>>51781824Is it? I think people here are sometimes stuck in 2005. The beat counterexample to use is Lola Bunny which has a lot of general appeal. One good example to point out is reddit rule34 sunreddit, a place with over 2 million subscribers. This sub is for a more general audience and these are the people that upvote girls cosplaying all the way to the top so I think it's fairly tame.and "normal" all things considered. In this environment characters like Lola Bunny thrive, the most upvoted picture of her has her in her normal form and she has more popularity than most 2D and 3D female human characters. In that subreddit a post of Gumball's mom is, I think, the 4th or 5th most upvoted post in that sub and I think one of the most liked nsfw tweet in Twitter. All this points is that is fairly tame to be attracted to these type of characters. Perception over it being furry or not don't seem to factor much here. After all these are characters that are constructed to be people with a superficial cartoony apperance so it shouldn't surprise us unless you are stuck in the past. Likewise to a western audience these types of characters are more normalized than "cat girl" type of characters which are more of a Japanese and weeb thing.
On the other hand Pokémon are constructed to be different. They're not constructed to be perceived as people and in reality they're constructed to be perceived as cute and innocent animal characters which is what our behind the scene sources tell us. Indeed we're told the anime.staff decided to mirror the relations between humans and animals irl to the relation between humans and Pokémon. The way this manifest in the reception to Pokémon is pretty interesting even if I think pokephilia as a concept is icky and dumb.
