A Nonsense Ramble (Pixiv Fanbox)

Honestly, this is gonna be a stream of consciousness ramble, where the topic isn't really set in stone and is just me rambling about a couple of things interspersed with some pictures of DOA girls. The first topic of which is actually this whole thing. Sorta. I just hit 100k followers, and it's one of those things that's just kinda... strange to me. Didn't really expect to make it this far, and get that many people following me. On one hand, I see it and just see a number and go "okay", but on the other hand it's like "that many people know of my stuff?" It's just weird all around. I'm not really caught up in numbers and all that since basing your worth on numbers on a screen is a self-destructive tendency, but every now and then I see a number like that and get that sort of out of body experience where it just doesn't quite compute. That said, I do occasionally get uptight about posting my stuff as I've grown more popular. I mentioned it before, but I do get this underlying sense of needing to one-up myself. "Since I mostly do pretty formulaic animations, what if now is where people start losing interest?" It's that sort of feeling, and just knowing thousands of people are going to see it. It's not too common, but it crops up now and then.

It is interesting to see what ends up becoming my most popular stuff and what doesn't do nearly as well. Some of the stuff I think is my best work isn't necessarily what others consider to be my best work. I've tried predicting what will and won't be popular as I post stuff, but it's a shot in the dark. Even after posting my stuff this long, I never can quite predict what will and won't be a hit. Some of the stuff I'm really happy with don't do nearly as well as the stuff that I'm just ambivalent or even unsatisfied with.

Case in point, my most popular post is the one with my very first Aerith animations. Those were some of the most half-assed animations I've made. In fact, I don't even like those three and they're probably some of my least favorite animations I've done. I had many issues while making them, I don't like the body I used, there's too much subsurface scattering so the skin looks gross, lighting is flat, there's too much bloom, scene was just whatever I had on hand, body texture doesn't really match with the face texture to the point the color is off... I could go on. Yet people really liked them - some people even want more stuff along those lines, but I do not like them. I've had more people realize the Yuffie animations were pretty half-assed, but I'm actually more content with those than those Aerith ones.

In fact, you wanna know how half-assed those Aerith animations were? I was literally working on an Ascendant One Iris animation set at that time. Aerith's model was ripped when I had one done, so I just copy-pasted the animation of an Iris animation I was working on at the time, edited it a little, and then added onto it a bit and that was that. Here, see for yourself: https://gofile.io/d/biP4QD

Admittedly, I don't put a ton of effort into my animations to begin with. The two I probably put the most effort into were the Lunafreya + Iris animation, and the Marie Rose + NiCO animation. To the point I felt a bit crazy when making those. It's why I haven't really done anything similar to those two since the Marie + NiCO one. Sure, I did the threesome with Luna and Gentiana and then the Honoka and Marie Rose, but there were no insertion scenes, or pull-outs, or swapping between them. Just straight cuts. The transitions are a huge chunk of where the effort goes into, since the loops themselves are nowhere near as difficult to do. On top of that, threesome stuff is just more difficult than one-on-one, since you have to take into consideration the action and reaction of three individuals instead of just two. It's not as simple as saying 3 characters is 50% more work than 2 characters. It's usually more like double the work, if not triple the work in some cases.

I've kinda lost the point of all this, not that there was much point to it to begin with, but in the end this is all weird to me. Fun, but weird. I am happy and grateful that people like my stuff, it's just I can never really predict what people will actually like, so I'll just continue to make whatever I want in the end lol. And sorry for the long, scatter-brained ramble. If nothing else you got a bonus animation and some pics out of it.

Also, the poll is really close. Yesterday there was a three-way tie, and today it's close enough that a few votes in one of four character's way could swing it. There is a narrow leader right now, but it could change at any point.