I think I'm--at least mentally--a little too old for the japanimation-centered culture of MMORPG (massively multiple online role-playing games), and all related media. I stumbled on this thought as I was going through the daily input-stream of art on Deviant-Art. The culture on that site is certainly a lot broader than the manga culture, but I have to reluctantly accept that all the art there, with a few exceptions, is male-centered.
I'm not absolutely convinced of this. The art they show me is according to their algorithm, which shows me artwork similar to images I have clicked on, and liked, in the past. I like looking at women, so they naturally show me lots of girls. But I like girls who are moderately endowed, or slim girls. But the vast majority of girls I'm shown are heavy-breasted girls.
Why is this? Partly it is the sort of image that Asian guys like to draw. There is another reason though. The cosplayers on the site are often girls who are curvaceous--a global phenomenon--having to do with the diet of families of leisure. American girls tend to be well-endowed, and a lot of the cosplayers are American girls. I tend to 'like' them, along with the bosomy Russian and Ukrainian cosplayer girls because I've got to know them, and I can't resist checking their boxes the same way I automatically like posts on Facebook! So there's a chance that if all my DA girl buddies were built like guys, I'd be fed images of nude girls more to my taste.
For whatever reason, I'm getting an overwhelming number of heavy-chested, blue-eyed, white-haired, enormous sword-wielding girls wearing stiletto heels. I'm not sure it's the guys who like heels; I think even the female artists tend to draw their female characters with heels. My (slight) training in anthropology hasn't prepared me to analyze this phenomenon!
But, if this is the world in which I spend my time, these are the artistic values I have to be inured to.
K.
No comments:
Post a Comment