I don't expect this thread to stay up since my attempt got shot down because of "Just use the schizo thread, bro"
>>248350
>Just because they're japanese
Unironically, yes.
Western amateur storytellers/OC makers seem to get bogged by grandeurous ideas of their characters and then get shocked that they suck at illustrating those ideas properly and that no one actually gets their characters like they do. They jump the gun with too much complexity and vagueness to the characters that no one actually gives a crap, and it's not like they even write them well enough for the vagueness to be remedied.
.
I'm not so sure how comparable these artists are, but I'm gonna do it anyway to try and illustrate this difference. I’ll compare Foxfire to Fusa.
.
So, the thing is, I actually don’t think Foxfire is even all that bad at OCs. At least kind of. I feel like in the Toroboro era he was actually pretty good, and while they clearly weren’t built from longer form stories, the Toroboro OCs were pretty effective in easily illustrating their personality and lifestyle. But of course Foxfire doesn’t like the “Simple but effective” approach.
.
He so desperately doesn’t want to make his characters “too simple” or stereotypy that they just end up so muddled from an outside perspective. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, maybe their stories are actually incredibly amazing and well written, but Foxfire never ends up finishing his projects so we’d never know that. The only one he finished was Bigger Sister Bae, which is literally just summed up as “Horny chick fucks dude she just meant.” It’s as typical hentai as hentai gets, and yet Foxfire was going on about how “actually deep” the characters are and how they’re “Just trying to survive in a world that’s against them”. His Toroboro OCs were really charming and had a lot of personality at certain points, and out of most of his characters, they had the best chance at actually working well for a bigger project. Maybe it was just that first chapter that didn’t click, and maybe it would’ve been better had Foxfire gotten to fully illustrate his vision of the characters, but given how “Social commentary” what he said the full story would be, I doubt I’d care for it. Not even mentioning how he redesigned his OCs so many times that some of them like Kyoho full on ship of Theseus’d (She went from a skinny oneechan, to a legal oppai loli, to a big tiddie tall goth girl).
Like bruh, he could have used those Toroboro OCs to make the best fat chick visual novel known to man and just have it be a cute dating simulator where you get to know the girls or whatever, but no, instead he’s doing this Kiari visual novel that seems so overly convoluted that it seems like it’s only comprehensible to the 5 people he spewed his OC lore to. I really want to believe in this project, but everything I see from that OC nowadays seem so “The creator is so lost in the sauce of his OCs lore that it’s incomprehensible to everyone else”. A “Former soccer star that it’s now a stupidly obese streamer, but shes skinny from the chest up so no ones knows”. was a really clever and unique idea that wasn’t really done before when the OC was first drawn a decade ago. Now there’s a billion extra things going on with that character that I’m not even sure if she’s a streamer anymore or if she even has her original personality. And I can’t even begin to say anything on the other characters in the “Story” because I literally have no read of them. And trust me, Bambooales contribution certainly doesn’t help matters, what with how devoid of personality for characters a lot of his stuff ends up being.
And thats not even mentioning Foxfires absolutely atrocious track record when it comes to actually finishing projects and the likelihood of him randomly fucking off for a year while in the middle of one with basically no notice.
.
Meanwhile, Fusa doesn’t get lost in the weeds of the minute psychology of his characters. He just draws simple but effective characters for the short mini comics he wants to tell, and you get a decent enough amount of characterisation from them. And he also has the skills to actually do a longform comic effectively with what is probably the single best WG comic we’ve got so far. The characters are a little less obviously defined than Fusa’s smaller comics, but that actually lends them well for the story. Ayano’s WG dairy is legit like 95% fanservice, and yet when it actually does give some introspection on the characters thoughts every now and then or gives some backstory, it services the story really well.
Not a fat artist, but Ryunarts/TNSR is another good example. Some of his characters have are literally just living embodiments of the random prompts he comes up with for characters, but he draws them enough times to get extra little bits out of their characters where you can understand more about them and can easily see how some kind of anthology series could work with those characters, because they’re actually really well defined.
If we want to use a western example of simple but effective OCs though, then I think W-oo-T might . And hey, even though it's pretty obvious that a lot of his characters are clearly designed for one pic one offs, that's not to say he's incapable of making characters that work well for longer form formats like the Paige and Vander House series he did back in the day.
Basically, what this all comes down to is that a lot of western fat artists, in there attempt to make their characters have more depth and “actual people” end up muddying the characters and making them “Just some woman I don’t really care about”. A somewhat bland character as the protagonist for a fat comic might be ok if it’s done something along the lines of SweetDreamCoffee’s comics or Fusa’s where it’s 90% fat fanservice and 10% story, but no, so many western fat comics think they’re better at character and plot than they actually are. It’s how we’ve gotten to a point where Elf-san Cannot Diet, which for all intents and purposes is just OK, is something I can confidently say is done way more competently than every story focused western fat comic.
.
Either way, I’m absolutely begging for this community to actually complete a fat visual novel. Just have it be simple and cute with lots of fan-service, with characters that can be summed up in a short sentence, but have enough room for further characterisation to make a decently compelling enough character the player would care to date. Don't try to make it "Deep", because it never lands. And for the love of god make it small scope so it actually gets completed, because there's no way our sorry asses can actually pull off a Katawa Shoujo.
.
And yes, I did just write almost 7000 characters on this topic.