I'll cop to violating the ToS, but depth_bomb has gotten an exemption in the past due to the generally high quality of the art itself, and I'm the anti-guro rules have always struck me as a relic of the days before tag blacklisting and Safebooru.
Consider this a friendly reminder to blacklist guro.
People draw guro for the same reason people make gory movies and violent games. Gore has a visceral appeal, even though many people don't like to admit it. I mean really, videogames have gotten to the point where dismembering people like this is almost passe.
evazion said: People draw guro for the same reason people make gory movies and violent games. Gore has a visceral appeal, even though many people don't like to admit it. I mean really, videogames have gotten to the point where dismembering people like this is almost passe.
I think most people are just getting squimish when its their favorite characters getting Guro-d. You dont see people complaining about all those random enemies you chop to pieces in video games these days.
Tetsamaru said: I think most people are just getting squeamish when its their favorite characters getting Guro'd. You don't see people complaining about all those random enemies you chop to pieces in video games these days.
You make an interesting point. But how many of those enemies have even as much characterisation (or even defining characteristics) as, say, Satori here? There is a world of difference between a character you're supposed to like and become attached to and a character you're not supposed to even think of as a character. To give this better context, if they had fleshed out the backstory of every random goon you kill on Shadow Moses island and gave each of them a distinctive face, don't you think people would have played Metal Gear Solid differently?
The skill is (sort of) there, yes, but expecting people to remain objective about it or like it is nothing short of fallacy.
My main gripe with guro isn't that it may be considered offensive in any way. It's that i know the exact frame of mind that generates these images. No its not sociopathic, they dont have any interesting (not always) mental or emotional traumas and they're are not expressing something to make people think... theyre like me when i was aged 13-17... teenaged angst sort of shit.
I drew some pretty... no, make that excesively violent images involving exposed entrails and really meaty gashes, sometimes it was of characters i knew and sometimes it was fresh from my twisted imaginings. It was curiousity at best, exploring my thoughts on death and violence. Needless to say i kept it private... Last violent image i drew was particularily nasty (disembowling is messy... even on pencil and paper)
Then my mum found some of my "doodles" and many questions were raised and couple of soft bans on certain games were established, little did they know it was certain animes that developed my curiosity (akira, ghost in the shell, ninja scrolls,... the usual suspects)
Angst? what the heck is that, well to be serious I can't imagine angst is what draws ppl to guro. Personally any guro I like tends to have a misogynistic appeal. I'd love to say misanthropic to make it sound less nasty but in the context or ero stuff I can't claim I want to see guys in it too.
If it's been said, I blame my flimsy will to attention, but I think the big difference between guro art and videogame dismemberment is in detail and permanence. In a game, especially one involving ripping things up, the camera's likely zoomed out enough where you can't get a good look beyond "there's the body, there's a limb, and there's the red stuff between 'em", and even for games that will do dramatic zoom-ins, how many have anywhere near the detail you see in these static images, especially if it comes to internal organs? Even if it's a generic nobody, if it's drawn down and fleshed out, you get the impact much harder and potentially much longer than the red spray before your opponent fizzles into the ether.