he is my perfect darling and he can be YOURS TOO for the low low price of recognizing that he is a 30-something y2k goth who was forced to hellraiser peel his own mother and then travel the world as her ex-girlfriend's lackey
and ty for your interest!
honestly it's not the bright patterns specifically, the bright patterns are a symptom of something larger
so i can't speak for anon ofc but to me "arcade carpet michael" is using the aesthetic fanon representation of michael to talk about something broader
i know in s5 it was confirmed that the distortion's hallways are a dull beige and not a technicolor explosion, so more like the backrooms than the stranger things video game levels many people were picturing (i, personally, have always pictured the hallways as being warm fleshy tones, with thick humid air and orange/brown/red lighting. i think this comes from michael asking jon if his hand in any way owns his stomach. since i heard it say that i've always pictured it trapping its victims in an eternal hell maze as a prolonged digestive process, so the visual has always been very organic and meaty for me, like a digestive tract filtered through mc escher architecture, something that was never supposed to have human characteristics but does, now)
but for me my complaint isn't the color schemes or the clashing patterns, even though i do think that making a character wear checkerboard print and stripes is a lazy shorthand for saying they're "zany"
my complaint is that michael is described, specifically and often, as being difficult to look at. it is, after all, a distortion. trying to see it hurts your brain. it's supposed to hurt your brain! it probably hurts your brain less than half as much as it hurts michael to be seen at all, because it isn't even supposed to have a michael shape. it is meant to be an impossible door, and here it is with this new appendage, living inside and beside and adjacent to it
sasha describes its terrifying, ungainly, spindly, meaty, enormous, boney hands, and this has somehow been fanon-ized into sexy salad fingers (i'll be honest if people's fanon depictions of michael were MORE like salad fingers i would be much happier about it)
the vast majority of michael art i encounter is just a very attractive, thin, tall, blonde, white man with very long hair. the indication that he has been consumed by an eldritch entity of lovecraftian delusion is that this thin, tall, blonde, white man with very long hair is wearing a loud shirt
and i personally cannot draw at all, so that is the grain of salt with which i would ask you to take my fan art complaints. i am just a guy looking at fanart who is incapable of producing any himself. but i have written about michael a lot, so i am personally committed to representing it as the throat of delusion incarante using my own preferred medium.
tdlr; michael is a character meant to be a perverse approximation of a person whose very presence in your field of vision gives you migraines and people instead draw him as a pretty, willowy man wearing clashing patterns
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