Taylor Napolsky
Humanoid
Reading a quote a famous actor gave about the fiasco involving a certain movie, and how the movie was having its visual effects remade so the main character would be more palatable to the online public, who had excoriated the original design, Leo turned to her coworker: "See, did you hear what Jim Carrey said? This is what I’m talking about... About crowds on the internet coming out against something."
"What happened?" said Rob, looking up from his laptop.
"Jim Carrey gave a response to this," explained Leo excitedly, "and he articulated it better than I’ve been able to, this whole time." After a short pause to get her thoughts together, "He talks about 'the collective consciousness,' and everyone being quick to jump on a bandwagon, on a trend, but for something they don’t even necessarily care about. So it’s like after it comes it’s like, 'Well I got that, but I don’t even know why I wanted it; I don’t even care anymore.'"
"Huh," said Rob.
Just then a mouse rushed across the floor somewhere ahead and to the right—so fast it was only an inscrutable (and alarming) gray streak, vanishing an instant later.
She continued, "He says he isn’t sure how he feels about the audience being in on the creation of something, especially while it’s still in production. And it’s dangerous to allow decision-making to be swayed by an audience opinion resulting from 'a sense of ownership from their childhood.'"
Rob hadn’t noticed the mouse, Leo felt pretty sure.
"Or it’s just that the design was total shit, and it needed to be corrected," Rob pronounced.
"That’s your opinion," retorted Leo, adjusting her glasses a smidgen, "but people had similar complaints about The Lion King remake, and The Lion King made a billion-and-a-half dollars. When it came out, people went to see it. It was a hit."
Rob stuck to his point: "But you have to admit this one looked like worse trash than The Lion King. It looked like... furryish. The character was like a furry."
Again Leo took a second to get her thoughts together. When she spoke next it was with firm conviction.
"The furry community gets a lot of shit, but actually it’s an extremely high percentage of people who are part of that community who are trans or identify as queer. When people tear down furries it’s often times, a lot of the time, a veiled way to take down trans or queer identifying people. It’s similar to the way people would disparage the disco scene in the seventies, in that way."
"That’s not even the point. Doesn’t have anything to do with it," said Rob, a little gruffly.
"That’s one bandwagon I’m not going to jump on."
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