As a hob­by­ist world­forger, Lelangiric’s post and Eternal’s con­tin­u­a­tion on how the mechanics/setting of anime tends to fall short of expec­ta­tions actu­ally ticks me off a lit­tle bit. Not quite because of their view­points, but because mod­ern Japan­ese ani­ma­tion, and much of recent scifi/fantasy in gen­eral, are a rather poor gauge on mea­sur­ing the lit­er­ary val­ues of set­ting cre­ativ­ity. But then, that’s also par­tially our fault as the viewers…

Expo­si­tion start: acti­vate lec­ture mode! (and who remem­bers this old yet remark­able anime?)

By and most in today’s series, we don’t have ‘set­ting’. More pre­cisely, we have a very much watered down ver­sion of ‘set­ting’ which is far bet­ter enti­tled ‘premise’. The dif­fer­ence between these two? A set­ting attempts to round out the details behind all the pri­mary con­cepts and mechan­ics it intro­duce. It goes beyond just those two ini­tial lines of con­cep­tual expla­na­tions and seeks to reflect the cast’s under­stand­ing of their World to the audi­ence, with­out inhi­bi­tions or con­ve­nient cutouts. On the other hand, a premise is a set of con­cepts and mechan­ics sim­ply handed to the audi­ence with min­i­mum scrutiny, and the viewer is expected to accept it in order to make the story work. ‘Premises’ can be upgraded to ‘set­ting’ through sto­ry­telling, but with­out intri­cate detail­ing and/or in-depth analy­sis, it will always remain what is it: merely a premise, a set of ideas and foun­da­tions, not a World.

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Over the past two weeks my life’s free time had been almost entirely con­sumed by pho­to­shop, as the Tarot Project is finally com­ing together. I only have three things to say on the mat­ter — I’ve never taken pho­to­shop to be such seri­ous busi­ness before; I can finally say I’m more than just a noob to pho­to­shop thanks to the picto-editing skills I’ve acquired; and I haven’t felt so proud of my goods for a long time.

Before any­one asks “why all girls?”, it’s to cut down on the com­pe­ti­tion between char­ac­ter and more con­sis­tency in art style. Not to men­tion — the deck is cuter this way.

I might think about mak­ing a bishie/GAR deck later, maybe, if I feel like throw­ing away another week+ of free time.

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