It’s been a year since Abuela passed, since the family woke up one day to find her door blank and swirling anew, an ‘M’ engraved on the door handle. Now approaching the age of 25, Mirabel is the new candle bearer of the Madrigal family, and dedicates herself to bettering her family and community. She’s devoted to her work; if not to serve others, then to distract herself from the burning grief that eats away at her mind when she sits still for too long.
Is it villain bruno au? Medieval crazy uncle come to protect his niece with a with similar powers as his? Fantasy kingdom au? Dark something?! I don’t hecking know! But sometimes you just gotta DRAW LIKE A MANIAC DAMMIT!!!
Okay this took me a long time but in my defense I was giving it serious thought! So here’s what I’ve got so far.
Tropes I love:
Characters who are adorable and tiny and also unreasonably powerful
Shark teeth. Allow me to repeat myself. SHARK TEETH!!!!!! I fucking love characters with shark teeth.
Cat ears. I’m not gonna lie, I like cat ears. On boys and girls. Cat ears for everyone (everyone who is cute).
Characters who are really nice but who look super scary. I’m not talking about delinquents who are secretly softies. I’m talking full Angel Densetsu–characters who are super nice and don’t even try to be scary in any way but unfortunately for them they come across as so intimidating that they can go “Excuse me you dropped your pencil” and ppl freak out because they think they’re about to get stabbed
Giant, terrifying, massively powerful man with super scary face!! ….and a tiny adorable child on his shoulder who loves him.
Misunderstandings used for comedy. (You know, like the school delinquents all becoming terrified of a character who is actually a total softie)
Your standard 4 Heavenly Kings style overpowered groups. Like the Student Council or the neighborhood delinquent crew.
I do kinda like tournament arcs. They can be a lot of fun.
Super hot androgynous characters who more often then not are evil. Is it bad representation? Yes! But they’re cool and hot so like… yeah
Super buff giant women. Are there enough of them? Hell no. But I love them when they are there.
Local girl is dumbass but boy does she try her best with a whole lot of aggressive enthusiasm! (Think Little Witch Academia)
Smug evil women. The real powerful ones who the main characters try to yell at and defy but she’s just still there grinning smugly and talking about how cute they are for thinking they can stop her.
Tropes that should die:
Female characters who are supposedly super strong and powerful but never fucking get to do anything ever.
Sexualized earlier mentioned tiny, cute, and powerful characters (”they may look like a 10 year old but they’re actually an adult or thousands of years old!” doesn’t make it any better)
Incest subplots… which is a different but kind of related topic since it’s usually younger sisters who are in love with their older brother or vise versa)
Perverts who never shut up about saying gross things and harassing every single woman around them but are still core members of the main group and will never fucking go away or die. And like 5 year old boy characters who are perverts and are used to creep on women in a secret and ~non-predatory because they’re just a child~ way
I really could just say fanservice as a whole. I mean, take your pick. The female character who just ~loves~ telling the MC to feel her giant boobs? Dudes tripping and falling face/hand first into a girl’s boobs? A group of boys peeking on the girls in the hotsprings episode but getting yelled at and slapped so it’s all okay b/c the girls can stand up for themselves (or not)? Female characters constantly talking about each others’ boobs and groping each other? Female characters being kidnapped and stripped and chained up naked and possibly tortured so that 40 year old animator and manga artists can get off on it? Burn it all. Sex and sex appeal and all that isn’t inherently bad, but jezus anime and manga cram a lot of it into inappropriate situations and in super sleezy, gross forms.
Characters acting like they need to dedicate their entire lives to the shit they said when they were 5 years old (aka, fantasies about girls’ physical and emotional purity because they’ve spent their entire lives in love with 1 person only)
Similarly, harems where a ton of girls fall in love with a dude because he’s like… kind of nice sometimes. That, and the reverse of where there’s a million girls all in love with the same guy because he’s emo and brooding and mean (we all know I’m talking about Sasuke and Tobey Maguire in Spider Man 3)
Characters who want to say something important (usually confessing their feelings), starting to say it, and then going, “…No… It’s nothing” *fake smile*
A never ending series of massive villain and hero powerups. Oh, you just beat a villain who could blow up the entire earth? Well this next bad guy can blow up the whole solar system. And then the next guy can blow up the whole galaxy! (cue training arc and/or massive gifted powerup.) Ya can’t substitute good writing and an interesting plot with characters who can destroy an increasingly large number of buildings or planets or galaxies.
Oh, and here’s another related one. Where the main character scarifies his abilities to temporarily gain the power to defeat the bad guy who was so overpowered that there was no other way to defeat him. Aaaaaaand then he gets his powers back 1 or 2 arcs later with no long term consequences for the supposed sacrifice. (Looking at you, Bleach.)
Overly complicated attempts at philosophical depth that don’t actually mean anything and barely even relate to the plot. “This world is but a hollow egg, propped up by a sea of roses with thorns that are built from the hearts of men who dream of honey but can’t grasp the apple before them…” *Followed by 5 more minutes of back and forth debate delivered through abstract symbolism and then the villain and MC sword fight.* Symbolism is real and can be done well and with genuine meaning behind it, but a lot of the time there’s just nothing actually there. Plus, symbolism is something you show. You can’t just have a dude say metaphors about apples and dreams for 5 minutes and have it count.
This one’s actually a bit more serious IMO. You know the whole Naruto/Sasuke dynamic? The one where person A and person B are friends, and then person B decides to do horrible things and hurt everyone around them but person A still views them as a friend no matter what? Yeah not a fan. Friendships aren’t a contract where once you call someone a friend once you need to be their friend for the rest of your life and tear yourself apart trying to help them. It sets bad expectations to kids about what friendship is when they think that their friends will continue to want to spend time with them and see them as their friend regardless of how shitty they’re being.
