#like they seem to not get that one piece is heavily stylized in the manga too

[kacievvbbbb]

I was in the One Piece twitter community for 1 second saw the Shanks vs Mihawk poll and already knew it was a hateful space.

[saturdayxiii]

The cute characters, shiny art, and exploration premise drew me into watching Made in Abyss season one; I have no other experience with this title.

I understand that it’s a pretty well loved show.  I can see why, but after having watched it I don’t understand why.  If I wasn’t aware of its popularity I’d tell the uninitiated that it’s a pretty show, but definitely not a “must see”.  However, knowing that it’s considered the “best anime of 2017″ makes me want to recommend… that people pay attention to how bad it is.  The fact that shows like this are considered the “best” is why I rarely watch anime anymore.  Made in Abyss definitely contributes to my list of reasons to not like anime.

I will grant that the artwork, music, and premise are fantastic, but these three things do not a complete anime make.  It’s possible that the manga could be phenomenal, and the premise is strong enough that I’d be interested in reading it, but I’m talking about the anime here because that’s what my media circles share with me.  I’ve repeatedly heard the show described as “fantastic”, but the one word review I’d give it is “gross”.

I’m aware that “gross” is a very subjective term and maybe doesn't reflect quality, but I really think that should be the first thing that people notice when watching this show.  Watch for how gross it is.  Specifically?  I’m going to make my number one issue to do with child sexuality.  It’s honestly not something that’s at the forefront of the show, and I think many people over look it because, hey, it’s Japan; we've seen worse.  But it’s actually sprinkled pretty heavily throughout the show.  It also has next to nothing to do with our story, except maybe our budding protagonists are developing romantic feelings for each other, but it seems pretty obvious that this stuff isn’t in the show for development sake.

Our main characters are 12 years old (though I thought there were 8 by their designs) and at the first minute mark of the first episode we get a mention of the main character being “strung up naked” as a punishment for something. Okay… That’s odd, and very tonally out of place in our fun childrens adventure.  Even odder is that they frame it as some kind of a gag that our hero is over reacting to as her company looks disinterested.  Then it becomes straight up creepy when this gag reoccurs throughout the series even with different characters.  Like this wondrous fantastical world is meant to draw you in and entice you, and hey also child abuse is a staple here, neat huh?  It’s one thing if this kind of situation is used as a plot point or even some kind of commentary, then there’s a possibility that its use could be redeemed with context, but no.  It doesn’t even drive any of our characters actions.  It’s paced and stylized to get a rise out of the audience, nothing more.  

Combine that with the times that our otherwise attentive main character forgets to put on clothes, and repeated references to the deuteragonist‘s penis, and characters pleas of feeling violated being regularly ignored, and the main char having her legs pulled apart to administer medicine that “can’t be take orally”, and yah, uh, the show is gross.  And that’s not even the physically gross stuff.  I mean like animals being sliced open, guts being pulled out, unsuccessful limb amputation, vomit, urine, human silly puddy??  And they tell you that once you go so far into the Abyss, you’re going to bleed out of all your orifices.  They tell you this, and by golly they are going to show it.  Here it is!  Up close and everywhere, again and again.  I get that this stuff exists in real life, and life is gross, but none of it serves the story or makes any kind of point. It’s there because they think you enjoy it.  Do you enjoy it? I don’t sympathize with these characters and the less I can relate to them the better.

Speaking of the story, even if you fixed all the unnecessary gross stuff, the story just doesn’t exist.  The show doesn’t end.  I guess they’re holding out for another season?  But if they had more space for story, then why did they fly through the Abyss so fast?  Isn’t that place rather important? The main character regularly talked about all the cool things she wanted to see as she went deeper and deeper into the abyss, but none of it was actually explored.  Just “There’s that thing I mentioned, okay either fight it quickly,  or lets move on to the next area”.  This is not the plot you are looking for.

I still do see how the story has potential, but they glaze over all the things that made me want to watch the show.  Mystery world, cool monsters, lost technology, fun characters.  They are there, minus the characters being fun, but the presented show wouldn’t really change if you completely took out those things.  Nothing that I felt was advertised to me got developed.  Instead our main character disregards her interest in exploration and treasure hunting, and sets off with the sole goal of finding her mother at the bottom of the Abyss. Leaving behind all the characters that I thought were going to be important.  Were you preparing to get invested here?  Woops.

That’s honestly fine, new directions are welcome, but even the mother plot point doesn’t deliver.  It’s just a Shanks and Luffy dynamic, and the writers know that because they don’t bother having a back story like how Shanks made sacrifice to inspire Luffy.  You’ve seen that before, so we just skip to the conclusion trope of “The fact that I’m not here for you is proof that I’m so awesome. Chase me.”  Also, even Luffy had well developed settings ajg characters to support his story.  Yes, I know One Piece is currently infinity longer than Made in Abyss, but 13 episodes is still plenty of time to develop something.

