Monday, November 16, 2009

You ain’t fooling anyone, fellas.

I don't think it's a secret that I'm an art lover.

In my eternal journey to become an artist that doesn't completely suck, I find myself on all kinds of websites. Unfortunately, most artwork tutorials on the net tend to be of the 'parrot fashion' kind. In other words, you can follow a tutorial to draw an amazing looking car, but all you've learned to draw is that car, seen from that exact angle.

Long story short, the really good tips and tricks tend to be buried away on the obscure lesser known sites…and the only way to find these sites is to type very generic keywords like 'art' into Google and wade through a lot of crap.

Well, yesterday I found myself on an 'Anthro Art' site.

What is Anthro art? Well, basically it's a euphemism for 'drawings of animals that look like people doing things you normally see in porn'.

The page I landed on was actually a forum page, and rather fortunately (from an 'entertaining blog post' point of view,) the thread was a bunch of fans of 'anthro art' discussing how they were not furries, that 'anthro' wasn't 'furry'…and how sad it was that people looked down on certain artforms 'without looking deeper into them'.

If I'm honest, they made a few good points. Technically Mickey Mouse is an example of Anthro art, and while there are some unnatural deviants out there, some people are just interested in the art style.

"We're not deviants." The forum denizens said. "We don't get off on this. We're totally misunderstood. There's nothing weird or strange about drawing anthros. A lot of kids cartoons are examples of anthro art and no-one thinks they're perverted."

They almost made their point with me. I was almost sympathetic. As someone who's a big fan of 1930's and 40's pin-up artwork, I know that some people automatically judge you without understanding the artform.

The thing is, guys, don't protest your innocence and claim you're not furries or pervs and then have 99.9% of your user-created 'artwork' gallery made up of drawings of anthropomorphized animals in little or no clothes doing things that you definitely wouldn't have seen on Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers.

Here's the thing: You can talk about your 'misunderstood art form' all you want, you can swear that you don't get off on it…but when the first image in your user-generated gallery is a squirrel-girl with 44FF boobs in nothing but a thong, and the next is two catgirls literally elbow deep in each other…your whole 'this is not furry porn' argument goes out the window.

Now, I'm not objecting to it. Whatever floats your boat is alright with me, but do me a huge favor?

When you have a site filled with your…ahem…'anthro art', could you please put it behind a warning page? Seriously guys…I had to take a shower after landing on your site and some things simply cannot be unseen…and most of the stuff on your site isn't what I'd call 'thought provoking' so much as 'fucking traumatic'.

No-one, and I mean no one, should be able to just click an innocent looking link… and the first thing they see on the new page is Huey, Dewey and Louie from Duck Tales involved a gay threesome while scrooge McDuck watches them.

How about a page that says "Click here to see unspeakable horror" instead of having a page featuring a lot of beloved eighties cartoon characters involved in sex acts that are illegal in 48 states that can be landed on directly from Google with a search as innocent as 'pen and ink rendering techniques'.

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