#your daily episode of “blue bitching about the splatoon fandom” has arrived

[bigblueoctoling]

One of the things that irks me the most about the splatoon fandom is when people notice a trend among multiple characters, and then proceed to treat this trend like it's a rule they need to follow when designing characters and that not following this rule is thus bad design.

I specifically bring this up because I see a common complaint from people who complain about Acht's appearance in Side Order, saying that they look "too human"- Which feels completely fucking insane because they're literally supposed to look humanoid and also they are fucking green how do they look too human compared to people who are not green

But I realized what it was- It's the fact that Acht kind of has a taller-shaped head, as opposed to the commonly-seen oval-shaped heads of most inkfish.

For starters- I absolutely hate this mentality of seeing a design trend breaking the mold as being "incorrect", like they made Acht "too human"- it's just introducing an arbitrary limitation for design variety for absolutely no reason. It's not like Acht looking """more human""" in this way makes them homogeneous- the reason it stands out is because it's unique. I wanna know how on earth that makes it bad aside from just "it's not what I'm used to seeing".

But secondly, I also hate this mentality because people act as though it's inconsistent, when... it literally isn't. This is a huge through-line for all of these little 'rules' people invent about Splatoon's designs.

One of Splatoon's biggest strong suits is how diverse its artstyle is and how wildly varied its designs are. Like, literally from day one, inkfish have been shown not to be physically homogenous.

Like... there has never been consistent rules on how you Need to design a species in splatoon, for the better. It's a part of, at least to me, what gives Splatoon its very accepting sort of identity.

Also just to raise a stink and to provide another example of the splatoon fandom doing this, I hate the whole mentality that all inkfish need to have a number of limbs matching squid/octopi. That was never, like, a canonical thing- it's a cute little coincidence, or at most, a cute little nod, with the designs from splatoon 1, but like. Why does this need to be treated like a rule that needs to be followed? Again, people complain about Acht's design, complaining about their tentacles and saying like oh they shouldn't only have three tentacles that's inconsistent, totally ignoring the fact that this has never been a universal trait among all inkfish- Pearl doesn't, a lot of hairstyles in Splatoon 2 don't follow it, and plenty of splatband designs don't seem to follow it either. But more than that, why the fuck would it matter? What are you, a fucking cop? Oh sorry we can't make a unique hairstyle because of this arbitrary rule we made up, inkfish NEED to have THIS amount of limbs because it's imperative that they have this one completely random arbitrary thing in common with squid and octopi.

This also reminds me of Shiver and Frye, because people were the exact same way about them:

"Shiver's tentacles don't look like octoling tentacles!" "Why are Frye's ears so big!" "Why are Shiver's eye markings so small!" "Why are Frye's teeth so pronounced!"

Literally because they wanted to make unique and interesting character designs? I'm sorry, I wasn't familiar you were the God of the world of Splatoon and that you personally knew every inkling and octoling that ever lived and decided that these two are sins against nature and don't look Correct to you.

Genuinely it's just like the most loathesome behavior. If you hate any splatoon character's design for looking abnormal, you're my fucking enemy.