DemetrianaYXX

[image description: a gallery of concept art and screencaps of characters from the anime series SSSS.GRIDMAN]

The anime SSSS.GRIDMAN, a reimagining of the early 90s tokusatsu series Denkou Choujin Gridman—brought to the US in the form of “Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad”, referenced in the title of  this new show—has some unexpected additional references, in the form of character and prop design. But it’s not to any incarnation of the Gridman character, nor to other Tsuburaya Productions franchises like the long-running Ultra(man) series.

No, it’s to Transformers toys, including some comparatively obscure items like the fanclub-exclusive Shattered Glass mirror universe. As Twitter users (including yours truly) have noted:

Protagonist Yuta Hibiki is made up of references to the Classics Cliffjumper figure, including wearing shoes that homage his car mode, and a backpack that looks like the “Wave Crusher” accessory when worn in robot mode.

(image source)

Yuta’s agemates are all dressed in references to Shattered Glass:

Best friend Sho Utsumi was the key that made it obvious to everyone: the slashed-out purple logo on his shirt, color scheme, and bagstrap branded TURBO in black on a yellow background all directly homage the side-changing rebel hero Sideswipe.

Deuteragonist Rikka Takarada features a subtle nod to the heroic Megatron in her color scheme and accessories, featuring a black-on-white outfit with a prominent splash of red (SG Megatron’s Decepticon insignia), and a few spots of red-orange, as well as yellow accents.

Popular girl Akane Shinjo may be referencing the patterns of the Botcon 2008 version of the evil Optimus Prime, clad in a sweater with a pattern shaped like his aero fairing, with a purple bow.that seems, like Rikka’s red one, to be an imitation of the faction insignia.

The “Mysterious Boy” has a flame pattern on his clothing, with edges that match the specific purple fire motif of the evil Rodimus, sans goatee.

Classmate Namiko wears a tie that homages the chest deco of the noble Starscream’s first toy, and she even wears a hair clip styled after that toy’s Cyber Planet Key…

…while her friend Hasu is seen wearing a facemask, green hair accessory, red bow tie, and a towel with the image and name of RAVAGE, all indicating she’s meant to be the very groovy Sir Soundwave.

A student briefly seen from behind wears a jet-themed jacket with the word THUNDER, in the the colors of the Action Master homaging heroic version of Thundercracker.

Rikka’s mother is more subtle, wearing an apron with a motif under the collar that imitates the deco found on G1 Megatron’s abdominal section—making the choice of Transformer into something that runs in the family.

A group of suit-clad characters whose names reference the mecha and weapons from Gridman and SSSS are all wearing lapel pins that homage the live-action movie Dinobots:

Samurai Calibur has a purple pin in the likeness of the pattern on Slug’s robot mode shoulders as seen on one figure, a result of the deco on his triceratops mode’s frill,

Big man Max has a gold pin that homages the jawbone-styled armor of the Japanese version of one of Grimlock’s figures.

Twintail-wearing Borr wears her own gold pin, this time imitating the chest deco of spinosauroid Scorn, as seen on another Japanese-exclusive version.

And most overtly yet simultaneously subtly, Vitt has lapel pins that form the eyes—lined up with the ‘mouths’, on his lapels—of the likeness of monster pterosaur Strafe’s two heads.

But there’s more! I thought it was just a coincidence until i saw people talking about Sho, and Yuta’s shoes, but there’s a scene later in the episode where Sho is using a pair of binoculars that are an exacting imitation of the alternate mode of “Real Gear Robot” Longview, as seen in this image put together by twitter user ussa1226:

 If your parents want you to be happy, they will be there for you when you need them, and help you with your struggles. They’ll take your pain seriously. They wont make fun of your problems when that hurts you. They’ll point out your good sides. They’ll let you know they hold you valuable and important no matter what the rest of the world says about you. They’ll make sure you know they’re on your side, here to protect and get you out of trouble, that if something happens you have backup, you have a safety to fall back on. They’ll make sure you have a place you belong to, place where you’re welcome and wanted. They’ll be a source of comfort, warmth and support.

If your parents want you to look happy, they’ll demand that you stuff down your emotions and play an act of a child who doesn’t need anything or anyone, who is just fine the way things are, no matter how bad things are for you. They’ll dictate what you’re allowed to think of them and how you’re supposed to react on anything and everything they do. They’ll demand you hide your pain, your symptoms, your anger, your fear, anything that makes them look like less than perfect parents has to go. They’ll let you know that they are important, you aren’t. Their emotions and needs and desires are important, yours aren’t. Their pain has to be paid back, yours has to be ignored and forgotten. Your life falls back on what is and isn’t convenient to them, every part of you is judged only by how much use they can have of it. And of course, they’ll tell you they did it all for your sake, because if they didn’t, who knows how awful you would turn out. 

