#I personally cycle through all of these

[feliz-navidad]

asking because science.

[lastoneout]

ngl ALL of across the spiderverse was fantastic but that short scene where we got to see a disabled spider-person using a wheelchair and crutches while STILL kicking ass AND making jokes and puns about said mobility aids while doing so singlehandedly cured my depression and added 500 years to my lifespan <3

[theactualsunshinechild]

I think Aventio and Screwtio shippers shouldn't fight. After all, Ratio has two hands!

That's right. Two hands.

One for his chalk.

One for his codex.

Both of which he's holding in an embarrassed death grip as they chat away with each other about him.

[vynnyal]

Turns out Sunlit Trail isn't quite done just yet, so after all that they just send you to a dead end 😂

[carlyraejepsans]

HELPP i found out about character AIs and im losing it over calling deltarune sans "a more manipulative personality" 😭😭 like whatt we've only seen this man like 2 times

sorry im being a hater hgfjdks but you're the sans understander

lmaoo character.ai, look where the fall of ai dungeon got us, smh. thank you for the compliment though!

[dylanlila]

it's cool that you think l'amica geniale isn't actually about friendship. you can go fuck yourself

[hella1975]

i cannot stand the aot fandom this is not a new take at all they are universally intolerable but oh my dayssss u are FORBIDDEN from making ANY take about the show it's actually insane to watch. 'aot is perfect' no show is perfect. 'tell me you didnt get the show 😂🫵' people have different opinions/interpretations about things. 'eren is a good guy they could never make me hate him' i think there's actually 4 seasons and two movies explicitely using him as a tool to show that no one is 'good' or 'evil' they are only trying to survive. hello. the fandom r all so far up aot's ass that they actually discredit its writing in the process and it would be laughable if it wasn't so frustrating

[yellowocaballero]

obito fic 👀?

HELL YEAH BABY. HELL YEAH. I HAVE JUST POSTED THE 70K OBITO FIC GO READ IT.

Naruto. Man. Very treasured aspect of my childhood. I've written a few fics now that are about an influential childhood media or character, and they always have such a unique quality about them. But I love my BAMF!Sakura fics so much. You Call This A Utopia is for her.

I talk a little bit about the specialness of that useless little girl in the author's note, but #justiceforSakura has always compelled me - on one level, just such wasted potential as a character, but on another level, it was one of my very early frustrations with sexism in writing. I wanted to live vicariously through her, to use her as a self-insert power fantasy like all the boys got to do with all the male Naruto characters, but even if she's a chakra master (!) and genius doctor (!!) who can wreck mountains with her fists (!!!) she was never quite able to make the tween girl readers feel special, because she was never valued. BAMF!Sakura fics were how I was able to have my little kid power fantasies in my favorite good-bad shonen. Today, if I'm reading BAMF!Sakura fic I am spiritually watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating sugar cereal and crying.

I didn't have very strong feelings Obito until I read butter_peanut and realized that one could hypothetically make him the most fascinating fucking character. Naruto fic writers are so creative and magnificent and better than Naruto. I do vaguely remember Tobi being my favorite Akatsuki character, because he had so much personality and was a lot of fun after Naruto got kinda serious. butter_peanut having Tobi say the word "bestie" truly inspired me. After writing him I now understand them completely, because I have happened to discover that he is the funnest fucking character.

I feel insane. Like a precious few people know and understand that Obito is so much fun to write. I love writing insane people and we know this but Obito is truly on another level (he is a villain in Naruto and you cannot match that level in any other fucking series). He is genuinely so unhinged and he genuinely believes that he is a normal person. He is so fundamentally broken and it is so funny.

What caught me about Naruto villains - because this is Naruto, it is interesting in theory and so stupid in practice - is that they are almost all, fundamentally, good people. The goal of most Naruto villains is "create a better world with no war and only love and peace". Which means that you have to be a special kind of nuts to be a Naruto villain, because you are a good person who got so incredibly fucked up and twisted by your incredibly violent life that you are now an evil schemer who is trying to blow up half the continent. The evil in Naruto is on a systemic level, not a person one. You Call This A Utopia?! is fundamentally about this. Except stupid.

Tobi is also one of the most challenging but rewarding characters I've written. FUN FUN FUN. Lots more to say about literally all of this. For now I'll just say that I'm an adult, so these days I gravitate to adult POVs. Obito is the adult's window into a kid's world. But Obito is honestly an overgrown kid himself. Let's see how that all plays out.

[atanxdoesstuff]

nejisasu doodle! a universe where the hyuuga's slavery bs doesn't get ignored and Neji and Sasuke are better off for it (and also they're married)

[definitelynotshouting]

Can I ask, since you mentioned agreeing 'even if under duress' - how did the Watchers convince Player Grian to join them in hunger au?

So take this with the specific grain of salt that ive never watched Evo directly (but have friends who have ((thank you wren)), so i know tidbits via osmosis from them), but my thought has always been that the riddles the Watchers gave the Evo Players were all tests used to measure cleverness and intelligence-- the whole point of them attempting to copy the mind of a Player into a Watcher larva in the first place was to try and avoid the insanely high infant mortality rate their typical juveniles go through, bc they dont understand their own limits enough to even know they have them yet. So they needed a Player they knew they could instruct and who would listen to them, and, well. Grian, for all he was rebellious and outright defiant of the Watchers, still solved their puzzles and only had to be punished once before he stopped trying to mess with them

What ive always pictured is after the dragon fight the two main elders of the Watcher colony finally revealed themselves to Grian properly-- i have this crystal clear image of the two of them hovering above and next to the central end island, looming over Grian, and like, these guys are big. HUGE. A good 5x bigger than the ender dragon itself, at LEAST. It would be hard not to feel insanely intimidated by that, honestly, especially when there are two of them side by side, blocking your entire view of the End from that direction.

Anyway picture that with the context of these two giant floating winged worms youve never seen before, who have demonstrated their powerful ability to manipulate code in a way you cant.... telling you that they have chosen you to become one of them. Thats an immense amount of pressure, both from flattery and fear, especially considering theyve punished you before for defying them. I like to think even then, Grian balked a bit, and while i dont have exact dialogue beats here, i know the Watchers continued putting that pressure on him (likely while leveraging his friendships too-- like ive always said, if Grian hadnt been chosen, BigB wouldve been, and i can absolutely see the Watchers offering to take him in Grian's stead) until he finally caved and accepted their "offer" of joining them.

Unfortunately, he didnt find out exactly what that entailed until it was far too late.

[skrunksthatwunk]

hitting this article with a rolled up newspaper. bad. stop it

sigh. exhaustive argument that none of these shows grouped together have the same art style below, complete with images and whatever

oh also im not the type to comment on articles so idk the etiquette but don't like. go over there and say "ur list sucks >:P" that's just gonna bring more traffic to it. i linked it so people could ratio me if need be not so that you guys could dunk on this random listicle writer. it's pointless and kind of cruel. just so we're clear on that

edit: the quote above uses "time period" instead of "era". i quote it as saying "era" a lot. i'm not fixing that

note: here i'm assuming "art style" refers to, generally: character designs (facial and body proportions, how things like hair is dealt with, etc), lighting, color (palette, saturation, value), line weight, etc [and mostly excluding things like shot composition, direction, etc because while those probably count my personal experience with these shows is mostly limited, and because most people focus on the previous things i've listed in their discussions of art styles. the analysis within the article is incredibly shallow, and if they think samurai champloo's art style is "rehashed and reused", i don't think they're like. super deep in the art analysis sauce. anyway]

code geass vs death note. what are you saying. what are you talking about

code geass' approach to color is more vibrant, and dn's is more washed out. dn takes a more realistic approach to faces and bodies, both in proportion and in shape (namely how curved their features are (as opposed to cg's far more exaggerated sharp faces, large eyes, and lanky bodies. note how lelouch's lips barely jut out in profile, for instance)). i shouldn't have to explain this they're not even close

that's the most extreme example, but samurai champloo and cowboy bebop aren't That similar either

it's hard for me to speak on bebop for the most part because i've never seen it (vs my ~8 eps of samurai champloo knowledge), but from what i have seen, bebop often has a sort of delicate intricacy to a lot of its linework (especially its backgrounds) that champloo tends to sacrifice in favor of bolder lines and higher contrast. it was hard to find great examples, but the silhouettes champloo's characters cut are often sort of.. choppy and wild, and usually lanky and stretched-out, while bebop's are more realistic (focus on the shoulders in the last image set, for instance). there's overlap, sure, but there are clear and intentional differences in the designs, to say nothing of champloo's higher saturation and the natural differences between hand-drawn and digitally-drawn animation

