Flamboyant or Something, Idk

It's not clear to me how often that ever actually happens holistically, but it's certainly a tool the series uses constructively.

What I mean by that is, it doesn't seem to me like characters are designed specifically in conjunction with a specific Pokémon, where the mon and character act as extensions of one another's character designs. Giovanni has his famous Persian (in the anime anyway), and that Pokémon suits him well, but Persian wasn't designed to complement Giovanni. Ghetsis has his Hydreigon that uses Frustration at max power, which certainly tells us something about what he's like as a character, but Hydreigon was not initially designed for Ghetsis.

And I'm sure someone who's more into the weeds of trivia than me would know if I'm wrong here, but to my knowledge, while there are plenty of human characters who are designed to reflect Pokémon, there are barely any Pokémon that were designed specifically to reflect a human character. The one example I can think of off the top of my head is Nihilego and Lusamine, where Nihilego's shape design matches Lusamine's, and they seem designed specifically to fit together.

Nihilego acts as both an isolating bubble, shutting Lusamine further away from reality and her children, as well as a "crown" or royal mantle, and acts as an extension of Lusamine's devouring mother archetype with the many staring eyes and enveloping tentacles. Surveillance and constriction.

And of course, Llilie's initial design at the start of the game has more than a passing resemblance to Nihilego's shape language, which again raises this idea of Lusamine trying to figuratively climb inside of her daughter, to make her child an extension of herself, which is familiar to certain kinds of narcissistic parental abuse narratives.

It's something that personally annoys me but people don't often seem to notice. Like in just fire emblem which I'll mention here since iirc you've played it too I can think of Edelgard and Lysithea (because spoilers) from three houses, Echidna (a skilled fighter and rebel leader) from fe6 and honestly every single female character that shows skin and is stated to be a skilled fighter. Especially ones who are reckless while fighting. And that's only a few examples.

While I know male characters having scars isn't like... Super common either it still happens way more often than with female characters, at least to my knowledge.

(I know that it's down to what people find attractive but I just think that shouldn't be more important than the story)

It's downstream of beauty standards, basically. Women, as objects of art, or aesthetic objects, are culturally expected to provide the service of Beauty™ to their observers, to the exclusion of almost all other priorities.

This manifests in the very obvious ways, with big tiddy anime gacha waifus flexing toes on an exclusive expensive microtransaction banner to drive sales, but even in media which is otherwise attempting to be more grounded, neutral or even feminist, what you'll find is a distinct, unquestioned and persistent tendency to treat beauty or aesthetic appeal as a primary design goal for female characters.

When is the last time you saw a show where the female actresses have bad skin, for example? And I don't just mean "visible pores on the face," I mean acne scars and blackheads. Psoriasis. Eczema. What's the last show or movie you watched in which women having such physical features is simply... normal? An ordinary, unremarkable part of life, a completely neutral behaviour of the human body which just simply happens to some people?

inb4 yes beauty standards apply to male actors as well, obviously, but we're not talking about men right now

Sometimes, the prioritization of beauty can fall under the umbrella of "empowerment;" there can be a fun and effective feminine power fantasy in pursuing or embodying beauty, or using beauty as a source of power. "I am the most gorgeous, show-stopping, unflappable, perfect beauty badass in this entire room and also in the world!" Think your (early) Tomb Raiders and Bayonettas, which many women love for exactly those reasons.

Obviously, feminist thinkers are divided on whether such a fantasy can ever be feminist or meaningfully challenge patriarchy. I am of the mind that it cannot, for however little my opinion counts here, although of course art doesn't exist just for the purpose of moral education or for demonstrating virtue. It is not a sin for problematic art to exist and to be fun and enjoyable to engage with; our job is to be critical of it, not pure of it.

But I'm running a bit afield here. Returning to the actual question: female characters are routinely denied scars as a feature of their character designs, because scarring conflicts with overriding cultural imperatives and biases that demand that women be objects of aesthetic beauty first, and that all other features of their designs must be subordinate to that superobjective.

