Monday DE: The Look of the Thing

[splash_of_blue]

Happy May Day Bank Holiday, everybody!

Your DE for the day, should you choose to accept it: we're not just about the words here, so talk to me about the aesthetics of your pups' canons. Do they conform to a particular style, are they parodying a look or style or do they create their own? How do they use colours and atmosphere to create a setting, and is this something you consider when writing your tags?

For those with literary or non-visual canons: how does the canon build the atmosphere of the text and/or world? Do you bring this with you into your Milliways tags? Why/why not?

Comments

[fairy_fixit]

Runescape tends to be colorful and bold, much like WOW, Overwatch, Fortnite, League of Legends, and so on. It's not as cartoony as TF2, though. Even dark dungeons tend to be colorful with bright splashes and accents of purple, red, or green. The dingiest places are probably Keldagrim, a dwarven underground city, Dorgesh-kaan, an underground cave goblin city, Meiyerditch, a human blood ghetto, Freneskrae, the dead planet Amascut and Icthlarin found the Mahjarrat on, the elven homeworld Tarddiad, and various swamps. Of these, only the Ullek swamp is devoid of at least some bright colors and light, which is very wierd because it is a corner of the intensely bright and sunny Kharidian desert. I sometimes have to change the environmental lighting and skybox settings in order to see anything there.

As for the way that bleeds into how I play Amascut and Fairy Fixit though, I don't describe their clothing often enough for it to matter. Oops. But it safe to say that they don't wear muted colors. Fairy Fixit is a bit more modest in her light browns and greens, where Amascut wears more colorful and often darker colors.

[cottoncandypink]

Canon pulls a really clever bait and switch with visuals for a very unique take on the unreliable narrator trope. It wasn't there from the beginning, but built off of a weird quirk of canon, being that the audience is (almost) always a character. Though I think that's going away for a while, but we'll see how the next short film turns out.

With the exception of the most recent short, everything has always been shot from the audience's perspective, which kind of has a weird effect of making everything seem like it should be taken at face value. It's from the audience's perspective, but it's not always the audience telling the story.

Each main character has their own colour grading, and it changes depending on who's controlling the scene. Wilford is very slightly red shifted with a little too much saturation. Abe is either very desaturated sepia, or straight up greyscale. Damien is slightly blue shifted and desaturated, or greyscale with chromatic aberration. Celine's colour isn't shifted, but her saturation is a little blown, or like Damien, greyscale with chromatic aberration. After everything goes to hell and Damien and Celine go greyscale, Damien's shift stays blue, and Celine shifts red. When they're together, both colours are present.

And then Mark's LUT is always 'human eye'. His colours are as true to reality as possible, but sometimes he's a little out of focus or the shot is just slightly unsettling compositionally. Everyone else who isn't a main character just gets normal LUTs and framing that makes sense and looks right.

The colour grading isn't used for when they're on screen, but for when they're driving the narrative. As Abe gets more confused or further into his own head, he gets more and more greyscale and higher contrast. When he completely loses control of the situation, the colour all comes back as Wilford takes over.

I honestly have no idea how to incorporate any of this, but I do love it.

[childofrebellion]

This is a fascinating question and it turns out that I had lots to say. I've always wished I was good at doing those moodboards which are popular on Tumblr, as I love the look of them, but I'm not as good at creating them.

One of my favorite parts of Star Wars and its world building is how lived in it feels even the shiny Empire parts still feel like people inhabit them. As a spy and a rebel, Cassian lives in the dirtier parts of the world which is something I don't always describe, his icons capture it fairly well. Though if he's in a rougher position or in disguise as someone more cleaned up, I try to highlight that. If I'm doing OOMs I try to capture some of the difference between the sheen of the more prosperous parts of the galaxy versus the dirtier ones. And a big part of Cassian's color story within canon is emerging from darkness into light, with the Fourth, I ended up rewatching Rogue One a few times.

The aesthetic of Quentin's canon isn't always easy to capture though its a classic Urban Fantasy trope; otherwordly Fae beauty and grotesqueness in the modern world. I do try and describe it in his EPs or in tags but I always worry that I'm under or overdoing it and not put it effectively. Since his part in it is that he's a race of Fae that are known for being beautiful in a way that's very much not human. Also illusions are a large part of canon, that's why I'll often mention if he's wearing a disguise or not.

