Agreed. Her personal artstyle is ugly as shit.
I'm gonna be a huge cartoon sperg here say that I kind of dig Sugar's ugly style. It's ugly in a very interesting way, at least. Her short "Singles" is worth a look, if only for being so trippy conceptually.
Then again, I was raised on some very purposefully ugly cartoons, mostly Ren and Stimpy (and so was Sugar, for that matter). For whatever reason, a lot of her personal style reminds me of the What a Cartoon! short "Tales of Worm Paranoia," which is downright horrifying but I also kind of love it. Glenn Kennedy put out a lot of ugly cartoons himself, but he really went above and beyond to make that ugliness really intricate instead of how usually lazy it was. Very Ren and Stimpy influenced, but still has enough of that Kennedy herky-jerkiness.
Compare with what Kennedy's most well known for: the dreaded kick-dance.
Rory, on the other hand, is drawing from Sugar's stylistic ugliness and Pendleton Ward's simplistic shapes without having any knowledge of their influences, and ends up with the worst of both worlds. She'd do better to study up on the UPA cartoons of the 50's and 60's that influenced cartoonists like Craig McCracken, Genndy Tartakovsky and Butch Hartman (and man oh man, did they EVER influence Butch Hartman) to better get a feel on making appealing character designs using simple shapes. Either that, or she should just go full ugly and start putting out some R. Crumb or Basil Wolverton-looking shit. Ugly and appealing is possible, but you can't half-ass it. And she's not pulling off the ugly-cute that she seems to be aiming for, which would be more like Thurop Van Orman's Flapjack.
Side note on Thurop: the dude
favorites literally every piece of Flapjack fanart on DeviantArt. Yes, even the slash stuff, and the poorly drawn anime. Everything. Regardless of quality. He just loves getting fanart. Meanwhile, Rory looks down her nose at somebody who asks her an honest question in a tone she doesn't like.
Long story short, Rory needs to study more animation history and broaden her pool of influence if she wants to be as good as she thinks she is.