A woman being anything other than beautiful is generally treated as a kind of notable aberrance (especially by men, especially by reactionaries) in demand of an explanation, and/or like an extremist political statement, rather than merely a neutral depiction of the sober reality that most people's looks are average. The constant social consciousness of the backlash that comes with challenging beauty standards in any way also creates heavy social pressure against artists even developing a visual language for designing women outside of beauty standards to begin with.

There are industry-leading artists in comics and video games and so on who simply never learn to draw women as anything other than beautiful, and who do not bother to maintain such skills, because they know full well from experience that they will essentially never be professionally expected to be able to perform that task.

It is a systemic bias which is tied at the root to patriarchy, in the west to white supremacy, and universally to misogyny. It is one of the most infuriatingly unquestioned and most aggressively defended biases that exist in culture, and (while this is not even in the top 100 of the worst problems with this bias) it is one of the biggest reasons female character designs end up worse than male character designs in terms of storytelling, worldbuilding, and theme- and narrative exploration. It is why women are so rarely allowed to have scars or battle damage, and if they do, it is not allowed to be unflattering.

Not really, no. The Nintendo Hire This Man look is generally when something gets chucked into Unreal Engine 5 with all of the visual effects cranked to maximum, but without any effort to harmonize the look and aesthetic with either the game's genre and themes or even with the actual world design.

So a fuckton of bloom and glow and raytracing and 4k resolution textures, but it's all slapped onto Mario 64, a game whose entire design is shaped around low-poly, low-resolution art design and limited graphical processing power.

It's the look produced by a creative who confuses fidelity for quality, who confuses surface level appeal for artistic merit. "If the light is raytraced, that means it's better! If the texture is 4k, that means it's better! If the model has more polygons, that means it's better!"

So if the new Star Fox game looked Nintendo Hire This Man, I would expect the character designs of Fox and the gang to be mostly unchanged, except for being much more detailed. I would expect especially a character like Katt to look unchanged except for being even more yassified, (because, again, confusing appeal for merit) and I also wouldn't expect Falco and Fox to be redesigned in a way that so many people find instinctively uncanny (because they're not used to furry characters that actually look like animals). Basically, I would sooner expect a Nintendo Hire This Man approach to produce designs like 2016's Star Fox Zero than I would expect it to produce designs like Star Fox 2026.

The Nintendo Hire This Man aesthetic is ultimately one which is incapable of meaningfully challenging its original game on the merits of its design language, because it's an aesthetic driven by nostalgia. All it can do is crank the graphics settings up to max with all the modern bells and whistles and go "look how cool the thing you already like is! Look how cool it is now that we fixed the problem of the hardware not being good enough to make it look this cool!" It doesn't want to change the original, it wants to dress it up in the gloss of legitimacy that comes from realistic, high-fidelity rendering technology. I would not expect that design approach to produce animalistic, off-putting furries, I would expect it to produce high-gloss versions of the original designs, unchanged in their fundamentals. Star Fox 2026 does seem to want to challenge the original a little bit—or at the very least, if it's trying to pull for nostalgia, it is a nostalgia for the original 1993 box art puppet designs, rather than the 1997 Star Fox 64 designs.

Honestly, right at the moment I'm more concerned about the Ocarina of Time remake being a Nintendo Hire This Man situation, since the only brief scene they showed of it was one of Child Link looking overdesigned and weirdly quasi-realistic, laying in a scene of glow and bloom lighting... but I need to see more of the actual game before I make that call. I want to see how (and if) the world design and art design of the whole game has been changed to suit the new look.

For this Witch Hat Monday I drew Coco in a Starry Night Dress! It's a continuation of the Starry Night Hat I painted a while back :)

Time lapse below, the full hours long art videos, PSD file and HD image will be DMed on Patreon the 5th of each month :)

As i roar into the sunset you have to swerve* to avoid the small flotilla of hacked Towyota devices trailing behind me

Another line of his is “democracy is non-negotiable”

Yeah, New Vegas has a terrible no good very bad ending and three mostly morally grey endings. Point being that sometimes neutrality isn’t possible even in imperfect circumstances. You’ve gotta choose a side eventually even if that means some bad things happen.