As I have reported, I spend a lot of time on the website DeviantArt.com, which is a website for artists to show their work to each other, and to fans. It attracts lots of youthful artists who contribute what is called Fan-Art, which is essentially artwork paying homage to Japanese popular art (from Anime, Manga, computer games, TV, movies, etc). Often, of course, this artwork depicts superheroes, gods, goddesses, aliens, mutations and so forth, so that the characters in these derived works look weird and sensational, and are shown doing things with their enhanced powers and physical attributes.
So far, so good; the fantasies of young people these days are inevitably fueled by the entertainment that is available to them, so many of the characters they like to draw are goddesses, ghosts, magicians (like Harry Potter and co.) and even vampires and zombies.
Vampires and zombies are laughably hokey to the greater part of the population, but there are enormous hordes of people who are able to suspend belief to the extent that the doings of vampires and zombies are of urgency and concern to them. Oh, how cruel of X to do that to Y! And he (or she) had been so patient and so loving, etc, etc.
There are some things, however—things I have mentioned often in the past, I believe (I'm too impatient with the subject to go look whether I have mentioned these things often)—which make absolutely no sense.
I must have mentioned stilletto heels. Platform shoes. But let's not forget banana clips, barrettes, and nipple piercings, and similar things that only make sense for ordinary ladies, 9-5 folks, or perhaps denizens of the night to sport. Why would a goddess, who normally lives in the Astral Plane, have such low self-esteem as to adopt platform shoes and stilletto heels, and so on, which are usually associated with human mating rituals?
Then there are stockings, and garters (or garter tabs; I'm not too sure of the latter). Some younger girls may not know, and guys may know even less: garters are intended to help keep up the stockings girls wear, especially if they wear shorter than ankle-length skirts or dresses. Stockings, meanwhile, are intended to smooth out the appearance of the lower legs, and to provide a little warmth in cool weather. A goddess, who can smooth out the appearance of her legs with sheer effort of will, does not need stockings, and certainly not garters to hold them up! And, in any case, for whose benefit is this supernatural being wearing these appearance-enhancing equipment? Imagine you're a goddess. Would you go to the trouble of obtaining garters and stocking to impress your secret sweetheart, or would you simply influence her mentally with your god-like powers?
Most recently, I have noticed the details of the lip color that the immortals who are depicted in Anime-style artwork wear.
A few decades ago, it became common for professional makeup artistes to slightly enlarge the lips of their clients, by applying lip color slightly outside the line of the lips. This was very effective in enhancing the lips of women in show-business who might have needed the enhancement. Then, of course, women began to use collagen injections to enhance their lips, sometimes with disastrous effect. But can you imagine a goddess enhancing her lips by painting on color outside the lip line?
Push-up bras, open-crotch panties—you name it, these goddesses do it. Well, of course they might have a sense of humor, and do it just to make us laugh. But that sort of defies reason. [When the artist comments on his or her creation, it is usually something on the lines of: "I just felt like doing that! Haha! Sometimes I think Xxyzzy needs a little something extra, you know?" Of course, Art needs to make no excuses!
What we have here is a crisis in imagination. There are a few authors who are true innovators in how they conceive their immortals to appear, and what characteristics (read: super powers) those immortals have. Then, the fans love those protagonists so dearly, that they are unable to conceive of any new super characters (gods, goddesses, fairies, aliens, you name it) that are entirely different from those. Even their names are derived from classical names of heroes, sometimes declined or inflected in painful ways.
I suppose Western mythology has been tremendously influential on the youth culture for more than a century. Many of the stories that young Japanese and Chinese and Korean and Vietnamese people love best are derived from Greek and Roman myths and legends, and Norse and Irish folk tales, and when a young person of today wants to invent a monster, for instance, nothing is more natural than that she or he should create a name from a Norse root, juxtaposed with an Indonesian suffix. (Forgive my murderous way with linguistic objects, but I hope the essential ideas are coming across.)
Take away the—to my mind—embarrassing missteps with clothing and accessories, and even the outsized swords and guns that Manga protagonists choose as their weapons, and you're left with some really innovative artwork. I did not mean to demean the quality of the art; it is just that some of these young artists take what I'm going to call anachronistic styles and accessories completely for granted; they don't hesitate for a moment in drawing a character wearing leather armor, sporting both a knife and a laser weapon. My word anachronistic is a hold-all for all pairs of accoutrements that combine any sorts of objects whose use together makes no logical sense, whether or not it has to do with temporal issues.
I also have a problem with females with super-large breasts. This is a cultural issue; both young boys and young girls imagine their heroines with ponderous breasts, it seems. Meanwhile, since a large number of users of the DeviantArt website are models and cosplay artists, it is clear that about half the girls who put up nude photographs on the site are well-endowed, while the other half is very slim. I'm not sure whether it takes a great deal of courage for a girl to show herself in the nude, if she has AA-cup breasts; at any rate it must be the braver ones who put up their self-portraits, and nine times out of ten, they are lovely. I suppose that betrays my personal taste.
The heavily-endowed girls are also quite attractive (though I don't particularly admire them), but I get the impression that they're not automatically favored over the slimmer girls. So there are subtleties with how audiences like their breasts. It is difficult to understand this trend towards super-large mammaries (a word that I dislike intensely, but which I'm using to avoid saying 'breast' too many times).
I suppose I must just get into the habit of skipping over the artwork that annoys me.
Kay
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