for hatsune miku as a cultural icon, the original v2 box art illustrated by kei in 2007 still defines what the character looks like to an unusual degree. subsequent voicebank releases have altered the design and art style in various ways, but none of them quite displaced the first image in the collective consciousness. this is hatsune miku:

this specific design remains the one people instinctively recognize. it is still the visual shorthand, and probably always will be. but logically, a commercial project of this scale cannot realistically rely on a nearly twenty year old illustration to represent its newest products.

vocaloid characters originate from music software developed by yamaha, where a recorded human voice is turned into a digital singing instrument, or synthesizer. each release includes a voicebank, a dataset of recorded vocal samples that produces a specific voice. hatsune miku is one of these voicebanks, which is why every major update tends to come with a new piece of key art representing that version.

wataru sasaki, who has been involved with the development of hatsune miku since the original release (as crypton’s producer/developer), stated that the brief for v6 was to create something that felt contemporary while still preserving the “timeless” essence of the character. illustrator LAM was a fairly natural choice for the role. he had already produced several high-profile vocaloid illustrations, including the key visual and costume design for magical mirai 2023.

our current digital environment is undoubtedly saturated with highly nonspecific anime imagery (especially from generative ai models), so it’s very pleasant to see that the new illustration seems interested in looking like its own unique thing.

though it’s not as peculiar as the original v2 miku (she has a certain early internet roughness that is difficult to recreate), the v6 artwork is noticeably different from the polished mid-2010s anime style that most of the intervening designs settled into. each one is obviously a product of the visual trends of their respective times, but putting that aside, i think v6 is the best one so far.

a brief visual analysis

here’s the highest resolution image i found in case you want to take a closer look

it's probably worth clarifying that this piece is mostly about the style of the art overall (rather than discussion of specific character design choices). i’ll be taking a look at the image as a whole and note what makes it stand out to me. also, i’m not especially well versed in advanced digital illustration terminology, so there are probably more precise ways to describe these observations. but here’s my best attempt.

linework

the outline thickness is naturally one of the first things i noticed (i am VERY biased towards thick, stylized lines in general) - in this case it is distinctly darker and heavier than the extremely thin digital line style that became common around the 2010s.

fine/clean lines do have their uses (especially in animation where clarity and consistency across frames matter) but for conceptual pieces, i still think pressure-sensitive bitmap strokes are just… better, generally. when you don’t restrict them to a single weight or color, lines have the potential to be a highly expressive element you can use to your advantage.

and even if the lines are overall much thicker, there is also a lot of dynamic line weight variation internally. some areas are bold and others taper into fine strokes. this kind of modulation helps create a sense of volume and form. the color of the line also shifts depending on the area of the drawing; it sometimes picks up different tones from the surrounding color (via colored lineart or tone-picked lines). a subtle trick, but it makes the image feel vivid and integrated. this is a technique i often use in my own attempts at digital art.

texture

another aspect that gives the illustration its character is the surface texture. zooming in, you can see distinct patterns and brush marks in several areas of the image! particularly on the hair (which makes sense since she has a lot of it).

parts of the turquoise blocks of color have visible paint strokes at the edges. these are deliberate “scumbling” effects that break up the surface of the color and give the piece a handmade finish. i quite enjoy when digital illustration still looks hand-painted rather than perfectly polished. the irony is that it’s technically always painted by hand, but a lot of modern workflows try really hard to hide the traces of that process for some reason.

plus, it can also can reinforce the graphic quality of an illustration. still reads as a strong silhouette from far away, but when you look closer the surface contains a lot detail through textured brushwork.

the face

a lot of anime artwork featuring female characters relies on a sort of vacant, “happy” smile as the default expression, for reasons i have not really looked into yet. even v2 miku has a bit of that emptiness in her eyes. maybe it falls into what is sometimes called the “stepford smiler” trope, where the mouth curves up pleasantly but the overall face feels doll-like or emotionally shallow.

anyway, the complete lack of a smile in v6 miku’s face is possibly an odd choice, but i think this expression gives her an elevated sense of awareness, maybe. she looks more like a conscious being with a personality (though maybe a different one than what we’re used to).

there’s also the eyes. LAM is known for drawing very expressive ones, and you can see that clearly here. instead of one smooth upper arch outline, there are visible individual pointy lashes on both the top and bottom lid. her gaze feels anchored. the interior structure of the eye is also more complex; it has a much darker, defined central pupil and a clearer separation with the iris. the pink border (apparently called “limbal ring accent”) is a nice touch.

in the v2 illustration and most subsequent versions, the iris is essentially a single oval gradient with some highlights but no distinct pupil. it can often make the character’s expression look a little blank and contributes to that “vacant anime girl face” trope i mentioned.

the hair

anime illustrators have another tendency, that is personally a bit insufferable to me, where they outline and render almost every individual strand of hair separately. it can look nice in an atmospheric scene, but it is terrible for design readability in a key visual.

miku’s twin tails are the most important part of her silhouette. the character needs those two large shapes on either side of the body, and once the hair starts breaking into dozens of thin floating strands, that graphic clarity disappears.

for many years fans have been half-joking (or half-worrying) that miku is going bald. memes about hair loss and bald miku edits tend to circulate whenever a new design makes the tails look sparser than the original thick masses by illustrating them in this manner.

v6 miku’s twin tails read as thick, coherent shapes again through solid hair mass blocking. there are still smaller framing strands around the face and some separation inside the sea of teal (with that intentional approach to texture i noted), but the overall structure remains solid, and this works much better for key art. strong silhouette shapes and form matter way more than realistic strand-by-strand rendering in this context.

