Using Panty and Stocking Profile Pictures Online
Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt is a Studio Gainax anime from 2010 that got a cult following for its animation style and crude humor. The two main characters, Panty and Stocking Anarchy, are angelic dead girls who hunt demons. Their designs are simple enough that they work well as profile pictures across different platforms. You can find high-quality stills from the show on sites like Reddit's r/pantyandstocking, the official wiki, and imageboards. The show had only 13 episodes before being cancelled, which means the total amount of screencaps is limited. That limitation actually helps your cause, since there aren't endless iterations to sort through. You want a clear shot where their faces are visible and not cropped weirdly. When I first started using these, I ran into a problem with Discord and Twitter's compression. Both platforms re-encode your image aggressively, which turns the show's bold line art into muddy blobs. The workaround was simple: I started cropping to the head and shoulders, saving at 120 DPI instead of 300, and using PNG format instead of JPEG. This kept the lines crisp even after the platform did its compression pass. Twitter's algorithm especially hates flat-colored anime art because it sees the color bands as compression artifacts and goes to town on them.
There are a few character-focused options. Panty's short blonde hair, red eyes, and generally chaotic expression read well at small sizes. Stocking's white hair, black and white outfit, and more composed look gives a different vibe. You can also use Garterbelt or Chuck if you want something less common. The fewer people in the frame, the better it reads on a 40-pixel thumbnail.
Where to Source Images
The official Blu-ray releases have the cleanest source material. If you can get your hands on those, use ffmpeg to pull frames at the exact resolution you need instead of downloading compressed YouTube screenshots. YouTube compresses anime particularly badly because the artists use heavy cel-shading that hits YouTube's encoder right in the weak spots. DeviantArt and Pinterest have fan edits with backgrounds removed. These are convenient but check the resolution before committing. A lot of those are 72 DPI web uploads that will look terrible when Discord tries to upscale them for its display. If you go the fan-edit route, look for posts from 2020 or later since newer uploads tend to come from people who actually own the discs.
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Platform-Specific Considerations
Different platforms handle circular and square crops differently. Discord uses circles, so center your composition accordingly. Put the face in the middle third of the image and leave enough negative space around the edges so nothing gets cut off. Reddit uses a square crop but sometimes shows it as a circle in certain views, which is annoying. I just design for circle-first now and accept that Reddit will crop it one way or another. Instagram is the worst case for anime profile pictures. Its compression will turn Panty's red eyes into brown smears. If you're serious about keeping the colors accurate on Instagram, export at 1080 by 1080 with sRGB color profile and avoid the app's built-in filters. Sometimes the filters add saturation that makes the already bold palette look neon and garish.
What Not to Do
Don't use images with heavy background detail. The show has some elaborate backgrounds in its action scenes, and at profile picture size those details just become visual noise. Also skip any frames where the characters' faces are turned away or shadowed. You want immediate recognition when someone sees your thumbnail in a comment thread or server list. Avoid cropped images that show only half a face or extreme close-ups. Those look like accidents rather than deliberate choices. I've seen plenty of people do this thinking it's more artistic, but it just reads as low effort at small sizes.
File Format and Export Settings
PNG is the way to go. It preserves the hard edges of the animation without introducing JPEG compression artifacts. For Discord specifically, a file under 256KB tends to bypass their most aggressive compression tier. You can check this in almost any image editor by looking at the file size before uploading. GIF works for animated profiles on platforms that support it, but the file sizes balloon quickly and the color palette gets reduced to 256 colors, which shows in the gradients on Stocking's hair. If you need multiple versions for different platforms, name them clearly. I use a format like psp_discord_400.png, psp_insta_1080.png, and so on. This saves time when you're switching between Reddit, Discord, and Twitter and need to pull the right file quickly.