This season is squarely centered around our two main characters, but we learn as much about them as we do other characters that are only in the show for 2 or 3 episodes.  The only consistent way we know that our characters are developing and progressing is by how far they get in the abyss, and they fly through it without expanding on anything that was previously hyped.  Brand new dramatics happen, then the season ends with no hint of a conclusion.  So you get no story.  

The only real story is in the last episode, the “one hour special”, and it has nothing to do with our main characters.  Maybe you could just watch that, but you probably won’t feel good about it.

So why is show with no story, being praised as the best anime of 2017?  Was it (another) bad year for anime?  Why are people whole heartedly recommending a show without mentioning that it goes no where, and children are regularly brutalized and assaulted?  Recommending this show without context is the same as recommending Ebichu the hamster without mentioning that it’s nothing like Hamtaro.  Not that I’d recommend either of those, but I think you know what I’m saying.

[drathe]

I hope at some point, when I don't have to work so much, I can also contribute to the art community of DOS2, and I would like your advice. I want to... see shapes the way you do, if that makes sense? Whenever I try to... deviate from standard norms, like exaggerate features (because I LOVELOVELOVE stylized differences between characters) I just think it looks wrong, but you have this awesome "I can bend it THIS way" thing going and it WORKS. How do you do it? I practice, but can't seem to get it

Oh shit man, I think I’m not really the right person to ask art questions. To be perfectly honest I don’t know what the fuck am I doing and how - my style has changed so many times, from wanna-be-realistic-but-is-just-a-parody to heavily manga stylized stuff to manga-but-more-realistic, and noooow we have this, kind of comic-y shit? I kiiiind of try to look at face or body as a big ass piece of simple shapes, like triangles, squares or circles. It’s easier to bend the rules when you have those simple shapes before you.

All i know about art is that I learned stuff by watching people way better than me do it, so maaaaybe try checking out youtube tutorials? Or like, a livestreams of your fav artists? I was lucky enough to have very patient friends who let me watch and even gave me tips ( @airagitt is one of them, absolutely fantastic artist and person).

Ive also seen my other friend’s approach to art - always trying to focus on details and instead of trying to look at bodies or other forms as simple shapes, she had a hard time painting anything really. Just let yourself do the simple things. Draw faces, facial features, take references, dont shy away from being inspired by your faves. Study their art and learn through it.

For example, I had a VERY hard time drawing a turian. It was IMPOSSIBLE for me. To draw new forms, I need to practice. I tried drawing something from the reference, but it still felt wrong, so I started to give them different, easier shapes I could actually see.

Sorry Garrus! But you see it’s all simple shapes, and this could be applied to any face or any body - you just have to be patient and not give up if at the first time its not coming out like you want it to be.

I’m sorry im not that helpful but I DONT KNOW WHAT TO SAY XD

[harcoxrt]

In this verse, Joanne has become a grim reaper after ending his own life. Due to the backstory I’ve developed that explains what drove him to suicide, this verse is set at any point in time after the current events of the manga.

Joanne is now aware of the supernatural happenings that once went on right under his nose without him noticing, and also has all the basic abilities that come with his new existence. He is only moderately stronger than he was as a human, but he has a far greater level of endurance and is extremely agile and light on his feet. He is and immortal reaper, and as such, can only die (again) by the blade of a death scythe.

His eyes are now the distinctive chartreuse phosphorescent that all reapers possess. The glasses he chose for himself upon completing his training are black, oversized frames with rounded edges, with temple pieces that start wide and gradually taper into a thinner width at the earpiece. At the start of each temple piece are two painted, stylized roses; one a metallic gold and the other a bright crimson. I will still use icons for this verse, so please know that even though Joanne won’t be wearing glasses in my icons, he will still have them for any thread set in this verse. As an additional reference, he chose to have his death scythe modified into the form of a folding pruning saw because he finds it easy to handle and likes that its blade can be folded away.

At the end of his human life, he kept heavily to himself and avoided interacting with others whenever possible, and he is slowly relearning how to be more social. He trusts his new coworkers, but only moderately, and if he feels like questioning them about something, he won’t hesitate to do it. He is still the curious type, always eager to learn and practice his newfound skills and abilities. As such, he has adjusted reasonably well to his new life, given the circumstances that led up to it. 

However, he isn’t too fond of working in the field to judge and collect souls, and would prefer a position in the Dispatch’s forensics department. His preference will be taken into consideration due to his high marks during training, he’s been told, but for now, he has been sent to collect souls and assist in the investigation of the “irregulars” (bizarre dolls) that have been appearing in London as of late. He has consoled himself on the matter by thinking of it as a trial run for a forensics position since he gets to take part in an investigation, and, truth be told, he also hopes to use his assignment as a chance to overcome his lingering fear of those very same creatures.