posing

the pose is interesting because it is actually one of the closest callbacks to the original v2 art, as many have observed. the body is angled in a similar way, and the character is presented as a still figure rather than a dynamic action pose.

like i said, this is actually important for this type of illustration. even if it’s not used in the instructive way a model sheet is, a key character visual is meant to show the entire design clearly, so it’s generally more suitable for the figure to stand in a rather neutral position.

v2 has a slightly awkward stiff quality that is really endearing, but you can sort of tell the character had not accumulated fifteen years of cultural notoriety yet. v6’s demeanor feels composed in comparison, though the line of action is fairly similar. her back still arches inward, but in a graceful way. having her right arm lifted, hand curled delicately against her chest instead of hanging at the side makes her look additionally feminine and mature. the stance is still recognizable, but it looks less like she's a silly anime mascot and a more like a much classier, real distinguished performer, perhaps.

color & rendering

v6 miku’s palette is noticeably vivid with higher chroma in key areas, but the rendering relies mostly on hard-edged cel shading and strong value contrast, so it’s not overly busy.

the turquoise in particular reads as a dominant color and helps separate the different elements of the design. the hair stands clearly apart from the light skin, the grey of the shirt, the black of the skirt and sleeves+legwear. everything occupies its own visual space with compartmentalized color zones and identifiable hues. the gradients that are present seem to lean toward darker tones, and function as subtle value shifts inside the shape rather than broad diffused blending.

standard approaches tend to aim for extremely smooth airbrush gradients and realistic diffused shading, which produces a very particular polished/glossy look. it’s not inherently substandard, but unfortunately it has been painfully overdone, and generative ai seems to be fond of it (which i’m not a fan of). v6’s color treatment feels palpably graphic and intentional (which i love).

the rest

there are also many visible changes to the costume and character design itself, though these are the parts i feel less strongly about.

the outfit has several new features. for instance, people seem happy that the gray shirt has returned, even if it has become significantly shorter. the headphones have been replaced with smaller earpieces connected behind the ears (she has ears!). the thigh-high stockings are now separated from the boots, whereas the earlier design treated them as a single latex-like piece. i personally liked the original look better, but some have pointed out that the change might make life easier for cosplayers since the old boots were famously difficult to reproduce.

all of these are real specific character design decisions with another layer of subjective reasoning behind them. fans will be arguing about some for a while, but online reception since the march 9 reveal has been mostly positive. a minority nitpick that it leans “too fan-art-like” for official key art. still, the hype for the april 14 voicebank release and fanart flood shows it’s landing well overall.

the general approach to the artwork itself is what truly stands out to me. the graphic sensibility it displays likely comes directly from LAM’s years working in ui design at atlus on persona 5, where the art direction deliberately leaned into oblique shapes, assertive color blocking, comic-thick lines, and a bold red/black/white palette to make the game’s interface feel like a punk poster come to life (here is a good breakdown).

a popular artist study video titled “How to draw like LAM” dissects his style; most notable is the heavy use of bold graphic elements (strong shapes, high-contrast color, flat-to-semi-rendered forms) and vibrant/high-chroma palettes that make colors pop.

as a whole, v6 miku is readable enough to function as key art without becoming sterile, and that balance is precisely why it ends up feeling like the strongest visual evolution she’s had in a while… the core identity is still intact, but the image also carries the marks of a specific illustrator again. i’m quite fond of that.

it is, nonetheless, a concept that is fascinating to think about as both an animation producer and social psychology enthusiast. hear me out.

i hereby warn you that there is nsfw content ahead. duh.

in my last piece i mentioned almost in passing that the team on my student film and i started drawing increasingly crude unofficial sketches of our characters at some point during development. that piñata kid got passed around and defiled in every conceivable way. this was eventually all compiled into a folder of “cursed images” that got quite large but stopped expanding once the project was finished.

at the time it felt like sleep deprivation edging into collective psychosis but the longer i sit with it, the less coincidental it seems. i've come to realize nearly every successful production develops some version of that.

there’s an industry-level analogue in behind closed doors, an unpublished spongebob sketchbook that circulated privately among storyboard artists in the early 2000s and resurfaced online years later. not from a secret executive vault, just a self-assembled compilation of mr. krabs and the gang with their dicks out for some reason.

i will refer to these unofficial sketches and illustrations specifically made by artists in the internal production space as “artifacts” from now on.

…okay? what’s so interesting about it?

there’s a concept in psychology called “relief theory”. it’s the basic idea that jokes relieve psychic tension. herbert spencer framed laughter as the discharge of nervous energy. production environments are saturated with it: deadlines, client surveillance, brand discipline... see where i’m going?

in the anthropological discussions of the carnivalesque, it is said many groups periodically profane what they publicly revere to manage its symbolic power. so in the case of corporate tv cartoons, maybe the cleaner and more controlled the brand, the stronger the urge to drag it through the mud. this could explain why hyper-sanitized properties from the likes of disney allegedly generate crude artifacts so often.

it’s important to note that the violation is benign because it’s contained. nobody is pitching the redraw to the network (i hope). it exists long enough to vent some pressure and then quietly disappears. the chance of them re-surfacing on the internet later is rather low, and when they do, they’re hardly widespread. i’ve had to dig around to find most of these examples.

