There is (inevitably) a quiz for it.
https://www.gotoquiz.com/who_is_your_anime_girlfriend_1
My anime gf is Mei Misaki whoever that is.
https://www.gotoquiz.com/who_is_your_anime_girlfriend_1
My anime gf is Mei Misaki whoever that is.
Should anime/comix/drawings have realistic bodies?...
- Thread starter Kyriakos
- Start date
H4run
Deity
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
man that quiz is ass. I mean I don't mind the lacking grammar, but literally 0 of those options represent me. I got matched with some villain girl (at least that's cool) only because she had pink hair. I wanted to pick purple, but pink and purple were the same option for some reason. i want my internet moneys back.
at least I got a unique option while y'all have to share one girl among three dudes. have fun with the drama
can confirm as well. I am currently dating grown-up Lain and we are wearing matching bear costumes.
Buffy is peak teen crush. Have you seen the Cheese Man episode?
at least I got a unique option while y'all have to share one girl among three dudes. have fun with the drama
can confirm as well. I am currently dating grown-up Lain and we are wearing matching bear costumes.
Buffy is peak teen crush. Have you seen the Cheese Man episode?
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PhroX
Deity
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Not particularly impressed by the possible outcomes there. So many better anime girls to chose from....
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
exactly. none of them are deserving of the predicate "best girl". also the shows are mostly bad.
I've always liked female portrayals in the Madhouse shows. Like Black Lagoon for example, where the women are scarier than all of the male characters combined. A lot of them are also depicted as emotionally stronger and more reliable than men, which I feel like is true in real life as well. If men had period pain this world would implode.
In general, if it's a Shonen, and the woman doesn't know how to crack open a skull, that's a hard pass from me dawg.
Speaking of females in anime, and breasts, this is one of the main characters in the failed show Shiki:
She is a vampire.
The show in the end became just a breast show.
I think I have never watched even one Buffy episode, despite the series being very popular at the time. But SMG was one of the main stars of the era, obviously
She is a vampire.
The show in the end became just a breast show.
I think I have never watched even one Buffy episode, despite the series being very popular at the time. But SMG was one of the main stars of the era, obviously
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Narz
keeping it real
IMO its better to stress to young people the fakeness of everything they see on a screen rather than demanding it conform to our sensibilities.
Focus on conventional ideas of sexyness, strength, machismo, unrealistic power, intelligence, etc is unlikely to change and even if certain bits are toned up or down it remains unreal.
I remember watching MacGyver and the A-Team at age 6 or 7 and thinking "damn these guys are smart compared to me". Now I realize these shows are absurdly unrealistic.
I could probably go back and watch them now and be entertained, the problem wasn't the show but that I gave it too much reality
Edit: the best media will have more realism than the worst but there will always be things that are unrealistic (even biography is embellished for dramatic effect) and the key for young people is to not "take it personally"
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man that quiz is ass. I mean I don't mind the lacking grammar, but literally 0 of those options represent me. I got matched with some villain girl (at least that's cool) only because she had pink hair. I wanted to pick purple, but pink and purple were the same option for some reason. i want my internet moneys back.
at least I got a unique option while y'all have to share one girl among three dudes. have fun with the drama
can confirm as well. I am currently dating grown-up Lain and we are wearing matching bear costumes.
Buffy is peak teen crush. Have you seen the Cheese Man episode?
At least purple was half an option. Haven't the Japanese heard of redheads?
PhroX
Deity
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Yeah, I do appreciate a good badass lady, and Black Lagoon's women are great examples - though I wouldn't think of characters like Balalaika as girlfriend material....
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
...Or sister Yolanda. Or the Bloodhound. They're genuinely scary characters.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
but even to us adults the fakeness doesn't diminish the influence I'd argue. though I still agree media education is one of our top priorities and helps with fighting this phenomenon.
Yes that is very true. However, it is also true that the focus on these conventional ideas is not just a cause, but also a result of our current media landscape. So changing representation would already counteract this to some degree.
But yeah, obviously banning/critiquing any show with a machismo character isn't feasible nor is it good. I would actually argue that you can make a great movie/show with sexist views of women or machismo men, because it's not just about showing stereotypes, but also about how you treat them. Any subject can be approached in a nuanced enough way to help people develop a conscience for tropes and reality. You can make a movie about neo-nazis and not have it be neo-nazi propaganda,.
A lot of Hitchcock movies (I recently saw To Catch a Thief) have these suave, good looking, old-school sexist characters, but the movies are to me totally unproblematic, because they inherently question their own characters and show nuance. The Cary Grant character is repedeatly awkward, or puzzled, or embarrassed or hopeless. I think protrayals like this only become problematic when you have characters like James Bond who are essentially male power fantasies. Bond always knows what to say, has all his cool one liners set up for him, is always calm and prepared, always knows exactly what to do, always gets the girl (even though he often treats her like dirt, I wonder why so many men think they're entitled to sex..), he's essentially not human at all. (gross generalization, I know, but you get the drift I think, the later Bond movies actually did this better imho). You can do the same with women of course, like you could show how even incredibly beautiful women sometimes have self-confidence or body issues (which never happens, especially not in Hollywood, and makes us believe they've attained a flawless state, which we in turn aspire to).
