do you guys feel like *most *designs from 2010-onwards have just been overwhelmingly bad or worse than shit made prior? I was born in the 90s and i felt like a lot of stuff from the 80s was awesome looking despite it being before my time. no nostalgia. lots of good shit in the 90s while i grew up. and the 2000s had a lot of cool stuff too. something happened around 2010 or so where it seems like every major franchise thats still around just gets shit tier new designs or just a bunch of 6/10 stuff. it all feels phoned in. seems like a real problem everywhere. not just manga/anime but in film, videogames, whatever really.

Beyond that I dont ever see any new IPs with cool looking shit that rivals old franchises in their prime either. Its really seldom and nothing really comes to mind right now. Im sure theres cool looking stuff that still comes out but it just seems a lot harder to find stuff today that aesthetically compares to crap from the 80s-2000s.

no, fuck off

>>23334303 (OP)
2012 apocalypse memes aside (and there really was a major astrological shift if you care to pay attention to or believe that sort of thing), I do think there has been a mass cultural burnout of a certain masculine energy.
There's this post in another thread >>23333869
> Yoshiyuki also wondered if it were possible for a new generation to truly capture his original mind set, since so many are quite separated from war.
I think this is the case. Young people, myself included, are quite comfortable and separated from an ever-present threat of real conflict, like my parents and grandparents had. I think this is good, in a way; this time of peace might be a time for people who were formerly enemies to become new allies, friends, and establish ourselves against a new common enemy. I think Occupy Wall Street in the USA was an important moment, in this line of thinking. Political commentators have noticed that social divisions along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and so on, were fomented by mainstream US corporations immediately after Occupy Wall Street, apparently as a means to distract US citizens from uniting against central banks as their common enemy. This, paired with global communication and the internet, completely alter the world social landscape within a decade.

But to this idea of burnout, you see it in major works of culture now. Dark Souls and the post-Dark Souls fromsoft games are very overtly about the "smouldering embers of civilization finally going out".
The Halo trilogy in the west is probably the best most masculine and /m/ adjacent piece of media from the west in the past three decades, Master Chief is almost the embodiment of the archetype of western masculinity, and the Halo trilogy ends with him placing himself into cryosleep to wait until he's needed again. Year 2007.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WDRvs-IApc

>>23334428
sounds like you need to think long and hard about what that "masculinity" of yours is, but I imagine you're not very good at that

>>23334435
You sound upset.

>>23334428
halo 3 was among many franchises i had in mind when i made the thread. either the story of an IP is fucking retarded/ terrible now, or the aesthetics are completely destroyed. where everything is overdesigned/greebled/clusterfuck and or just a boring lazy design that doesnt have the same appeal as what came before it.

Halo (most people hated the new look so they pivoted back to the original)
Warhammer 40k (most people hate the new space marine look, plenty of arguing)
Starwars (imperial design/republic vs first order vader v kylo boba v phasma
Evangelion TV evas/angels/plot vs rebuild
Gundam everything that comes out now is weird ugly boring or overdesigned btfo by zaku
Kamen rider (sleek balanced looking early 2000s kamen rider design vs modern overly noisy clusterfucks)

just shit off the top of my head

>>23334469
halo trilogy** still enjoyed odst and reach

>>23334442
retardation offends me

>>23334494
Explain how you are not retarded.

huh

>>23334303 (OP)
I know it might sound like gay culture war shit but yeah I get what you're saying. Sometime around the 2010s or thereabouts I feel like a lot of things started to lose lustre. And yes, I absolutely agree with you, this is beyond just mecha in general, it's a very broad cultural truism that everything now seems broadly shittier than what was offered in decades even before I was born. There are absolutely some positives and other things which were unimaginable just a short time ago, within my lifetime even, but it does not feel like life or media in general is becoming more and more robust and of high quality.