…

i know you’ve probably noticed something else. why is it all sexual!? well, not always (you’ll see later) but often enough to warrant an eyebrow raise. sometimes certain body parts get drawn in suspicious detail... or the characters are straight-up fucking, in spongebob’s case. here the redraw drifts from grotesque parody into something that could plausibly be pinned to a very different kind of folder.

wait. so it's actually just horny? animators are all freaks?

i’m not particularly fond of freud. psychoanalysis is often prescriptive rather than descriptive and becomes unbearable when it tries to reframe your childhood through the lens of “you wanna bang your mom lol”. however, for this particular topic, his perspective of relief theory is useful as a framework.

in jokes and their relation to the unconscious, he argues that jokes allow repressed impulses, often sexual or aggressive, to bypass internal censorship. when you express them, the mind saves the energy it would have spent repressing the thought. mental energy is a precious resource in this industry.

there is also a stress physiology component. sexual arousal2 and laughter3 both shift neurochemical states. dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin in some contexts. they modulate anxiety. during a project crunch, any controlled shift in arousal state can feel like relief.

plus, erotic drawings can slip through that filter under the cover of humor. everyone can look at it and laugh and pretend it was “just a joke.” the laughter provides plausible deniability. the desire, if it’s there, doesn’t disappear. it just gets “laundered” through play, more or less.

this is why some of these pieces feel genuinely erotic and absurd at the same time. the two charges coexist. there’s a whole lot of pressure involved in the making of cartoons; relief theory explains the pressure valve and freud tries to explain why the valve so often vents sexuality.

i think there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. in fact, once i became aware of this phenomenon and its various psychological benefits, i began to appreciate and even selectively encourage it within certain projects.

what the heck? why, grey? why would you do that?

stay with me please. let’s put this in a separate section called:

morale as production design

while working on a tv series where i was unofficially in charge of managing the whole production, i’d occasionally make something stupid on purpose. nothing overtly explicit or not-safe-for-work in this case (unlike the merenguito situation), but for example, a silly video edit based on some tiktok audio about croissants that i’d found and giggled at. i’d edit a frame of the protagonists in and drop it into the discord channel i had previously created for “off-topic” conversations. people seemed to enjoy it, and would later join in with meme edits of their own.

there’s a body of organizational research that looks into emotional contagion. mood spreads. whether you intend to or not, you regulate the room. a dumb image after a long call lowers the emotional temperature. when people laugh, the pipeline feels less corporate. it reminds us that we’re artists supposed to be having fun doing what we love.

psychological safety matters too. low-stakes stupidity is a bid for vulnerability. when artists respond, they signal that they feel it’s safe to be informal and not feel pressured to perform perfect professionalism at all times. an animator that feels safe and trusts me enough to show their frivolous side is an animator that is more likely to do good work. at least in my experience.

sociologists talk about communities of practice. teams build shared repertoires: slang, recurring bits, cursed still-frames… that “memetic” residue is cultural glue and arguably, it makes long productions survivable.

there’s also something quieter happening. james c. scott calls it hidden transcripts. the public transcript is the brand-safe enthusiasm and the private “hidden” transcript is the whimsical shitpost thread in the discord server. when “someone in charge” (through the official studio account in the latest example) participates in the hidden transcript, hierarchy flattens slightly.

i’m still a producer sending invoices, but i’m also in on the joke. that dual position recalibrates power and makes me appear slightly less intimidating without the need for a tedious and forced corporate team-building activity.

is it manipulative? yes. i’m not even sure anyone in the animation space has consciously approached it like this before. at least not that i know of. artifacts usually just happen naturally. in my defense, a little engineering of social psychology principles here doesn’t hurt. morale is often overlooked. maybe if the artists start to perceive “banter” as some sort of forced policy it will lose its effectiveness and dry out. but i haven’t encountered that yet.

also, i’m not saying sexual obscenity has to be involved. less obscene forms of crude humor work well too, and are probably preferable most of the time. they seem to land well with internet audiences on the rare occassion that they manage to witness them.

it just worries me when there is no unofficial layer at all. when a team never develops these inside jokes it usually means they never moved beyond transactional coordination. it feels off. a perfectly “clean” pipeline does not breathe, and when it stretches over years, it becomes a miserable space to be working in.

unrelated to morale, but still relevant to me, is another pattern i’ve noticed. i say this as someone who has hired and supervised a lot of artists:

some of the most technically gifted people i know, the ones with the cleanest anatomy, the sharpest timing, the best sense of appeal, are also the ones who regularly make explicit art (as a side-gig and/or hobby) and are responsible for some of the more vulgar production artifacts. perhaps pulling off something transgressive that is still funny, still aesthetically coherent, requires a special kind of competence.

there’s some research suggesting that verbal fluency and dark humor correlate with cognitive flexibility4. i don’t know if that’s causal, but it tracks with what i see. the artists more comfortable breaking decorum might be the ones most fluent in the language of the medium. maybe i’ll expand on this on a separate piece later on.

an additional note on “child” characters

it gets complicated when you think about how animation is often for and about kids. the short film i keep mentioning was created with adults in mind as a target audience. but isn’t merenguito, like, 11?

nowadays, most people working in the industry are internet-native. online, we tend to treat characters as sort of “modular” symbols5. rule 34 is common knowledge to adults in these spaces. it’s a baseline assumption that if a character exists, someone has sexualized it. even if the character in question is underage6. the shock threshold is low because the pattern is ubiquitous. we’re used to it.

but outside that bubble, anything child-adjacent activates one of the strongest taboos in contemporary culture. legal frameworks and public discourse often operate on the harm principle. the gap between those logics is where there is a non-negligible risk. i am well aware of this.

