Proof that I am taking this 'Gaia Online user' thing too far? Well, that can be found in the fact that I have spent a ridiculous amount of virtual monies on ordering avatar art - that is, I have asked someone to draw a picture of one of my Gaia avatars and offered to pay them for the privilege. Yeah, I'm an idiot - but this puts me in line with a lot of other users who've done the exact same thing, and it still doesn't make me as bad as the subject of tonight's rant.

... yeah, you knew it was coming. Once again, Gaia Online users are idiots. Why so tonight? Because they pay vast quantities of play money to get people to draw pictures of the 'OCs' they made on an eLouai Dollmaker.

I first became aware of this phenomenon - as far as it involves a user going by the name of xXYumi-DonoXx, anyway - while hanging around and randomly posting in the sale thread for the artist I commissioned. I'd just posted to let her know I was going to start a trade so she knew I had the item I'd said I'd give her when another user came along and posted a commission request. This was despite the fact the artist had already stated she was swamped and wasn't really accepting at the moment. Still, Gaia users as an entity aren't exactly known for the quality of their reading comprehension skills, especially not when it comes to 'OMG OMG I WANT THAT', so that wasn't too surprising.

What was surprising, though? Well, that was the commission she was actually asking for:

... not that you'd know it just by looking at it. At first, it looked pretty much par for the course. If it had just been an avatar commission I'd probably not have given it a second thought - but it was an 'OC' commission and where Gaia users say 'OC' they almost inevitably mean 'Mary Sue'. Sometimes the Sue is a subtle one; more usually, though, it's not. This, of course, aroused the curiosity of the badfic sporker in me and, being a glutton for punishment, I decided I wanted to know a bit more about this 'Hina' character. I went to check out a few reference images.

Okay, so what I got from that was that 'Hina' was a really obvious Mary Sue of the 'shinyspeshul pretty princess' school.

What I also got from it, though, was that Hina looked familiar. Freakily so, given that I was damn sure I had never seen her before. For a while, I was stumped as to why this 'OC' should look so familiar. Then it struck me: she was a Candybar doll.

A bit of background here: for my own amusement, I use the Candybar Doll maker over at eLouai to create artist's impressions of the Weiss Kreuz Sues I've run across. There's no particular reason behind my doing this except that I find it funny, especially as I try as far as possible to stay true to the way their creators have described their new characters, and it's patently obvious that some of them didn't put any thought whatsoever into whether or not their new characters' totally awesome outfits or their own idea of attractive yet striking coloring would look good - or even remotely non-eye-burning - when they were all combined in the way they describe.

Which is where I realized I'd seen 'Hina' - or at least a part of her - before. I had created Mary Sue dolls which used her rather distinctive bright pink outfit before. In fact, I'd used it twice, the second time with a palette swap as it looked almost precisely like a black, vaguely kimono-styled 'party dress' a Suethor had described her own 'OC' as wearing during the inevitable formal ball sequence.

So, what we have here is a rather dispiriting piece of Suethor math:

Which, as anyone who has actually sat down to create a character from scratch will tell you, isn't how it goes at all. I can create a tiny handful of my own characters on the eLouai Candybar dollmaker, absolutely none of them come from my planned original works, and what comes out the other end for the few I can manage to create vague approximations of just does not look right. It doesn't even begin to match the person I see in my head. You shouldn't start with the Candybar doll and work from there: that way painfully generic Mary Suedom lies.

( Once again, I have proof. )

These aren't characters. Expecting an artist to draw these girls is like going up to an them and asking them to draw a Barbie, then claiming she's not just a Barbie doll - her name is actually Sakura, and she's a cherry blossom fairy! I feel incredibly sorry for the artists who had to sit down and draw these hideous OCs - especially for the hapless artist who first drew them, who was handed a 'reference image' created in ten minutes on Candybar and told that this was what they had to draw and by the way she's a headstrong butterfly princess and that sparkly thing in her hand is actually a fan. It's a credit to the artists that any of them managed to do so as well as they did - but, no matter how carefully they work, no matter how painstakingly they concentrate on getting the details of these girls' hair and dresses precisely right, no matter how many Photoshop filters they expertly use, they're still drawing a Candybar doll for play money - and they can't even change their outfits.

They're having to struggle to bring to life, on paper, a character who has no life in her in the first place. These characters have no life in them because all three of them are just a flimsy set of 'characteristics' carefully selected to be adorable first and foremost and human a very poor second pasted on top of the Internet equivalent of a paper doll, then given a back story a Disney Princess would be ashamed of.

I know we've all got to start somewhere - but this isn't even a start. Even the worst Weiss Kreuz Suethor has more creativity than this.