. Nostalgia is a huge impact on trend cycles, I think we’ll see a lot of 2000 and 2010s trends seeing as the generations looking up to teens following those trends in their childhoods and longing to live those lifestyles are now old enough to embrace that dream. I think for people more into alternative fashion this will translate into a emo and scene resurgence that I’ve already been seeing.

Twee

This is based off the nostalgia again, I think a lot of folks who gravitate more towards cottage core-esque fashions and aesthetics are going to start embracing twee. 2024 is going to be a year of embracing cringe and quirky “individualism”, it is the year of the manic pixie dream girl, is is the year of pissing off boring men with “annoying” femininity. I think cutesy patterns, lace, buttons, diy big jewelry and hair accessories are gonna be on the rise. I can see girls making videos about their craft nights on tiktok already. Skater skirts, Peter Pan collars, bangs, Jess from new girl eat your heart out.

“Humble” Classy/reverse flexing

People are getting tired of the insistence on being “classy”, I think in 2024 we’re going to see a lot of celebrities trying to seem humble and average and down to earth. I think we’ll see a lot of brand mixing, super expensive designer paired with cheap every day brands, I think we’ll see this in clothes and especially in food. I think we’ll see a lot of branding for fast food popping up alongside that “classy” aesthetic. I think that this will also show up more with thrifting becoming popular again amongst influencers but specifically thrifting for designer/up cycling designer (badly). They’ll sell it under a veil of sustainability, it’ll be infuriatingly shallow.

Lightning Round

Pom poms

Feathers (especially hair feathers)

Fur in mens fashion

Metallic makeup

Grungy makeup looks

Full coverage foundations/matte foundations

Peplums (somehow)

Skinny jeans

Jewel toned nails

Short nails

Dainty chokers

Statement earrings

Wood/leather jewelry

Flats

Vintage anime merch

2000s/2010s brand mascots

Mod style

70s resurgence moments throughout (this is wistful thinking I just love the fashion of the 70s)

My Trend Timeline

End of winter into spring- indie sleazing our way into the new year, I think it’s a versatile enough fashion that can be easily executed with what people already have from previous trends in 2023. Everything is set up rolling out into the warmer months.

Summer- I think this is going to be prime time “trashy” early 2000s party girl kind of time. We got a little of it last summer but I think it’s going to really hit this year. Whale tails, chunky low lights, messy makeup, bedazzled jeans. I think we’ll also see some keywest kitten esque looks from the preppier side of things, lots of bright colors and fun jewelry. I think we’ll also get a lot of vintage Americana moments, once again we got a bit of it last year and I think it’ll be brought back.

Fall- peak twee season, especially nearing the holidays. I think we’re gonna see a lot of rich color this fall too, jewel tones, beautiful deep greens and reds, not a lot in clothing but I think definitely in makeup and accessories. Around this time I think the preppier leaning folks will get back into skinny jeans. I think vintage graphic Ts will also get popular around this time, something easy but still interesting. Men’s fashion doesn’t cycle through as quickly so I think the kind of 70s aesthetics I’ve seen a lot of dudes into will continue (but I think they’ll also get in on the indie sleaze, I think for mens fashion it will stick around for fall). I think we’ll see more textures, lace, fur, leather, etc.

Winter- this is right around when I think the forced “casually classy” down to earth bs will start. Twee will continue amongst a smaller group and we’ll see a lot of cute diy gifts and stuff for the holidays, this will also impact the up cycling I think we’ll see from influencers and celebrities. I think hyper-feminine aesthetics will really kick back up, Pom poms, whites and pinks, skirts and big sweaters, Ralph Lauren teddy bears everywhere. It’ll be contrasted by a new interest in grungy/intense makeup looks, thin brows and dark lips, messy eyes, glitter.

I’m very excited for these all to turn out totally wrong and for me to make a fool of myself! But who gives a shit, I’m just saying this all for fun. Happy new year everyone!

- Valentine <3