for example: many years ago, miraculous ladybug storyboard artist wilfried “winny” pain posted various erotic sketches on twitter while the animated series was still in production. this wasn’t anonymous fan art operating under rule 34 logic anymore, but rather a man officially tied to a children’s property producing sexualized imagery of canonically underaged female characters. thomas astruc, the creator of the franchise, publicly defended this. when people found out, some were reasonably upset.

although the miraculous ladybug series itself doesn’t depict the characters in this specific way (marinette does not have such a large chest in canon) it led people to question other design choices in the show. why does ladybug, the 15 year old protagonist, wear a skin-tight suit that highlights very specific areas of her body? why do some shots insist on having her butt in the frame? isn’t that a little suspect for a kid’s show?

the answer is yes, obviously. children’s media operates on an implicit contract where you assume the adults running it are not using it as a vehicle for their own sexual interests and exposing kids to them through loopholes in the rating system7. the perception that someone in authority blurred that boundary destabilizes the entire framework.

this ladybug incident didn’t hit mainstream news. it’s obscure and rather ancient tumblr fandom knowledge that ultimately had no major repercussions beyond some individuals coming to the decision to stop watching the show, but it still exemplifies the risk. any artist or producer in this specific context should be very careful and responsible with the containment of any vulgar artifacts that may arise. don’t be stupid. keep them off your public twitter account.

there’s also an adjacent, messier layer here that i don’t want to collapse into the same category. some western works aimed at children have long been accused of embedding very specific, recurring fetish imagery in ways that don't feel like parody anymore.

totally spies! gets cited constantly in this context. unlike the artifacts of this discussion, it isn’t explicit per se, there’s hardly any nudity, it just fixates on the female protagonists going through transformation, weight gain, inflation, and other highly specific bodily predicaments. as stated by x user pecificow_outime: “if a fetish exists, there's an episode of totally spies about it.”

i think it’s objectively a different phenomenon from some sleep-deprived, underpaid and overworked animator scribbling a penis on their shot and sending it to a close colleague for shits and giggles. this kind of fetishistic imagery is sneakily embedded into the official work and eventually presented to a child audience. eek.

in practice, most shadow artifacts live in the realm of parody and they circulate privately. they are not in the actual shows or movies, and unlike conventional pornography, they are not produced for arousal markets or monetized. they only exist inside a bounded group, for reasons i’ve discussed earlier.

once again, containment does a lot of work. “behind closed doors”, more than a euphemism, is the condition that allows the diversion to hold ethically. similar to what happened with the hazbin crew and their jokingly affectionate commentary on their sexually abusive antagonist valentino, or with winny’s suggestive post-it sketch, once this sort of ingroup material leaves that context, the interpretation can shift violently. the backlash isn’t always fair, but fairness is irrelevant at that point. you don’t control the lens anymore.

so all in all, it’s important to acknowledge some taboos carry heavier institutional and public gravity than others. some symbolic inversions are more “combustible”. when you are dealing with client work, especially characters that are simultaneously underage and made for the enjoyment of minors, handle it with care.

real children’s safety comes first. whatever we think about adult permissiveness in fiction, we should not blur boundaries in ways that expose minors to inappropriate material or create openings that can be misused. the shadow layer only works when it stays clearly separated from the audience it was never meant for.

… that's it for now.

thank you for reading. if this introduced you to something you’d rather not have known about, i apologize. animation is made by humans, and humans are strange. the medium would be poorer without that.

stay weird, friends. but be smart about it.

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i will try to be as fair as possible, in the unlikely event she ever reads this. i do hope the cycle eases. this shit isn’t healthy for anyone involved.

so what happened now?

at the time of writing, the most recent outrage comes from a resurfaced clip taken out of an official blu-ray release of hazbin hotel. the discs include audio commentaries for all episodes, recorded by vivienne medrano alongside animation director skye henwood and art director sam miller.

the version that catalyzed the current wave of discussion was posted on twitter by user wispiicoatl. in this segment, the three laughingly describe valentino (an abusive pimp/overlord who assaults angel dust on-screen in the series) as a moron who does not understand consent. these are the lines being talked about in particular:

“…and valentino just doesn’t get it. like, he literally doesn’t know what the word ‘consent’ means.”

“yeah, he thinks it’s a fun word or something.”

“someone asked him, ‘hey, did you ask for consent?’ and he’s like, ‘wow, that’s a cool name for a bar, i like it.’”

“he’s a moron… but he’s our moron.”

“actually, he’s vox’s moron.”

within the “hellaverse”, valentino functions as a caricature of predatory power structures in the sex work industry. with good faith, the joking commentary could be read as the creators highlighting his ignorance as part of that satirical exaggeration. however, people have not been taking it so lightly.

another recurring criticism in some of the responses is that medrano relates to her cast less as narrative devices and more as ocs in the fandom sense of the term; original characters that are played around with like toys. the crew’s comments are giggly, almost affectionate. calling valentino “our moron” like he’s some little creature to laugh at. a silly guy. the register resembles how people sometimes talk about a badly behaved pet, rather than a serial rapist.

although i understand why it strikes some people as odd, i also recognize that kind of giddiness. while working on merenguito, my team and i produced a concerning amount of joke art and off-model “shitposts.” one recurring bit involved drawing the protagonist crucified or generally placing him in deliberately absurd or inappropriate situations. the short is about a piñata kid who is bullied and tormented to the point that he ends up killing all of his classmates.

