You see, whether you can draw like this or not, being able to think up this kind of design, it depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, girls like this exist in real life.” If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it.
Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people, you know. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!
:miyazaki-laugh:
To take things even further I think that the objectification, flanderization, comodification and "othering "of female characters in anime has resulted in it almost exclusively catering incels and otaku that see women (and disturbingly, underage girls) as dolls to fetishise.
Which is frustrating because there is good anime out there that isn't like this, but I can't really say I'm an anime fan without people thinking I'm into moe crap or otakus gatekeeping me because I don't like their moe crap.
I just wanna talk about how cool Full Metal Alchemist is...
This is also storytelling though. I don’t want to nitpick because everything you said was correct. But character design is part of telling the story through the “physical” looks of a character. Hence why the “main character hair” or “evil seductress” are such common tropes and their characteristics are often very obvious.
Sometimes the story subverts those tropes by having characters look but act a completely different way, but that’s not often.
Yes and it is even more complicated than that because anime is inherently a stylized representation of reality, without defining what "realistic" means where do you draw the line?
Think about all the anime in high school setting. Is it ok to have all the crazy hair styles and eye colors? Is it ok to have all the extravagant clothing? Is it ok to speak completely differently to how real teenagers speak in Japanese?
You go down the rabbit hole of what it means to design realistic people and the conclusion is you need far more nuance than is allowed for this meme imo. Sometimes it is done for storytelling reasons, sometimes it is done for pandering, sometimes it is a very particular art style a studio/director is known for.
If someone just wants straight up realism go watch a live action drama, but even those are full of tropes, Japanese dramas are also big offenders of this. The issue of "designing real people" is far far deeper discussion than just anime and otakus.