You're giving me way too much credit here, buddy; that's totally ripped off from a Disney animator.
But "basic fox fursona", boom, got it, helping me make my point. See, a basic fox fursona doesn't stand out, so what do you do? You add all those gewgaws and jimjams I like to complain about. You show up in a fursuit at Confurence 0, you're one of two guys. You stand out! It's great, it's fun! You're the center of attention! Fast forward 10 years, you show up at any furry convention with your basic fox fursuit, there's 10, maybe 20, basic fox fursuits, and, let's face it, yours isn't even that good! Nobody cares about you, nobody wants their picture taken with you, you might as well just went in your street clothes.
So what do you do? You go home and spraypaint that shit hot pink! Boom, next year, you're the bright hot pink fox! Lot's of fox fursuits, but only one hot pink one! You're back in business, boys! Until, boom, someone else does something, and they're the cool one, now. So you just keep adding polka dots and antlers and sabre teeth and tiger stripes and flashing lights and just all this shit, but what you never do is actually just fucking improve the suit.
Or, god, I don't know, just like your basic fucking fox suit.
It's the exact same process with art; yeah, there are good artists who do good work just drawing basic foxes really fucking well, and then there are people who don't, so they, once again, just throw attention grabbing shit at their artwork until it's just garbage.
Nothing wrong with a good, fucking basic fox. As the great poet Baren Akedladies once wrote, "I like vanilla, it's the finest of the flavors".
And, you know what, what I really want to talk about now is insurance companies, because fuck a Geico, man. Fuck a Geico. You kids today, with your Flos from Progressive and "Dadadada-We-Are-Farmers" and that Mayhem guy (I don't even remember which one he's selling!), but back in the old days, our insurance commercials were boring, and we liked it like that. Do you even realize what insurance is? It's actually really depressing! Money you pay now for a disaster you know is coming later! And now we have a fucking cartoon gecko selling it to us! Are you fucking shitting me!
Seriously, it's obvious in hindsight, because insurance is something you have to have (it's literally required by law). You don't have to sell it; you have to make people remember your company when it's time to buy it! It's advertising 101; you don't actually sell the product with your commercial, you have to make it STAND OUT! (So actually that Mayhem guy kind of sucks.) So Geico started making these funny commercials with cavemens and geckos and raccoons and fucking Speed Racer at one point and now all of them do it because it worked. It's the most serious, depressing thing you can spend money on, and they are literally using cartoons to advertise it!
And that's where Erin Insurance comes in; in order to sell insurance, they made a sexy cartoon character. Bright colors, simple lines and shapes. Designed to stand out. And it was sexy. Yes, the commercials themselves were, at worst, a hard G, but they using tropes from genres where the conventions meant, characters in those situations, they were gonna fuck after the commercial was over. It wasn't explicit, but it was implicit. Bright, poppy cartoons and implicit sex; do I need to make it clearer. And it turned out the problem wasn't people weren't ready for it; the problem was people were a little too ready for it and you couldn't get to the actual fucking insurance for all the fucking fan porn.
I mean, it's not like what furry is doing is that weird or unusual; we don't even have to sell out for Disney to use us for their own purposes because we're doing the same thing they are, we just are doing it finer. By that I mean is that we have literally spent the last half century drawing the same goddamn basic fox over and over and over and over until, my god, we couldn't help but get better at it. That may seem to contradict my first couple of paragraphs, but not everyone is a talentless hack who is trying to stand out and be popular. Some people may just like basic foxes, and other times you get talented hacks who could care less about basic foxes, but they're professionals, goddammit, and if what people want is a goddamn basic fox, they are going to draw a goddamn basic fox, goddammit.
All Disney has to do is type fox in to e621, see what furries have learned in those decades, see what works and what doesn't, and blammo! You can't even get mad at them since a. we're already ripping them off, and b. the process I just described is furries ripping each other off. A corporation is not your friend, but neither is a fandom.
And there's pressure in the fandom to change an artist in ways they might not want to change; our currency may be more about popularity than, well, currency (but it can be currency, too). I mean, the obvious one you'd expect from me is an artist with qualms about porn may feel pressure to produce it, but it could be something as simple as an artist drawing a fox when they really just want to draw an ocelot, you know?
My point is not that we should all sell out to Disney or Geico or whoever the fuck, because they will totally knock off a lot of our weirder edges and lovable quirks in an effort to sanitize furry or whatever. But the problem is our art is already so bound up with the corporate, pro-capitalist "mainstream" that taking a stance against it is laughable and probably impossible.
Unless we go with Green Reaper's plan and make furry about turning cub porn into an acceptable business endeavor, and I'm going to vote no on that one.
