#hork

{NMA} Happy Hork

A comm from Pfeffaroo of Gali, my Hork-Bajir, sitting and enjoying some flowers. One of her favorite things~ Art (c) to Pfeffaroo on Tumblr Gali (c) to myself

Thank you so much for thinking of me! I do like Hork.

Join me on a journey to rank cuddly shark toys.

First, we have the IKEA shark, BLÅHAJ. A Newsweek article about its popularity as a trans icon cited the source of this as 2014 tumblr. BLÅHAJ is trustworthy and likeable.

We have one, which Mouse accidentally shoplifted from IKEA. (Well, Mouse did it on purpose, but our letting them get away with it was accidental.) its name is Sharky and it bites people.

With a long and storied history of trans comfort and iconography, and no particular blood in its origin, BLÅHAJ is the best cuddly shark.

Next we have Hork, a plush toy made by Randimals. I am often shown Hork. People send him to me kindly, because he’s a horrible thing with legs.

Hork is based on memes from around 2015/2016, from Photoshop battles on Reddit. He is identical in every way to those “Shorses,” and is based most obviously on an image made by a Redditor around 2016, with no creative changes or development, apart from sticking on a dorsal fin. They just started a company in 2020, called this creature Hork - faintly pretending that it’s an OC they invented - had some underpaid textile workers knock it up out of polyester and other ecologically dreary fabrics, and now they sell it on their merry way.

Although shorses became “memes,” and therefore people don’t bother citing the creator because Memes Don’t Count As Art Apparently; although anyone can Photoshop a shark/horse; although it isn’t a hugely NOVEL idea; I think it’s boring to sell plushes of art/ideas you didn’t even make. Like, by all means, sew or create your own shark/horse. But if it’s a company selling this product as a business, I find it cynical and dreary.

The REAL problem I have with Hork, though, is the fact that the front legs on the plush aren’t how a horse’s front legs go.

I could forgive the grift of branding someone else’s meme and cranking out copies to sell. But Randimals…

When you look at Hork’s front legs, you can see the plush design has botched the anatomy and angled the front “knees” to hinge backwards, like a dog’s. When you look at one of the original Shorse images, it’s a reminder that the actual joint on horse forelegs goes forward. Once you spot the backwards legs, it isn’t cute any more.

Like, sure, it’s meant to be a Cute Abomination, but like… I’m observant. I have taste. Randimals forgot how horse legs work, and paid zero attention, and thought it didn’t matter, and want to charge $35. People who actually like horses and pay attention to animals don’t make that mistake.

When Randimals further capitalise on the meme image with a hard toy - here you can see they have not deviated from the meme image apart from adding the fin; c’mon, if you’re pretending Hork is an original character, at least invent your own pose - they once again designed a toy with horse anatomy, which is meant to be a joke about horse anatomy, that does not refer to horse anatomy at all. They copied the meme, and therefore copied slightly better legs, but fell apart on the hooves.

Those are not the hooves sculpted by someone who knows how to sculpt horse hooves, and the reason is because the hooves in the meme are hidden by grass. This meant that Randimals couldn’t trace them exactly, and they don’t know what horses look like. So rather than doing anything else, such as looking up a different reference image to trace, or asking a passing child, Randimals stuck assorted sucker-shaped lumps on the legs in a panic, and called it a $20 product.

Thus, despite its undeniable charm, and my pleasure in having Hork shared with me, I have to call it quite a low-quality plush shark. It is terribly let down by the manufacturers, and is inattentive. I also have personal reasons for thinking that “turning someone else’s social media post into a plush toy” is faintly stinky and uncreative as a grift, in a world that needs doctors and artists.

Moving on to plushes of the three-legged shark in blue shoes, Tralalero Tralala.

This shark is one of the most recognisable Italian Brainrot characters. As I’ve explained, you’re not expected to understand Italian Brainrot if you’re old enough to be on Tumblr. They’re AI-generated videos that anyone can make and post, and which are created and consumed in the same thoughtless state. To make your own Tralalero video, just type prompts into a GPT for a three-legged shark in blue sneakers, add AI generated music, and hit post. It’s called Italian because the characters have nonsensical rhyming Italian-sounding names (and some originated in Italy) and brainrot because it’s self-confessed garbage.

Italian Brainrot is mostly popular because unsupervised kids scroll it on an endless feed. The kids have zero thoughts in their head about it (it’s Brainrot) and consider any criticism to be hopelessly pearl-clutching, conservative and reactionary (it’s Brainrot.)

however, part of the point of Brainrot is that it’s subversive and renegade, often shocking and offensive. To quote :

In the original TikTok videos, the text-to-speech voiceover speaks the character's names followed by a length story that is usually complete gibberish and often unintelligible. But in some cases, the longer audios include phrases that can be translated into English.

In Tralalero Tralala's case, the original audio features a voiceover that some have said mocks religion and includes inappropriate and blasphemous language.

And with Bombardino Crocodilo, who is depicted as a military bomber plane with the head of a crocodile, users have grown concerned that the original audio mocks the deaths of children in Gaza.

The original video has Tralalero Tralala singing a catchy Italian song with blasphemy, sexual content involving children, and quite a lot of cum.

Most of the original Italian Brainrot characters are similar in origin. But the kids watching it don’t care whether or not it’s offensive that the funny crocodile’s original music in one video, if translated, is about “bombing children in Gaza and Palestine.” (absolutely awful, of course. The best thing to do is not give attention if you can help it.)

It would probably surprise people to hear that the words they’re repeating aren’t gibberish, and that’s even if they’re familiar with the OG video, not the thousands of AI-generated spinoffs that form the bulk of Brainrot material. There are so many layers of remove, of lack of interest, of apathy - of brainrot - that it is not possible to isolate a single statement of intention to criticise, because anyone can make any Brainrot of these characters and have them do anything, say anything, with their AI-generated voices and AI-generated music. The response would be: Of course there’s a lot of racist, pornographic, blasphemous and distressing Brainrot content. Of course it’s terrible. It says it in the name.

Besides, it doesn’t matter to anyone involved who invented the character, what it originally sang, or what it originally meant - it’s not like people can suddenly claim intellectual ownership of an AI-generated video. It isn’t stealing to do what you like with these characters because they’re memes made by AI for the purpose of being literal mindless garbage.

The people who make the content type “make a video where a bomber plane crocodile fusion drops a nuclear bomb on a three-legged shark in shoes” and try to grift as much as possible - views, attention, clicks, merchandise, reaction videos - to earn as much as possible before the kids move on.

When adults with brains pay attention to Italian Brainrot, it’s mostly to get outraged (about things intended to be outrageous Brainrot: Crocodilo himself points out “if you translate (his song) you’re an asshole”), or to grift. Adults are the ones who make these plushes to capitalise on what Kids Watch These Days. Adults are the ones making reaction videos to feed the feed. And it’s a global phenomenon. Untold billions of views around the world, consuming slop product where consumption is the point. Of course someone made a plush of it.

So I’m not super impressed by the Tralalero plush. Hork is just a bit dreary, but the whole landscape around Tralalero really drags you down, I think.

However, in a few months nobody will care, leaving only the flotsam and jetsam of the three-legged shark plushies in charity shops and landfills around the planet - decaying with about as much thoughtful context as they were created with.

Final rankings of the shark plushes:

1. BLÅHAJ - best of the lot.

2. Hork - dreary, but not dreadful.

they said i'd become too powerful if i found an animated text generator