For Moist and Discworld, one thing that's so effective about the world is the different atmospheres that are created. Moist is someone who slips between them from the dark and Gothic Uberwald to where he normally is the almost bland business world of the plains that gets interspersed with the interesting dirt of Ankh-Morpork.

I've always found it tricky to capture the feel of Ivan's world and the galaxy of the Vorkosigans that is shiny sci-fi and then the more old fashioned ritual and formal trappings of Barrayar. That's why his uniforms matter so much, each one has layers of meaning. This is another universe that feels very lived in to me in terms of places having history and meaning behind what characters where and why.

Sameth's canon has two very distinct aesthetics, the very England of the 1920s feel of Ancelstierre and then the darker medieval Old Kingdom. I see Ancelstierre as a fond riff on the British school novels of the 1900s. Sameth mainly lives and is more comfortable in the world of Old Kingdom as a smith, he spends his life dirty and grimy. Then sometimes he's pulled into pageantry but even that aspect of the Old Kingdom connects back to the shadows which are always around.

For me, Demeter is the character where I feel like I've captured the right aesthetic with her always bare feet, green dresses and how she shifts with the seasons. I think it helps that I see the world she inhabits, a modern one with gods as fairly elemental and she is incredibly connected to the dirt.

Will S. was always a tricky one for aesthetics as I've always imagined the Robin Hood folklore and his version especially in this strange space that's kind of historically accurate but not all the way. Its not full on anachronistic as I tried to do my research and it was important to have the dirt and grime alongside the hope and almost fairy tale nature of Robin Hood. As well as there being a complicated mystical element that is a part of Sherwood Forest.

Charles exists within his own particular aesthetic that is constantly shifting depending on the comic and movie. The heart of the world he creates is the warmth, safety and idea of wealth, a wealth very much influenced by ideas of a school that's a second home. In the reboot movies, the aesthetic switches eras for clothing and look but Charles is always rich and well dressed even when he's being messy.

William is from a realistic Western movie which is a world full of contrasts from the bright sun and darkness to the ever present dirt and mud. This is a world where even the sharpest dressed characters end up grimy and bloody. William's look is that of someone getting by, his clothing is basic and neutral colors so he blends with his world.

Narnia is a dream that begins with an ice cold nightmare and Tumnus fits in as a creature of softness, his only clothing his scarf. He's of the forest but its a forest that has touches of fairy tale and darker parts too.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

The aesthetic of Odaiba in Digimon is very Odaiba, in that it's hyper-specific to the point where any given shot is an almost exact recreation of an actual part of Odaiba.

Which is an important thing I try to consider when playing Yamato: Apart from the giant monsters, the version of Earth he lives on is a fairly grounded, exacting version of the real world. Fiction often takes place in a sort of heightened reality in which Things are more Thing than they are in the real world, and playing fast and loose with reality is permissible, and Digimon kind of doesn't. Even the schools that the kids go to are actual schools that exist either on Odaiba or on the mainland.

The Digital World, meanwhile, is always meant to be sort of dream-like. It mingles elements of modernity, nature, and ruin in ways that don't really make sense; the colours aren't exactly right; structures don't exactly make logical sense. In contrast to how grounded and normal Odaiba is, the Digital World is a barrage of visual cues that the characters are in a place whose internal logic is only a couple of steps removed from dream logic.

The Digital World is also usually in some form of ruin, too: The Temple of the Chosen has apparently always been ruins, the same with the Pyramid and much of File Island. There's an element of disrepair that's meant to be both disconcerting and lend itself to the idea that there's a mysterious, mythic element to the world.

As far as characters go -- well, Taichi is meant to resemble Kentaro Kamon, the protagonist of the 1997 one-shot manga C'mon Digimon, and Yamato was probably designed to look as different from him as possible. That's probably true for most of the characters, too: Sora and Mimi are designed to contrast each other, Koushiro and Jyou to contrast each other, and Takeru and Hikari to contrast each other (and resemble their brothers).