Same Face Syndrome?

I honestly don't care about SFS since I've pretty much accepted it as artistic stylistic choice. You can tell when it's an intentional choice when the artist is able to diversify characters from different age groups or ethnicity (ex. Disney and Ghibli characters can all look very similar depending on their age group)

The thing is... it's not that weird for people to look alike IRL either? So why is it such a big deal in art? People mix up Jpop/Kpop idols, American models and actors all the time, and it's usually only the fans who remember who's who in a group of people who are all conventionally pretty/same ageish. If you're making a series to appeal to that kind of demographic, you're gonna go with what face types people enjoy looking at.

I'm not defending lack of diversity or any of that, I just think people overlook that SFS is very often a valid stylistic choice and not just laziness (depending on the artist in question, anyways).

I don't actually mind sameface that much.
I do like and appreciate art styles that give characters unique features (and I am aiming to develop a style like that myself), but it's not an absolute requirement for me. IMO it's one of the less important problems an artist can have in their work.

Having multiple characters in a work that share similar hairstyles, body type and clothes is a problem. But this can happen even if their faces aren't identical. On the other hand, I do not mind characters having the same face/eye shape/body type as long as they have enough other differing characteristics, and hair and clothes are included in that - in most anime, comics, or other media, you're not really going to see the character bald and naked a lot, right?

I think many people, when they say "same face syndrome" they actually mean something more like "same expression syndrome". If you can only draw like 5 expressions and put exactly the same expressions on every character, that is lazy.

For me personally, it's always been a struggle trying to find facial/body/etc. differences that look okay in my style while also still looking like a human being. I've also found it's a lot harder than I think it is actually conveying those differences in a way that's noticeable to other people, lol. I like to think I'm getting better at it, but it's definitely tricky!

That said, I'm not really bothered by same face syndrome as long as I can easily tell which character is which. If the characters also happen to have similar hairstyles or clothes, then yeah, it can get really distracting trying to remember who is who, lol.

It may be harsh, but if I mix up characters more than once or twice, I stop reading (that's for main characters obviously, not secondary characters we have not seen in a while).
I think it's one of the most essential things, to make characters distinctive enough. But I don't mind so much if it's only the faces that are very similar, as long as the difference can be made another way (by hairdo, clothes, etc...).

As for me, I have the opposite problem, I have a hard time making characters who are supposed to be of the same ethnicity look similar enough.

It depends on what media I'm getting into, and how intense it is. There are some comics (web and print) where the characters have the same face and nearly the same hairstyles, and man! It bugs me! Although I'm more forgiving of Eastern stuff, and amateur creators than Western professionals. Probably because I expect them to know better, (From what I've heard Japanese comic/animation artists tend to parrot other anime/manga styles rather than learning to draw from seeing actual people, but this could be a misconception given how long ago I heard it) a good case of me being irked by SFS in something is Frozen. Anna, Edna...or whatever her name was, and their mom all shared literally the same face, no visual difference in age or anything! The people working on them even stated that they kept them like that because "animating women is hard because you need to keep them looking pretty.2"
Disney being a giant, monstrous, world ruling corporation. I felt the people they hired should have known better.

The lenience I have with Eastern stuff also comes from the fact that I'm a tad bias, being someone who used to be a total weeb, and who drew animu SFS bullshit. Really, what is considered SFS could also depend on the person. Some people think you have it if you don't diversify your character designs to the point of almost being different styles, other's genuinely have trouble distinguishing faces.

Even now I still get some people having trouble distinguishing my characters apart. The last person who had trouble saying the couldn't tell my characters Brandon and Daniel apart.

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Which I can see how some people would be confused. Most of my characters are cis-male crackerjacks with dark hair.

Overall if I have a really hard time telling characters apart, and/or I feel the creators should know better from a professional standpoint, the SFS bothers me. Other than that I don't care too much.

I think its a problem with anime because everyone looks the same style wise. You got generic anime girl with long blue hair #3125, you got generic anime dude with brown hair #577574545. An anime with a unique art style and interesting characters makes its less jarring than something generic.

A for me I personally don't care, it only becomes a problem when its clear the artist has no concept of anatomy. Like those artists who want to draw elderly characters that end up looking like a teenage meth user lol

My opinion on the mater is still pretty much the same.

I REALLY liked it as a kid. For me it was just.... really great that side characters like 'the nerd', 'the Asian™', 'the dumb guy' were all allowed to look just as normal or gasp, pretty as the main character. I absolutely hated series where only the lead looked 'ideal' and everyone else didn't, sometime they didn't even even have normal human like proportions (fat characters with impossibly small legs for example) more often then not the character designs VERY often fell into both stereotypical and racist character designs =/

I hated it... I just... hated it so much.

SFS as a problem when it IS ACTUALLY a problem, I don't like when I run into it and it makes reading or watching a series confusing (HONESTLY THOUGH, I run into this issue a LOT more often watching American Live Action shows, NOT comics and animation), but I don't seem to run into it as often (in animation) as other people do, and honestly I often find that it is very over-diagnosed, especially in smaller creators, and especially for Asian media. Which can be... kinda maybe a little bit racist... I mean I still have to deal with white people telling me they can't tell me apart from the other Asians in work/meeting/gatherings because we all look the same... even though we very clearly do not (it's sometimes suggested that 'the Asians' should wear name tags)

Like if you're posting a bunch of FF characters and claiming SFS in SquareEnix game BUT you got Kairi from KH1 next to Lightening from FF13 on that list then you can fk right off.

