artist-confessions: How to cure same-face syndrome

artist-confessions:

This is not a confession of course. Someone asked how to cure it and I think that’s pretty simple:
Draw different human races. If you draw anime you are drawing cartoonised Asian people. Don’t go for the cartoonised style just yet. First look at photo’s of people from different races. Practice and…

So some time ago I made this comment on artist-confessions on how to cure same-face syndrome. People who reblogged it wrote angrily about the sentence: “If you draw anime you are drawing cartoonised Asian people.”

When writing this …rather rushed piece I just came from prejudiceismagic after a discussion about anime girls and what race they depict. 
I was linked to this article, telling you about how white people see anime characters as white simply because they see themselves as the standard.

I’d like to quote Kayleero’s comment on my above post:

“‘First of all, it’s manga, not anime.

Second, manga isn’t even “cartoonised Asian faces”. The faces don’t look Asian at all, they have really large eyes for example, and manga characters come in all races. Also, it isn’t only manga artists with same face syndrome, people who draw American cartoons can have it too.”

Iactually ment to say “anime styled”. Sorry for that one and the horrible grammar. I should have had more patience. 

Now onwards; the faces do not look “white” either. That is just because  seeing something without any charateristic features, you probably will see it as your “default human being”, which for Western people is a white person. It’s all in the article and really worth reading. Please do. 

Lastly, I said “if”. You don’t have to draw Anime styled. However, I went with that example because every entry on the confession blog that told us “X has/ I have same-face syndrome” was using an anime/manga style. Therefor it seemed more appropriate. 

Really, I just want to encourage people to draw things new to them and don’t fear trying it. Ironic how my message about thinking out of the standard didn’t come through to people who think within their standard.

Pokemon humanizations

I like to touch upon this one because at prejudiceismagic this comment was posted claiming the MLP fandom is the first to have POC humanizations.

In between ponies I have been a huge Pokemon fanatic and if there is one thing I loved at the /vp/ board on 4chan, it was the “Gijinka threads”. One requested a gijinka of, let’s say, Tentacool, and people went posting all what we have for that pokemon. Or it was just free “load up whatever you have”. 
I’ve seen so many great ones I made a whole folder filled with them.
I love how people converted features of a pokemon into clothing and accesoires. Why did I just bold that line? Because for the most part I was looking at that. I did not care for the race, I cared for fashion.
However, I began to notice something. Try to find a “white” whimsicott Gijinka. 

Pokemon with a brown colour are the only pokemon likely to be given a dark skin. With that I do not mean Teddiursa, but this humanisque pokemon whom you can’t easily give the skincolour of the fur, because you need that cotton fur for the gijinka. The most variety in skincolour are the Gijinka’s of Jynx for obvious reasons. 

Of course there are white Whimsicott gijinka’s but there are almost no
black ones for the other pokemon. I think these artists focus far more on  conveying pokemon aspects into the human and just pick a human which is default for them. For Asian artists that mostly is an “Anime girl”.

Yes, Girl. Male gijinka’s are rare. That is probably because fashion wise, males are limited due to sexism. Otherwise, they tend to be sexualised with enormous boobs and revealing clothing. 

I was overjoyed when tumblrmon came to be. (I had not joined tumblr at that point) The whole idea of tumblrmon is to draw yourself dressed like your fav/partner pokemon. Now those are technically Gijinka’s.
So it happen to be that real life has more diversity than any fiction we ever produced. POC’s. Different body types. Different ages. Yep, I was truly happy. 

And then I learned about prejudiceismagic and how some fans of MLP;Friendship is magic can react if you make a character not-white. It came as a shock to me. However, poke-gijinka’s are not gijinka’s of actual characters, but designs of certain creatures. I thus think the same drama won’t be attached to them if you choose to make a dark-skinned Lilligant. It is just that they don’t think about the skin colour, they just make what they see as default. That is why all-white Pony humanizations aren’t bad either.
However, if the artist has prejudiced motivations or people comment with “why” it is indeed prejudice.  

FiM fans were certainly not the first to have diversity within humanization but they certainly are in high numbers…which was partly a reaction against racism and prejudice within the fandom. 

Swaying from the default is something a person has to be made aware of. Unless that person has diversity in their surroundings and bases their character appearances on what they see around them.
Raises the question why we don’t have more black Humanization. After all, all these I-am-not-racists have black people as their best friends. 

Prejudice Is Magic: Yo, Ink here. I decided to send you a message through here instead...

prejudiceismagic:

Yo, Ink here. I decided to send you a message through here instead since I know the ‘ask’ feature is a bitch when it comes to message length.
I wanted to give you a take of what happened with the entire BAN thing that took place a few months back at Diversity-is-Magic. I’m keeping names of the…

Founder of the “diversity is magic” group on Deviantart on the banning of a very prejudiced person who was the reason the club was made.

A brony-drama that I did not know of? Shame on me. 

The Pony Spectrum: The Pony Spectrum is up and at 'em.

equalityismagic:

The brony fandom has a pretty harsh reputation when it comes to acceptance and more diversity is always good so why not start a project about it?

You want more animals species? You want more representations of different cultures? You want more POC humanizations? You want more diverse body types?…

The start of something wonderful, I say.