Mittens gets kinky

It all went a bit odd

Mittens episode 2: where things got weird.

The year was 2001. Gay and bisexual people were rarely on television. We still watched actual broadcast television. YouTube wouldn’t appear until the end of 2005. Netflix sent people their films on DVDs in the mail.

… And Macromedia’s software called ‘Flash’ was pretty much the only way to make anything move on a website. (Macromedia was purchased by Adobe in 2005.) Adding audio was far too taxing on bandwidth, so these online-moving-things were mostly silent.

Into this world, Mittens & Snowdrop episode 2 was born.

It’s probably best to watch it before reading on…

So…

These days, among other things, I give lectures about intersectional feminism. One of many important topics is consent. Mittens is very much an agent of chaos, but even they understand boundaries (eventually).

In last week’s post, I wrote about a classic formula for comedy, which is to take something innocent (e.g. kittens) and give it a sinister twist. This episode of Mittens & Snowdrop is another example where I played with that idea. I suspect this episode was also a watershed for people who watched my animations — you were either going to enjoy this kind of humour or you weren’t.

Alongside lecturing about consent these days, I also talk about visibility and inclusion. It’s fair to say I’ve been interested in this work for a long time: the line ‘I don’t even know if you’re a boy or a girl’ ended up on T-shirts that I sent all over the world.

Like I say, in those days being LGBTQ+ wasn’t spoken about much, so choosing to centre pansexuality as a characteristic of Mittens was very unusual.

Underneath a lot of my work, there’s often been a goal of creating an inclusive, kinder world. Not always — sometimes it’s just having fun — but quite often there’s a little bit of it in there. As strange as it sounds, with this Mittens animation, I wanted a few viewers to feel just a tiny bit seen in ways they weren’t in mainstream media.

Yes, it’s silly, it’s a horny kinky kitten… But there are also some real feelings of awkwardness that were perhaps familiar to some people?

It would be easy to say this highbrow interpretation of the animation is over-the-top but, a couple of years after this animation went online, I started up forums on my website and ended up with two or three thousand users on there (again, years before today’s social media giants were born). On those forums, you could post surveys. I very clearly remember one, years after the forums started, which asked people’s sexuality. Well over 50% of people on there identified as bisexual.

Bearing in mind that my site wasn’t about sexuality, and this animation was really the main incident of sexual content, I think it shows how much people needed community and representation back then: we built it and nurtured it wherever we could.

For all the things that have gone badly in the last couple of decades, the visibility of queer communities online and in the media is a huge leap forwards.

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I hope you enjoyed this little ‘flash'-back (geddit?). I’m very slowly converting my old animations to the new fangled YouTubes, if you want to make sure you don’t miss new episodes then don’t forget to slam that subscribe button.

On this blog, I post every week on topics related to horror: original short stories, critiques, writing tips and exercises, but also other fun (sometimes non-horror) things. There will be occasional discussion of video games, movies, and of course these old animations will be here too.

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Until next time, go be awesome, kind, and pet good dogs,

Mata <3