>>56314309Gardevoir is popular because it already looks like a woman. Lucario is popular because it's already an anthro dog. In both cases you barely have to alter their designs to make lurid fanart. Pikachu, though, looks like a potato. It just seems harder to lewd.
>given some slight Animal Crossing treatment>What does this even mean?It means stretching them out and giving them more defined limbs like in your picture. Normal Pikachu has stubby little arms and legs, and Animal Crossing characters have...less stubby limbs. Maybe AC was a bad example, but I just mean stretching out the character and giving them a more humanlike build. Anthropomorphising it. The thing is, you can do that with any Pokemon. At that point all you're changing is the face and colour. I guess general vibes the character design exudes also count. Pikachu Libre definitely has the feisty shortstack thing going on, which I totally see the appeal of. But that alternative design only popped up in 2016, and only became well known when Smash Ultimate came out 2 years later. Pikachu Libre also counts for less than 10% of all Pikachu pictures on E6. Also I feel like shortstacks didn't really explode in popularity until the mid 2010's. I wish I could see E6's data for a particular tag over a single year. Like 1000 pictures in year 1, 1200 additional pictures in year 2, etc. Has Pikachu always had a relatively high amount, or was it behind and then caught up somewhere?
