I am thinking again about the voltron merman yaoi somebody sent me where the font used for the signage was the iconic spongebob font and multiple other elements had clearly been taken from spongebob such as catching jellyfish in butterfly nets for fun
Editor’s note: They also eat hamburgers underwater at one point. The mechanics of this are never explained
they wanted their ship to visit bikini bottom. good for them?
have we ever told you about the spongebob yaoi comic we read as a teenager? it was incredible
it was a relic of its time. genuinely good art, op drew traditionally and could draw scarily quickly. remember watching streams and people always asked them if they had sped it up... when it was live. it was spongebob/squidward and they were like... extremely bishounenified and like... gijinka'd i guess? made to look more like humans but still retained some of their sea animal-ness. don't remember anything else about it but i think it was good actually. like, plotwise. as far as a teenager can gauge the quality of xir yaoi comics in 201x lol
Okay this is extremely interesting to me because there is a weirdly high incidence of SpongeBob fujos and yumes who are like… startling talented artists compared to most people who are hyperfocused on a western cartoon in that way, who no offense usually have a very crude style. I forget her name at the moment but a couple months ago my friend showed me someone who ships her OC with this edgy demon version SpongeBob and despite the inherent silliness of the content the craft was genuinely so impressive to me, you could tell an enormous amount of care and skill had gone into it.
IMO when you compare early SpongeBob to its contemporaries the characters, writing and art are truly a cut above anything else a kid would see on TV at that time; I think a lot of extremely sharp and creative people with a strong ability to appreciate those qualities probably imprinted on it at a very formative age.
That's IMMENSELY cool and I would love to see more art like that. I get what you mean about western cartoon art being more "crude" and I think we have AdultSwim to blame for that because for some reason cartoons had to look kind of ugly (or extremely ugly) in order to be viable shows for adults, I guess? I hate you America?
I think people also have an unfortunate kneejerk reaction of "this is too silly to take seriously" about some cartoons (but not all) and it's interesting how deeply that's tied to childhood/nostalgia because it's like. If you didn't continue to care about it into adulthood then I think the basic thought there (even if it's not directly in words even in your own mind) is like "this is for kids." I wish I was more coherent about this but it's something we think about a lot because we still like cartoons, lol.
We (very strangely) seem to not really remember Spongebob episodes the way it seems a lot of other people do so we don't have a lot to say personally about it but we do know people talk about like, how Spongebob handles certain topics really well especially for the time the original show was coming out. Someone we follow on cohost is super into spongebob (iykyk) and we've been osmosis learning a bit about modern spongebob and older spongebob too. Love to learn about things from other people who are so passionate about it. :) But yeah, the writing and the art and the characters are all things they talk about sometimes!
Sorry for the disorganized ramble, lol. (hits a cool pose)