Below the cut is the backstory I’ve developed that explains why Joanne would take his own life. It also adds further detail to the process of him becoming a reaper. Trigger warnings for mentions of depression, violence/gore, drug overdose, and suicide apply. Another, less serious warning: this is long. 

The moment the story hit the papers, there was chaos:

“Horrible Murder by Sphere Music Hall!”

A range of emotions struck him the first time Joanne held a copy of the paper in his hands—first, sadness for the woman shown in the photograph; pictured lifeless in the dirt. Then came the shock, disgust, and utter horror towards the rival music hall that he and his bandmates had been working so hard to defeat. The people of Sphere Music Hall were far worse than competition; they were murderers!

Could Redmond and the others have known? Were they part of some kind of awful scheme by the music hall?

It was indeed an awful thought fit to match the deed itself, and Joanne would have rejected the idea if not for the secret he knew about his former upperclassmen. It deeply saddened him to think that they might have yet again soiled their hands with more blood, but in truth, it would not have surprised him. They had paid for it once with expulsion, and surely they would pay again.

The blond sighed, lowering the paper down onto his desk. Something had seemed unusual about the photo for the cover story the first time he’d glanced at it, and now that he looked at it again, he saw what it was. Strangely, there was a piece of cutlery sticking out of the gun held by one of the men in the picture.

Confusion came next. The story gave no discernible reason for the cutlery in the photograph, only mentioning that the photo had been provided by a freelance photographer. The knife in question—for he was almost positive that the piece of cutlery was a knife because of how it fit in the gun—appeared to be quite ornate, but beyond that, there was no visible indication of who it belonged to or where it had come from. The style of the knife alone narrowed down the owner to one associated with nobility, and aside from his own family, the first noble to come to mind was—

No; It couldn’t be! But…if it was, then why the knife, and why Funtom Music Hall? He’d never gotten a straight answer as to why Funtom Music Hall and the Phantom Five even existed. All he knew was that Sphere Music Hall held a certain allure that put the citizens of London in danger, and the goal of Funtom Music Hall was to draw people over to somewhere safe. But with another woman dead…it hadn’t worked.

…Or had it?

The thought chilled him to the bone, and his body became rigid in his chair, a whirling ball of nausea forming in the pit of his stomach. Phantomhive simply didn’t fail. He’d seen that first hand at Weston while the two of them had been fellow students. Not only that, but both Phantomhive and his butler had praised the group of five for their excellent work.

What if Phantomhive had known this death would happen?

The article itself gave the cause of death as blood loss, yet there were no serious wounds visible on the the body of the woman in the photograph, nor any signs of wounds that might have been hidden underneath her clothes. That most likely meant she was dead because her blood had been drained from her body—a horrifying death, to be sure, but why? And assuming that was the true cause of death as the article said, why would one of the guilty men be brandishing a gun? The man must have tried to shoot someone, or else there wouldn’t have been a reason for him to have it out, but he couldn’t have shot at the victim.

Perhaps at the photographer? No; there was no way a freelance photographer would be able to defend themselves with cutlery in such a manner, and if only the photographer had been there to apprehend the men, Joanne personally doubted that the photographer would have lived to help publish the photo. Scotland Yard certainly wouldn’t be throwing around dinner knives either…which led him back to his original assumption of nobility. Phantomhive was the only noble who made sense, given the circumstances, but the blond just couldn’t picture Ciel throwing a knife directly into the barrel of a gun. It would have taken a great deal of precision and force, and although Weston had seen another “Blue Miracle” with the help of Phantomhive, Joanne knew from a very personal experience that it was because the Earl played dirty—not because of strength or skill.

Another name in connection with Phantomhive rose to the forefront of his mind, and he longed to reject the possibility, but logically…he could not.

…Mister Michaelis. Phantomhive’s butler. It would, in an odd way, make sense—a butler wielding cutlery as a weapon. If he accepted that as fact, the rest of the puzzle pieces fell into place quite neatly—Ciel had known this would happen, and Michaelis had been there to help the photographer. Sphere Music Hall was indeed responsible for the murder, for he could plainly see a bracelet associated with the hall adorning the wrist of one of the men in the photo, but Phantomhive had known—maybe even wanted this to happen.

And the Phantom Five had helped, including him.

Joanne felt physically sick to the point that it made his stomach ache, and he shakily slumped forward, cradling his head against his arms on his desk. How could he have been so stupid?! He had thought he was helping; doing something good. Instead, if his deductions were correct, he had been an indirect accessory to murder—all because he had been so blinded by an immoral love. Hot tears stung his eyes before spilling over, running down his cheeks and dripping onto the newspaper. He cried himself to sleep that night, still sitting at his desk until the next morning when the first sound of the school bell stirred him from a fitful, restless slumber.