I think the only thing that concerns me when it comes to SFS is if it takes me out of the experience. I want to enjoy the story, get involved with the plot, characters, etc. but if I can’t tell anyone apart - that’s a problem. I don’t think I should have to spend a long time trying to flip back and forth a book (or rewinding the film) trying to figure out “wait is that character A or B? They look like twins.” Because if making the story hard to understand/get into isn’t the author’s intention, it’s a mistake. If all your characters have the same facial structure and you can only distinguish them by their hair color, dialogue, and clothes, I couldn’t care less. In fact, good on you for being able to distinguish your characters in a non-superficial way!

I think it's definitely a problem, or more a symptom of a problem. The mindset that causes it is pretty bad for you, if you're trying to get better. Mixing up the facial features like the jaw shape, nose shape and even the way the eyes are drawn can help immediately. Even the shape of the eyebrows should be considered when you're drawing a character's face.

Same face syndrome happens when as artist gets stuck in a rut of "this is what a face looks like" while drawing. If you try drawing real people from life you'll actually start picking up new features and details as you do so and you'll find your characters start to vary as well. The bigger issue of not studying from life can lead to all kinds of other art problems like whitewashing, boring character design and creative fatigue. You can't expect to find much inspiration if you're not looking at or referencing anything while you work.

You can argue that it's an "art style choice" but it's not a smart art style choice. It's a choice that limits your learning and growth. You can argue that you want your characters to be "attractive" but there are so many ways to be attractive that this isn't even a valid defence.

There's no shame in being at an early stage in learning to draw faces, but thinking it's alright to draw faces to be the same all the time is a trap. You'll end up drawing yourself into a corner.

actually, the SFS is a serious issue because the face is an important part of the character design. it is the main part of the body one remembers and gets more information from.
i think it is caused when one just has learned how to draw a face but hasn't learned how faces are constructed and/or they go with the mentality of "this is my style and i won't change it".
The solution for this can be, drawing people from the real life, or from mangas or comic you like, and see how their faces differs from others, like faces more circular, others more sharp, the shape of the eyes, and what kind of characters have what kind of face

Something that comes to mind is that the more realistic the style, the more opportunity there is to differentiate faces, and vice versa - the more simple a style is, the more everything will tend to look the same out of necessity since a lot of the small details that could make different faces unique get omitted.

One way to avoid SFS with simple styles is to base the faces off of different shapes (e.g. circle for one person, square for another, triangle for another - like Phineas and Ferb). But manga-style artists generally base their design off of a foundation of real anatomy rather than a foundation of abstract shapes (you could say that is a defining trait of manga styles), which eliminates this option.

Therefore I think SFS is almost unavoidable for simple manga/anime styles and not necessarily a problem if you can still easily tell the characters apart via their other features.

If I saw a really detailed style that still had SFS though I'd probably think it was pretty off-putting, even if the characters are recognizable in other ways.

Personally I kinda try to avoid it, not because I think it's bad, but because I feel like including different face types is an opportunity to make my art stand out and come across as less manga-ey.

I used to have that issue when I first started the original version of my comic, which never saw the light of day. But, even as the artist, I couldn't tell them apart. That's how bad it was.
I know that my faces for the main characters, have the same face syndrome, except the boys who have their own face syndrome going on there. It wasn't on purpose.
But, I can honestly say that you can identify each character with other characteristics.

I mostly agree with @A_Toad that the extent to which this is jarring really depends on the style. There are some styles where SFS is basically unavoidable, since the faces of characters have been distilled to their absolute most basic shapes while still being recognizable as a human face.

But the closer the creator's style approaches realism, even idealized realism where all the characters are intentionally drawn like supermodels- the more it bothers me. Probably for the same reason jarring anatomy weirdness combined with a more realistic style is bothersome? I think it might be evoking some uncanny valley type of cognitive dissonance. Like if you're not somebody with face blindness or a similar pre-existing condition (in which case I can't speak for that experience of the world)...sitting in a room with a group of people who all have strikingly similar faces that all move in the exact same way and have the exact same mannerisms...would be really creepy.

So I suspect a similar thing happens when you're looking at a comic where the style leans towards realism, but all the characters look and act very samey, like one person wearing different wigs and clothing. Not only does it break immersion...it's a little disturbing on a deeper level.

I've only gotten that feeling from a handful of comics.

I think it tends to happen when there's either 1) A mismatch between the creator's skillset and the level of realism they're aiming for...or 2) It's some kind of externally imposed quirk of the genre that is in fashion at the time, because the creator is imitating the look of a specific actor/actress/model/musician or maybe even another creator's style? (and the "sameness" comes from the fact that it's an imitation, or their dependence on tracing is becoming a crutch, rather than having their own developed style)

It has seemed to me like more of a problem for creators who depend heavily on 3d models of characters, which they may or may not paint over? My knowledge of creating believable 3d characters is basically zero, so I can't speak to that too much...

When it's a more cartoony style with a lack of variety in character design, I feel that's not so much creepy as disappointing. There is so much that can be done to make characters not constrained by realism different from each other that lack of variety there hints at lack of imagination.

I worry about SFS and really try not to have it....but man I worry about having SFS... then again some of the best artists I know have huge huge huge problems with SFS, no one criticizes their art for this.

Personally I find the only thing being wrong is just originality. So i'm not exactly sure.