/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>25261252
>Can westerners make something similar to these?
Of course they can, and they did. In the 80s/90s/early 00s ASCII/ANSI artwork had similar levels of polish.

It just mostly died out for multiple factors, mainly from technological progress:
1. As it became the norm for computers and websites to process images files within discussion areas, there was no longer nearly the incentive to stick to text art for artistic expression.
2. Since you could use images, text art was increasingly seen as just spam and isolated on forums/imageboards, which limited the audience/appeal of it.
3. For ASCII online, websites began to increasingly use custom font settings, breaking older art and demotivating others from making new art. You can see this clearly on this thread in the posts which use the SJIS tag and those which don't.
4. Mobile sites, and cellphones in general, break most complex ASCII art by using some degree of text reflow, eliminating consistent word wrapping and character position.

The main why SJIS art is still made to some degree on 2ch/5ch is because the site's UI is literally stuck in the 90s, has no image support, and there is the expectation that newer changes won't break the desktop support for SJIS.