Smoking cigarettes to look cool. Can't stand that shit. Cigarettes are dogshit. If a character does it it should never be in a pathetic attempt of enhancing how cool they look. It should be because the character naturally smokes because it's just a mundane non-central habit, or mere incidental self-destruction. If it looks enticing, you have failed. It's not cool. You look like a tryhard loser behind-the-bleachers high school jackass.

Bonus trope points if it's in a sci-fi setting to show how grounded and dirty and realistic we are and ooh we're not like the clean look of Star Trek. I get it. You like Cowboy Bebop. Now stop trying so hard.

My biggest hate object is a cartoon they show here and I couldn't for my life memorise its name, when i wrote my last post, but today i sipped so strong espresso that my eyes popped out and the name came to me

This is THE cartoon that fuels my hatred towards this particular 'design trope' I mentioned. It is ok cartoon in sense the colours, stories, execution in general, voice acting etc, I just do not understand why the f**** they have to make them animals.

Characters with ridiculously ginourmous boobs/asses

Like, I know you the character to look hot, I get that. But bro, why the fuck are the boobs bigger than the head?! There cannot be bras that big for you, I'm sorry.

It doesn't make the character look hot, they just look like an abomination.

characters that are supposed to have their own stories/lore, or have serious personalities/roles, but their designs are too fanservice-y (either by being TOO "good"-looking, or by having THOSE sorts of "proportions") and not executed appropriately or tastefully. like damn nice ass but i cannot take them seriously. i often just see this from random artists that make OCs though; i'm definitely not stopping anyone from designing their characters to have biiiig big boobs LOL

I sometimes think it can be cute but I thinks absolutely disgusting looking when it's horny.

As a furry… thanks, I hate it!

These characters are so… weird-looking. o_o

Yeah I agree that the whole bikini armor thing is overdone. Thing about that is that wether it be in an anime or video game if they had the women in actual full body armor, then it wouldn't do well in the eyes of many because again, sex sells. And people would be raging because armor like this is unacceptable in their eyes:

0/10 No sexy armor. Game sucks ass.

As for my take on this post is aliens that always have humanlike appearance and can basically do anything a normal human can do. And when they actually do something that's alien related such as flying, shooting lasers and stuff, it gets ignored.

I second this. You’d be surprised how much out-there stuff is possible with irl fashion, especially with outrageous (positive) alternative styles that blur the line between everyday wear and a costume. So you can have someone wearing several layers of outfit, a full face of dramatic makeup and a fancy wig with a bunch of accessories clipped into it and it’d still be true to what’s possible in real life.

I think the majority of people who make very basic outfits for their characters are just kids who don’t have a fashion sense yet. (Usually boys, because girls are exposed to more fashion stuff on average when they’re that young.) I’m one of the exceptions, being a girl who used to throw on a t-shirt and pants every day and would at most give my characters a simple dress with maybe an interesting neckline or different color trim.

i guess i'd say... when you can't identify what animal the antropomorphic animal is supposed to be. which IS an issue with your example (i was going to say kids like funny animal people and blahblahblah in its defense, but there is something unsettling about this one. maybe kid me would ignore it, but there's something bothering current me).

Themed attraction enthusiast here! I think the uncanny look of irl animatronics compared to the usual FNaF look is because a lot of them don’t have separate limb segments that each have a fabric covering like the first four FNaF characters do, they instead have a complete mechanical skeleton and a “skin” that goes over the whole thing.

The ones that do look segmented generally have a hard shell over each part made of plastic or similar, and have their mechanical joints covered by more hard shell (like the Glamrocks or possibly the toy animatronics) in order to protect their mechanisms from the elements. But those are usually older, and animatronic technology is steadily improving such that outer skins can simulate more and more things and the robots can become more and more lifelike.

Honestly, considering the odd “dark science fantasy” direction that the franchise went in for things like Sister Location, the books, and Security Breach/Ruin, I’m retrospectively not surprised that the FNaF characters gradually started looking less and less like old Disney Chuck E. Cheese’s animatronics and more blatantly like androids with anthro character designs.

To be fair, once a story is old enough and impactful enough, people start wanting to tell it their own way. Think of how many different versions there are of any Shakespeare play, fairy tale, or classic novel you like. I’ll bet you some of them are very transformative in some way. For instance, in my high school English class, we read Macbeth and then watched the film starring Patrick Stewart where Macbeth is a general in World War II. I found it especially haunting, some of the visuals and music still stay with me.

