Here you go:
He's not perfect for a lot of reasons, but I'm really happy with him. First big model I've ever done.
That is fucking disgusting for all the right reasons. You nailed it with the stitched fleshy tones
I mostly liked this post. I can see how Adventures can be seen as a canary, even if I don't agree that the books themselves are an "unthinkably stupid" expansion of the IP.
Thanks fam
Regarding thundercats, I think that's a slightly different phenomena, just one pretending to be "broadening the appeal." Because the primary reason for adopting that art style and form of humour is just ease of writing, low cost of production and ease of animation, not actually "broadening the appeal," because it's actually reducing the size of its audience. There's also an element of a lot of the artists they're bringing over being people who actually despise the old canon; as far as I know, GW and BL have hired people who despise certain factions and characters in 40k, but they haven't hired someone who's hated the entirety of 40k itself (not counting obscure shovelware). It's the perfect fusion between quick and cheap production for the studio, and the fulfillment of the weird desire postmodern artists have for defiling beautiful things:
I love this example because they had an intern deface an original drawing made by one of Cowboy Bebop's creators - who later said it was an accidental fuckup, as they didn't know the significance of it. Yet after they learned the significance of it, they found another drawing and did the same thing, even smugger
So it's rather bizarre, where you've got a few who have some ideological boner to homogenize everything in favour of a target audience - I suppose in both cases, they're claiming it's to appeal to a younger audience by stripping both mediums of all the things which made it appealing to a younger audience, but I remember an interview with an animator once where he went on about how you had to be careful with criticism, because artistic criticism could get you blacklisted pretty quickly from future employment, resulting in this weird world where pointing out how their "mass appeal" is reducing the appeal or the art style is overused is seen as hateful.
There may be a simple element of education, in that arts Unis struggle to get Professors who teach draftsmanship and students who want to learn it, but then you get this kinda weirdness:
Where artists go to art Unis and somehow go backwards in skill...?
This is confusing given the success of action shows for kids. I do like this logic, for it is a common thread between what is happening to animation and 40k - which is why I think many fans are panicking with such anxiety. In the distant minds of corporate consultants, one can only imagine that they believe genre shifting something from a mature audience to a child's one means an easy cash cow, based off of assessments over what is successful and what is not [even when it is demonstrably evident they are getting less successful!].
It is also alarming that GW is making overtures towards children as synonymous with moronic and immature - certainly doesn't bode well for the franchise. I remember in my childhood reading BL books for the first time, one of them in particular is vivid in my memory. The opening chapter featured a boy in a regiment of guardsmen landing in the no man's land between some Guardsmen and some Orks. His Guardsmen regiment use Napoleonic era tactics, equipment and strategy, and are entirely wiped out by the Orks with a single survivor reaching Imperial trenches, populated by more cynical Guardsmen using standard Imperial attrition strategy and tactics. It's the boy-soldier, whom the other Guardsman say won't make it past the average lifespan for Guardsmen on this front:
Fifteen Hours. Which is also the name of the book
The boy joins other guardsmen on a reconnaissance mission where they're entirely eliminated, including one particular instance where they encounter an Ork Dok with his buzzsaws and it doesn't end well. Our young "hero" is mortally wounded and all of his squad dead, but as he watches the sun rise, he's happy, because he proved all of the guardsmen wrong by surviving more than 15 hours.
It's stuff like that which makes me so puzzled at the logic working in GW's mind. Going backwards in maturity, deleting all the character which actually makes 40k appealing to new audiences and new generations... How does homogenizing the setting into an indistinct mass with the rest of the various sci-fi settings on the market make any sense? It is like there has been a confusion between a "mass appeal" and "appealing." It's just so incomprehensible why a company which invented a whole genre would embark on a quest to exile itself from its dominant position in that genre market - it'd be like Coca Cola abandoning soft drinks o_O
It's all just so frustrating seeing days go by where people never stop going on about how children can't handle the Chronicles of Narnia or Thomas the Tank Engine or Paw Patrol because of their theological, colonial and fascistic themes. 40k was already fine lol. It's all so tiring
When does it end