Welcome to my world
here you'll find...well let's face it you won't find much of anything, not many people pay attention to these places do they? lol
anyways, what you might find here are various thought from myself on random stuff...and also maybe some notices when I intend to change something, etc.
...yep that's about it, it's you'd still like to lurk look about, feel free.
yeah...so I know a lot of people like the long/lean none-too-masculine Bishi look, but seriously some of the illustrations I've seen of them (I can't name any specific series, I honestly don't know, just see them around sometimes), mainly the Shoujo Manga type stuff, makes them look downright unhealthy. o_O
like something about the skinny build, and sometimes the way it's shaded and how the eyes look, etc. they just look sickly or like they've been starved for a while, I'd be more compelled to give them a freakin' sandwich than fawn over them lol.
I just can't wrap my head around why that's supposed to be attractive :/ kind of creeps me out, sort of in the same vein as why I don't like uber-skinny, unhealthy looking female models.
mind you this is just my opinion of course, but I definitely prefer guys (and my fellow ladies for that matter) to have at least a little meat on their bones, just so they at least look healthy, ya know? (unless some hardship requires them to look otherwise) not that every character should be medium build etc, but there's a difference between a slender/small boned build (I like to call guys that are slim but still attractive "Thoroughbreds" XD) and unhealthy skinny. :I
...makes me glad again that I decided to go with the inconsistency error I made on a picture of Mikhail a long time ago and make him a bit thicker built.
anyways yeah, minor rant/observation over lol
Just something I've wanted to rant on for a long time...and not talking about freelance/hobby artists like myself, we have no real obligation to draw anything we're not into really.
I'm talking about the work professional artists who produce the shows and manga we all consume.
(yep, I'm going there)
anyone else ever notice that the horses (and often the animals in general but horses are among the worst) in anime usually look really horrible?
Like, I totally get that they're usually not the focus of the story, and all that, blah blah blah...yeah...we know...
But tell me, is that really an excuse for the frankly shocking lack of animal drawing skills? It's like no one is even trying and expect no one to notice how bad it really looks, like they're deliberate half-a**ing.
I mean it's one thing when an animal is not as detailed so as to not take away from the important characters, it's entirely another when they're done so badly that they actually begin to distract me from what they want me to pay attention to...they want me to pay attention to the dramatic tension going on between the two characters conversing on the screen, But I can't get it out of my head how utterly freakish and ugly the horse in the background looks or how horrid it's movement is.
I know horses are hard to get right, their anatomy is difficult, their movement is complex and very different from dogs and cats, but for normally professional artists to be as bad as I've seen, I really think the effort really has to be lacking on their part.
And come on, if you're going into a project that involves maybe drawing something one's not used to drawing, there's something called researching your subject matter, at the very least so you can do it just well enough to not detract from the important stuff and the stuff you are good at.
I dunno, I guess I'm just tired of the laziness when some of these artist do just about everything else beautifully, but not this one basic aspect that they have workshops for in art school.
...and on a side note...has anyone else noticed that a lot of the horses in anime look like clones? Like, 99% of the time, they're the same ugly dirt brown with a slightly darker brown mane/tail...it's a conspiracy! the brown freakish horses will inherit the unsuspecting anime world!! O_O lol
And I've been writing a lot lately on here...I don't know why...maybe cause I have nothing better to do...or had a lot of petty crap to get off my chest, I dunno...oh well.
I know no one's gonna see this being I'm so little-known here, but...
...have fav-and-runs gotten Worse in the past few months???
seriously, used to be I'd submit a picture of a character and it'd get at least one or two comments before it was buried beneath other submissions.
but lately all I get is favorites - which are nice, don't get me wrong - but ZERO comments, nothing, zip.
I Know it's gonna happen, I do the same thing myself sometimes, I'm guilty too I admit, I think we all do it sometimes. but that doesn't change the fact that it IS annoying when it becomes as extreme as this.
and it's getting just as bad on deviantART as it is here on Otaku too, it seems to be a universal epidemic.
I mean I don't expect everyone to have something to say, but now it's like people aren't even bothering anymore.
seriously, if you like an image, it would be really nice if you at least try to tell the artist WHY you like it. what features stand out to you? how does it appeal to your tastes? etc. etc. I don't expect an essay or anything, just maybe a quick "I love the eyes" or "the outfit is great" now is it really THAT time consuming to write a quick comment like that??
even I comment sometimes, it's not that hard, seriously people, at least think about it and give it a try.
So considering this is a site called theOtaku.com and aside from the other obvious tip-offs about me, it’s easy to see that I love anime/manga, both as an art form and an entertainment medium.
Most of us can say that we were not always fans of the genre, and we all have our individual stories as to how we discovered this realm of fandom. But the thing about my story that has made me wish to share it through this challenge, win or lose, is just how far away from a “fan” I was in the beginning…
I was about as far from a fan as anyone can be - I was an anime hater…
Yep, a HATER, no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it.
My disdain for the genre started back when the fandom really was starting to seep out everywhere…when basically no matter where you went you couldn’t get away from it, mainly due to the fact that "Pokemon fever" was sweeping the nation (and later, similar franchises like Digimon and Yu-gi-oh!) DragonBall Z was huge too.
