usbdongle:

btw like…wrt that person, and their art style. there isn’t really anything WRONG with how their style simplified, per se. but in order to see what people are crowing about here you need to know how i think of stylization and how stylization works in cartooning. when you stylize something, you’re creating a language of shorthand symbols that make things faster and easier to draw. an eye isn’t really spherical or almond shaped, an actual eye (when being drawn) is a series of like 9+ planes that come together over a semi-circular object set into a socket. but because it’s difficult and not always fun to draw realistically, we create shorthand in drawing, which become symbols, essentially, of how we’ve distilled reality.

the problem i’m feeling, here, is that when this person developed a faster, quicker style, and was forced to distill their symbols further, their true, honest feelings came to light in their symbology. an honest portrait of finn turned into a startlingly racist composition of badly chosen features. because they chose to distill “black person = dark skin+light pink lips” as their chosen symbology, it highlights underlying racism that they allowed to surface. because they choose to draw what they think a transmasculine body should look like, according to their symbology, they developed an extremely transphobic and dysphoria-triggering portrayal of what they think shorthand for “trans man” is, visually. to them, trans man equals person with short hair, square, masculine jaw, and exaggerated traditionally female proportions. this is what their cartooning style tells us, and this is the outcome of their symbology being boiled down.

so no, objectively, i don’t see anything wrong with simplifying your art style, especially when you work or plan to work in animation. it’s good practice for keeping simple forms on model and being able to keep them solid during the animating process. the PROBLEM is that once this person simplified and distilled their library of symbols down into something THEY felt would be immediately and easily readable as this or that upon viewing, they came up with something racist and something transphobic. that’s what the issue is.