I think I'm confused. How do you know they don't like the characters if they've watched the show and recognize them? Like I get being being disappointed or annoyed if they're leaving stupid tags or not getting why you made it or the significance of the relationship or they don't want to talk about it with you I just don't get what you meant by referential obligation bc generally I would've thought if they reblogged it was bc they DID like the characters in some way, even if it wasn't the same way or to the same extent.

I'm sorry if this is a stupid ask I just don't get it.

no i think its a fair question to ask and this is why i say that

you assume they DO recognize them. some people have left tags to the effect of "i dont remember that guys name"

others have tagged every character except bido

its just kind of a thing that the more notes something has the more likely people are to reblog it. "hey this has a lot of notes and i know that anime" is a very common reason for the average casual blogger to reblog something, especially the ones who just spam reblog a hundred posts at a time at the speed of sound

i am absolutely positive that over ten thousand people do not give enough of a shit about bido fullmetalalchemist to reblog a post featuring him solely because they like him. maybe they like greed or mei but ive been in fma fan circles long enough to know that if you ask the average fma fan their thoughts about bido, the most common answer will be "who"

on the art i made telling people to imagine the premise of my fanfiction (scars team + greed and bido being friends), once it left my immediate circle, everyone(!!!) started leaving tags like "my favorite dynamic" "this is why i love fma" "arakawa was so real for this". Greed And Bido Are Very Clearly Standing There. Arakawa Did Not Do That. Apparently This Is Registering To Nobody and Nobody Mentions Their Presence

that one was reblogged by takashi 0 the conservative brony.

another conservative antivax blogger reblogged it, said "isnt this just fullmetal alchemist", and yelled at his wife (also a tumblr user) when she told him it was in fact fullmetal alchemist

please trust me .

FWIW this lead isnt technically new but like yeah I agree ever since the other two devs left there's been such a huge shift in priorities in aesthetics and I'm like... How much of this is genuine "we need to broaden our appeal because this genre is highly competitive and generally aren't incredibly successful" and not just the current guy being like "I will make this game what I think is pretty because I can make all the rules now."?

Like I don't want to speculate too much bc it feels a little disrespectful but based on the timing of the other devs leaving I think some changes (like redrawing the artwork) was probably stuff they were also in favor of but bigger changes like making calico obsolete by creating the white coverage system, completely changing the color and breeding system, and now removing the undercoat patterns do have a smell of being heavily influenced by this dev's personal preferences which, ok, its his game now I guess so he can do whatever now I guess. And people seem decently receptive to these changes so.. :/ I suppose this guy just has an aesthetic most people align with as well.

Sidenote: I was mostly ok with the undercoat change when reading about it until I actually tried it out and it looks like a lot of people are kinda peeved by it too, lol. I doubt we're gonna get fun patterns back but users seem to be really wanting at least being able to have more options instead of being forced into the dynamic thing. It's ain't much but it's something I hope.

ooh yeah i know the current project head isn't entirely new to the project (and even having a leadership position in it i'm pretty sure) i just know there was a change of leadership at some point that put him in as the current head dev. i agree that redrawing the artwork was probably done under the old leadership.

honestly i felt like the original target audience was going to provide a pretty solid niche which i think can work pretty well for these games too. a dedicated but small userbase can be better than a bunch of users making accounts and then losing interest (see dappervolk). i really, really connected to the idea of a petsite as an avenue for character creation and written and drawn creative content like the original concepts of the kickstarter laid out. however it's entirely possible that these elements are still considered a significant focus of the game and are getting less emphasis due to the part of the development cycle currently being asset and base gameplay focused. the cats just feel weirdly glamorous now? which makes it harder to make characters with different personalities or energies as i would imagine people might like. the white markings are also confusing to me, i felt like maybe they were inspired by pce's white markings but pce's markings being divided on a scale of 0 to 10 and in different categories means it doesn't get in the way of planning out the appearances of cats even if there's a lot of different options.

at first i was actually really excited about the breeding system changes because it seemed like an interesting to concept but then they seemed to change it AGAIN and it got kinda... too complicated for me to keep up with it? which again i bet a lot of people like that level of complexity in breeding but for me it gets too overwhelming especially how it was being visually expressed on the creator. trying to remember both a color's name and where it falls on the saturation and color scale feels like a lot.

re: your sidenote i wasn't sure about the idea of removing undercoats but i wasn't fully against it until i also tried the cat creator and got.... bored? it felt like i couldn't come up with my own concepts so much so i just kind of checked out and stopped playing with it. it doesn't really help that i don't like the way blossom and ivy overgrowth are looking most of the time, the higher amount of rendering makes them feel pasted on because of all the fur detail but of course none of the plants displace the fur. the preview art of the genes felt less like that to me because there wasn't enough details that it felt like something was Missing in order to blend the plantlife with the fur, you could just intuit that was happening but the simplified art style wasn't depicting it. ivy generally does a bit better than blossom for me in that it's resting on the cats backs and not growing out of their fur so it looks less strange.

honestly i think my funniest thought is the image of someone sitting in the theater for spiderman no way home opening night, seeing a blind lawyer on screen and everyone cheering for them, but not understanding why the fuck everyone is so excited for this random blind guy because they haven’t watched the netflix shows and only watched the movies