The following is a note I received yesterday from an old and prominent member of the living machine community, (and also the biggest baddest kinkster of them all). You readers may have your personal views on the matter, But the fact that it came from who it is it came from, is in no small way a personal vindication of what I know to be true regarding the current state of the LM fandom:
*ever have any regrets when you look back at the contributions you feel you made to the living airplane community? cuz for the last few months i’ve been thinking about that, in fact every time i upload a new batch of pics to Aero i’ve kinda thought about it ^^;
my regret is that maybe i shouldent have been so loud trying to attract people to plane porn, which is something i’d never thought i’d say ^^; i’ve been promoting that kind of artwork since 2008-ish and whats happened since then? artists come along and make some awesome plane porn in a style they like, it becomes super popular, then dies out…only to be brought back to life by somebody new who draws it in their own style, or uses the previous style as an influence, and the cycle continues. now after almost a decade all i feel its done is make a mockery of people who are interested in the concept of an anthropomorphic vehicle. lots of art, particularly aeromorph art, has been made over the years that has been so weird and fetishy trolls swarm to it like mosquitoes to a bug zapper. this has been the result of promoting plane porn on multiple art sites over the course of a decade, people who are into some weird shit and might not be the greatest artists in the world then start drawing their own plane porn, attracting trolls, who make the WHOLE anthro plane community out to be one big fetish and nothing more. this attitude is going to take years to reverse…if it ever can be, and i feel like i’m partly responsible for this…
every time i upload a batch of pics to Aero over half the pics are hyper herms, or involve some weird furry-typical fetish. maybe it was a mistake trying to promote ourselves in the furry fandom? but honestly where else could we have gone? furries are fans of anthropomorphism as a concept…which is why aeromorphs eventually caught on, even if the transition was rough XD but now i see all the troll-worthy qualities of furries superimposed on aeromorphs, and what can you do? shove these people away and call them heretics? you cant cuz they’re like hybrids of furries and living machines, technically both but not quite either… and thats not to say all aeromorphs are bad, some are actually really good (the proportional, mono-gendered ones…) but god DAMN the majority of whats being made…i simply can not fap to them XD
so yeah…thanks to me and others like me, the community will never be taken seriously, it’ll always simply be a fetish without any merit otherwise, which is sad cuz living vehicles have as much creative potential as human/furry characters. entire movies/TV shows, anime/manga, books/comics, etc…could be made for older (13+) audiences involving living vehicles, but wont cuz in 2017 all people think of when they see a plane with a face is, “oh shit guys its that anthro plane fetish!!”
not that plane porn needs to go away, its just quality NSFW stuff needs to be more common, and more SFW stuff needs to be done as a whole to balance out the scales so people can see that the community is 50/50 SFW and NSFW. but so many people who could have tipped those scales have gotten frustrated and fled to Tumblr or other sites, or simply stopped drawing in general.
plus almost all the people i respect in the living airplane community have stopped talking to me…a lot of them over disagreements about aeromorphs or plane porn, so yeah…maybe thats the real reason why i’m spamming you with this wall of text…after a few years of uploading hyper titted herm aeromorphs to Aero, i’m starting to understand.*
I don’t have an answer for you man. No reassuring words. We did this to ourselves trying to make it seem like we aren’t alone in our own ideas. Like someone.. somewhere out there is ok with what we do or how we think. Even Hydro and AeroIngo warned me that what I am currently doing with Furraffinity and my Dire machines is only going to lead to my own head world being shat upon by fetish tourists.
In the grand scheme of things, none of what we are into matters, except very intensely to ourselves and our little group.
We are also just as equally far from God’s light- as they say, as the very people who disgust us. So its going to become a lot more important in the future to lead by example. The few of us that are left should focus on ways we can make Living machine stuff equally balanced, even if that means cutting back on instant gratification artwork. Tell more stories, do more diagrams or studies. But do yourself a favor and make sure your gallery is about 50% normal to every % of weird.
I can tell you definitively that people who draw hyper herm aero stuff don’t give a shit about airplanes, their wonderful history, or have even visited a museum once in their lives and touched these things like we have. They are only after the next weirdest latex-looking robot shark girl to put a 12 foot long dick on. If you are looking for quality over quantity, Please don’t feed this kind of autism.
All that said man.. I share your pain. I share it hard.