(and if "art style" is referring to the direction rather than just character design, lighting, color, etc, it's because these two have the same director, which hardly creates an "era". that's like comparing two miyazaki films from the 90s and saying "this is what 90s anime movies looked like", it's nonsense. also, i feel like lumping these two together because they look a little similar is unfair because they're pretty unique from their contemporaries in their own right. they may resemble each other a bit, but how much do they resemble other late 90s early 00s sci-fi/historical anime? does samurai champloo look like outlaw star to you? or trigun? or evangelion? does cowboy bebop look like ninja scroll? or samurai 7? or sword of the stranger? etc etc etc?? if we're claiming that cowboy bebop and samurai champloo share an "era", then what of their contemporaries, and what about differences across bebop and champloo's very different genres? more on this point later)

even fruits basket and ouran, the ones i initially felt were most similar, have clear distinctions

ouran's got a distinct abundance of pastels in its color palette, tending towards pinks, blues, yellows, oranges, etc. its use of black and brown is very limited. fb's palette is a bit more relaxed, and while its colors are often pale, i wouldn't call them pastel (they also skew more towards natural, earthy tones). fb's characters have noticably.. flatter skulls? in some shots, and their heads are so squat that they can seem consumed by their eyes. anyway this is a trait ouran does not quite share, for a number of small reasons, like how their cheeks bow out, greater emphasis on noses and mouths, and its use of highly variable line weight (vs fb's very stable line weight). hair is more voluminous and multilayered in ouran, and features like lips and noses (esp noses) are fuller, more three dimensional (in general, ouran's approach to shading hair and faces makes the characters feel rounder). the sharp edges and bell-sleeves of ouran's uniform blazers are actually far more reminiscent of the designs in code geass than fruits basket, imo. (actually.. i'm not sure how to express this but a lot of the poses in ouran resemble code geass poses, in their locked-joint arms-stretched kinda way). ouran forgoes hair-shine, while fruit's basket adds them in either jagged points (see most of the images i included) or a sort of triangle wrapping around the head (not pictured here, just trust me)

(note: i'm assuming they are referring to the 2001 anime adaptation of fruits basket rather than the 2019 one, because not only does the 2019 adaptation resemble ohshc even less, but because they are closer in time period, and the grouping is supposedly based on era).

my point is none of these shows look rehashed from one another. there's sometimes overlap, but each has a unique aesthetic based in many small choices made in their design.

now let's look at their use of "eras" a little more. this is the timeline of air dates for the first episodes of the six shows mentioned (for their original japanese runs, obviously):

cowboy bebop, april 1998

fruits basket, july 2001

samurai champloo, may 2004

ouran high school host club, april 2006

code geass, october 2006

death note, october 2006

code geass and death note being paired by era is, at least, accurate. same month, same year. it's about as close as one can get. however, the other two groups are far more removed from each other. fruits basket and ouran have five years between them, and bebop and champloo have six. this wouldn't be such an issue if there weren't other anime within this list that came between them. if bebop and champloo are in the same era, why is fruits basket grouped differently? ouran came out in 2006 just like code geass and death note, so why is it grouped with something that came out five years prior instead of them?

i think it's fair to say that eras are not purely chronological, that there's overlap between them. one doesn't begin as soon as (and not a moment before) its singular predecessor ends. but era feels like an incomplete distinction here. this list alone shows quite a lot of variety for what someone can mean when they say something "looks like 2000s anime". most anime fans have a picture in their head of that, and, to be so honest, i don't think samurai champloo is it. using only time as a distinction rather than movement, genre, etc is simply not enough. the fact that 5/6 of these shows occur within 2001-2006, and yet they're set apart into three different eras, and each pair (in ways i'm sure the author of this piece would admit) does not resemble the other, is proof enough that 2001-2006 did not have one repetitive art style, at least not in a way these anime exemplify. that's to say nothing of whether or not the anime within the era-pairs look the same, which we've established i don't. but since they don't actually tell us what their eras are, we can only speculate. personally, i speculate that they didn't think about it too hard at all, or even look up the release dates, going off vibes instead, if that.

when this person is talking about "eras", i think "eras within certain styles or genres" is more accurate, but even with these in mind, matching shows up like this makes a lot less sense than i think they realize. death note and code geass are sometimes lumped together because they're both mind-gamey thrillers with megalomaniacal protagonists with a single unique power that they use to try and fix/control the world, not because of their art styles. trying to say they look the same just because they share plot elements and came out around the same time is just... really weird. fruits basket and ouran both fall into early 2000s shojo, which is part of why the comparison fits more. target demographics and what magazines cater to those demographics (and thus the aesthetics of those magazines, which you have to fit into enough to get your manga published, and which also just influence what you want, what readers want, etc through exposure) (<- oversimplifying) are an actual valid point of comparison, at least more so than "idk 2006 lol". even if the result is more like "romcom for girls, 2006"

it doesn't help that many of the choices they made for unique art styles don't feel particularly "unique" to me.