And there was one thing I knew – I hated these genre giants.
I hated the art, I thought the characters were annoying, and the acting was horrid, and so in my “ignorant” youth I condemned all anime to be the same judgments as the few that I had been exposed to. I didn’t understand the attraction at all.
So naturally I was rolling my eyes when our cable provider finally got Cartoon Network, and I found out they had an entire airing block of anime, some play on words called “Toonami” with a dumpy little robot as the host on a spaceship.
“Great…Dad’s gonna be all over that…” was the thought that went through my mind.
- Hold the phone, wait what??? Yes, I said my dad, not my sister, not my brother, my old man, my DAD.
See, He had been an anime fan from way back…literally a fan from basically the dawn of Japanese animation itself.
In a way it was almost “in the blood”, that he’d be exposed to anime. He’s half Japanese, in Japanese-American terms, he’d be called an “Issei” – He was born In Japan, and lived there for about the first 3 years of his life, and so when my grandfather (Dad’s American side), a former B-29 crew chief during Korea and tech sergeant in the USAF brought my grandmother and my dad back to the US from good old Nihon, I suppose it was natural for my grandma to let her children watch the then-new series coming over from her homeland, like Astro Boy and Gigantor. And the fondness of anime Dad gained as a little boy didn’t fade even into adulthood.
Anyway - flashback over, back to present...or more recent past...or something like that - I was right, he was quiet happy to find this “Toonami”…
And I found it annoying, just as expected, and remained stubbornly blind to how much individual anime series can differ from one another…for a while…
Then one day I found him watching a new series…or at least one that wasn’t in the lineup when we got the network…this one was different…sure it had giant Robots, but it wasn’t Gundam…or Robotech…these robots looked like animals…I like animals…
So I convinced myself that I would just stick around “just because it was on”, because the machines were “kind of” cool, and I eventually learned the name of the show was “Zoids”.
I warmed up a little to it over time, I at least admitted that the machines were cool, not just “kind of cool”, but it took me a while before I dared admit that I was defrosting to the characters and that I was feeling something oddly similar to fondness for the artistic style…
It wasn’t gorgeous…but it certainly wasn’t the hardcore masculine DragonBall Z look that I so disliked.
The show slowly chipped away at my ice queen visage, until I finally had to admit it, the impossible had happened, I liked an anime; a mecha anime by the name of Zoids: New Century Zero.
But despite how Zoids had found a special little place in my favorites, I still remained obstinate to basically every other anime out there, including all the other shows on the Toonami block.
Sailor Moon, Tenchi Muyo, I turned a cold shoulder to them all after giving as little as a single short glance. I still was determined to NOT be called an anime fan!
Even if I did like Zoids and it had turned out to be the biggest ice-breaker between myself and my best friend (who is still my best friend since those first few Zoids-based conversations almost a decade ago), one show did not make someone a fan of an entire genre.
I stayed like that for a long time, maybe a year or so, until yet another “new” show appeared on Toonami.
This one was again, different, from the few other animes I had seen. This one had swordsmen in traditional costume…kind of like Tenchi Muyo…but Tenchi had a bunch of wacky futuristic stuff in it too, it wasn’t actually traditional.
This one looked to have a more historical setting…and the art was…well…it was kind of nice.
I still convinced myself that I was indifferent to it, that I alerted my dad to the new series simply because he might want to watch it, and not because I was curious...because I wasn't, not in the least...right??
The day of the new show’s airing came and we tuned in, well, Dad tuned in… remember, I was the passive observer; after all, anime was the still the devil!...except for Zoids...
But after a little while, as much as I might have denied it in my own head at the moment, I watched just the same. One thing was for sure, this one was REALLY different…
It was kind of pretty…and surprise, surprise… the main character wasn’t annoying, or self-centered, OR immature…he was nice…heck he was a total sweetheart.
And somehow the drama didn’t bug me, I could get behind these characters, I liked their motivations. I liked this show…
But only after the first episode??? No, sorry, I wasn’t going to make a decision that fast.
I decided I would give this one a second look, and that I would tune in for the airing of the next episode…but this time was different from when I started watching Zoids, this time, I made the decision to watch on my own.
It's not that my dad disliked the show, but the way he put it was that it was that it reminded him of a Japanese soap opera, like my grandmother (his mother) watched, it wasn’t really up his alley as more of a Sci-fi/Action fan.
I watched the second episode - this time with my sister, another anime-sceptic at the time - then the third…and the fourth...
Finally, I had to admit it, I didn’t just like this show, Rurouni Kenshin, I loved it…and the weirdest thing?
I didn’t care.
I didn’t care that my preconception of anime was defeated, I didn’t even look at it as “defeated” it was more like a discovery now.
I had stumbled upon a whole new world and from then on I was ready and excited to explore it – I had no reservations anymore about giving all the new animes I came across a good chance, and in turn I found even more shows I enjoyed.
So, it was official.
I was an anime hater no longer, in the course of roughly two years, I had turned a complete 180, I was an anime fan...and I liked it!
End
