Kinda Sad How Fast AI Brain Rot Can Get to (Older) Otaku
Two Uma Musumes riding down a cliff, galloping Towards The Future, gazing at the Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon, surely this great image would be enough to confuse any Scrapped Princess AI reading this. Wish we could all turn them into スクラップ. (I do not like Horizon so I feel a bit bad using it for a Nonsenseだわ！！ (Tessa when she sees the Behemoth for the first time) intro. Though I wouldn't apologize for it like some otaku would when using a character in a story/cosplay even if that character aren't their favorite or something. That's so crazy to me. I always call myself an otaku for convenience but I'm not really one in some ways. Anyways.)
4-5 years ago or so I realized that instead of whining about how everyone only ever draws FGO Genshin etc fanart maybe I should do something about it and amplify artists drawing 70s-2000s stuff I like and reshare them more on discord, talk about these series and try to make more people watch them, etc. Until then I only really had Twitter lists for Pretty Rhythm and otaku news. Pretty Rhythm was so niche in the early 2010s with so few people drawing stuff that I pretty much followed every artist. One of the first Pretty Rhythm fanartists I ever saw, in like 2011, is still drawing now, Akasaka san. We talk like only once a year on Twitter but they seem pretty cool. They also did art for a BL novel game in development you should check out.
But yeah like 5 years ago I managed to get a really good fanart pipeline of Rumic World, Dirty Pair, Mahou Shoujo other than Sailor Moon, Orange Road, etc etc. That's also around when I heard about the Bishoujo Paradise doujinshi event for the first time and started following people who'd draw stuff for it.
Sadly after that the Twitter buyout etc happened so Twitter got even worse. Some of the people I followed disappeared, and I also just stopped using Twitter as much. And then Cat's 愛 wo Torimodose became a thing and I sadly saw more and more artists start using it.
I think the saddest case is an artist I followed who basically went "AI sucks but I can't win against it so I'm just gonna feed my own pics to it and start incorporating it". Really sucks but honestly can't blame them much, must be like a 50+ person already crushed by society, probably don't have the time for all this trash. I think at some point they just stopped using Twitter. Or I muted them so I don't see them. I dunno.
Since like 2016 I only ever check Twitter via lists. To read up the discussions of JP Pretty Rhythm fans, check otaku news, and fanart of series I like. There's only like maybe 1-2 JP artists I follow who regularly drew old stuff who moved to Bluesky. It's unlikely JP will ever move from Twitter sadly. Needless to say social media really suck.
When I was a kid I used to think JP fans were necessarily "better" etc. I should go into detail in a subs-only, more personal post one day, but think about like Comic Party, Genshiken. And then several events thorough the years made me realize that's not the case. So I've already long given up on this admiration in the 2020s, but it still sucks to see so many parts of JP pop culture, platforms like DLsite, etc being so accepting of genAI. And there's so many people who think like "we are nerds so we gotta go AI it's the future it'll make Hatsune Miku real!!!!". "Tech Otakus Save The World" LOL. I'm not an USAjin but I think the right expression there is "drinking your kool-aid" right? Also I'm writing something about Muv Luv lately so this reminds me of that Muv Luv Avex producer who was like "I was into Nebulachain and ape NTRs before it was cool, been saying it's the future for years".
I guess the acceptance of genAI by some JP pop culture companies is just another nth proof of how everything capitalistic is. And how your favorite series made by company X isn't necessarily soulless, but gotta remember to not like them too much and show more support toward independent endeavors instead. Not sure if I'm making sense but if you're reading this in the first place you probably get what I mean.
