Who Am Ii?

Okay, upon further review, this looks even less like me than I even thought. Oh, how I hate you, avatar creation systems.

Don't let the ambiguity of internet text fool you; I really do have a hatred of avatar creation. Especially in the case where I'm trying to make anything that resembles a real human being. I actually have a bit of a reputation among my siblings for having a Mii on our family Wii system that looks nothing like me, despite my repeated claims that it does. For that reason, I gave it another go for this assignment. Sure enough, my Mii again looks absolutely nothing like me!

So who's fault is it? Mine? The Mii creator system? I'm gonna go ahead and say it's a little bit of both. I've always had no sense of what I look like, as strange as that may seem. I was never able to draw myself back when I was young enough to not be completely embarassed by my lack of drawing skills, and every avatar I've ever created looks only a tiny bit like me. I'm a skinny white boy with medium length hair; From there, I don't really know where to go. I learned from this assignment that I have really small eyes, which I kinda tried to replicate in the avatar. I also tried to use a facial expression that I use often in real life when I saw it as an option for the mouth, but it just made me look upset about everything, and I saw myself as a bit more happy than that. I ended up going with a straight face, which is pretty much how I feel about avatars as a whole.

The Mii creator is also at fault here. Designed to be very simplistic, the Mii creator program is very limited, and I've never seen a Mii that looks exactly like the person it's supposed to represent. There are no realistic eyes, the facial expressions are amazingly exaggerated, and it takes a large amount of tinkering to make a face with the proportions of a normal human face. Also, for me, my hair style simply isn't represented in the creator, so I had to go with a more bowl-cut look, which would have been a bit more accurate in middle school but not right now. Using the Mii creator to make cartoon characters can actually be really fun, as I learned from trying to do so in extreme teenage boredom, but for making humans it is kind of horrible.

So, if I'm so bad at making avatars of humans, and the Mii creator isn't good for it, why do I continue to do it? Well, in this case, I just wanted to run an experiment on myself, but also, the image of me is still the image I want to portray across the internet. Pretending to be something else is a really strange concept to me. The closest I ever came to this was using a green skin color for my avatar on a game called VMK, but that was really only because I thought it would be cool to use the only non-normal skin color. In all other cases, I represent my own gender, race, and image (to the extent that I can recreate it.) Perhaps, if I were to critique myself, I can do this without issue because, at least in the USA, I have the features of those associated with power: white males. But also, I just want to be myself in all contexts, and see where I fit in. For example, I've never been one for "badass"-type imagery, so in a game called Toribash, whose tagline is "Violence Perfected," my avatar had the head of... Nemo. As in Finding Nemo. Again, I didn't stray from who I was: I love Finding Nemo, and I'm totally a kid at heart. I couldn't have put my own face on my avatar, so I used something that still represented me. I can't really explain why I have this need to try to show who I really am at all times, but it's present for sure.