Analoguma

Some of you who follow Japanese news may know that Kusanagi Tsuyoshi of the Japanese idol group SMAP had been arrested for indecent exposure last Tuesday.

Link -- [link]

Police responded to calls that someone was yelling unintelligible words at 3 AM in a park among a classy neighborhood. What they found was the idol drunk, buck naked, and sitting on the ground, yelling and singing. They tried to take him into custody to sober up but he started screaming and thrashing so they had to arrest him and take him in forcefully.



Being an idol whose impeccable nice-guy image is everything, Kusanagi was pretty much done for with his celebrity career for the time being.

One of jobs was the poster child for the national campaign to switch all TV's in Japan from receiving conventional analogue to terrestrial digital signals. His face was ubiquitous, on posters and TV ads all over the place, telling everyone that unless you switch to the Terrestrial Digital by July 24, 2011, you are screwed.



Now that the campaign's "face" was gone, the committee scrambled to get a new mascot. What they came up with was this yellow leotarded cartoon deer.

Link -- [link]

The name is "Chidejika". It's a play on the word Chideji, which is a contracted form for Chijou Dejitaru or "Terrestrial Digital", and "Shika which means "Deer".
The design reeks of "we don't give a damn" or the "final draft scribbled on the back of a napkin" feel, but that may actually be fitting with the recent fixation on "relaxed" designs of Yuru-characters.

Anyways, the character was announced, not specifically but obviously as the replacement for Kusanagi. The people of the internet immediately took to producing parody artwork, like moe anime girl versions, or satire on the whole naked drunken scandal that was the reason for its birth, for example. It was all in good nature for fun, Rule 34 included, and it seemed like things were following the normal reactions when a new character for something is announced.

Link -- [link]

Once a character is announced, people produce all conceivable variations or interpretations on it until they get bored, and then move on.



But then, the organization pushing the switchover （National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan, a.k.a. NAB) saw all the fanart being produced, and decided this was not acceptable.
In an interview, NAB declared that any unauthorized use of the Chidejika and copyright violations would be met with the appropriate response including legal action.

Cue the Streisand Effect.

I personally have only seen it from inside the art community site Pixiv, but what was a originally a trickle of Chidejika fanart suddenly exploded into a deluge, most everyone posting for the lulz.

This bad move by the NAB also ignited the latent dissatisfaction with the whole switchover present in the 2ch forums as well. The planned switch had been criticized as being unnecessary and only serving to benefit the commercial entities involved in producing a whole new broadcasting infrastructure to replace the old one in place.

The people on the 2ch forums declared,
"Well we don't want your stupid fancy digital TVs or lame deer mascot anyways ... we have our bear and our analog TVs!"
And thus was born the Analoguma, the champion of analog broadcast and continued use of existing TVs.
The name is a play on "Analogue" and kuma, or bear.

NOTE: I've explained this before, but the character known as Pedobear in English circles is only associated with Pedo-ness after being adopted by 4chan from 2ch and given that title.

Immediately, an "official site" for the bear popped up -- [link]
This was a parody of the original Chidejika official site -- [link] (Currently VERY SLOW)

Someone made an amazingly good official song using Hatsune Miku -- [link]

People were suddenly having so much fun producing Chidejika fanart just to spite NAB and playing chicken, or producing Analoguma fanart and sites to confuse search results and drown out the official Chidejika campaign of NAB.
As a testament to how slapdash and unplanned the whole Chidejika campaign was, someone even succeeded in registering the domain first before NAB -- [link]
The owner pasted a naked version of the deer with its family jewels proudly on display, referencing the original nakedness that brought down Kusanagi.



Now seeing this unfold made me want a piece of the action, so I drew the artwork above, the Analoguma with the Chidejika in its maw.
I posted it around noon, and suddenly I got a flood of reaction from the pixiv community. More than 2300 pageviews, 160 faves as of this moment (8:30 PM)
I would have been happy and proud if this was the only reaction. But this was also immediately posted on 2ch, and before I knew it, it was suddenly being paraded about as a great pic to "piss off the NAB", or a political satire, or something grandiose like that.

Oh noes.

Dude, guys! I thought it would be harmless fun to join in on the ruckus with the crowd, but I don't want to be the pointman! I just did it for the lulz! No political motivation!

It would be pointless to take down my pixiv post now since it's already loose in the wild, but I'm a bit worried about the backlash, if any, for producing something that was obviously (in highsight) aggressively attacking the NAB rather than just making hentai anthro pics like everyone else...



How this ends up remains to be seen.




EDIT (for those of you who care):

As of now, I have just under 20,000 pageviews and 875 bookmarks.
I haven't gotten any late-night visitors in business suits yet so I think I'm in the clear.