choices like mononoke and land of the lustrous i get. and i'm not saying any of the examples i've just pulled or in the article are bad art styles, or that they don't bring anything unique to the table. i'm sure many of them are beautiful, and help elevate the tones of the stories, and all that jazz, whatever. but if the name of the game is "unique", then i don't think these cut it from what i can see. it doesn't help that most of the analysis comes down to "it looks really really cool" or "you don't normally see this art style with this genre/tone" (which is not the same thing as being broadly unique, imo)

it could be that we have different impressions of what "art style" means. it could lie somewhere in the bits of art style that i cut out, like shot composition and direction, etc. and some of it is probably a difference in what constitutes uniqueness, both between our differing experiences with media and personal taste/philosophy. but i don't think i'm wrong here when i say that the assertion that samurai champloo is era-typical in a way that beyond the boundary (2013) isn't is just fucking wrong.

look i know that bit that i screenshotted that started all this was a filler paragraph. i know it was the mandatory setup for the listicle you scroll to immediately, the parts you're supposed to ignore. i usually ignore articles like this completely because they're kinda bullshit. but i think this hunt for what looks the most unique is a flawed and confused one, at least to some extent. especially when all of the justifications are like "it supports the vibe well", which is something that all art styles are supposed to do, no matter how "unique" they are or are not, and i think that when people discuss things like art styles and anime and what looks generic and what looks unique, lumping things together too much often removes the nuances that really do influence people. i'm an artist. it's gonna sound dumb, but the way things look matters to me, even if it's stuff like how shirtsleeves or noses are drawn. to ignore all these little differences that make each piece unique is to blend so many singular, unique things into this easy-to-categorize mush that just... does a disservice to the choices every artist makes, i think. even if it is a pretty mild disservice. again, i cannot stress enough that this article is not important, and that this post responding to it is also not important.

look, what i'm trying to say is stop and smell the roses. notice the differences in the art you consume and think about it. looking for something that's so different it jerks your brain around is cool and good and fine and normal, but to disregard things as "basically the same as xyz" is reductive and icky and i don't like it. if you want something unique idk go watch kaiba (2006) have fun it's really good. i'm going to bed

nvm miscellaneous gripes section + i go to bed at like 5am lol i LIED:

the only thing said about beyond the boundary's art style is "it's hard not to fall in love with the art style", and the rest of the comments are other elements. that's too vague! i'm docking points!!

a lot of this seems based in the color palette now that i'm rereading it. not that my analysis doesn't also involve that, and not that that's invalid, but it makes me think there uh. might not have been Too too much thought beyond that. (example: "Though the dark and cool colors provide a sense of dullness, these colors cater to the tone of the story, which is dark and representative of its heavy content." like. that's not. unique. that's not unique to solo leveling y'know to have a dark story be awash in dark and cool colors that's pretty normal actually. maybe how they do it is unique, but we'll never know bc i haven't seen solo leveling and the author didn't care to elaborate :/ oh well)

this one's petty but i actually think ohshc's art style is pretty unique. maybe it's just because i've seen it several times and certain details like how the bottom-lip-to-chin shadow is done have caught my attention but like. pouting crossing my arms huffing >:( i think it's unique wth...

demon slayer's an alright choice i agree. idk i barely watched it a few years ago and it still wrenched my art style in a new direction. i dunno anything that looks quite like it. i'm not mad about all these choices per se it's just hard to whittle something like uniqueness down to a top ten list, i guess. and to say samurai champloo's generic while violet evergarden is the 5th most unique anime you've ever seen is like. weird. you're setting yourself up for people to go ehhhh... idk...... if you're not picking stuff that's like. Clearly Out There (i.e. mononoke)

"It’s no surprise that Demon Slayer is an anime with some of the best art styles." i might be fighting something that was written by ai now that i think about it...

