a friend sent this picture and asked
>Is there a name for this genre of art? Like an overly detailed doomsday 20th century war?
this is downstream of harajuku subculture brands. jirai-kei / yami kawaii specifically if you just look at the general composition of the anime girl. but there is other stuff going on that is more like, they were inspired by that stuff and made something in a different cultural context. but idk if you were asking more generally cos there is a whole history lesson to pick apart in that piece lol.
the angle of overly detailed doomsday 20th century war? i dont know if there is a name for it. the moe military stuff kinda intersected with the cyberpunk/street wear look that has been popular in the past decade. and the op schizo stuff is probably entirely an american thing. but that is not to say there arent a lot of people going for this look because it seems like its a natural next step
so you had cyberpunk in the 80s. and then the west and japan recycled that forever. neon katakana script became cool in america. that kinda thing. and then you had ghost in the shell, battle angel alita, lain. this all took off here. and then that became cool again in the 2020s w cyberpunk 2077 as post-cyberpunk and what have you.
in the background you had nerds doing military moe stuff in japan. the girl is the weapon. (kancolle -> girls frontline -> arknights -> blue archive) and this inevitably crashed into streetwear and cyberpunk in the mainstream.
at the same time you had alt culture japan. you had gothic lolita that sublimated into the mental health crisis that was being grappled with. menhera stuff. sickly girls cute. (evangelion rei, lain -> yami-kawaii -> jirai-kei) this is where you get girls eating pills and cutting and ED and stuff as an anime subculture. yea its incestuous :-(
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in america here we had military surplus taking off in the second hand market. lots of this stuff was exported to japan as a style. i learned abt this from (name omitted). i think it started with some fashion week thing but it took off like wildfire. over time it became a part of street wear and esp in japan, who had largely stopped innovating with war since it became a crime with article 9 and disarmament and stuff. people were sick of war and their family members dying left and right. so it escaped into fiction. battleship yamato (1974) is a good example, literally resurrecting a sunken ship from ww2 but its okay now because its in space and not on the pacific ocean
so basically this all converged into this t-shirt. sorry this is not helpful in any way shape or form to answer your question but i had fun thinking about it
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anything i missed, anons?
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