one thing I’m realizing is that the majority of people under the age of 24 pursuing “the arts” are just cobbling together influences from random softboy cartoons and video games and very few of them outside the ones I work with have any artistic inclination at all. I don’t think any of them understand that art and cartoons are two completely different things. I am constantly hurled into manic depression by just seeing their output as an endless incoherent mosaic of Steven Universe / Undertale / Cuphead / Hazbin Hotel because their Skyrim modder parents just handed them an iPad in their infancy before leaving for work to zone out forever at their job shift managing a GameStop or Best Buy. Not just that: every character in any given story has some incredibly Nonbiney name like “Spike” and they have to pigeon hole every contributor’s OC (usually a random anthro character with a weird sex thing?) into their works to prevent the in-group suicide rate from cresting 40%. If it were up to me I would force them all to do pottery at gunpoint until they figured out that if Stephen from Stephen’s Universe existed in our world his fat ass would get pistol whipped until he learned to be off putting and mysterious from his traumas like a real man