So you don't take entire Japan seriously?
The "...Tan" culture is pretty normal there. I like Anime/Manga and I like cute drawn girls. And Pandora was female so it fits pretty well. To make it more clear, I don't want to live in a world where the beauty of the female body is forbidden! See it like: she is a powerful girl that can defend itself and is self confident enough to stand tall (and wear such an outfit).
There are many things that seem "normal" in Japan (or, more correctly, merely outside the mainstream or slightly creepy) that are borderline (or not) unacceptable in the West, which is our domain: as far as I am aware, the Pandora (and by extension the Pyra) is most well known in Western Europe and North America, with English (and secondarily German) being the language of the community. As such, it is Western sensibilities that we must worry about, not Japanese ones.
Other "normal" things in Japan (if one trusts cheap TV): "compensated dating", love hotels, maid cafés, idol groups (consisting of barely pubescent girls dancing and singing for the delectation of large groups of adult males), dirty schoolgirl underwear in vending machines and a stable sex doll industry. Japan is well known for being relatively sexist for an "advanced" country (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2013_Gender_gap_index_world_map,_Gender_Inequality_Distribution.svg) and for not banning
production of child pornography photographs until 1999 (
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2054271,00.html) and for not banning
possession of child pornography photographs until 2014 (
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/06/04/national/crime-legal/japan-finally-moving-to-ban-child-porn-possession/) and for being the origin of the "lolicon" culture. Presumably you are aware of all this, as someone who (like me) consumes some Japanese culture.
Invoking the culture of Japan as a defence really does not work, in this instance.
Regarding the concealment of the female body:
if/when I want porn, I know where to find it. And isn't it interesting that most nudists (stereotypically, at least) seem to be wrinklies, while images of the nearly nude are not?
Historically, powerful people would wear
more clothing than the less powerful. Ermine robes, heavy crowns etc.. By wearing masses of expensive cloth, they would both make themselves look big (i.e. physically powerful) and display how much wealth they could waste. Also note that powerful women, like Hilary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher (whom I both dislike, by they way), tend to wear quite modest attire, perhaps including shoulder pads (again, physical size counts). Nor to contemporary powerful men tend to show much skin. I cannot think of a single powerful person that habitually wears clothes like those worn by the "-tans" in this thread.
Don't you think that is a bit of a close-minded attitude? Even if you are right, I see no reason to ban "teenagers", "basement-dwellers" or "dweebs" from expressing themselves in this community. Nor anybody else that dabbles in a form of expression which happens to summon a connotation of something or someone you don't like. Your statement is an offensive dismissal of quite a few people in the world, including many adults.
The Pyra/Pandora-tan is just fan-art, not an official mascot. I'm perfectly ok with some less serious topics in the Offtopic section.
The question is, who do you want to attract and who are you fine with repulsing? Someone, who saw nothing but the first few posts in this thread, may judge the community to be nothing more than the same kind of immature people who discuss their favourite female character in game X on GameFAQs, interminably, and so miss the more sophisticated aspects of the Pandora and Pyra (open, hackable full GNU/Linux systems in the pocket, which, incidentally, allow game system emulation to run quite well). Someone put off by the former and attracted by the latter might be lost to us (and, in my opinion, is exactly the kind of person this community should want to attract). In the real world, people
do judge books by their covers, as reading them usually takes too long."I don't have time for this crap" etc..
Fan-art that gains traction, that becomes ubiquitous, effectively becomes an unofficial mascot. I think any of the examples in this thread would be damaging to the Pandora's (or Pyra's) image if they became widespread.
they're ment to be created for fun and for their artistic value (e.g treated as Art).
And what is the difference between "Art" and pandering?
For the most part, their creation is part of an artistic approach known as
Moe anthropomorphism where an object is given a human-form attribution using the art style found in Anime and Manga
The art-style, typically, of the most low-brow and low-grade anime and manga available, mostly the stuff that exists only to pander to the baser emotions of the audience. Most of the better stuff (the Ghost in the Shell film, Welcome to the NHK, Planetes, Cowboy Bebop etc.) tends to avoid this style.
The uninitiated/innocent would look at such representations and think "oh, these are pictures of children" -- big eyes (even compared with other cartoon characters), short limbs, and (often) flat chests.
By all means nobody said anything about any hypothetical Pandora-tan having to be a sexualized
Bishōjo fanservice character,
Yet all the examples, so far, have been at least either sexualized or Bishōjo.
and if nobody here finds the Anime/Manga styles likeable
There is plenty of anime where the characters (male and female) both look like adults (or, at least, age appropriate) and wear practical, credible clothing. Take Princess Mononoke, for example, or, indeed, most of Hayao Miyazaki's output.
For the record though, have in mind that Anime and Manga don't just focus on portrating fantasy school lives full of cutsy teengares, they can also convery well more mature subjcets (although somewhat in a nutshell) like Survival/War (see
Shingeki no Kyojin,
First Squad) and dystopian/utopian futures (see
Ghost in the Shell,
Real Dive - Sennō Chōsashitsu). So if anyone cares for my opinion, using a different and more appropriate approach for designing a hypothetical *-tan character for the Pyra could work quite well if done right. So i don't think giving the entire style crap too early based on some prejudice is in anyway a good idea (heck look at
EvilDragon's avatar, it could serve as a point to the right direction).
I have nothing against anime and manga as media, but I do have a problem with
moe. If someone makes a non-
moe anime character that does not look like an idiot or some semi-sexual fantasy, then great. The ones in this thread, so far, have all been
embarrassing.
It is unlikely, though that any non-embarrassing character would count as a "-tan", though, given that the entire point of a "-tan" is to be embarrassingly childish, given that "-tan" is, in Japanese, a childish distortion of the "-chan" honorific, itself a childish distortion (historically) of the "-san" honorific. It could be well translated as "a baby-talk character", which is something rarely appropriate in Western culture (and, personally, something that I find very grating).
