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¿Will It Shall Never Have Been *I*, For Forevermore?
aa-blay-OO' (glottal stop) aas-chra-TAAN-ih-kuh
Astratanica/Ran if that's more syllables than your legal name || Hit me with your best pronouns || Adult || Battlefield: The moon
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Imagine if a fictional protagonist losing a limb were a sign that they’ll have to adjust to life without that limb rather than a sign that they’ll gain magical limb-regrowing abilities
Everyone dropping this pic
And talking about how the new frizz her is her niece, allow me to do a direct side by side instead
These are STILL not the same woman. Where is the icon fashion, the earrings (the chameleon, which might be in the new show idk I haven't watched it), the prominent hooked nose, the broader shoulders, the volume to her hair, the LIFE IN HER EYES
This frizzle looks like she's been called into the school board for inappropriate behavior and dress one too many times and has been broken.
Also others have said it before me but I couldn't find it in the scroll backs but they whitewashed all the kids too. They same face syndromed everyone to either be easier to draw or be more ambiguous so as not to offend or both or something, and it just makes me sad
And that’s not even to mention what they did to the bus itself.
The old bus had a personality and life and fun and now it’s just… a bus.
HOW DO Y’ALL WHITEWASH A BUS?!
It's gives "anti abortion Jehova's Witness cartoon" now
Vector puppet animation and a shocking drop off in investment in kidvid is largely at fault, but international marketing is also to blame.
What's important to remember is that the whitewashy approach to character design in kidvid is a backslide.
Representation in cartoons had generally been on an upswing since the 1980s, even though efforts were often minimal, clumsy, or badly executed. Diversity helped sell action figures in the lucrative US/Canadian market and it was recognized as a prosocial value on the production side.
"Prosocial messages" are a major part of kidvid TV pitches and development, nearly every show has specific prosocial lessons the narrative themes are intended to work around, even if its an action-figure ad. These range from sincere expressions of the creator's intent (Gargoyles, OG Magic Schoolbus, OG He-Man (no, for real)) to the entertainment equivalent of carbon credits.
Slight aside. Actual ink-and-paint animation tended to lock characters down into more distinct tones because there were only so many standard paint colors. Which is why Kwame from Captain Planet, Roadblock from GI-Joe, and Tim from OG magic schoolbus all use essentially the same pantone.
Ralphie gets skinny because not only fatphobia, but I suspect because he would need slightly different rigging and would add just a teensy bit to the budget adjusting his animations when they could just copy-paste from one of the other identically built kids. If they need to put them all in spacesuits or diving suits or whatever, they just make the one body and slap the heads on, eazy-pezy.
Decals on the schoolbus mean they have to be tracked, they have to use different versions of the bus in flipped shots, same with Mrs. Frizzle's clothing patterns. Wouldn't want to spend time flipping Ralphie's "R' around.
And with the marketing for everything now being global, there's an impulse to average everything down to appeal to all markets to a general degree. Making stories oversimple makes them easy to translate. Humor varies culture to culture, keep it slapstick or quick quips that can be localized easily. Everything that makes the Chinese censor boards happy also makes US reactionaries less likely to kick up a protest, the incentive is to keep everything:
ALSO: These characters have the same face. They probably use the same eye and mouth parts for character animations.
It's all to do it as cheap and broadly appealing as possible, as determined by business weirdos who know nothing about art and care nothing about kids, and they're more than willing to leverage racism (or just ignore that its happening) for the promise of a tenth of a percent more profit.
And what's galling is that this kind of animation software doesn't have to make crap. It can be used to make amazing stuff and still be vastly cheaper than traditional hand-drawn, but the same quality at 60% of the cost is never going to beat 1/2 the quality at 5% of the cost for the money-men.
The path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people.
Reblogging for "the path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people"
All of this, but I want to highlight @therobotmonster's point extra hard because I see people watch media from the 90s and get confused on the difference they see now. There was a massive, intentional push to diversify children's media to connect to specific communities that has been watered down in order to sell to an international market. Chasing after more money has robbed us of richer storytelling, and you can see it in not just children's media, but in what movies Hollywood decides to make.
