#TheStruggle

Status
Not open for further replies.
Main problem I have is finding character portaits when they aren't supposed to be attractive or a celebrity face claim. Tricky shit, that.
Which goes back to my point of if you're challenging what most people go to drawing and roleplays for then of course finding it is more difficult.
The desire for average or less than average looking characters is a minority desire, not a majority.

There's nothing wrong with it mind you, I applaud efforts to make more diverse and realistic characters.
But generally when people escape real life they want to be more powerful, attractive etc. not less attractive.
 
Seeing as she's using "hot anime female" as her search description, I don't think either of those are her problem. ;)
"Then having to surf through bull shit pages of "hot anime female" and other winner google searches for the jewel".

I honestly read this as 'hot anime female' is what she had to shift through, not what she outright searched. :/
If I read this wrong though... derp.

Though my point would still apply to those who replied and complained about a lack of unattractive character photos.
 
I just specified anime because I prefer the art style.
 
I once remember trying to be creative when searching for pictures once, I got a picture of a full grown man, breaking a child leg...... As for female pictures, yeah the struggle of finding a pureeee looking one, without them showing 90% of their breast is stilll a struggle.
 
I definitely struggle with pictures, but I've made use of two solid workarounds recently. The first one is just writing descriptions, because that's a minute or two to write a paragraph instead of hours to find an image. The other method is looking for character images before I start deciding how exactly I want my character to look. Basically I'll get to the point of deciding to join something and getting a general idea of what kind of character I want, then I'll immediately start image hunting. Appearance used to be the last thing I'd decide on, but that left me with a bunch of ideas for how the character should look and finding anything very specific in an art style and quality I like is harder than finding a needle in a haystack. Doing it first instead helps me sort of shape the character as I go through personality and backstory and skills and such, meaning the character is sort of shaped to the image instead of trying to find an image to suit the character. I might start doing that thing others have mentioned though, saving pictures I happen to like but that don't fit whatever character I'm currently working on, because having a nice folder of images to pick through would be perfect for building characters around images.

Another thing I have issues with is names. Not just character names either; if I need to name a country or a city or a business or a weapon or pretty much anything, it tends to take me an inordinately long time to make a decision. I'm really bad about using the "oh noes, the character's whole family died in some tragic accident and/or act of violence!" trope, and a large part of the reason is because I can get away with not bothering to name the family members if they've all been dead for years and years. I just can't ever be happy with whatever I first come up with, so I end up with some huge list of names that might be okay and have to whittle it down from there.
 
Which goes back to my point of if you're challenging what most people go to drawing and roleplays for then of course finding it is more difficult.
The desire for average or less than average looking characters is a minority desire, not a majority.

There's nothing wrong with it mind you, I applaud efforts to make more diverse and realistic characters.
But generally when people escape real life they want to be more powerful, attractive etc. not less attractive.

Which is fine, I get it's escapism for some people or even just projecting an idealistic vision of what they wish they could be, but as you more or less stated, not everyone is super fit and attractive, and it somewhat kills stories for me if most of the players are more focused on their character appearance verses their personality or bio, and I have noticed in general there's this lack of diversity or risk taking with character roles and archtypes, partially because nobody wants to play the unwashed janitor hobo from Orion VII if their character is a college-aged individual with a lot of potential, and that young characters typically aren't the wise old wizards or fleet admirals for obvious reasons. It's also a case of play what you know, and if you can't relate to a character who is decades of experience older than you are, you might tell yourself you can't play ot convincingly.

Or for some people, old age means no more romance options.

And don't take this as me saying all of that is wrong! All I was getting around to was saying that after getting back into roleplaying, I find myself wanting to explore some characters I never tried before and challenge myself by playing characters well outside my maturity level and experience, and heck, look into something as mundane as them having a family instead of being the standard issue batchelor with the dead parents. I want to try the freaky aliens that are horrifically ugly by human standards, the troubled family man who puts his work before his loved ones, the brilliant scientist for the forces of good with a very dark secret, and so on. Part of the fun of roleplaying is trying new things and seeing if you can't break your comfort zone to make something memorable.

And to do that, I personally have been on the hunt for images for characters the internet is very reluctant to provide. Heck, I even had a couple character commisions done to solve some of my issues haha.

Attangent over. >.>
 
  • Like
Reactions: Gwazi Magnum
I browse character art threads around the interwebs until I see a neat picture and go: "That'd make a cool character. What can I come up with for them?" and voila! Four thousand pictures later...

The sad part is there all labeled so generically. "Human male archer", "female elf commoner", "dragon male warrior", etc. The only way I know how to find them is by the order I saved them.

Like this picture. It was supposed to be art. But its too funny to pass up.
1552y2r.gif
 
  • Like
Reactions: Lewi
I tend to just peruse art websites in my spare time anyways, so even when I'm not specifically looking for a character image I'm massing metric fuck tons of images to just have on standby. Whenever I need a character image I tend to look through my ~5,500 images before I turn to the internet. More often than not I've got something saved already that fits a character idea/appearance I have in mind.

For me finding interesting male anime images is huge chore. At least with the image sites I use, you're more likely to run across several dozen female pictures before you find even a single male one. You can use tags, but only two at a time so you tend to have to use "1boy" as a tag and then some other descriptive tag... which unfortunately leads more often to pornography images as they'll just be images with "1boy" sticking his dick into a girl possessing the descriptive tag you meant to describe the male. The males you find too are often pretty lackluster and generic. You don't get as much variation as you do in females, so it's harder to find something novel.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.