It would be super funny if you had a "deconstruction" of a big tiddy anime where all the protagonists suffered from severe back pain and were constantly harrassed in public, because this is the actual reality of having big tiddies. Matter of fact, I'm pitching this right now
H4run
Deity
The one that on top of my mind currently the anime heroine from Valkyrie Profile's game (a true jrpg gem), aside from Asuka which Jung already posted:
Lenneth:
Spoiler :
If that's not badass enough, the oldest sister, Hrist:
Spoiler :
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Characters in comic books and animations should have bodies which are appropriate to the tone and feeling which the author is trying to convey. They should have bodies which are evocative.
The proportions of Nergal the Head Lopper are completely unrealistic, but they are part of a character design which carries a huge amount of information about who the character is, about his place in the world, about what he represents in the swords and sorcery genre. A realistically-proportioned design, even of a very large and well-muscled character, would not convey this so effectively.
The issue, I think, is not that artists sometimes decide that the most evocative shape for a female character is huge tits and no apparent internal organs, but that some of them seem to think this is the only evocative shape or a female character, even when it is dissonant with the rest of the character design. Even the hackiest artists have two or three different body-types for men in their repertoire, but may only have a single female body-type.
This is not a problem simply because it's objectifying- although it is frequently that- but because it indicates the inability of many artists or studious to imagine female characters in anything beyond one-dimensional term. You don't need creative character-designs if you have nothing to communicate. Even "woke" audiences would be more prepared to tolerate gratuitous anime tiddies if the characters carrying them were more substantive, if they appeared to be actual characters and not just a device.
edit: An example of this point would be the titular character of the Bayonetta series. At first glance, she seems like standard fan-service: long legs, slim waist, large breasts. But the artist who designed the character is a woman, Mari Shimazaki, who has described the character explicitly as a power-fantasy, analogous to similarly over-the-top male protagonists like Dante in Devil May Cry. Her design notes show that a great amount of thought was put into the characters design, that while the outline of the design may appear predictable, all of the details which comprise the design were carefully considered.
Ideally female protagonists would be entitled to the same diversity of body types as male protagonists, but I think this serves to demonstrate that this body type is not in itself the problem, but rather the complacency of mostly-male designers which it too-often represents.
The proportions of Nergal the Head Lopper are completely unrealistic, but they are part of a character design which carries a huge amount of information about who the character is, about his place in the world, about what he represents in the swords and sorcery genre. A realistically-proportioned design, even of a very large and well-muscled character, would not convey this so effectively.
The issue, I think, is not that artists sometimes decide that the most evocative shape for a female character is huge tits and no apparent internal organs, but that some of them seem to think this is the only evocative shape or a female character, even when it is dissonant with the rest of the character design. Even the hackiest artists have two or three different body-types for men in their repertoire, but may only have a single female body-type.
This is not a problem simply because it's objectifying- although it is frequently that- but because it indicates the inability of many artists or studious to imagine female characters in anything beyond one-dimensional term. You don't need creative character-designs if you have nothing to communicate. Even "woke" audiences would be more prepared to tolerate gratuitous anime tiddies if the characters carrying them were more substantive, if they appeared to be actual characters and not just a device.
edit: An example of this point would be the titular character of the Bayonetta series. At first glance, she seems like standard fan-service: long legs, slim waist, large breasts. But the artist who designed the character is a woman, Mari Shimazaki, who has described the character explicitly as a power-fantasy, analogous to similarly over-the-top male protagonists like Dante in Devil May Cry. Her design notes show that a great amount of thought was put into the characters design, that while the outline of the design may appear predictable, all of the details which comprise the design were carefully considered.
Ideally female protagonists would be entitled to the same diversity of body types as male protagonists, but I think this serves to demonstrate that this body type is not in itself the problem, but rather the complacency of mostly-male designers which it too-often represents.
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TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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I do think it's at least somewhat relevant. When you have an actor or actress in a movie, the character is fake...but the person's appearance, while abnormal outside the context of the movie, is not. Especially when it comes to aspects of the character's appearance, we should expect at least some difference in how this influences peoples' responses to it.
I would argue it works, but not to the extent we'd like. Usually transgressions have to be egregious, and sometimes they are. A lot of low grade junk anime we'll probably never see, similar to shovelware on Steam. Though most of that stuff gets filtered out in the manga stage, which functions as a sort of testing grounds before they convert them into anime in most cases.
This is something I often forget because the experience is so different between countries. If taxpayer dollars are going into it then the demand for what it will do holds real credibility. Entertainment media is not something IMO the government should compel taxpayers to support in the first place (edit: and yes I extend this to strong-arming cities into footing the bill for stadiums in football, even though I like football), but if they are then the taxpayer becomes a stakeholder in the production of said media.
Japan does not state sponsor much, if any, of its anime to my knowledge. I could be wrong about that though. The studios involved are really diverse in terms of talent, resources, and philosophy. Some push out great stories, others push out questionable political messages, others still push out a copy of last season's girls with slightly different shapes and hair colors but basically the same personalities.
AFAIK they have a more favorable indy scene for new IP than the US has, which is part of the reason they produce so much.
You have to be really careful. As they say on TVTropes: some of them would do anything for love. Anything.
When this happens it's usually obvious pretty early, and it's indicative of a sinking ship for the story.
~~~
The match I got in that quiz was triggering lol.
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yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
Hrist has 10/10 armor. Also, apparantely I have to read the entirety of Head Lopper now. What a ****** fantastic artstyle my god. Gorgeous stuff.
H4run
Deity
Have you play the game? The lore also quite mind-blowing, and the composer is Sakuraba, the one that cover the ost for Dark-Soul. It's a gem Jung, you will love it!
edit: This game contain zero skimpy armor! That's a big bonus for you!
