oh no, it's TBSkyen

Hi, I'm TBSkyen. I make videos on YouTube sometimes. This is my main tumblr blog, the "brand" blog as it were. I also have a sideblog called @tbposting which is for shitposts and reblog spam and the occasional funny observation.

You can find me in most places online as TBSkyen.

Here's my Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/tbskyen.com

Here's my main YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@tbskyen

Here is my short-form YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@tbskyenshorts

Here's my rambly spam-and-reactions channel where I will spend an entire whole hour frame-by-frame gushing over cool animation and such: https://youtube.com/@3bskyen

And here's my Linktree where all of those links are collected and easily accessible: https://linktr.ee/tbskyen

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.

Aro

It's June, motherfuckers, and you know what that means! Apart from firing a few rent-lowering shots to filter out the chuds from my following, it's probably also a good time to post a reminder that there are many strange ways to be queer, and this is one of them.

video transcript below the cut, may be slightly inaccurate, I tend to ad-lib when reading my scripts into voiceover

hey commissioned this goober as a me a while back and wanted an opinion rn i think i wanna remove some of the web stuff but i just want your opinion really

Any advice or thoughts are greatly appreciated, as are the great videos!

Hmm... I mean, to start with you wanna just look at period architecture from whatever culture you want to code your environment by. Those buildings are all generally built to withstand cold, and anyone who knows what areas that kind of building is from will understand what it implies.

Second, you can adorn the building with things that suggest heat and warmth. A thatched straw roof, for example, or have it overgrown with evergreen vines or moss, or flanked by evergreen trees like fir and pine that visibly "shelter" the building. Those things also have a fuzzy outline and texture to them that essentially visually implies "fur," implying a certain resistance to col.d

You can also think in terms of "body language," as it were. i.e. a building that stands up quite tall and thin from the landscape looks exposed and therefore colder and more precarious than a building which is short and broad and which flattens or almost "burrows" itself into the landscape. Have the building resting in a small depression in the ground, with hills or embankments on either side, and you further help that impression.

Similarly, thick heavy walls imply better resistance to cold than thin ones, rounded shapes look more cozy and friendly than sharp ones, and you can get some mileage out of having fairly small windows with thick panes of glass, and give those windows thick shutters that can be closed against a storm or bad weather.

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.

Katt Monroe's design in the new Star Fox is the best design she's ever had

(video transcript below the cut)

1. How long have you been on Tumblr?

2. Is the beard as fluffy irl as it is on your model?

3. Do you consider yourself a vtuber?

I've been on Tumblr long enough to remember multiple human bone theft issues. I saw Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles crash and burn. I was away for a time, but came crawling back when every other social platform got so much worse.

The beard is only as fluffy IRL as I remember to brush and condition it, which most days, well, I'm working at home so it's easy to forget.

Regardless of answer, thank you and have a nice day!

been a long time fan and a while ago u discussed ur tone of voice. Specifically how you slow things down to emphasize or make a PointTM, which is fair and common practice!

anyway, been watching ur vids (especially your shorts) ever since with that lens and there's one thing that u might be interested in knowing about

basically, when your idea is weaker, that same engaging tone now reads quite a lot as mansplaining

(as a side note, I think we all generally do find u spouting good opinons more often than not!! which is really all anyone can ask for)

I think the general cause of this is men making a big fuss over explaining straightforward ideas to a mostly female/non-male audience. But I don't think this issue translates at all into your long-form content. Since ur ideas are not necessarily simple, even if I disagree with them, it would never read as mansplaining. Also, the art of the lecture, I think, justifies a tad bit of mansplaining anyway.

It's really just the shorts, which I understand are made to attract a new, and perhaps not as rigorous, audience.

But for your long-time audience, idrk if the tone does anything productive? Each short is usually one or two developed ideas, and there's certainly not enough volume to necessitate that kind of emphasis. We can understand it perfectly fine and intuitively know where your "thesis statement" is or your ultimate conclusion, even just by reading it. Best case scenario, your tone of voice is ignored, and worst case scenario, it reads as mansplaining.

To be fair, I strongly believe that besides this, the current system works rather well, and I don't know if there's enough justification to change it up. If not this flaw, then inevitably some other weakness will appear. But just thought as a critic, you might appreciate a bit of external perspective!

I don't think I really understand this critique. I am not sure how to parse the point you are making, and I don't think I understand what change (if any) you are arguing for.

Honestly, given that this is coming from a completely empty blog, it reads a lot more like a troll's attempt at negging me into... I guess being insecure about my style of delivery? Which would be very strange behaviour. Mansplaining, at a baseline, requires me to make an assumption about your level of knowledge based on your gender, and I can't do that when posting broadly to an anonymous audience. In fact, the information I do have is that the majority of my audience is male (or at least The Apps think so). So it feels like this is less about the qualities of my delivery and more about your personal response to a given tone of voice, which, while valid, is not really useful or actionable critique from my perspective.

I also don't think I really like that snide little "it's made to attract a new and not as rigourous audience" jibe. As opposed to... what? How rigorous you are? What is that supposed to mean, exactly, if not to signal disavowal of an audience who you feel are dumber and less discerning than you? Whatever the intent, it does not endear me to your perspective, and I would be a much worse essayist than I already am if I started from the position that the audience is beneath me.