evidently, dark material did not cancel out this sort of “backstage irreverence” so chances are, we would have been talking about valentino in a similar fashion if he was our own creation.

when you dedicate yourself to fictional characters for a living, you tend to see them as your beloved offspring even if the characters in question are objectively horrible people. you get attached, you tease them, and even if they’re victims instead of aggressors, you torment them (affectionately). that dissonance is normal in production spaces where the characters are yours in a way client work never quite is. these lighthearted crude interactions are excellent for team morale. humor brings people together and helps cope with the stress of how demading the medium is.

unfortunately, things change once it leaves the studio, if you allow that to happen. viewed from the outside, some banter can be perceived as insensitive or disrespectful when your work handles serious topics. the hazbin crew releasing this kind of commentary into an environment where people are known to be sensitive to the portrayal of sexual abuse almost guarantees the unforgiving backlash.

this is also where miss medrano’s chronology comes into play. she has very little interpretive charity left. people aren’t willing to give the benefit of the doubt. more often than not, any questionable comment will be taken the wrong way by default. this is just how online discourse operates, it rewards the most scandalized reading and circulates it until nuance is out of the question.

but she should know better by now, right? this is not her first time stepping on the same rake, so why does it keep happening? is it calculated provocation or chronic incompetence? are people too sensitive nowadays?

these are my thoughts.

1. PR ILLITERACY IN THE INDIE ERA

before the internet turned every animator into a public figure, there was some insulation in traditional studio systems. besides getting the shows made, they produced “buffers” in the form of publicists and communications managers. if a creator misspoke, the statement passed through layers of filtration before reaching the audience. the “front stage” and the “backstage”, to borrow from erving goffman, were structurally separated. social media environments compress these regions, contributing to what later scholars term “context collapse”.

in the contemporary indie animation boom, the creator is a brand, a twitter account, a livestream presence, a shitposter, a reply guy in their own fandom... alice marwick’s concept of microcelebrity is useful here: visibility is sustained through constant accessibility, relatability, and informal self-disclosure.

this can be extremely beneficial to a project's reach, but when the same person who writes the show is also casually joking on commentary tracks, responding to fans and defending their creative choices in real time, the objective of the speech blurs. there is no clear distinction between “this is me engaging in a little tomfoolery” and “This is an Official Stance.”

vivzie’s instinctive reaction to backlash is often to double down or block whoever’s disagreeing. from a purely human perspective, that is understandable. however from a brand management perspective, it is akin to throwing gasoline on a dumpster fire.

the “valentine’s day artwork” incident from about a week ago depicts this pattern well. a promotional hellaverse illustration sparked criticism for its cluttered composition, and the artist that was hired for the piece responded with relative composure. medrano and another staff member, however, reacted defensively, with vivzie eloquently stating: “fuck these people oh my god lol”. the content of the disagreement matters less here than the response style.

another contrastive case might help. take gooseworx, who, somewhat ironically, is known to be friends with our subject.

she operates at a comparable level of online visibility and engages heavily with fans of her show. not that controversy never touches her, that is inevitable at this scale, but somehow the atmosphere towards her as a person feels less hostile. many of those who enjoy the amazing digital circus also watch hazbin hotel, so it would be difficult to attribute the contrast to her having a more “reasonable” audience. both are also adult shows that make use of narrative or visual tropes from children's media. the difference seems to lie elsewhere.

i think goose comes off as extremely competent in tone management, detachment, and a consistent refusal to litigate every sign of disapproval in public.

you can see how that perception took form. for example, someone quote tweeted a thread with screenshots of gooseworx responding to a youtube critique of her pilot. the reviewer had called the episode “try-hard” and her reply thanked them for the feedback, expressed an intention to improve, and threw in a self-deprecating joke for good measure. the creator of the video became a fan of her show later on. the youtube video is now titled “The NOT So Amazing Digital Circus (This review is old, it’s actually Amazing)”.

that response was shared as a comparison to a bluesky post where medrano dismissed a three-hour video critique as annoying and implied the critic lacked production knowledge. unfortunately the critic was a calarts student with corporate animation credits, and the video was gentle. girl, not even a writer can script irony that cleanly.

the issue isn't register either. it's not like you need to be fully fluent in linkedin corpospeak to avoid these problems. goose often makes crude comments and trivial statements about the show and its characters too. they are simply more likely to land as jokes. which they are.

and it helps that they're also really damn funny. this one in particular sends me:

as i was writing this, another relevant incident surfaced. almost on cue. sigh.

in short, gooseworx made a statement that upset some users on reddit and subsequently deleted her account after receiving negative responses1. she later expressed frustration about the incident on x: “I have considered never touching this franchise again with a 10 foot pole.” almost immediately, twitter user salayley launched #GooseworxAppreciationWeek as a show of support. fans have started to pledge art, fanfiction, and general encouragement to counteract the perceived toxicity. a parallel hashtag, #LOVEFORGOOSEWORX, also began circulating. glitch productions has now acknowledged and expressed gratitude for this gesture.

so clearly nobody is immune to pissing people off. but goose gets a fan-organized group hug and vivzie doesn't (so far). the reason why could be explained by the following section.