oh god this was totally written by ai. or it went very unedited. man i spent like 2 hours on this (<- LOSER LOSER). they can't decide what the plural of anime is

they insist that chainsaw man's art style is weird enough to maybe put people off, and the only reason i can think that is is bc it's cg. but don't do the same for land of the lustrous, which is also and much more obviously cg. idk

they phoned it in but didn't even include that ping pong anime smhing my head. y'know the one everyone includes. which means whoever wrote this actually did stick to personal choices over crowd-pleasers, or chatgpt goofed or whatever. idc. guys they didn't even put flcl (<- but they put gurren lagann? as a gurren lagann fan im confused) oh my godd

ik i said this before but im saying it again: a lot of their pros and cons come down to whether or not an art style is typical for that kind of story, so like whether something gritty in tone has a more realistic art style or whether it has something visually cutesy instead. art style is more than just those things, but even that analysis is like. pretty much as bare-bones as what i just said. yucky

oh also part of my issue with this (didn't phrase it right sorry) is like. "unique" is a broad term. a really broad term. it can mean anything. there is no top 10 anime with unique art styles article that would escape that problem, and my analysis here does not escape that problem. i find the term a little unproductive (same with the concept of "originality"), so just know that i guess

[lycankeyy]

You'd think Pico's behavior in his mixes would set me back on seeing him as a "jerk with a heart of gold" type situation but I'm gonna be so real he's Such a little prick in these mixes that it's actually supporting it. Literally like all but two of his of his animations INCLUDING UNUSED ONES involve flipping the viewer off. His ass is a TRYHARD /silly

[nina-ya]

do yall ever have a friend who's making the stupidest mistake and you can't do anything but watch the inevitable car crash just happen

[carefulfears]

what do you consider the heart of californication? like really carries through the series & makes it compelling

thank you for this question, i really love it. to me, it's a number of things, starting with that the show cares deeply about hank and takes him seriously in a way that the culture doesn't. in a way, yes, he's their dog and pony show with the funny one-liners and the salacious pull. but the arc of the series is unequivocally aligned with him and his desires and his needs and his values.

hank wants to be with his family, wants to be better for them, wants to not let them down- and the show needs him to fail at all of those things. for the dog and pony of it all, for their viewership and for their thesis and for the food in their mouths, but it simultaneously feels bad that he is failing. simultaneously knows that this isn't what he wants, and that it's sad. and it can be as simple as a dream sequence or a look or a quiet final scene, but every single episode is ultimately going to remind you that everything you're laughing at is a loss.

which, like i said at the top, speaks to a level of respect that the show had for the character that is just gone in discussions of the series. they take the time to recognize that he is missing something. he is losing something and he is without everything that means anything to him, this is the cost. equally important, duchovny respects that character and understands the same.

i was listening to an interview last night (trish you heard this) where he was speaking with some podcast dudebros and one of the hosts said that he always wanted to be just like hank moody, and then he made some "bad decisions" and got there, and he doesn't like it. and duchovny said that every time people come up to him saying "i'm just like hank moody," he says "i'm sorry."

men watch and they want to be just like hank moody and women watch and they want to fuck hank moody so bad, and all of you miss what the source comprehends: that it's an irreparable deficit.

other than that, i feel like what roots that show is that it really isn't all that cynical. not in the way that it could be. and the show believes in hank.

there is a lot of kindness and hope (often false hope) that runs underneath most every relationship and interaction and dynamic in the series and i really really appreciate that about it. it's like in the pilot when hank is being mean and he wants marcy to yell at him and she just says "go home, honey. sleep it off. tomorrow's another day."

there's always a little bit of understanding and grace amongst the crazies and i think there's something really special about that

[sketching-shark]

Golden Cicada + Canon I outright reject

Ooooo interesting choice anon! Especially since there's so little know about that guy in the first place lmao. As is with the creative license that is non-description I've seen people give Golden Cicada every form from a pretty regular looking human monk to a full-on man-sized cicada yaoguai, and there's nothing in the text to confirm or reject any one of these interpretations.

THAT SAID, given the hints of what Golden Cicada's incarnations went through before he became Tang Sanzang (probably getting devoured one after the other by Sha Wujing for starters), and given everything that our beloved weepy monk went through before he reached Enlightenment apparently as a way to make up for his past misdeeds, I guess my "rejection" of Golden Cicada canon isn't so much a rejection as it is an expansion of what him being "heedless" of Buddha would have actually been. Because just falling asleep during one of Buddha's lectures doesn't seem like something you would need nine lives and then 14+ years of trials to make up for; making the choice to ultimately reject Buddha's teachings so that you could perhaps be like a number of other figures in Xiyouji and live it up on Earth as a yaoguai warlord before meeting your untimely fate, however, does seem something that would throw you into the cycle of samsara for around ten more rounds before you got back to a state of Enlightenment lol.

[bookshelf-in-progress]

A big part of author life is learning to make peace with the stories you'll never write.