Not gonna lie, the topic in itself is actually interesting, and I've been thinking about it for a while. Particularly in the first half. So I will have to go through it piece by piece...
Sorry if this is the wrong topic, I am new here.
Welcome to the community. Nice to see new people coming in and starting discussions on various topics.
Even though the characters are hundreds of years old they still look like children (zun's benign, though accidental effort to make his characters clean)
I have been talking a lot about this part in a dedicated thread. Short version of the thread, it was about me trying to understand the way and artistic choice of ZUN, and whether drawing everyone in these child proportions was intentional or not. Scratch that, there are actually 2 threads I would like to refer to:
With this, perhaps I could revive discussion in the original threads as well.
I am against the sexualization of these children as our brains walk a line of nurturing and evil, many in the anime community take the evil side because they (usually) like the manipulation, the brain's feeling to breed, the things that make up a drawing perfectly crafted by perverts and virgins of a loli character.
This whole thing reminds me of a couple memes I have seen recently. Trying not to stray far from the Terms of Service, the two memes I would like to refer to are the following:
I am stil trying to understand the culture and appeal formed about the whole concept of "loli/lolicon" (and by further extension, that of "shota/shotacon" as well). Personally, I just do not see the appeal of it. Overall, this seems to be generally more a Japan thing, at least in terms of who is producing the themed art.
Why watch shows that contain high school girls? Well, the audience for these types of content were made for teenagers that've hit puberty. Was the brain made to develop itself and it's presences on these depictions of characters in media? This continues later on to life for some; their brains are programmed.
I think it might be related to that temporary release of dopamine - but don't trust me, I pretty much failed biology and moved to Philology when I noticed I was much better at history and geography. Anyway, puberty is a weird part of our lives, very hard to understand. Even myself, at the age of 20, am still trying to understand what the hell happened to me through those years. It does not help either that I reprimanded, have not asked, kept secret or did not have who to talk to about the changes happening inside of me, so I might say I had a...perhaps crippled (?) development I have to recover from. Anyway, "life is strange".
Oh, speaking of people having weird to say the least reactions. This is more than likely copypasta, but after all, all copypasta has something at its original - best copypasta is the one that evolves naturally, many times without you even having intended it to be as such (spoiler for rather obvious reasons):
Perfect representation of the more degenerate side of the internet - and exactly the one I was talking about in the "why are Touhou fans so horny" thread weeks ago. Anyway, all I could tell to those people is...
As for overall depictions, it is just what sells/brings in most attention and makes people want to watch your show. Numerous people have told me that many times anime works as a medium to escape from the harsh, shitty reality people live in. How much do you want to indulge yourself in this escapism, it is up to you. You just want something normally you would not have access to, at least that is how I feel it is.
Additional lecture:
May their motivation be sinister or be simple as just a hourly happiness fix.
Again, I think this might be related to what I just said in the previous paragraph.
You can say the same thing about black tights (I have a preference of them being completely opaque).
Personally, I do like the black, opaque thigh-highs. They are elegant, or just an element I tend to find attractive in terms of wardrobe (please don't judge me). They look good on a lot of characters, and can be fit with a lot of other accessories. On of the examples I really like comes from the artist Iganashi1 (even though I really like their art as a whole, especially their version of Eiki):
As for overall canonical black thigh-highs, Nue has always been an interesting case. Black stockings, combines with short black hair made for combination that caught my attention for a while. Maybe not exactly the illustration drawn by ZUN in UFO, but there is a loot of good fanart that tends to outline the features and fashion style of the character (and characters in general).
Yet another additional lecture: