First photo: immaturity, longing for status.

Second photo: maturity, longing for happiness.

Anyone old enough to call it an avatar?

I'd respect it if she wasnt the literal worst girl.

Once cringe, always cringe.

I’ve never been weeb enough to use an anime girl for my avatar.

Another day of weebs trying to vindicate themselves within the gamer community smh my face

I have a particular term for certain kinds of edginess I just call “Shadow the Hedgehog writing”, where it’s more likely to come from a teenager trying to seem grown up/cool than an actual adult.

Plenty of anime/VNs have fallen in this category, giving early content warnings that the content will be dark; and then just having non sequitor turnouts like “And then the heroine stepped in a trap that severed her spine. She screamed for hours, praying for help, but none came.”

There’s a particular game whose name rhymes with “Tomato” that did this for me once. You bring some children to safety, and then go fight the attackers sending tanks after them. I came back to the kids, joking to myself “Sorry, hero, it’s too late; we already drowned in our own fear and sadness…!” And then I laughed out loud when my joke turned out right.

Worst part is, there is some grim and depressing stuff in the world, and yet so many grimdark writers don’t see any nuance in it.

People have inferiority complex when they're young so they feel they need to brag with how "badass" they are.

When you're older you understand that true wisdom is in the little things, in the things that don't look like much but make up a healthy society.

I've used the same pfp which is a photo of myself with a funny mask since 2007.

I wanted a pfp of what I wanted to be and now it is what I am. I wanted to be read as cool but now I have Many from Honzuki no Gekokuji, because I love literature and I see myself as a small girlie.

I feel called out.

The first pfp I used was a cropped FF Advent Children walkpaper of Cloud with sunglasses.

I still use Panty from Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt in some places. In other places I have an anime style OC character from a game I was developing (for which I lost the code to a hard drive crash). Some places have my photo (which I regret).

Now I use a photo of my cats.

I don't think I have a pfp on Lemmy

Nah, nothing really changed. Your profile picture is just an aspirational version of your ideal self.

You went from wanting to be a strong army guy at 11 to a cute girl at 23.

When young, want grow up. When grow up, want be young. Simples.

embrace of the whimsy :)

Anon at 11: starting to be interested in girls his age.

Anon at 23: still interested in 11 year old girls.

my profile picture has always features some kind of creature with a fish's face. When I was a teenager it had a quiver of arrows and a hood because my favourite game was Thief, then later (moving on from pencil drawings to digital methods) it was holding a HKG3 because it was my favourite gun in CoD4. I like to think I mixed the edgelord and the whimsy at all times.

After all, what can be more edgy than being whimsical in a community of tryhards?

Forced, secretive estrogenization of TI's is a real thing

Bruh.

My PFP at 11 was a cube projection world map, and then I changed to a stylised graphic of a star. I have no idea what that says about me

At 40: a fat furry