#im pulling my asian card rn bc marjorie liu the one actual asian who thoughtfully wrote his racial identity and codified him

[grassoftunnel]

Character Design rant

It pisses me off seeing how much people judge whether an artist is good or not based on how much like a department store model a character looks. Like they do not even want a distinctive look they just want them to exist within extremely limited modes of conventional attractiveness like an instagram filter. Who cares that character designs are meant to convey a visual and narrative purpose or give the character a distinctive look, am I right…..

Why should daken have his actual design (mohawk short-to-average height heavy brow) that made him stand out when he could just look like the generic general shang from mulan way that some people want every single hot asian guy to look like (which ijbol please look inside your hearts and examine why thats how you always want them to look, It’s giving 2014 tumblr only knowing 1 asian actor and fancasting him for everything)

its true that there is a serious issue of artists not knowing how to draw asian features but the way some people quantify looking ‘actually biracial’ is so fucking weird!!!!! It circles back to like…feeling racist af (I say this as an asian), like i get it i want ethnic features to be like depicted properly and they havent always been with him, but like he has an actual visually interesting design with actual thought put into it!! Which is done best imo by Camuncoli (I’ll die on this hill I hate how fucking rude and bad faith people are about his art based on panels that are deliberately exaggerated rictus grins, like his style is not for everyone but he understands his face and clearly depicts him as chiseled handsome and as asian vs other artists who clearly dont intend for him to be read as handsome) and checchetto. Like this character specifically is not the hill to die on To Me. He was conceptualised as a metro guy who contrasts his father in appearance and personality. Please don’t tell me that the reason some people prefer the roided out ultra masc (and ooc but thats not relevant to my rant) Krakoa version of him purely bc they want to do the corny try-hard 00s after school special subvert stereotype of asian men as small and effeminate (which mind-you, daken is not and has never been short or small hes just a low end of average height and average muscular build) by going in the opposite direction thing… (in my most charitable reading of this decision, the x factor artist chose to make him look like that to contrast him against prodigy, or to match the roided out hypermasc style hes drawn with by some artists in his early comic appearances and the later parts of Daken:Dark Wolverine, in that case I’ll accept it, but i really don’t know).

Cause as late as All New Wolverine he still had a design that seemed congruous with the initial vision of his character look. Like different artists will have different takes, but it is weird to see the 180 from Krakoa onwards! like they’re just giving up on actually putting the same effort into making a distinctive design for him that preserves his facial design elements while more effectively communicating that he is mixed asian, and instead just putting all their effort into making him Look Asian (whatever the hell that means!). It’s to the point that people discovering him from newer comics have kneejerk reactions to how he looks in early comics or in Hellverine where they’ve returned to his original look! Deeply Deeply Weird!!!!!