Dobbear! SYAC: The Master Review 6
I am so going to ruin someone’s childhood with that now, but...
guys, it had to be done!
Dashing and daring…
Courageous and caring!
Faithful and friendly…
With stories to share!
Doesn’t at all apply to this one artist…
Lesbian obsessed and each nerddom’s nightmare!
Dobby BEAR!
Whinning here and there and everywhere!
Making claims that are beyond compare…
This is our Dobby-Bear!
Yeah, if you can’t guess, around now is the time I am going to put down the kids gloves and will really dig into why SYAC is garbage. And a huge factor into this, is in part Dobson’s self insert past 2012.
The existence of the blue bear as Dobson officially calls it (or Dobbear as most people call it) is in my opinion rather baffling already in terms of design choices.
I get e.g. that Dobson wanted to distance himself of his past humanoid self inserts as much as possible. But why of all things a bear?
The fact I am focused on that may sound weird, but hear me out for a bit. For starters, I know that Dobson likes western animation. And seeing how western animation has for the longest time been dominated by anthropomorphic animals, I can understand why he would redesign himself as a funny cartoon animal.
But there are at least three things that feel weird about it. First, Dobson had made it clear in the past that he hates furries. So him actually redesigning himself as an anthropomorphic animal is kinda weird
In fact, Dobson himself acknowledges that realization in one of his strips shortly after his fursona took over.
Second, of all the animals to choose from, why a bear? This question is in so far valid, as that bears are not necessarily one of the first to go animals, furries or western animators tend to go for when designing an anthro. And before any furries or anthro enthusiasts are calling me a hater, let me make one thing clear: I like anthropomorphic cartoon and comic characters too, and am okay with most furries. As long as you don’t have a diaper fetish, are a pedophile or hurt actual animals, you can do and enjoy whatever you like.
But I am also aware enough of furry culture to know, that bear based anthros are most of the time hyper sexualized and muscular, connecting them to how the term “bear” is used in real life gay culture. Which is okay, I think it is just a funny coincidence that Dobson choose an animal, that most furries associate with a life style that Dobson is deeply afraid of, even if he claims to be an LGBT ally.
And as stated earlier, bears are not necessarily the go to animals for animators.
Don’t get me wrong, we all know some cartoon bears like Winnie the Pooh, Yogi Bear, Poh and the main cast of TaleSpin (btw, Kit Cloudkicker fan for life). But lets be honest here; ducks, mice, rabbits, canines, felines, equines and any other “easily to domesticate” animal in the real world tends to make better for easily recognizable cartoon characters than something that can reach a size of 3 meters tops and weigh over 500 pounds.
Truth be told, the pool of cartoon bears is so small, these are the first two things that came to my mind when thinking what may have inspired the Dobbear
And wouldn’t you know? According to Dobson, the Carebears were supposedly the main inspiration for his design.
Unfortunately, this is also more or less the most I could find of Dobson addressing what went into the creation of the character.
Which kinda brings me also to the third issue as why I think the bear redesign is weird; It is too sudden.
One day Dobson draws himself as a shaved 20 something, the next day he is a fedora wearing Carebear clone, likely created and then rejected by Care Bear villain No Heart, as part of a plot to create a mole when conquering Care-A-Lot.
… and now I need to reevaluate my choices in life, that I was able to make such an elaborate Carebear joke.
It is just a change of design that in my opinion should have been addressed either outside of the comic or in context of it. Which it kinda is, but isn’t.
See, this is the first strip with the blue bear
And then only 13 strips or so later in something called “Continuity” is Dobson more or less willing to address the change…
And he does so in a passive aggressive manner, with Persistent Pam as a stand in for those asking him what is going on, while Dobson just dismissively continues working.
On one hand, you can argue that this is just the joke. The change happened, don’t bother with it, just enjoy what is still to come. And you know, I don’t want to make a rope out of everything Dobson ever posted, including that comic.
But then you have also to account for the fact, that Dobson would eventually associate himself with the blue bear so much, he made him his avatar and icon for his comics and online accounts. In fact, that one comic I posted WAY BACK in the first Master post of Dobson reminiscing how he started SYAC?
For reasons that are a bit confusing to me, he redrew himself (badly I have to add) as the blue bear in one of his earliest strips ever. The one where he belittles the manga fangirl for drawing manga. So I have to ask, what is going on here? Has Dobson increasingly decided to reset his past? Does he want to destroy any traces of his “human” self in his work to create the illusion to any new readers, that he never was as controversial of a person as he was and that there never was a need for him to reimagine and reinvent himself? Is this 1984? And how many of you realize that this paragraph is just me going conspiracy nuts for the sake of entertainment?
But still, it is kinda weird that he went to the bother of redrawing his human self in that one background sketch as a bear. Plus, I honestly think Dobson never even attempting to “explain” the change in the pages of his comics is a wasted opportunity for some decent jokes. Like every time Dobson tries to explain why he is a bear now, something interrupts him or we only get fragments of a story that if we put them together would be as ridiculous as the entirety of “Trapped in the Closet”.
I mean, the dumbest joke idea I have in mind is that Dobson went to build a bear to get a present for a family member. Instead he was build into a bear and later on successfully sued the company, which explains why he can afford to live despite not really working on comics anymore but lecture people badly about the evils of nerd culture.
So yeah, three major things about the design choice that more or less confuse me.
But here is the thing: Confusion is nothing compared to feeling genuine disdain for the design at hand. And compared to Dobson’s earlier human designs, Dobbear is just utterly unlikable.
A lot of that boils down to the following three facts:
1. From a certain point in time on (which I will cover in more detail later on) Dobson uses his bearsona primarily as a soapboxing mouth piece to talk about “politics” in nerd culture. Or at least what Dobson perceives as politics, coming off like a condescending jackass who believes among other things that white people are inherently incapable to identify with black people…
… or that comic book shops have radicalized nerd culture, essentially calling them terror cells.
Which btw are so inherently offensive to me, I promise I will cover these two separately. One even sooner than the other.
2. If Dobbear is not talking about politics, he will tend to be a smug asshole to other people (most of the time strawmen) or their interests in one way or another. Being e.g. used by Dobson to express his disdain for criticism…
or to mock legit criticism he had gotten by exaggerating things.
All while also tending to make his critics look like inherent assholes.
These two facts, combined with Dobson’s average erratic behavior online on platforms such as dA, twitter and tumblr over the years, pretty much assured such a close association between the two, that a separation between artist and creation was not possible anymore, condemning them.
And for the record; Dobson was always a bit of a whinner who liked to act as if he was a better nerd than the average comic book fan. Otherwise, we would have not e.g. gotten Danny and Spot out of it.
But as the years went by in the last decade, Dobson turned from someone in his mid 20s, desperate to be seen as a “quirky” and likable internet persona (like certain internet reviewers), into a virtue signaling, lesbian obsessed asshole who likely regrets his life choices.
… Like certain internet reviewers.
But seriously, Dobson turned into someone who would flip the lid at something as ridiculous as Cheeto flavored chicken fries…
While also being just the worst type of condescending nerd….
All while losing his mind about politics. Especially after Donald Trump became president
And just as Dobson became a radicalized left winged jackass who saw politics in everything he consumed, so did by default Dobbear, because Dobbear was not a character with his own personality, but a mouth piece.
Something I am about to get into detail in the near future. But till then, I want to cover in the next post the following third and final fact about Dobbear that really makes him unlikable to me: The fact he can’t be happy.