PETER: he doesn’t seem so bad.

HARRY: not if you’re a genius.

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

Here are two things I believe about Steven Universe:

First, Steven Universe has a lot of high-concept science fiction worldbuilding concepts that it is not really interested in engaging with, because it is not what the show is about. These include:

The radical alternate history of the world, including the changed division of the states, the fact world war 2 possibly didn’t happen, the absence of Russia, the cultural fallout of California (somehow!) being flyover the way the Midwest is often treated as in real life. All of these are, like, hugely interesting, and totally ancillary to what the show wants to do, so they’re exclusively used for one of gags. 

The presence of “Roadside picnic”- style depots of abandoned alien technology all over the planet, including in places that teens are capable of casually accessing in some cases, as well as the presence of wandering inhuman monsters that have coexisted with humanity for as long as there’s been agriculture. This is the kind of thing that should have a much larger impact on the shape of culture than it was shown to, and the main reason it doesn’t is because the show is thematically about Steven acting as a bridge between the two mostly siloed worlds- but the world is implicitly big enough that stuff should be happening without him and around him! And yet you never get anyone remotely curious about any of it who don’t use Steven as an entry point.

The occurrence of a massive extraterrestrial war in the show’s backstory, with thousands of superpowered aliens fighting an ideological rebellion against their totalitarian homeworld, culminating in a giant not-qute-but-arguably-worse-than-a-massacre, and including ideological infighting among the “heroic” side about how far is too far. All issues famously better unpacked in a show for adults.

The biology and society of the gems themselves. Generally examined in broad strokes as needed to make the story work, but many of my favorite SU fan works are the ones that do deep headcanon dives into the how and why of the gems- what are gems, how did their culture come to be, what does the day-to-day look like, why do they all have weapons by default, what was their militarization for, what are the mechanics of fusion, why do fusions always have a coherent aesthetic concept if cross-gem fusions aren’t supposed to happen, what are the implications of a society where “wall decoration” is a job that a sentient being is custom-engineered to fill, often digging even further into the horrifying implications of their society than the show itself could get away with.

However.

Steven Universe has a number of emotional arcs, character arcs and trope examinations that work so well specifically because Steven Universe is unironically a show aimed at children. One one level, this is because you have to adapt really mature themes and arcs so that kids will get them and so the suits will let you; on another level you have to pull it off with the constraint of 11-minute episodes, you have to work with the strengths and weaknesses of animation, you have to throw in the flashy stuff that kids watch cartoons for. And that leads to some beats that, in terms of pure craft, are interesting in terms of how they’re executed in the specific context of a kids show.

Rose’s arc, particularly the fact that her death is suicide-coded as all-get-out, and her behaviors are allowed to ripple forward, benefit and damage her survivors in a consistent way in a way that I’ve never seen- in a children’s show.

Pearl’s abandonment issues, rampant projection, complicated feelings regarding Steven and Greg, her treatment of Connie, her difficulty forming an independent identity and the ways in which that hurts the people around her- in a children’s show.

Amethyst’s arc, her guilt simply for being born (and what that’s a metaphor for), everything that’s implied about her dynamic with Greg and Rose in Maximum Capacity, her identity problems and lack of cultural context, all unpacked over the course of dozens of episodes of a children’s show.

Lapis’s bumpy, non-linear recovery arc, including her toxic relationship with Jasper and an excellent approximation of an emotionally abusive relationship with Peridot, all- and I cannot beat this drum enough- in a children’s show. Similarly, Sadie and Lars’s whole thing and how that was given space to breathe and play out.

And of course, Steven himself. Steven’s long term arc is normally something you would find in a show like The Venture Brothers, something that’s willing to play off the tropes of the kid hero while being very much aimed at an older audience, with a level of detached parodic irony baked into the execution (since they’re often unpacking specific characters via expies.) Steven Universe is literally the only children’s thing I’ve seen on TV that, even as it does all the unironically fun adventures and misadventures, also does the work to examine how much being an archetypical wholesome Saturday-morning cartoon kid hero would screw you up, and we watch it happen in real time, and there’s a whole season fully highlighting the damage his status as a kid hero has done to his identity.  And I can’t stress enough the degree to which the impact would be lost if this arc hadn’t been done “in house;” if Steven Universe Future had been done twenty years from now as a deconstructive parody of a nostalgia property, it would suck. It wouldn’t land.

