Mood: CONFUSED...
I thought it would be a good idea to go back and read The Adventures of Marth and Roy.
HA....
So many awkward transitions. They're all over the place. I still struggle so bad with those... "orz That, and Unnecessarily dramatic panels...
The quality suddenly gets better at this page, though, and the writing and facial expressions are more like things I would write and draw now. SO IT ACTUALLY HAS SOME DECENT MOMENTS FROM THAT POINT ONWARD... For instance, this page! I like it for some reason. S-so I guess my sense of humor/etc hasn't changed since around 2011......................... or 2012. Actually, that makes sense. Idk how much I've changed since junior year of high school. I mean, I still drew a lot of SteGabe back then, so... NOT MUCH HAS PROBABLY CHANGED AT ALL! 8D
But sadly, as the writings suddenly gets better, the story suddenly stops. I actually still have the 3rd page of chapter 3 that I sketched maybe a year or two ago somewhere in my room back home.
But yeah, it's been a fun trip down memory lane. My sense of humor was so boring before that sudden time jump, you guys, whyyyy did anyone even think it was funny. xD;;; CHAPTER 1 IS BASICALLY JUST...
HE'S IN A SKIRT.
HAHAHAH!
H-HOW IS THAT A PUNCHLINE, AKIOH...
THOUGH MAYBE humor's not different at all. 8D; I use so many reaction panels and exaggerated expressions... and actually, I think I exaggerate expressions more now than I used to. xD
And even, it looks like OFAV started as a comic along the premise of, "Tomato acts like a girl! HAHAHAH!" That's essentially the same thing as "he's in a skirt. HAHAHA!".
Somewhere in me, I think I made Tomato as a character to make fun of comics/shows that rely on an "unnaturally effeminate male" as the source of humor... but I'm probably giving myself too much credit. Most of the comics I've posted, though, don't really address the fact that Tomato's a "fruity guy"; and the comic would be largely the same if Tomato was a biological woman.
There's probably still a degree of entertainment that ends up coming out of Tomato's gender, for some people. I remember when I showed my comics to my mom, she said she "got a kick out of Tomato." If Tomato was specifically a girl, my mom may not have said that.
I'm not trying to get at anything like "girls are less valued than boys," by the way. In fact, I think the remark has different roots, where someone finds entertainment/amusement in a boy or girl acting uncharacteristically of their gender.
All that said, the difference in entertainment depending whether Tomato is a boy or a girl isn't that much. When my stepdad read OFAV, he read all the way through the first 8 strips finding the comics with Tomato funny, while under the impression that Tomato is a girl. (The first pronoun used for Tomato comes discreetly at the end of strip 5; but the most obvious references to Tomato's gender are at strip 9, where Stefan repeatedly refers to Tomato as "he.")
And uh... Where am I getting at with this?
I have no idea. That was a weird little tangent! 8D
AND I'M GOING TO CONTINUE IT!
Now that I think about it, I think one of the reasons I made Tomato was to make fun of or to explore the impressions of male characters whose only interesting characteristic was being an attractive gender bent. (Boring trap characters, essentially.) I think someone I was subscribed to at the time was making TONS AND TONS of trap characters that I couldn't easily distinguish from one another, but still had many fans/etc. THEREFORE, I thought I'd see if making a character that would normally be a simple "ditzy girl character" would get the same kind of "trap character attention" as the others.
For the most part, people saw Tomato as a male ditz with cute clothes on. Which is essentially what he is, so hooray! Couldn't fool you lot. :V There was at least one person who praised me for how "original" Tomato was, though, which made me A LITTLE CONCERNED...
I actually think I've talked about this before. Huh. Anyways, these aren't complete thoughts and I didn't have one specific, CLEAR AND DISTINCT direction with Tomato. This is just one aspect of why I made him. I don't even think about that fact nearly at all, anymore. These days, when I think about Tomato, I like to figure through how Tomato is self-absorbed but simultaneously a caring person, and why someone like him makes simple minded decisions.
ANYWAY, I'm late for a thing, so I have to go now. THANKS FOR LISTENING TO ME TALK ABOUT MYSELF, I GUESS? Wah.
