Randomly got notifications of actvity in this thread yesterday and saw in the reactions tab (I use that when watched threads stop pinging me with activity cause it's right there) people were rating shit I forgot I saw years ago on google images of all places while looking up shit like map info for games I was playing at the time and shit involving characters from video games in general. 8 years... Nightmarish this stuff is still around if not possibly worse lmao.
I usually see this in people who are into extreme forms of BDSM and basically roleplay as mindless submissive beings all day on Discord. They get off on being so heavily degraded that they're no longer regarded as anything other than an object and transformation is just a means to give them their degraded form.
Jesus christ that's depressing. Also horrifying but mainly depressing. Usually if people feel like they deserve being degraded to nothing or whatever they either get therapy or commit suicide. Combining extremely fucking sad self image with the porn addiction is how this shit happened I guess but still it's fucking sad.
Anyways, on to the thing I was going to post initially.
An insurmountable amount of media in the 80s-2000s had some form of transformation related stuff in it and it mostly just completely predates these fuckers that get off to it and make these horrible images their whole thing. Might've said that at some point earlier way back when this thread started but I can't remember. I don't think I explained though what I noticed about these compared to the examples of ""similar"" shit in media before the rise of this specific shit though, and reminded again about all this, I 'm going to do what I always do and leave a rambling message late at night while I'm almost fully awake mentally.
So, what I've noticed is with the Stuff everyone likes, the blatantly non-fetish shit, the cool shit. It's got around 3 or 4 different forms it takes.
1: Quick blink and you miss it stuff.
Usually shit like goku abruptly going SS in DBZ or Ranma with the water shit for anime examples, and visual gags in western stuff like a guy's head turning into a donkey for a sec because he realizes he got a jackass made of himself. It's meant to be used as a kinda punchy thing for either "oh shit" or "lol, lmao" type energy depending on what media it is.
2: Meticulous shit of varying yet still pretty quick-ish overall speeds
Almost always used to showcase some form of mode-change or alteration. Any tokusatsu ever, transformers, magical girl anime, ratatoing suit up sequence, many use this. It's not always a direct physical change thing but the general overall usage of it is to showcase flair of some kind to the viewer to tell them that "action is coming.... I promise you...". Usually works well for that. If you REALLY wanted to you could make 2 separate categories for these which is why I said "3 or 4" but they seem to just pretty much be universally used for the same exact thing which is why I'm grouping both the suit up and mass shifting for robots/vehicles shit in the same boat here. Also used for visual gags that require a bit more timing, specifically a " simmer before the bang" to pull off more or less.
3: SLOW, ANTAGONIZING BODY HORROR.
ALIEN, THE THING, THE FLY. EVERY ZOMBIE MOVIE EVER.
MR. HYDE FROM THE PAGEMASTER PUT THE FEAR OF DEATH IN SMALL CHILD ME.
This one's pretty fucking self explanatory. It's slow and detailed, specifically to showcase the "wrongness" of it all and instill a kind of terror in the mind of what that'd probably feel like if it happened to you, or if you witnessed it happen to someone and then you end up being killed by whatever was once your friend or family. Long enough to be there and instill enough dread, but not long enough to become boring.
Fetishist shit from the last 2 decades or so cherrypicks bits and bobs to ape off from all 3 of these, but there is a certain "wrongness" that's sometimes instantly recognizable. It's like a skinwalker version of the trope more or less. The long, agonizing things are framed as good and wholesome end results that sometimes involve sex, The fast things lack the punch aspect, and the meticulous things spend too much time focusing on each part of the process. A lot of those miss actually putting in the logic of what would work out visually most of the time. It's just "oh no! i'm inexplicably inflating again!" tier shit. Or I guess in the context of the fucking splatoon textwall jpegs I witnessed 8 years back that never left my mind because of how fucking horrid they were "His spine popped and his squid dick inverted". This isn't even getting into the artstyle shit. Dear god, the artstyle shit. This post is getting too fucking rambly but fuck me man I just re-witnessed unintentionally hilarious horrors from a few years close to a decade ago now and NOTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN SOMEHOW. I mean, there's the whole "current year" politics flavor shit slathered over it now but that's just infested everything, and these fuckers would 100% be the first to exploit it to their advantage.
