This is - if not a conspiracy theory - mostly something like the sense of the “company identity” or the “signature design” that makes one thing different from the other.
As for example if you want to draw a cartoon character you can start sketching some ideas on the design face, but once you hit some certain proportions your characters becomes “Disney” character, you might then change the design and avoid that art direction, since you might not want to be extremely obvious on how it looks.
And same goes with any sort of design, even at cars (oval light shapes + curved roof-to-back + air spoiler = Porsche) or even airplanes (pointy nose + wings from-nose-to-the-back + two vertical tilted tails = F22).
So this means that most of the times when you want to achieve a unique design you would need to avoid or hide any similarities from existing designs.
This mostly has to do with the idea of what sort of “template” works best to depict such characters. As in the case of depicting girls or young women there is such a format that works best and it might be even the default or standard choice.
Such as in the theory of cartooning (which is some form of design) relies heavily on the depiction of certain ideas that are translated into such designs, they might be something like blueprints or archetypes if you wish.
Such as for example if you want to have a strong character that gives the sense of stability, power and authority you would go for a square jaw, or for example if you want to depict a character that gives the sense of being sneaky or dangerous you would go for triangular shapes (pointy noise, pointy jaw, sharp eyes).
This is mostly a type of conventional thinking within the design principles of cartooning and respecting these principles quite often leads to successful results.
However imagine if you want to portray a very strong woman and make her muscular and square, things won’t work correctly there. You would rather go for more subtle and elegant features instead.
These were absolutely great, and it hurts my heart how many people in here don’t seem to realize that these are intentionally crappy and hilarious. And yet, they show more control that some much flashier shorts.
I’m surprised about the copyright aspect, I’m always tempted to do something with some character as supposedly the corporations tolerate fan stuff etc, but I can imagine lawsuits as the parody is not as high as I remember the norm used to be with for example MAD magazine, where they even modified the titles to avoid lawsuits. There’s a comic artist Dave Sim and I remember Marvel sued him over Wolveroach which was a wolverine spoof. It’s sort of fascinating and can sort of imagine a sudden onslaught of profitable youtuber lawsuits.
Copyright law, in some aspects, is so ridiculous right now that some reality shows blur out company logos and business signs just to be on the safe side, even if it’s just in the background or even on a shirt someone is wearing.
Fortunately, we haven’t seen that same level of caution required for people just posting videos on Youtube, yet. I don’t know if some of the corporations are dumb enough to try to go after people who just want to post videos of their cat, copyright enforcement getting that strong might force a reform that they might not like (as it would otherwise clog up the courts for decades).
Also I remember the Ghost Rider creator got in trouble for selling art prints at comic cons, but in that instance I seem to remember it was portrayed to be vindictive retaliation after the creator tried to get some of his rights returned. This was a pretty old guy trying to get a little money from his creation (with the prints after failing in court) , but I imagine if say Star Wars producers try to lay blame if one of the future movies really fails, that they might see youtube parodies as more of knockoff products across the board, which would get pretty ugly if done incorrectly. A little bit of : “These 'fans’ are making knockoffs which are affecting the economy!!!” along with more thoughtful “Should these fans be liable?” type propaganda
There must be movie execs who think they’ve made an incredible cake fit for a queen, on a fancy table, and the recent fan policy puts like homemade beans , a whole bunch of well intentioned juicy meats sauced homemade food all over their great cake affecting it’s salability
The point you make here is about the control of the flow.
If there are no knock offs at all the entire flow is centralized from the source.
However with hundreds of thousands of knockoffs the power is distributed among persons.
And this translates to views, ads, subscribers, popularity. Which translates to strengthening a brand.
Such as for example we all know about the classic case of where the internet killed the traditional newspapers and tv. This is because it disrupted the flow of information.
Now I notice that the current trend that goes on the very last 10 years or so and keeps getting even bigger. Is that artistic and technical people disrupt the notion of branding and IPs massively.
Such as for example the most notable cases:
Mass effect female character was purposefully designed not to look good enough (or at least exactly as the same as the reference model) and some modders took the initiative to fix the design.
Also some fans were really unsatisfied with that Mario game and it only took a simple sketch to make that “Bowsette” character go viral. And currently is the most popular character on the series, not even created by Nintendo at all.
Some person created his own Tomb Raider game in Unreal (Dagger Of Xian), as a straight derivative from the classic TR2 series. And people loved it far better than the current direction of the series because it brought that original look and feel that now is lost.
No I just mean that they may someday feel it lessens the overall impression, the ‘feeling’ of their product. Like with the mario, now many people have a finished image in their minds of substandard representation of the character which one previously would have had to dream, or create themselves, which doesn’t totally tarnish a character, but iI suspect it does.
The TombRaider example is a good one because the guy beat the company to a relaunch of upscaled version of one of the most classic beloved games, which I think they would have gotten around to doing, re-texturing on a level incapable by the talented lone developer. So now if they thought about recreating the company would have to wonder if there would be demand even after 5 - 10 years (after the initial 20 years that have gone by, I remember in the '90’s used to be signaled with a “20 year anniversary” re-release).
It would be interesting to have a test with mcdonalds and burger king, where one restaurant has a mix of fan made or unflattering/incorrect imagery, Ronald McDonald in leather chaps etc, and see if that affects the choice of meal.
Here’s another example, where some feel random things like this help generate excitement, I personally feel with the idea that items have a limited amount of exposure before people get bored.
So far it seems all is well though, I am only thinking of previous actions, and the event of massive failure.
