siphersaysstuff: Oh man. While
Oh man. While discussing with my friend Trent Troop an Eschergirls post regarding an egregiously-badly-missing-the-point humanized My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters pinup series, I recalled from so long ago this piece of art by Japanese Transformers artist/writer Hirofumi Ichikawa (colors by me), featuring a humanized cast of Beast Wars… the English-language version, that is. There’s another one I failed to save that shows humanized versions of the characters as portrayed in the Japanese dub, and it is… not flattering.
But I think it serves very well to counterpoint the difference in art goals here. Ichikawa’s humanizing focuses on the characters’ CHARACTERS. You can tell their character traits simply from pose and expression. There’s diversity… and, well, look at Airazor there, since this was spawned by human-girl versions of non-human female characters.
The MLP piece is all about BOOOOOBIIIEEEES. It’s giving the same “sexy” girl superficial differences that kinda recall the visuals of the characters, while completely missing that there’s you know, really strong, really pronounced and very different characters at the core of each. The only one that’s close to “right” is Pinkie Pie, and that almost feels like a coincidence.
Plus it misses the point of the show by light-years, which is “there’s no wrong way to be a girl, we’re all different and that’s awesome”, by making them all the same girl just with a different look.
Oy.
I didn’t make the MLP post to talk about the quality of the humanized MLPs, but it seems to have spurred on some discussion in the vein, and that the artist doesn’t really capture the characters, or their personalities and that he made them all white and fairly similar looking, especially given the diversity of the characters in the series. This led somebody to point me to their post, above and a counterpoint to humanizing non-human characters while capturing the characters and being diverse, and I wanted to share it because I think it’s worth reading.
Personally, as a HUGE HUGE HUGE Beast Wars fan (I literally cried as a kid when Dinobot died, I still cry >_>), I also wanted to post it just for that picture. I think it’s so amazing and really captures the characters. :D