I may be stupid

idk maybe they just liked yellow :)

there's also this aside in a New Yorker article:

[Eberhard Faber] advertised the Mongol—a yellow pencil named for his favorite soup, purée Mongole—by highlighting its silence, of all things.

tho that was patented in the 40s. Dixon Ticonderoga's yellow #2 started production in 1918, per their website, so i'm giving Joey Dixon the 'made a pencil that looks like a Pencil' prize

also check out this pencil sharpener:

ain't she a beaut.

Hymen Lipman patented a pencil w an eraser on the end in the 1860s. born in Jamaica and immigrated to Philly! nice. wiki page

erasers at one point, so sez blog posts from 2018, erasers at one point were made from rubber and pumice, and the pumice was sometimes pinkish. so there's your that.

tangential, but here are some images of the 1938 Eagle Pencil strike that are pretty nifty, here's one:

sans was a special case because people preferred his original design (short and not conventionally attractive) however the “refusal to engage with any other character” was very much still there like look at all of the AUs that were made specifically because of him.

the amount of mischaracterisation a character has to go through in order to truly count as a sexyman (and there’s about 20 sexymen proper) would cause most people to have a brain aneurysm like it sucks so bad.

times have drastically changed since the onceler, and the range of characters people hype up is far more diverse than it once was. the time period in which a character was most popular (between 2012 - 2018) is the most fundamental part in making them a sexyman.

this is why any sexyman poll made after the one that killed queen lizzy is completely null to me. 90% of the characters in them are just regular fan favourites like get this common real life dude out of there. if you could talk about liking a character with a coworker and not get viciously made fun of by them then that character is not a sexyman like that’s the full truth of the matter.

(this is also why anime boys like reigen and komaeda often count. hate for anything anime-based outside of the internet was especially egregious before 2020)

Absence.

--