CountVonNumenor
Onshi
- Thread starter
- #21
I would definitely love to see something like that come to life. And if you need help with it, I am more than eager to help with such a project.
Alright, so to bring new ideas on some of the old ideas:
I have found a few threads online on something like that, out of which this one jumped into my eyes as being the newest. The thread is related to the question why hasn't ZUN decided to hire someone else do the art for him in the games instead of keeping all the work on himself (and due to the so-called "involution" with the past few main games). Initially, I was wondering why it was rated so low, but then I actually saw why - in short the dude could express his dissatisfaction with ZUN art a bit more gracefully to say the least...Evolution of ZUN art
Long ago I have written about my oddities with his style. For anyone unaware, this is what my original text stated back then:
Ever since I joined the fandom, one of the things that caught my attention is the unique artstyle adopted by ZUN for his characters. Thinking of that, I have recently decided to start using more his original art as point of reference whenever I want to draw any of the Touhou girls.
Ø DISCLAIMER: I absolutely do not hate the original ZUN style. I think it is very unique, and it has evolved and improved quite a lot over the years. Plus, it is quite to be appreciated that he can also drawing, given that the main games are basically done by a one-man army.
However, I have also noticed a bit of a problem, which might be one in general with Touhou art. Everything looks so ambiguous, while I also do know that ZUN has his kind of "no fanservice" policy. Which, as I was talking about in the past, has led to people judging us, the Touhou fans, as pedophiles or "loli lovers" in the most extreme of cases, while people generally wondering why our characters look so much like children, even when we come with the arguments like "she is (supposed to be) x hundreds/thousands of years old". In a way, I was concerned that Touhou might have also given birth to the "thousand year old loli trope", which just made things worse. It is interesting how fans tried to "fix" his art (be it by drawing safe things or not), even if the fan art going at times more towards the fan-service area. We even have a meme about how fanart is much better than the original art - it is good, but the original needs credit too, since the fan-art would not exist had there not been an original to start from
I know that drawing the characters as more mature or outright adults is also an option in your own style, while also implementing some of the design choices ZUN came up with, one that I actually like a lot and try to use more. Only problem I have noticed until now is that reactions from those you will show then the images tend to be mixed, from people appreciating them to making the whole upper-mentioned statement about Touhou fans even more than before, saying that we are so desperate to legitimize our liking for a child-looking-like character by making them look closer to their supposed ages.
In a way, up to this point I have ended up picking characters for drawing that are either canonically adults by this points (ex Akyuu who is known to be born in 1994) or someone who could work well in a more adult and mature form (ex Eiki Shiki and Iku Nagae). However, I am wondering how I will do with other characters, even if some like Yuuka, Junko and Hecatia will actually work rather well with that vision set in mind.
Anyway, back to the point. Besides the "no fanservice" rule, why do the ZUN characters look the way they do? I find it interesting how much of a difference there is between the main games and spin-offs art, and how much of a contrast there is between his original style and the closer to anime vibe given by, for example, the fighter games.
Now, for comparison, OVJN has decided to go by another route when talking about the art evolution. As seen in the image, he split it in between multiple eras: PC-98, Seihou and other pre-EoSD works (from what I can see, he counted “Portrait of Exotic Girls” and Dolls in Pseudo Paradise), EoSD, early Windows era, early modern era and everything from UFO onwards. However, I would personally add a new era, starting with Unconnected Marketeers as the style is rather different from anything that came previously. I would have written a whole text in regards to this, but a comment found in the video tells quite well what I was thinking of + a few more things:
