Japanese design is full of small details
I want you to look at this example:
[img]https://images4.imagebam.com/e2/01/51/MES3SDX_o.jpg[/img]
Now, what's special about this girl? Well, her design. Three things:
1) She's 11 years old. The world she's living in is a post apocalyptic hell where even kids are forced to mature quickly in order to survive. Not only does this tell us that kids can actually mature really fast if they have to, it also shows a boldness in the design, to treat a kid like an adult. What I mean with this is that this girl, Amy, acts more mature than most adults do in the west today. It's all about how life shapes you.
2) She's wearing a thong. The image makes it pretty clear she's wearing thongs, because you can see how it rides up between her buttocks. So why a thong on an 11 year old? Isn't that perverted? Not necessarily. Thongs are adult underwear, but in a twisted world such as that where she lives in, where kids are forced to mature quickly to survive, she dress in adult clothes. It makes perfect sense.
3) She has a flabby butt. This might seem like some fetish stuff, but it's not. In the series, she's a computer geek. She gets absolutely zero exercise, as she only sits on her butt all day. Of course it's going to get flabby. It's not like it's big, you can clearly tell it's small like a kid's, but the way it's drawn, how it's squishing etc, makes it obvious that it's flabby.
All these three things is typical for Japanese design, where they give a lot of attention to small details. In western comics, characters tend to look vastly different from each other to make the reader be able to tell them apart. I mean, look at American superhero comics and most characters have different colors. Japanese people typically work with smaller details than very obvious ones such as color.
Are Japanese people smarter than western people, because they pay more attention to small details, rather than big, obvious details?