And yet, when art is able to speak to and about those communities, it's very successful. Kamala Khan has been a breakout star of Marvel comics because of her Pakistani-American background, her connection to her community, and being a Muslim American. Sinners was one of the best movies of last year. Most of the best graphic novels I read last year (Big Jim and The White Boy, Hello Sunshine) were about specific challenges faced by specific communities and how to navigate them.
When you're creating art, an essential question you should ask is "who needs this the most" instead of how to make it appealing to the most people. If it is genuine, the audience will be there.
remembering again that perplexing post by someone who claimed everyone should get standards because the locked tomb didn't have any substantial explicit queer representation and the only definitive gay thing they found in all of it was judith's unrequited and socially discouraged feelings for marta that got brought up in as yet unsent. I saw that post before I read the books and already knew it was wrong, but I assumed it would be at least a theoretically conceivable take to have, like maybe the sapphic relationships were clearly set up for endgame romance arcs but they hadn't kissed yet or something so no one was technically a couple. and then gtn was five hundred pages of gideon expressing boundless sexual attraction to women every three sentences like she needs it to live. cavalierhood is her job and lesbianing is her one and only hobby. how on earth could a person convince themself that everything she thinks about corona is just table-scraps allusions at the possibility of a gay person.
you can always give your blorbos mobility aids btw . you can always make them disabled its always morally correct
Thats what i mean with this now . Fuckign commit violence against that beast until they have your disability we're getting representation the hard way 2night
make that blorbo disabled. hit them with the disability beam. especially if they obviously were or should have been disabled in canon but canon didn't meaningfully dwell on it
for $1 name your favourite fictional lesbian. and no "straight female character popularly fanonized as a lesbian" or "this male character is a lesbian to me" allowed
“I love when people of color come up to me and say, ‘You don’t know what it meant to me to see myself in a cartoon. I got one little black girl that I get to see that looks like me, thank you so much.’”
—Cree Summer on her impact.
Iconic.
I do love that when the Heated Rivalry’s show runner was asked about casting queer actors to play queer characters he ignored the bait and was just straight up like “You can’t ask that. That’s illegal.” lmao because yeah. It is. Weird how a lot of discourse on this subject acts like this is not a factor.
This is just my two cents on what is ultimately a very complicated issue, but I feel like too often we treat representation like it's a quality problem when it would be better approached as a quantity problem. For as many people want to see a serious grounded portrayal of their experiences, there are also those who just want to relax and have a good time. So for instance, if you're writing a trans woman for your story, instead of pouring all of your effort into research - trying to avoid every stereotype while simultaneously making her all things to all trans women - you could instead just add a second trans woman
This has the added advantage that you can make them kiss, but I digress
how do i say "horror novels these days are too woke" without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary
something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is.... dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don't use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom's abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it's like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel
One of the difficulties of book discourse online lately is that there genuinely has been a huge rise in "progressive" literature that feels like it was written for a Tumblr post about "bad characters are okay as long as the text doesn't agree with them!" - that are super didactic, or allergic to making an actual villain out of anyone from a marginalized group, and so on - and yet there are also a ton of right-wing weirdos on book sites still who throw fits about "woke" if there's a gay character or a Muslim character or even a major female character who exists to be something other than a love interest / damsel in distress / masturbatory description about how big her boobs are. (You especially see this if you read anything that combines more than one of those identities, and especially that has powerful women or LGBTQ+ people in a non-Western and/or historical setting. So many people just cannot wrap their heads around that, say, non-cishet Muslims are real people who exist in the world, or that people in the past having different attitudes about sexuality and gender from today applies just as much to 2.5-kids-and-white-picket-fence heteronormativity as it does to contemporary queer culture.) So I wholly sympathize with the delicate dance of how to say "I am a person who cares about representation and thinks it is good, but I would like these new diverse takes on well-worn genres to be well-written and to be written for adults who can handle some challenging concepts and moral ambiguity, please!" It's hard! It sucks! And yet it's important enough that we have to do it.
I have been told the Macy’s Day Parade has Golden on. I am also being told the dancers are multiplying and regressing in age. I don’t really know what’s happening other than the relay whooting about the Asian American representation.