Sadly I think some of this is just era specific. Something like a gorgeous 198X or 199X Japanese OVA was made in a much richer and more economically powerful Japan, filled with people possessed of a very different pool of talent, skill, and actual lived experience, who grew up in a society which was very different to Japan of today, and they were probably under the guidance of executives and producers and so forth with very different ideas of how best to make money (or at least who were more lenient with how this might be done). When people lament things like how a 198X movie might simply literally be impossible to make today they are lamenting a very real loss of specific skills, technologies, people, and ideas which came together at just the right time to make something great or maybe terrible but absolutely a product of the time.

Changing societies (e.g. lonelier and more isolated social experience, general loss of popularity for mecha), changing economics (e.g. price of living is higher, execs more numberbrained than ever), changing technology (digital tools, no "need" for cel skills, loss of dedicated mechanical illustrators, mechanical design philosophy changes drastically) means a very different media environment, though I think at the end of the day things being more and more money and exec-controlled is the number one thing.

>>23334303 (OP)
Old designs had to stand out on toy/hobby store shelves. They had to be strong, original ideas that kept people coming back for more. The shows and movies were just gravy to give the designs context and sell more toys. Nowadays, most designs that get toys/model kits come from preestablished franchises with fans who will buy anything from their pet franchise. A great example of this is how Gundam fans will buy the same red, white, blue, and yellow robot again and again, just for the sake of consumerism. Many games and anime don't even get toys, so their designs don't have to stand out.
There's also the fact that the old mechanical designers were intelligent individuals from all walks of life asked to apply their talents to original, standout toy designs. Ralph McQuarrie was a Boeing engineer and movie poster painter. Okawara was a fashion designer. Kawamori was a mechanical engineer. Nowadays, people who design fantasy vehicles have no frame of reference outside what came before, so it's all derivative and perfunctory. In about a decade or so, all these old IPs will have been driven into the ground and we'll start getting original stuff again.

I'd just place most of the blame on the growing investor influence on stuff. Things that actually appeal to people no longer get made, instead you get what an investor thinks appeals to people. You get a reboot that clearly has no understanding of the original appeal, but on paper has all the attributes associated with success. There's too much money being moved around for a guy who knows a lot about money and nothing about the product to not show up and ruin everything.

Simply put all products now are paper tigers, designed to check all the right boxes and carry all the right buzzwords but no one actually wants. Everything is sleek, polished, highly market researched failures. Imagine a hero looter shooter royale extraction videogame that sells a couple thousand copies total, for everything forever.

>>23334659
>>23334708
You can go on any artist portal right now and find absolute shitloads of interesting and original artists, many of them using the extremely vast resources of the internet to have a way wider spread of influence than many older artists could have dream of having. It's not the fucking artists lol, there is no distinct spiritual malaise of people who draw good that could possible affect art when none of them are even being picked up.

Why do you think none of them get hired, and instead they just get ramjesh from artstation who's done nothing but flashy portfolio stuffing cg work that looks like a bayverse transformer on the box of a graphics card?

>>23334303 (OP)
>do you guys feel like *most *designs from 2010-onwards have just been overwhelmingly bad or worse than shit made prior?
No. The designs are pretty good. Look at mechs like the Vidar, Bael, Phenex and most of the manga-only wfm designs. Well, not Gquux save for a few exceptions, but that is the fault of the Evangelion team.
>I was born in the 90s and i felt like a lot of stuff from the 80s was awesome looking despite it being before my time
Nah, the 90s was the low point of mecha design. Just look at the shit from wing and G gundam.
>>23334469
>40k
Primaris are shit but they arguably peaked in the early 2010s.
>starwars
Was never good. Particularly not after the second trilogy. The early old republic setting was cool but it was pretty much speculative fanfiction.
>eva
Bad since the 2000s.
Anyways, I do notice a general trend but I don't think it affects /m/ designs very much. WfM had a pretty decadent plot, for one, but there were plenty of great designs from that show.

>>23334303 (OP)
Most mecha designs stem from an era where intricate animation that could convey them was widely available. It’s inevitable that they would suffer when what made them work is simply no longer there.