What I don’t approve of is bringing in a desire to outright destroy the original. If it had no creative merit at all, it wouldn’t be popular enough to be spun off like that. In order to parody something effectively, you have to acknowledge what it does well, both internally as you create your spin-off and externally as you describe what you made. A lot of race-swapping/otherwise politically motivated media nowadays has that exact same mindset of hating the original because of some aspects the rebooter found unsatisfactory, while refusing to acknowledge why they’re spinning off of it in the first place.

I mean, I know some artists who have characters that are both meant for serious storytelling and erotic fantasy, depending on the artist’s mood. I also think it lessens the impact of the story, although if it’s not trying too hard to be both things, I don’t mind.

Oh lord, I didn't even realize I hate this as well until you mentioned it.

WHOA man careful with the metaphor there

Edit: uhh I think I might have brought my own racism to that metaphor actually. Shit wtf do I do now

As artists we should never turn chocolate ice cream to seagull shit

Wish I could delete my comment. Ill-considered, not funny.

Oh, I totally get you. Those furries need a few more minutes in the oven.

The more I experience of the entertainment industry, the more I realize what's going on there. The mandate to flip an old IP is just to hang on to publishing rights, which is definitely coming from soulless executive demons, but what happens is they throw it to some bottomfeeding showrunner that never had one of their own original pitches greenlit. The idea that these things will flop is a foregone conclusion, bad directors are cheap, and THAT'S where everything goes to shit. Not some mass woke conspiracy from the top down, not a coordinated effort with a coherent political agenda, just a lot of low talent directors hanging on to their failed ideas, taking any IP reheat gig they can get and Frankensteining it together with their failed pitches while nobody's looking or cares enough to stop them. That's how you get black Velma, and that's why shows like that all feel like the people making them resent the fact that it has to have even a superficial connection to an existing IP.

I didn’t know how to mention that directors usually want to direct their own original work, but you put it into words well and added a bunch of nuance

And to clarify what I said as well, because I realize I worded something too vaguely: There’s no agenda in the entertainment industry as a whole, but specific writers and directors sometimes have an axe to grind (and more often than not don’t have the proper sharpening stone). That’s how we get original media like High Guardian Spice, that became infamous for hamfisting a bunch of issues that the creators wanted to talk about but couldn’t talk about in a nuanced way because all they cared about was raw visibility. But the higher-ups in the companies are just out to make money, preserve IP, and get attention, and if they happen to hire someone who causes a stir, that gets them attention, which benefits the other two things, so of course there is no bad publicity to them.

On the topic of the industry and low key remakes in it.

Then there's also something people do not realize is an important factor and indeed sometimes bad films are done by purpose and fully knowing it will be a loss. But it would be loss only in paper.

After I mildly crossed paths with Warner filming Tenet 100 yards from my house, and knowing some local crew that worked with it, and my town mayor being like a child (without filter) , then what i did learn is that when you film in location, most of that money is returned if you hire local people (In this case random town outside USA and UK) .

That is step one. Step 2 is that you get additional returns from causing work-places domestically, where studio is from (in this case USA and UK [Warner and whoever actually was behind film tenet from UK] )

Then you get extra returns from marketing costs. And so on. They tell you it is cost of 200 mil, but a lot of it is returned to them by various entities.

Long story short - there are a lot of projects which are never meant to get anything from cinemas and are partially also money laundry schemes or what-not-schemes (Tenet was not a scheme, but there are few titles Warner and Dinsey have done that have telltale signs of scheming). This is why you see those cheap and bad marvel films made. Look the most recent Marvels, film is so bad that even its poster is so low key that anyone in this thread would make better. Let alone the script which is like written by chatGPTs worse version from Bing Chat.

Then top of that, after I met a fella (long live social media and our united interests to some things), who has worked on several Hollywood films as an artist and half those films been flops (but his work is crazy good tho), I did learn that small-guy-staff is so often underpaid and overworked. So it is indeed possible that in some point people stop caring. Getting minimum wages from X or Y job does not sound fun at all. Also the amount of money people, who wrote/write She-Hulk episodes (which is noted for extremely low key writing and quality) was/is less per episode is than what I earn for whatever I do for same time period. And I am unknown nobody.Makes you ponder.

Unfortunately i do not know a thing about Netflix, but minimum wages+tax fraud which Disney and Warner do a lot, would also explain why Netflix Witcher TV series is so obnoxiously bad, And 100% that Amazons Rings of power was a tax fraud as no way they spent that money in episodes they claimed to have the budget of. Now HBO's Velma is not a tax fraud, however HBO has a system, where they give you platform and you can make own productions. This gem of a shit was this authors own random ramblings and HBO just took money from the author to air it.