Steven Universe is a show that taught me to meet a story where it’s at, and judge it’s success and failures in terms of what it chose to prioritize, and not what I would have wanted to prioritize had I been writing it. Because at the end of the day, it’s fine to let the high-concept nerdbait setting elements fall by the wayside in favor of prioritizing the character-driven thematic stuff and genre analysis stuff. 

the star wars universe has no official name but in fandom you’ll see it shortened to GFFA for “galaxy far, far away”

glass - transparisteel

metal used in construction - durasteel

very strong space-plastic (used in stormtrooper armor) - duraplast

tablet computer (analogous to a PADD in trek) - datapad

rather than paper, handwriting is usually done with a stylus on flimsiplast (flimsi/flimsy for short)

holos are 3-d videos or videomessages, recorded and played on a holoprojector (these are often seen in small formats, palm-sized - analogous to like. a GoPro.)

we don’t drive cars, we drive landspeeders or speeder bikes

we don’t shoot guns, we shoot blasters

if you didn’t bring a knife to a gun fight, you perhaps brought a vibroblade instead - an edged weapon that, you guessed it, vibrates. little ones could be called vibroshivs or vibroknives. we actually got to see polearm versions of these in The Mandalorian! it was very exciting.

robots in GFFA are, of course, droids. astromech droids (astromechs) are the like. iphones of the droid world - ubiquitous, multipurpose, most with a similar aesthetic. R2-D2 and BB-8 are both astromech droids. human-shaped droids like C-3P0 are protocol droids.

got a papercut? a nasty flesh wound? a missing chunk of your torso, perhaps? slap a bacta-patch on it or take a dip in a bacta tank for a soothing treatment with this all-purpose miracle healing goo. this is what diapered Luke is bobbing around in during the early part of Empire Strikes Back.

you’re supposed to say kriff/kriffing instead of “damn,” “shit,” or “fuck/fucking,” but this is for cowards. let Obi-Wan cuss.

midichlorians - ignore them.

before the Empire comes to power, baby jedi who can’t hack it as knights or are never chosen to be Padawan apprentices become members of the Service Corps, the branches of which are the Agricultural Corps (AgriCorps), Medical Corps (MedCorps), Educational Corps (EduCorps), Exploration Corps (ExplorCorps)

dates are expressed (typically) as [date] Before the Battle of Yavin (BBY) or [date] After the Battle of Yavin (ABY). for instance, the sequel trilogy begins in 34 ABY.

Very well then. I assume you're appreciating and celebrating the dress, style and behavior of somewhat shabby, weird outcasts who firmly refuse to make themselves palatable to you?

...it is actually very likely that they will...not appeal to you.

"Why can't people be unapologetically themselves, in a way that is of course never "cringy" or too weird or too ugly or uncool? Why can't we have self-expression without performance, in a way that is not boring to me and that doesn't weird me out?"

"Ah, but you see, that one is personally unappealing to me!"

We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.

Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:

How do you populate your backgrounds?

Well, here’s the answer:

If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.

The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.

How do you fix this?

Well, here’s the simplest solution:

This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.

From Blacksad (artist: Juanjo Guarnido)

From Hellboy (Mike Mignola)

Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.

I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!

Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!

Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)

The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.

By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!

Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.

We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!

If I remember correctly, the big push to keep it in the DSM came from the pharmaceutical companies who need this diagnosis to exist so that they can market a drug they are currently working on to treat “female sexual interest/arousal disorder”. 

This diagnosis is so fucked up. It not only pathologizes Asexuals, it also pathologizes non-asexual women for having less interest in sex than men. This disorder literally used to be called “Frigidity” and feminist psychologists had to fight like hell to get the DSM to clarify that simply having a lower sex drive than one’s husband was not sufficient for a diagnosis. 

The APA throws in that little disclaimer about being a “self-identified asexual” and the diagnostic criteria of distress, but they did the same thing before they removed homosexuality from the DSM. 

A lot of people think that psychologists stopped considering homosexuality a disorder in the 1970s, but that’s not entirely true. They kept it in the DSM with a slightly changed name and a criteria that the person experience distress about being gay. This was used to justify “reparative therapy” for decades.