You're giving me way too much credit here, buddy; that's totally ripped off from a Disney animator.
But "basic fox fursona", boom, got it, helping me make my point. See, a basic fox fursona doesn't stand out, so what do you do? You add all those gewgaws and jimjams I like to complain about. You show up in a fursuit at Confurence 0, you're one of two guys. You stand out! It's great, it's fun! You're the center of attention! Fast forward 10 years, you show up at any furry convention with your basic fox fursuit, there's 10, maybe 20, basic fox fursuits, and, let's face it, yours isn't even that good! Nobody cares about you, nobody wants their picture taken with you, you might as well just went in your street clothes.
So what do you do? You go home and spraypaint that shit hot pink! Boom, next year, you're the bright hot pink fox! Lot's of fox fursuits, but only one hot pink one! You're back in business, boys! Until, boom, someone else does something, and they're the cool one, now. So you just keep adding polka dots and antlers and sabre teeth and tiger stripes and flashing lights and just all this shit, but what you never do is actually just fucking improve the suit.
Or, god, I don't know, just like your basic fucking fox suit.
It's the exact same process with art; yeah, there are good artists who do good work just drawing basic foxes really fucking well, and then there are people who don't, so they, once again, just throw attention grabbing shit at their artwork until it's just garbage.
Nothing wrong with a good, fucking basic fox. As the great poet Baren Akedladies once wrote, "I like vanilla, it's the finest of the flavors".
And, you know what, what I really want to talk about now is insurance companies, because fuck a Geico, man. Fuck a Geico. You kids today, with your Flos from Progressive and "Dadadada-We-Are-Farmers" and that Mayhem guy (I don't even remember which one he's selling!), but back in the old days, our insurance commercials were boring, and we liked it like that. Do you even realize what insurance is? It's actually really depressing! Money you pay now for a disaster you know is coming later! And now we have a fucking cartoon gecko selling it to us! Are you fucking shitting me!
Seriously, it's obvious in hindsight, because insurance is something you have to have (it's literally required by law). You don't have to sell it; you have to make people remember your company when it's time to buy it! It's advertising 101; you don't actually sell the product with your commercial, you have to make it STAND OUT! (So actually that Mayhem guy kind of sucks.) So Geico started making these funny commercials with cavemens and geckos and raccoons and fucking Speed Racer at one point and now all of them do it because it worked. It's the most serious, depressing thing you can spend money on, and they are literally using cartoons to advertise it!
And that's where Erin Insurance comes in; in order to sell insurance, they made a sexy cartoon character. Bright colors, simple lines and shapes. Designed to stand out. And it was sexy. Yes, the commercials themselves were, at worst, a hard G, but they using tropes from genres where the conventions meant, characters in those situations, they were gonna fuck after the commercial was over. It wasn't explicit, but it was implicit. Bright, poppy cartoons and implicit sex; do I need to make it clearer. And it turned out the problem wasn't people weren't ready for it; the problem was people were a little too ready for it and you couldn't get to the actual fucking insurance for all the fucking fan porn.
I mean, it's not like what furry is doing is that weird or unusual; we don't even have to sell out for Disney to use us for their own purposes because we're doing the same thing they are, we just are doing it finer. By that I mean is that we have literally spent the last half century drawing the same goddamn basic fox over and over and over and over until, my god, we couldn't help but get better at it. That may seem to contradict my first couple of paragraphs, but not everyone is a talentless hack who is trying to stand out and be popular. Some people may just like basic foxes, and other times you get talented hacks who could care less about basic foxes, but they're professionals, goddammit, and if what people want is a goddamn basic fox, they are going to draw a goddamn basic fox, goddammit.
All Disney has to do is type fox in to e621, see what furries have learned in those decades, see what works and what doesn't, and blammo! You can't even get mad at them since a. we're already ripping them off, and b. the process I just described is furries ripping each other off. A corporation is not your friend, but neither is a fandom.
And there's pressure in the fandom to change an artist in ways they might not want to change; our currency may be more about popularity than, well, currency (but it can be currency, too). I mean, the obvious one you'd expect from me is an artist with qualms about porn may feel pressure to produce it, but it could be something as simple as an artist drawing a fox when they really just want to draw an ocelot, you know?
My point is not that we should all sell out to Disney or Geico or whoever the fuck, because they will totally knock off a lot of our weirder edges and lovable quirks in an effort to sanitize furry or whatever. But the problem is our art is already so bound up with the corporate, pro-capitalist "mainstream" that taking a stance against it is laughable and probably impossible.
Unless we go with Green Reaper's plan and make furry about turning cub porn into an acceptable business endeavor, and I'm going to vote no on that one.