#why do i think about yojimbos rabbits character design while cleaning

[umhuhwellthen]

So I know that Usagi wears blue kimono because that's Mifune's colors and Mariko wears pink because Girl(tm) but

Usagi's eyes are pink and Mariko's are blue and

Do you see where I'm going with this

She wears pink and his eyes are pink

He wears blue and her eyes are blue

Do YOU SEE MY VISION!!!!

Listen I know it's not canon compliant but think about iitttttt think about iiiitttttt

[drawnaghht]

hmm so last week i was trying to think of why it might be that ppl suddenly started shipping Rise Leo and Yuichi Usagi (a "never met" crossover ship) when the Usagi Chronicles series was teased in 2021* and I think it might just be because it's so easy to change this iteration of both the ship and characters - a lot of the appeal of fanworks these days is full bespoke fan AUs and redesigns.

so I think this Usagi was just easier to sorta project new ideas onto, since he doesn't come with 35+ years of comics history. He's like a clean slate. especially if folks don't watch/don't care to look into the series.

which I kinda get, from an artistic perspective, creative endevours are always more fun if they're new and something you can make your own, right? or at least that's one possible aspect (of both this and fanworks in general)

but from a fannish perspective, my brain is also going like, "oh noo, my blorbo..." xD

and it's also a bit sad that folks ignore the og comic completely in some cases or just, don't look into it out of interest at all lol. I guess I kinda get that too, sometimes in some areas of the world, comics are really hard to get by and maybe some are like me, who want to read them on paper. It might also just be that older comics are unappealing to younger fans (?) but that would wholly be an assumption, since we don't really know all the reasons other people don't get interested in things like comics. I doubt many Rise fans have read the og TMNT comics either (it's fine, cuz again, younger audience + that's sorta the point various animated series sometimes - to get the new audience into the old comics - and sometimes it doesn't go like that)

the other thing is also that technically, Yuichi Usagi seems to be like the Gaumont/Netflix crew's way of making like a fun fanwork in the form of Samurai Rabbit: the Usagi Chronicles. Many of the project leads were fans of Usagi Yojimbo and even some of the voice actors had read the comics as kids or had seen Usagi in the old TMNT series (from the SDCC interview with Stan and crew). Boy even has the Stan Sakai signature under his shoes, lol x3 So he is in some way already a fan-character and has a lot of those "new character" features that might be appealing to some (the hair and clothes are very "generic modern boy") and appealing to change drastically as well.

but anyway, yeah like... I've been around fandoms for a long while so I don't mind much that people are gonna have different tastes abt fanworks and how to write characters, etc. Everybody ships their niche ships differently. it's just interesting to think about, cuz there's so many ways to make fanworks in general and so many ways to define fandom or fandom ships and so on. like it's just something interesting I realized while having a bus ride.

*you can correct me on when the leochi/leochi ship became popular and when people started properly watching the SRTUC series, at least going by tumblr tags (more reliable than twitter, for tags at least) and I'll make any corrections about the timeline of tags here on tumblr xD Going back through the tumblr tag for "leosagi" and "leoichi" you can see a sort of a sharp drop in old leosagi "content" (fanart, fic, posts etc) and then the new stuff, mixed in with various fan designs for a Rise!version of Miyamoto Usagi and other designs and ideas. but I think there needs to be some sorta archive blog for this cuz honestly, going through the tumblr tags without a pages system is... so annoying xD Like I am not in university anymore so I don't feel like doing this sorta stuff (archiving by screenshots or by reblogs) but dang.... sorta feels like this would be nice to have lol