Yeah I didn't think you were saying anything along the lines of "everything's going woke"; it's just such a prevalent and misguided interpretation (from other people) of what's going on, I figured I'd bring it up. They think there are these giant media conglomerates that are giving commands from the top to purposefully ruin everything, when really they've realized that quality control just adds costs to this endless cycle of content regurgitation we're stuck in. The industry runs on apathy and cynicism rather than some secret communist conspiracy to feminize our men and steal our toothbrushes or whatever dumb shit they're on about.

To tie that back in to the design trope conversation, this is also part of why so many modern character designs look so inexplicably ugly, undercooked and incongruous to the subject material. The same thing that's happening in the writers' room is also happening on the art side. You give a novice art director full freedom on a project that execs already expect to fail, they're going to abuse the fact that nobody cares or will hold them to a higher standard. Obviously there are still good shows with real vision behind them, but ambition is something people have when they're paid well and put on projects run by people that give a shit. All things being equal, it's like a 1 in 20 chance you'll land in one of those good projects if you get a gig at a studio hired by a streaming service to make exclusive content.

They are supposed to be hedgehogs and would you guess that the main trio is hedgehogs? No.

Characters that are fantasy creatures where

• Male version

Built like a square, actually looks like the fantasy creature they're based on.

• Female version

conventionally attractive woman in skimpy clothes thats just hue shifted green and maybe given a horn or something

Edit: Didn't read the thread before saying this and didn't know how many people already said this. Its still true.

Cutesy dark emo/mallgoth Halloween-y character designs rarely hit for me the way Invader Zim & Nightmare Before Christmas did.

Whenever I see dark Victorian aesthetics these days it gets me bummed out that we never got American McGee's Alice 3

As for my own reply to this thread: Personally I don’t mind a lot of these tropes and tend to adopt a “so bad it’s good” mentality or try to be understanding with the artist and their preferences. But after some soul searching I remembered one thing I hate enough to sorta passive-aggressively pester some of my artist friends about it.

Same body syndrome (from artists who clearly aren’t just beginners). Or even just samey-looking characters in general from artists who aren’t starting out.

You’ve taken the time to learn all the other fundamentals of art, why have you not expanded your palette yet with regards to character designs and the different ways humanoids can look? A lot of the time, the cynical part of me wants to assume it’s intentional and that the artist is just making art to fulfill their very specific tastes in things to jack off to, but from my experience in talking to people about it, it’s actually often just inertia or not realizing what they don’t know. Still not a good look for anyone.

I don’t even mean that everyone has to adopt a huge range of body types, but at least just vary your heights, breast and butt sizes.

Anything that has a rainbow on it, gradients or not, I hate it.

It's not some subtle LGBTQ+ hate, it's because I hate it when artists need to use a fuck ton of colors to design a character. This best explains my hate.

I get that color combination is unique, but do you seriously need to rape my color efficient eyes like this? I feel like anyone who has color deficiency (IE Deuteranopia, protanopia, and trianopia) have it safe here, because this wouldn't stick a sore thumb so much because it's limited to only four colors.

Anything that is a complete eyesore like too much colors, too much details, Like come on.

Most of the tropes mentioned already are more "so bad it's good" for me so I guess I'll just list some general stuff I'm apathetic to:

Generic anime designs (with like 2 exceptions, I really don't care for anime as a whole)

Sexualized designs

Ridiculously complex designs that achieve in telling me absolutely nothing about the character (In my eyes less is more but don't make it too simple)

Plastic-y designs with little to no variation in line art and really saturated colors (oddly specific one)

Soft/bubbly designs ("mishmash of bezier curves" as Skoops mentioned, although my dislike has to do moreso with making really samey stuff as a result of said style-- think "cal-arts style" I guess. I used to do that a lot mostly because I like drawing cutesy stuff)

Heterochromia and 2 different colors of hairs

Is more common to see it on OCs and stuff, but when it happens i go like: "MF, GENETICS DON'T WORK LIKE THAT, U STUPID SON OF A BITCH" and when they fuse hairs of 2 OCs... oh my fucking god, it's so fucking terrible, that's not hair it's an amalgamation of shit, it's even worse seeing the 3 stuff together, heterocromia, 2 colors of hair and fused hairs, may god have mercy on us,,,