He became a recluse again, keeping to himself and largely ignoring anyone who tried to cheer him up. At first, he still tried to focus on his studies and perform his fag duties, but eventually those too began to fade into the background. He couldn’t concentrate; couldn’t bring himself to care, and with each step he took to force himself to go about his daily routine, he felt as if he were simultaneously slogging through thick, wet mud and sinking into quicksand.

He lost his position as the fag of the Red House prefect, and the occasional nightmares he’d been having became more and more frequent. He often woke up screaming, or with his cheeks stained with tears, or both. Nearly every night, he would dream of undead corpses chasing after him, dragging him down to sink their teeth into his flesh. Sometimes he was lucky enough to wake up before they caught him, and other times—more often than not—he would not wake until after one or more of the monsters had begun to devour him, biting and tearing away at his limbs.

He never told anyone, though. They would have thought he was crazy, especially if he mentioned that some of the dreams also featured the Phantomhive butler crushing the skull of one of the monsters just before Joanne himself met his doom.

His reputation was ruined, with many of the Weston students whispering that he’d gone mad, and he simply let them talk. The loneliness he felt was soul-crushing, but at the same time, he couldn’t bear the thought of trying to be around others and pretending that everything was still normal. He couldn’t trust that they actually cared; he barely even trusted himself. How could he, knowing that he had been duped in such an awful way?

He no longer yearned to see his former professor—or so he told himself, anyway. He should hate the man, by all accounts, and yet a small part of his heart still ached at the thought of the kindness Michaelis had shown him. He had no way of knowing how much of that kindness had been genuine, and he was terrified to think that it might have all been nothing but another ruse.

The ongoing tears and nightmares didn’t ever stop for more than a couple days at a time—until the day he finally decided to end it all.

He didn’t want it to hurt, as he’d been hurting too much to bear already, so he did the only thing he could think of that might work without causing him too much additional misery or pain. Weary from a lack of sleep and miserable indeed, he decided to visit the campus infirmary. It took very little effort for him to convince the nurse there that he was feeling unwell, and he soon found himself resting in one of many beds housed in the infirmary. After he listed his supposed “symptoms,” the nurse brought a large bottle of chlorodyne tablets to his bedside, along with a glass of water for him to drink. He took the recommended dose, even attempting a small smile afterward to show his thanks, and the bottle was left behind in case he felt he needed more later to ease his ills.

Within the hour, another student came in with a few scrapes and large bruises from a rather rough cricket practice, and as soon as the nurse turned their back, Joanne grabbed up the bottle of “medicine” and dumped several more tablets into his hand, shoving them into his mouth and swallowing them right away with another sip of water from his glass. He did this again and again until the bottle was empty, hurriedly sneaking extra doses each time he was sure the nurse wasn’t looking his way. With such a high dose of the drugs in his system, the fate he wished for came swiftly, and his eyes soon drifted closed. The last thing he remembered was the odd sensation of floating even though he knew he was laying down on a bed, and then it was over—or so he’d thought.

After his suicide, Joanne was in for a rather rude awakening. He was thrust into the world of being a grim reaper, placed in the Dispatch’s training academy with little mercy. His eyes, once a bright pale maroon, were now a starkly bright duotone green that gave off an almost phosphorescent glow in dim lighting. His human self was no more, he’d been told, and his existence was now that of a death god—immortal, but bound to serve the Dispatch and aid in the judgement and collection of mortal souls.

He was given a pair of standard-issue spectacles to compensate for the fact that his human death had cursed him to become incredibly nearsighted, and as was suggested, he threw himself into his new studies, taking it upon himself to learn everything that the educators at the academy endeavored to teach him. It had been incredibly strange to learn that a whole different world existed outside of the human one he’d known, especially with all the additional, more modern luxuries and technologies he now had access to, but he drank it all in nonetheless. The novelty of it all, as well as his newfound immortality and abilities, were a wonderful and welcome distraction from the utter despair he’d felt at the end of his life as a human.

Weeks and weeks passed, going by in a blur, and by the end of the training term, Joanne had earned himself both impressive and solid scores for each course of study. For both the written and ethics portions of his training, he scored triple-A marks, and in practical skills, a solid B. At the end of his training, he was assigned a partner to work with for his final exam, and his re-entry into the human world was jarring. He’d become so immersed in his new life that he’d actually managed to forget how awful humans could be, and it was with a heavy heart that he assisted his partner with their collection assignment. After their success, he and his partner returned to hand in the collection report and were subsequently granted permission to go choose their own personal spectacles. Joanne was officially a full-fledged reaper.