Miyazaki sitting around in the eighties, referring to kimagure orange road entirely unprompted in an interview "yeah people can't make anything good ever again because we were the last generation to grow up drinking water out of hoses!"
Now doomers are now reusing his quotes incorrectly (happens a lot with this guy) to complain why their 70%-korean production light novel adaption tv shows that aren't allowed to show smoking or nipples aren't any good.

there is no mystery and there is no esoteric twitter bullshit reasoning here its fucking simple: we are too poor to do art properly that is it that's all there is to it
all this muh lonliness muh testostorenoe muh comtetency muh spirit or something is fucking bullshit cope invented by deraged to distract themselves from the simple fact that they are poor and instead focusing on some wishy washy shit to relive themselves of real responsibilities

Artists are not always both technically savvy -and- creative. It does take someone with at least a broad strokes understanding of engineering mechanics to design compelling machines, and realistically those skills are being applied in a career field that isn't entertainment.

>>23335489
While I agree that's the core issue, the world economy is fucked, people in first world nations are generally poorer than 20+ years ago, etc., a lot can be accomplished by sheer willpower even with low resources.
This is biologically tied to testosterone, which is also declining in first world nations because of an increase in estrogen from artificial sources.

This whole thread is off-topic.

>>23335637
Kill yourself retard

>>23335172
Well that's just the thing anon, I already knew that and was thinking of several artists who are living real lives, drawing from real inspirations, and generally producing excellent work, but I was also alluding to how we live in a more money driven world where that more "real", more interesting base of artists and skill is neglected because investors are not interested in good and interesting products as much as money.

I also still think that much of what I said accurately reflects Japan especially (among other things I will get to) because as far as I can tell they are and will remain the only guys to make significant mecha content, and right now mecha broadly are not popular. There is a reason many people are upset or make fun of isekai being a popular genre in the modern anime environment: they're what sells and evidently what the common current Japanese consumer wants. This is a reflection of where Japanese society is as a whole. You can see, if I understand correctly, very similar genres in both Korean and Chinese common fiction- some genre or other, which is incredibly common, about some guy going to another world in another form, accumulating great wealth and power, and smiting his enemies. This meanwhile comes from societies which we know to be very harsh and conformist; so there is absolutely a common thread in popular escapism. Separately, the death/dearth of given skills, worldviews, etc. is also absolutely real. This isn't just a Japanese thing either; it's an infamously known fact that Disney killed off its 2D capacity some years ago because it was not raking in the big bucks.

More broadly, I also think OP absolutely has a point about this being something widespread in society and media now. Yes, again, you are right, there are people out there right now making wonderful things drawing from real experiences and influences, but there's also a reason the word "enshittification" exists and where everything has to be a multiverse, sequel, etc.

>>23335489
No, I agree, I think that money is the root cause of the problem, but I also think it ties into other changes in the world which don't necessarily need to be referred to as testosterone driven or whatever.

>>23335195
>Vidar, Bael, Phenex
vidar looks overdesigned it has the graphics card razr design philosophy common today

bael is okay but looks like something from one of the early 2000s mecha IPs full of generic designs riding of the coat tails of gundam and evangelion

phenex is an eyesore. reminds me of the ultimate forms kamen riders get which always look worse than the base version. compare kamen rider blade to kamen rider blade gold form/ultimate/ whatever the fuck its called. the older designs stood out more while not being full of so much visual clutter.

i think a lot of the warhammer designs got worse around 2010s, necron specifically and their art style change which again are now overly cluttered with stupid symbols and glyphs and shit on them. i feel like its designed marketed to people that play mobile gacha games or something and NEED everything to be full of pointless details and glowing areas. again by adding so much shit ironically the design just becomes generic and looks like whatever other artstation concept art you see online.

starwars was good but i know a lot on /m/ dont like it. old designs like the common storm trooper have a timeless appeal like the gundam zaku. the clone trooper in a similar sense has the same sort of appeal as some kind of GM model. Lots of old starwars helmets like vader and boba fett feel right at home in sci fi anime of the past and the starwars designs from the original trilogy were arguably ahead of their time. Ships like the tiefighter and tie interceptor still stand out and are iconic to this day even from their silhouette.

eva i would say had a 6/10 story but 10/10 design. thats why it sold so much and got so popular. rebuilds are 2/10 story and 4/10 design. rebuild shit is purposefully bizarre for the sake of it in the contrived goal of looking esoteric. anything in the original eva tv series that achieved that did it with less detail while being more aesthetic at the same time and again more memorable.

