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why is western animation so often deliberately ugly? why so visually repulsive? why have we let this permeate our culture? from Spongebob to Family Guy, Rick and Morty to Big Mouth, Steven Universe to Simpsons to Rugrats—a dozen styles, all seemingly consciously hideous. Why? https://t.co/JlQXfueHkn
@tracewoodgrains i got a helpful reply from @lumospascal here https://t.co/KhazbwUegt
@tracewoodgrains It's adaptive https://t.co/FZNO40BILq
@tracewoodgrains A lot of modern western animator grew up watching weird shit like this. https://t.co/bsOzmRC00k
@tracewoodgrains Some of it absolutely disgusting shock humor. https://t.co/prObKNTPz0
@tracewoodgrains I think a lot of it is driven also in part from sort of generational / cultural rejection of all the toys and stuff pushed on kids. That and the impact of fads like the Garbage Pail Kids working their way into cartoon art to be relatable to children. https://t.co/2eEPmeIbiF
@tracewoodgrains A good number of nickelodeon cartoons that animators grew up with were wonderfully gross in their own way because of this fad/trend.Ahh! Real monsters was particularly tasteless. They collected human toe nails as currency, and ate garbage. https://t.co/fgUyjk8wI2
@tracewoodgrains You can also trace this meme as the "Gross-Up Close-Up" trope, which afaict originated with Ren & Stimpy. https://t.co/UjVX3x4RrL
@tracewoodgrains Tho I imagine this could be traced further back to the history of western comics.There were a lot of rules the comic code authority put in place that probably biased what kind of art got fixated on & chased people away from it and into cartoon animation. https://t.co/NItxzkyuFC
@tracewoodgrains You also have to seriously consider toy aspect. They toys wanted to stand out on the shelf and appeal to the fad interests kids had A show was often greenlit under an idea of it selling merch. This is copy-disney 101.So the garbage pail kids thing influenced what got green lit!
@tracewoodgrains If you go into a toy museum there is a sort of phase shift that occurred in what kind of toys were being sold based on marketing appeal to children. https://t.co/9qdeqVW42U
"Television programs that feature heroes and villains drawn from the toy-store shelf or developed in conjunction with the marketing of toys, once banned by Federal regulations, are booming in the free-market era of the current [FCC]" [1986] https://t.co/me2sz2QABU https://t.co/wAK4CjydfV
@tracewoodgrains There is also a history about childrens programming shifting to be from educational to edutainment. Everything slowly becomes a marketing vehicle for toys or gamified on trying to get user retention for ads.https://t.co/fg25sGoeKX
@tracewoodgrains In a way, the grossness thing is a sort of parasitic trend that has evolved as part of the larger "lets make a show so we can sell colorful plastic to children" thing that has been a plague on western society since at least the 1980s https://t.co/f3puPjwZQQ
@tracewoodgrains Which also means you can trace this to hasbro and power rangers too. Lots of foreign toy manufactures got in on the game, and you can see it in made-for-wester-audiences stuff.https://t.co/xAlgVUpWTL https://t.co/zmITYCDwk2
@tracewoodgrains Anyway, I wrote about how to cure skin cancer using literal🍆 on bluesky after spending a few hours looking up the history of a cowardly dog cuz its funny to me.https://t.co/ocmcAv4GtW https://t.co/Ey0n5eYYok
@tracewoodgrains That thread talks about the motivations of pharmaceutical companies to market and profit off of ethnobotany, but its the same basic process as we see here. Looking at what people are consuming and repacking it for a larger market.
@tracewoodgrains In this space it ends up creating artistic ecochambers where nostalgia and attention grabbing indie animations are hoovered up by larger studies and imitated and mass produced by content farms. https://t.co/ZYsr0nqORF
@tracewoodgrains This is just capitalism accelerating to it's eventual demise."Here, we buy and sell a million kinds of Hell.Imagination is the limit to the devil's clientele"https://t.co/IORB3WS11uand its only going to get worse thanks to AI slop.https://t.co/JSD2QXSvlU
Huge difference between a creative personality using AI to amplify their output, and a collective's content farm competing with each other over who can best game the YouTube algorithms for ad-rev by targeting children with too much time on their hands.We're automating elsagate.