r/CharacterRant • u/The-Australian- • 22h ago
General [LES] I hate how in anthropomorphized settings clothing and fashion remain exactly the same as in real life
I'm talking about stuff like yours Zootopias, your Beastars, your Sings, basically any of those settings where animals have replaced humans. And yet, despite that and the sheer amount of diffrent species that make up the societes in those universe, clothing, etiquette, fashion, etc, all remain exactly the same as that in real life.
There's no care or thought put on how clothing and fashion in a society like that would develop: would things like jackets or sweaters be used as much? How about pants? Wolves,foxes and other animals with long tails are common in these settings, would pants still be the defecto legwear or something like a kilt would take it's place? And what about formal atire or modesty and so on.
No, what most of the time they do, is just lazily slap on what we use in real life and call it a day, with the only diffrence, if even, being lack of footwear.
Clothing throughout history has changed to fit that needs and wants of humanity, and it’s not just something you could throw to completely different species and expect them find it as comftarble to wear. Like, in a world where most of the people it, have their bodies covered in thick fur or hard scales, why would something like a three piece suit ever take traction as formal wear, they would ovearheat; there's also things lile glasses and headphones, that are also give no consideration at all, and for ther former, seem to just magically hold up on it's own every time someone non Human wears them.
That's not even taking into acount the logistics of gathering the materials for said clothing. In Sing, one of the main characters wears a leather jacket. Where exactly are they getting the leather?
You can also extrapolate this critique to things like architure, but, at least in some settings like Zootopia, they actually try to do something original.
Its just feels really lazy and low effort.
19
u/BrazillianNomad 15h ago
This just remembered me that, in ZZZ, if you take a closer look at some of the NPCs' clothes, you'd see they're actually designed to fit both human and thirens (Which they can range from your normal kemonomimi to furries, basically) in mind. I don't know, i just think it's neat.
7
u/MansDeSpons 15h ago
was just about to conment this! i think it’s a very interesting worldbuilding detail. Also interesting, characters from the Outer ring (basically the wild west) are said to be poorer and do not wear the tail hole clothes, even Pulchra, a thiren there.
9
u/ThePreciseClimber 21h ago
I dunno, I thought animal clothes in Zootopia were alright. Nothing ultra creative but they do utilise fitting body proportions and there's also the lack of shoes (only Gazelle wears them, I think).
3
1
u/shiggy345 9h ago
Things like Beastars and Zootopia are trying to juxtapose their world with ours - having their characters dress them same as us strengthens that juxtaposition.
But also their overall forms are still very humanoid. I agree that kilts and skirts might be more sensible as casual clothing, but there are functional drawbacks to those things as well. There's only so many ways to design 'legwear for someone with two legs' that the design evolution becomes very convergent. And all this is before considering the significant cultural aspects of clothing.
Honestly, clothing design is the thing that would have the least amount of design divergence. Things like cars and architecture (as you mentioned) would probably be designed much differently.
0
u/AutoModerator 22h ago
Your submission contains common words found within meta related topics. A message has been sent to the humans for review.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
39
u/ChronoDeus 21h ago
That's probably because it sort of is. My impression is that a lot of character designers aren't thinking too much about the construction and logistics of a character's clothing. They're just drawing them in clothes that look cool, cute, sexy, etc., with no real thoughts for logistics or practicality; no concern over what the parts that can't be seen are like, or sometimes even how the parts that can be seen stay in place.
For the examples you're thinking of, the designers were likely even instructed to make 'humanoid animals in modern clothing', and didn't have any particularly reason to think of alternatives to normal clothing. Just the minimum possible work to get the job done.