>>23335313
the problem is a paradoxical one--- in the past scenes could be more complex. background complexity added to a scene. complicated action scenes with realistic details like broken glass, rubble, smoke, missile trails, splashing water, things of that nature add to the complexity of a scene. that level of complexity from past animation seems to have vanished. the attention to detail that made a scene feel alive. the mech designs themselves do not always need to be complicated and often times its better that way. today we have two problems.
a. the simple designs of today are lazy and boring, but do not have the same appeal or perfected designs that made the simple designs of the past so memorable and pleasing to look at. look at the OG zaku and OG gundam. you can keep the same silhouette and base shapes and they are nicer to look at than the overwhelming majority of what comes out today. but with minor upgrades that some artists do modernizing the designs, they typically BTFO anything today that is more detailed.

B. complicated designs of today are only complex for sake of complexity to dazzle people. but they just look like bayformers transformers where it is a mess of shapes and details and pointless greeble that in effect just camoflauges the basic shapes and design of what youre looking at. and the more franchises that do this the more everything just looks the same. today there are too many franchises where design from IP A just looks like it could exist in the universe of IP B C and D and vice versa.

the older generation just had a better eye for design i feel like, it really seems that simple.

>>23335873
I'm starting to think you're just a bot regurgitating old arguments with the insane amount of cherry picking here.

>>23335877
This whole thread is a bunch of ESL zoomer rambling.

>>23335839
None of that matters when what's actually happening in media, is that major companies have hyper-optimized their production methods and every new show is an overbudget, focus tested piece of AAA shit that gets farmed out to india or korea for much of its grunt work. No one with a soul is even getting near production anymore. They hire purely based on budget and investors ability to micromanage. Everything takes ten years to make with a bajillion dollar budget and cgi by happy smile work farms. This has absolutely nothing to do with people. It's corporate.
>Disney killed off its 2D capacity some years ago because it was not raking in the big bucks
It's the opposite, they were still making good money. They deliberately overbudgeted and bombed movies to excuse shuttering their 2D productions, and they chose to murder 2D because investors didn't like it anymore. "3D is the future" was said in a boardroom and then they killed their own films.

>>23335924

>>23335924
>lemme tell you all about the industry, I heard about this in a WokeDestroyer420 youtube video

>>23335172
I do see those artists, but they're few and far between, and the best ones are amateurs. I make my own designs as well and I think they're decent.
>>23335195
Victory, G, Wing, and X all had designs with great balance, color distribution, and sleekness. All the designs you mentioned are generic sludge.
Star Wars is objectively the pinnacle of mechanical design. It makes simple shapes into completely original designs, and it's a method that's used in all the best designs I see.

>>23335950
>It makes simple shapes into completely original designs
NTA but thats why i said earlier the basic tiefighter is still iconic. All of the OT starwars ships have shapes that make them stand out even if some light was behind them and you could only make out their shape. theyre all absurdly recognizeable and they do it without taking the modern zoomer approach which is to cram every nook and cranny with pointless greeble, just enough to make it feel finished.

>>23335877
sounds like you just dont have an argument and you also have nothing to add tot he conversation. how is that post cherry picking? is a nuanced argument that approaches the issue from multiple sides. What shit is coming out in the last decade that pound for pound has designs that are as appealing as shit from the 2000s and before? it just doesnt seem to happen. if youre lucky a franchise today might have a couple interesting or decent things in it while the rest is garbage. /m/ shit more than other genres needs shit that looks cool because the underlying stories more often than not are the same ones in other genres which often times they do better. The entire point of /m/ shit is stuff that looks cool and is well designed.

>>23335965
Even the prequel and sequel designs use that method. There's a Last Jedi ship that's just a rectangle with the cockpit on one end, and the prequels/Clone Wars have very, very sleek ships.

>>23335978
I know what you're talking about and that's a terrible design. What the fuck man, you niggas have shit taste.