2. REPUTATIONAL PRIMING AND THE BENEFIT-OF-THE-DOUBT DEFICIT

the existence of dedicated “receipt” accounts cataloguing alleged missteps is very peculiar to me. vivziereceipts on x functions as an archive of controversies and accusations. evaluating if the claims are valid or not would be a fruitless endeavor. what is sociologically significant here is that such an archive exists at all, and that it is sustained by ongoing audience labor.

in social psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes our tendency to interpret others’ behavior as a reflection of stable character rather than situational context. as i mentioned earlier, once a creator is reputationally coded as problematic, every statement, old and new, is processed through this code.

zizi papacharissi’s notion of affective publics is also useful here. it basically states that networked audiences tend to coalesce around shared feelings. outrage is an adhesive that binds strangers into temporary alliances. a “receipts” account sits precisely at the intersection of these dynamics. it converts scattered moments into a coherent character narrative, preserves them for redeployment, and provides a rallying point for affective alignment.

plus, internet memory makes this extremely durable. vivziepop’s online archive dates back to when she was still in her teens and posting invader zim fan art. those early years remain searchable, and people continue to bring up that she drew the sauerkraut hitler character from sausage party or that she jokingly labeled one of her zoophobia characters a “sick pedo” in a tumblr tag. a decade-old screenshot can and will be summoned to stabilize the preferred narrative. once that happens often enough, the narrative outweighs the person.

this produces a closed loop, and at some point the individual personality matters less than the narrative gravity around it.

3. WHO INVITED THE MIDDLE SCHOOLERS

there is another layer here that might have to do with audience ecology. hazbin hotel is branded as adult animation. the rating, the profanity, the sexual themes, the violence, all signal that it is not intended for children.

and yet, it looks like the visible fandom culture often skews younger in nature. i am not making a statistical claim2 but chances are you have probably scrolled past a very earnest thirteen-year-old with a hazbin profile picture on tiktok arguing about which characters are okay to ship and which aren’t.

i think most people would agree that there are clear qualitative signals that the most visible part of the show’s fans is on the younger side3, so it led me to think about how that might have happened, and how it impacts the topic at hand.

for starters, many detractors describe the show itself as narratively juvenile. structurally, it is a brightly colored musical with disney-adjacent sensibilities embedded into dark topics. despite being set in hell, season arcs resolve through ensemble numbers about love and forgiveness and found family. none of this is inherently ‘wrong’, this sort of contradictory proposal is obviously intentional and could potentially be executed well, but it complicates hazbin's “adult” label. it starts to make sense why a certain demographic might be drawn to it.

transgression (or “edgyness”) tends to attract teenagers, laurence steinberg’s dual systems model suggests that novelty and transgression are especially rewarding during adolescence, so clearly they not uniquely incapable of handling dark material. it is barely surprising that a show marketed through demons, sex jokes, and relentless swearing will circulate widely in their online spaces. combine that with banger musical numbers about friendship and easily legible emotional arcs, and you have a product that feels really accessible to underage viewers.

unfortunately, this has a devastating effect on the discourse environment. online fandom debate, particularly among teens and adults who never graduated from kids’ animation, frequently collapses into black-and-white thinking and the usual lineup of cognitive biases.

developmental psychologists such as deanna kuhn have noted that evaluative, context-sensitive reasoning matures gradually, and media literacy scholars like sonia livingstone argue that interpreting complex media requires cognitive and cultural scaffolding, which are capacities that tend to mature with age.

hazbin hotel, both in the text and in the way it is discussed publicly, seems to oscillate between parody and sincerity in ways that invite misunderstanding. if the tone is playful toward a predator archetype, an adult viewer may be able to perceive the satire. a chronically online teenager may see others label it “romanticization” adopt the frame right away, and call everyone who disagrees a rape apologist.

there is also a structural component at play. clips can circulate on youtube shorts and tiktok without the algorithm enforcing age segmentation with much rigor. context collapse applies here too, now across age demographics.

the result is a property that is legally adult but socially embedded in youth-dense online communities. add the aforementioned tonal confusion to this algorithmic distribution and it curdles into something noisy and useless. you could call it some sort of… amazing digital circus. sorry.

4. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR AND PROSHIPPER DISCOURSE

this section brings us back to valentino. i will briefly contextualize in case you aren’t familiar with the series: season 1, episode 4 features the major musical number “poison” stunningly performed by angel dust (a primary character voiced by blake roman). the sequence takes place during the filming of a porno scene. angel breaks into song while the visual language alternates between stylized performance and the coercive dynamic with valentino. lyrically the number frames valentino as both literal and metaphorical poison. it is one of the show’s most indignantly discussed scenes, and admittedly, a sequence that is very well put together.

at one point the discourse around poison shifted from the text itself to the people behind it. one of the widely circulated posts criticized the involvement of storyboard artist r2ninjaturtle, citing his publicly acknowledged rape fetish and his shipping of valentino / vox with angel dust.

the problem went from the scene's alleged mishandling of trauma to the storyboarder’s kinks contaminating the story's moral stance, and the fact that vivziepop both allowed and encouraged it. the argument might seem reasonable on the surface. if someone involved finds rape erotic, then the show’s framing is automatically suspect, right?

for a significant portion of critics on the younger side, the issue is not whether abuse is depicted respectfully. it is that it is depicted at all. rape, in this view, is a subject that should remain both off the screen and off raphielle's personal art entirely. the debate hardens a little at this point.

can you depict abuse without endorsing it? can you eroticize something immoral without normalizing it? is “problematic” art a confession or a coping mechanism?

this is where roland barthes’ “death of the author” quietly lingers in the background4. what it states is that once a work enters circulation, meaning is not anchored to authorial intent. audiences will read it through their own little frameworks regardless of what the creator claims they meant.

