Something Other Than Spiky Hair – Pixiv Fantasia

Posted: April 25, 2009 | Author: Dennis N. Santana | |20 Comments »

Anime is pretty much my second-largest hobby and has a decent influence on my imagination. Let’s talk about it, because its influence over me is extremely misunderstood, given most people think about anime artwork in significantly different ways than I do. I bet you think – schoolgirls, blue hair, katanas, robots, the cover to Big Eyes Small Mouth (which I hate, by the way).

As an anime fan into RPGs (and oh dear God, blogging about it, on a network about RPGs!) I am practically trying to dance a waltz in the middle of a minefield. It’s no secret that a sizeable chunk of the D&D hobby believes me (me as in an anime fan, though Wyatt fits too I think) to be a cancer that helped destroy their golden days.

This doesn’t stop me from doing the occasional post about anime stuff though.

We all have things that pop into mind when we think of fantasy roleplaying artwork (IE D&D artwork, I don’t talk about anything but that here).

Classic artists such as Jeff Dee or Erol Otus; more contemporary artists like Wayne Reynolds or William O’Connor.

I tend to think about guys with incomprehensible online handles. I guess I’m from the imageboard generation or something.

Pixiv is a japanese site, kind of like deviantart, where artists can post artworks for the wider world to look at, download, comment on, put in their favorites lists, whatever. However, it’s not really public, because you need to register a free account to be able to browse anything.

On safebooru, you can find a collection of stuff from Pixiv that you can browse without needing registration (and in English). It usually includes the best stuff, so I prefer it to using my actual Pixiv account (which I can only barely understand.) All safeboouru pages link to the original artist, so even if you have a Pixiv account you stand to profit from going local. (What.)

This post is about Pixiv Fantasia, a collaborative world-building group of Pixiv artists, who develop a collected body of fantasy work through their pixiv-submitted artworks. Worlds, scenary, backstory, monsters and heroes, quite akin to what we dream about over here as opposed to the stereotypical notion that anime is all about robots, schoolgirls and katanas.

A lot of people are doing collaborative worldbuilding on the RPG Blogger’s Network, so I thought, despite my limited ability (IE I don’t want to browse through livejournals picking up scraps of information that may or may not be true about an exclusively-japanese collaborative worldbuilding event I cannot accurately document in any other way) I would turn people on to this.

Even if we can’t grasp the story or the characters – the thousands of characters, seeing as any artist can submit something, and there are even artists allying their characters and so on within the world, advancing the story through more drawings, comics and whatnot – we can look at the images and maybe see something they hadn’t before. I know I’ve already surprised one or two people with images from Fantasia (I think it was this one and this one) who had never really seen what Japanese anime-style artists think and imagine as fantasy. Whether you look down on anime or not, I think it is worth browsing for a moment.

Or you can just flame me, I’m used to it by now.

As said before, you can catch the artworks on safebooru. Navigating in Pixiv is difficult, because there have actually been 3 Pixiv Fantasia “rounds” by now. Safebooru users, I’ve found, tend to be pretty discriminate in picking the highest-quality stuff. So for greater accessibility, I went with linking safebooru instead of Pixiv. If anybody wants a Pixiv account, I can try to help you through the registration and I can link you to the pertinent areas of Pixiv discussed here. It’s really not necessary though.