>>23335978
the overwhelming majority of the ships and designs introduced in each film in episodes 1-6 were all good to great. the overwhelming new designs introduced in 7-9 are regurgitated slightly changed or boring with only the occasional good one mixed in. thats the difference.

people still shit in the prequel films but the absolutely insane amount of cool shit each prequel film introduced to the starwars universe is a level or creativity and quality in films that probably will never happen again.

the ships purely being recognizeable is only one component--it should stand out but it should also be a thing you would like to own or is a worthwhile addition to the universe. the sequels completely failed there. even if the sequels had WORSE plots, people would still like them more if they did what the prequel did and made sure each film was packed with awesome shit in it. At least that you can salvage for videogames.

>>23335989
I know the sequels have regurgitated designs, but there are still a few stand outs. The Sith Troopers and First Order stormtroopers look great, as do the few original ships like that First Order snowspeeder that got cancelled. Even the red TIE Fighters look cool. The rest is too generic to stand out.

>>23335924
>It's the opposite, they were still making good money.
Their last 2d movie had a 30 million budget. If you're comparing budgets with box office, don't forget the theaters take part of it too, in addition to promotion. Generally it's considered you need double the budget to make money on pure theatrical run.

>>23335999
i think the first order troopers look terrible. at first i thought they were a 7/10 but the more i looked at them the more i realized they are like a 5/10. once i saw the daffy duck face i couldnt unsee it. it bugs me everytime i look at the helmet. they also have what i would describe as modernized apple product design to them. they are too fucking smooth everywhere without enough edges or sharp corners or any surface detail to make them interesting to look at.

overly detailed cluttered designs with excessive panel lines and shit are one thing but overly minimalistic wall-e looking designs are a whole seperate problem. theyre just boring. i would say the sith trooper is like a 6.5/10. the face is still fucked up but it has more going on that it desperately needed. i would say the best trooper design of the sequel era was the shore trooper and that wasnt even in the mainline films as far as im aware. to me that was like an 8/10 or higher. the entire sequel trilogy should have been handled like that.

the shore trooper looks like they took the inspiration of the scout trooper and changed it enough to do something else with. but the design works for all the reasons the scout trooper armor does.

>competancy

>>23335620
>a lot can be accomplished by sheer willpower even with low resources.
no.
>This is biologically tied to testosterone
no.
>>23335844
>but I also think it ties into other changes in the world
like? the only reason why you perceive these changes as bad is because you and everyone around you is poor and end up seeing only the ass side of these changes.

>>23334303 (OP)

>>23335965
>they do it without taking the modern zoomer approach which is to cram every nook and cranny with pointless greeble
That's literally what star wars invented. I dig it but they're a direct predecessor.
Is this the surface of a spacecraft, or a skin condition zoomed in by X1000?

>>23340529

>>23340503
Weak willed.

>>23340777
materialize some food from vaccum with your test and willpowa then ill believe you

>>23334303 (OP)
we need to do it. actual fans of mecha need to do it not just animators trying to make a generic anime plot with some sci-fi flavouring

>>23340503
As an example, I think it is a serious misnomer to say that changes such as social media's prevalence and its deleterious effects on the masses are not a significant impact on our world, along with things such as decreased general reading skills, higher reported levels of societal isolation, etc.

>>23340777
Thank you Jesus

>>23340506

>>23340851
Okay. Done.
Now what?

2010 is too early to make the distinction.
But I do not like the
>It's CG so we should make the designs more complex!
ideology.
I actually like cleaner, more readable designs. It has nothing to do with animation limitations. The fact that they happened to work better with 2d animation was an incidental bonus.

>>23334303 (OP)
>>23341038
This woejack-adjacent excrement needs to be stopped.

>>23335924
This is probably the answer, at least with banrise. Remember they’ve been doing this shit all the way back since victory gundam when they gave the original creator depression by meddling too much. There’s definitely some suits pushing gundam to more diverse audiences to drive growth, like having all these female main characters and weird looking gundams

>>23341201
>>It's CG so we should make the designs more complex!
It's the other way around retard.

>>23341323
Nah it's still funny.
Wojak was fine until it became a template for soijaks