the empirical landscape is far more ambiguous than online discourse suggests, and that ambiguity is precisely why moral absolutism struggles here. you cannot reliably look at how a specific theme is portrayed in work of fiction and diagnose the creator’s psyche5 or predict how it's going to be interpreted by the audience.

nobody asked, but i’d like to state my own stance on the problematic fiction debate. for reasons i might expand on at a later time, i’m close to radical permissiveness at the level of adult creation. adults should be able to make and consume morally questionable fiction if they choose to. rape, child abuse, murder porn, incest, necrophilia, exploitation… all of it can exist within art without automatically collapsing into advocacy. fiction has always metabolized the worst parts of human experience.

the non-negotiable boundary would be access and labeling. the same way you have the freedom to create taboo art, you have the obligation to label it clearly and gate it rigorously.

which brings us back, ironically, to consent.

if media consumption is to be ethically coherent, it should function like informed consent. the ‘don’t like, don’t watch’ principle is sacred. if you enter knowingly, you accept that fiction may disturb you. and if you are not old enough, you should not have unsupervised access (or a tiktok account, but that's a topic for another day).

i bring this whole debaucle up because i think the friction in most of the vivziepop discourse emerges partly because contextual layers are constantly collapsing. minors encounter material intended for grown-ups in algorithmic feeds and adults encounter youth-driven moral policing in fandom spaces. evoking death of the author theory does not solve that, but it does remind us that once a work is public, its meaning is negotiated socially, and this social system is particularly terrible at negotiating meaning.

the more useful question is not whether problematic art should exist. it already does, and eliminating it would require a level of censorship far more disturbing than the art itself6. the question is how to manage its circulation without feeding it directly into a space dominated by teenagers armed with screenshots older than themselves. consent, in the broadest sense, might be the only principle that scales.

TO CONCLUDE (FINALLY)

it would be less exhausting to blame a single person or dismiss the audience as hysterical. we could spend the next five years debating whether the animated moth version of p. diddy was called a moron too affectionately or we could admit that the more scalable issue is how creators are trained and how audiences are segmented.

it is also worth remembering that, outside the timeline, these episodes are rarely as apocalyptic as they feel in the moment, meaning they do not usually end careers. this is not on the level of credible real-world misconduct allegations that materially alter someone’s professional trajectory. most of the time, what happens mostly amounts to reputational turbulence and a very emotionally exhausted creator.

i know there are many other factors at play that i have not discussed here. but i think it is safe to say that once you operate with such massive reach, everything you say becomes public relations. and once you release adult oriented content into algorithmic spaces full of kids, you will find yourself needing to manage a potentially rabid crowd.

the matter of “how” is something that i'm sure is still being researched by people who are more qualified than me. but debate will continue, and unlike the titular hotel, the internet does not believe in redemption arcs just yet.

this may sound harsher than i intend. i promise it comes from a place of care. view it as an expression of what people here call “amor serrano”.

1. nostalgia as entry (and end) point

if i had a sol for every time i’ve heard something along the lines of “i want to work in animation because i liked watching dragon ball as a kid,” i could probably self-finance a short film. i’ve heard it from first year students. i’ve heard it from studio founders. i’ve probably uttered a softer version of it myself at some point, because who doesn’t love a good disney film from their renaissance era?

and so, the origin story of a lot of people working in the industry is often a childhood attachment to imported media. don’t get me wrong, inspiration can be an artist’s most valuable resource. however, professional identity anchored in fan mentality can stall the evolution from consumer to author. at some point you’re supposed to stop auditioning for the media you grew up watching and start trying to create something of your own. i’ve had to physically restrain myself from telling some people that maybe instead of collecting funko pops, perhaps we could pick up a screenwriting book for once.

2. looking north for permission

in school i watched classmates set their thesis films in new york or some vaguely american suburb. none of them had ever set foot in those places. and somehow they’ve been convinced it’s inherently something more worthy of storytelling. why? are they more cinematic than what? a provincial bus terminal? a coastal desert that looks like mars?

spend enough time around it and a certain logic begins to emerge: the eurocentric mentality. peru is a postcolonial society, and imperialism is very culturally present, infecting everything from artistic expression to the average citizen’s self-perception, ultimately producing a cultural inferiority complex. i don’t mean that as an accusation against individuals. one doesn’t wake up thinking “today i will devalue my own culture.” you grow up consuming media that frames elsewhere as more cinematic or more worthy of attention and internalize it through years of propaganda. this also carries into the next point:

3. copying the wrong things

the united states, and occasionally japan, remain implicit reference points for what is considered exportable or high quality in film. this is quite visible in the animation industry’s derivative tendencies, beyond the amateur context of student work. many of the projects that manage to get finished and launched, often commercial kids’ features, echo american genre formulas almost beat for beat. story structure, humor cadence, and character archetypes follow american grammar.

i’ve also lost count of how many times i’ve seen posts announcing “the first peruvian anime.” at this point there have been at least four. possibly more to come. each one introduced as if no one before had attempted the format. the ritual of declaring a new beginning every couple of years seems a little strange. it looks like a compulsion to market everything as unprecedented. often the framing comes from media outlets or overexcited fans online, but the repetition reveals we might be narrating our work as a novelty, despite the industry having existed for decades.

the aspiration is to approximate these conventions competently, but unfortunately, most of the time the approximation can hardly be called competent. the results are, more often than not, just not very good. this particularly scathing letterboxd review of a multi-million dollar production from peru (which i will not name but some might be able to recognize) always comes to mind:

“What’s the worst part about this baffling sub-Dreamworks horseshit? The sexualized barely-teen characters? The demonization of interracial relationships that’s bafflingly walked back at the end? The heavy-handed anti-industrialization plot that never ever makes any sense and is inferior to every single movie it lifts from (Princess Mononoke, Ferngully, even abominable trash like Avatar)? The fuckbrained animal sidekicks that are more annoying than even the most pedestrian of Disney swill? Gaze upon (what is hopefully) the worst film of 2021. Feeding this to your kids is child abuse.”

one thing i do wish we’d copy from those industries is their organizational literacy. i’ve worked on projects where no one could tell you which draft was current, where deadlines shifted because “we’ll figure it out as we go along”. basic asset tracking is an optional hassle. but sure, let’s focus on emulating the disney princess formula.

4. heritage in the background layer

when we do willingly turn inward, toward precolonial cultures, especially the incas or something dimly “amazonian”, it often feels like a costume somehow. the names are quechua, the landscapes are recognizably andean or “jungle”, yet the approach to narrative remains… imported?

even visually, motifs drawn from native traditions are filtered through (often outdated) global trends. color scripts that align with modern cgi palettes. indigenous characters end up having light skin and blue eyes or other suspiciously european features. one gorillion incan fantasy concepts all mimicking either hollywood blockbuster or shonen anime staging. representation exists often at surface level and indigeneity seems ornamental.

this kind of cultural warping is predictable when it comes from outside. when disney makes something like the emperor’s new groove (peak movie by the way), of course the culture is bent to fit an american comedic sensibility. i wrote an essay about it some years ago. distortion is an expected, maybe even acceptable (if the work is particularly great) part of the export package. it just feels strange watching that same distortion reproduced domestically.

5. proximity to prestige

national media discourse reinforces this dependency on foreign countries. achievements are framed through it. i’ve seen this pattern repeated along the lines of: “peruvian film arrives in x country.” a few years ago one of my shorts got picked up by a small festival in portugal and local digital outlet ran an article along the lines of “peruvian student short selected for international festival.” i was supposed to feel proud, wasn’t i? by all means being mentioned in “the news” as a young graduate is something to be proud of, but even then there was a quiet sense that something wasn’t being measured correctly. now i understand why a little better.

apparently, a work’s value is inferred from international validation rather than interrogated on artistic merit. if your studio is animating a music video for an american pop star, you bet your ass that’s what leads the announcement. look who we worked with! it took me a while to admit that i benefited from that same logic. i still like collecting laurels though. it’s great for the ego.

6. don’t ask if it’s good

as if the above weren’t enough, we barely critique the output to begin with. locally, most conversations stop at how impressive it is that a feature got finished at all in peru, for example. and much of latin america seems to operate under the same protective instinct. i was reminded of it watching a youtube video by huérfano producciones where the creator criticizes the way a film was marketed:

“Algo que me molesta personalmente es el abajismo con el cual se marketeó esta película, recordando constantemente que es ‘la primera pelicula animada de Colombia’ (lo que no es cierto) y "Miren como hacemos todos los dibujos a mano! Oye nos tomo mas de un año terminar este proyecto pero lo hicimos mucho cariño niños!" ¿Porque así es como vamos a promocionar nuestros proyectos en Latinoamérica? ¿Grabarnos sudados por todo el esfuerzo que hubo detrás de esta producción, buscando puntos de simpatía en vez de que la película sea… no sé, buena?” Regue Chicken - Crítico Histérico

he points out the constant emphasis on it being sold as “the first animated film made in colombia” (it wasn’t) and on how long it took, how everything was drawn by hand, how much effort went into it. he asks, essentially: why are we marketing our projects by filming ourselves exhausted and sweaty, asking for sympathy, instead of letting the film stand on whether it’s actually, i don’t know… good?

yes, animation is hard. but if we don’t hold ourselves to standards beyond mere completion, we’ll keep producing “baffling sub-Dreamworks horseshit” without necessarily getting any better at it.

7. the vicious grant cycle

public funding through DAFO, the Dirección del Audiovisual, la Fonografía y los nuevos Medios (a branch of the ministry of culture that administers film and animation grants) has made many projects possible and continues to do so. unfortunately, it tends to distort much of the production logic. projects are frequently haphazardly executed around grant compliance. i’ve watched people with genuinely interesting proposals under their belt celebrate their winning of the fund with industry peers, scramble to deliver the minimum required preproduction materials by deadline (after begging for prorogation), and then slowly evaporate. sometimes without a proper premiere. it ends when the file has been submitted, and the audience doesn’t even get to watch it. you might catch it at a festival in some other country if you’re lucky.

if you want to get academic about it, perhaps in economic terms you could call this “rent-seeking behavior”. securing funds being more urgent than securing viewers, so internal production discipline weakens because the market is not the immediate evaluator. something like that.

8. final thoughts

it’s easy to critique an industry as you pack your bags. i’m aware of that irony. i have benefited from the same grants, the same headlines, the same foreign-validation dopamine hits. maybe europe will reveal a different set of delusions. maybe i’ll find new orthodoxies to be cynical about.

there is real talent here. artists who are sharper and more disciplined than the system often allows them to be, and i don’t plan to distance myself from them or their work. i want to find ways to involve them in productions that are actually put together properly, where their competence isn’t wasted or exploited.

for now, this is simply what the peruvian animation industry has looked like from my desk: nostalgic, ambitious, occasionally brilliant, frequently derivative, structurally fragile, and still trying to decide who it is actually for.

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