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Fursuit heads where the wearer's eyes are visible
13 years ago
General
So like, what's the deal? The majority opinion seems to be that these are not as great as the fake-eye variety. I mean, it's just not the style people like, you rarely see it in the fandom. The potential for treading into TERRORSVILLE is also pretty high. But I've seen some great heads that make use of the wearer's eyes in a way I much prefer to the glassy cross-eyed stares of the more mascotty style. It's the style of head I build, when I work on my own half-cocked fursuit projects, and because I obsess over this kind of thing I want to really understand the forces at work behind the TERRORSVILLE reaction so I can figure out whether I should actually take peoples' advice or whether I should roll my eyes and move on.
So okay, the uncanny valley thing. Mostly an excuse for stylistic xenophobia! And by that, saying "it's the uncanny valley" is just an easy way out of an ambivalent reaction that hasn't had the chance to solidify yet. The uncanny valley has a cool name and a CHART and it was invented by a SCIENTIST, holy crap. As a design rubric meant for robots, the uncanny valley is meant to be avoided. Applied more generally, people superficially familiar with the concept use it to say that because something has that uncanny quality, it's bad, and ought to be rejected in the way that nerds reject anything that has slight flaws. The concept of the "uncanny" is paradoxical, though! It blends the familiar with the strange. You see it, you recognize something in it that draws you in, but it's different in such a way that your regular reactions don't seem to match up with the situation. You wonder what you should do next. The uncanny valley isn't a state of fear, it's a state of ambivalence; you're left teetering on the edge of making a decision. The reason I say it's stylistic xenophobia is that the uncanny valley theory gives people the authority to say: "This is strange, I don't know how to feel about it, therefore it's bad." It's easy to have this reaction because you see it over and over again, you lose nothing by parroting.
People don't see eyes-visible suits that often, they don't look like mascots, and so there are no established social conventions for dealing with that. So... let's unpack that a bit! What does it mean to say that there are social conventions for mascot performers? You have sporting events, theme parks, promotional gigs. A mascot is the centre of attention and draws people in, gets them excited. You see the same sorts of behaviour in fursuiters: high energy, bright colors, entertaining.
But just by having your eyes visible, you don't look like a mascot performer. You look like... something else. What happens when you make eye contact? What do you do? Everything changes the moment a pair of real human eyes strikes yours. You're involved! It's personal! A switch in the human brain gets flipped and the neurons that deal with peer-to-peer social interactions lights up. You do the threat assessment. People can't help it, it's the way we're programmed, we compare other humans to what we've been exposed to. We either allow our prejudices to take hold or we fight to overcome them. Ambivalently, we flip wildly between curiosity and fear until we settle on one or the other. The reward for success is that you get to hijack that strong neural pathway and create a really powerful and memorable character. The punishment for failure is that everyone is terrified and nobody wants to go near you, which is not what you want as a performer!
The trick is... well, I don't know the trick to making this style of costume work. It's hard work overcoming that curiosity/fear response... Offer people something they like, maybe, in exchange for the stylistic deviation. Distract them with some other part of the costume so the intensity isn't dialled up super high all the time. I have no clue! I know, though, that I wouldn't be interested in making it work if it didn't provoke such an ambivalent reaction in people. What I struggle with dodging the negative reaction, and I suppose that's as much my struggle as an artist as much as it is everyone else's challenge to get outside their comfort zone.
So okay, the uncanny valley thing. Mostly an excuse for stylistic xenophobia! And by that, saying "it's the uncanny valley" is just an easy way out of an ambivalent reaction that hasn't had the chance to solidify yet. The uncanny valley has a cool name and a CHART and it was invented by a SCIENTIST, holy crap. As a design rubric meant for robots, the uncanny valley is meant to be avoided. Applied more generally, people superficially familiar with the concept use it to say that because something has that uncanny quality, it's bad, and ought to be rejected in the way that nerds reject anything that has slight flaws. The concept of the "uncanny" is paradoxical, though! It blends the familiar with the strange. You see it, you recognize something in it that draws you in, but it's different in such a way that your regular reactions don't seem to match up with the situation. You wonder what you should do next. The uncanny valley isn't a state of fear, it's a state of ambivalence; you're left teetering on the edge of making a decision. The reason I say it's stylistic xenophobia is that the uncanny valley theory gives people the authority to say: "This is strange, I don't know how to feel about it, therefore it's bad." It's easy to have this reaction because you see it over and over again, you lose nothing by parroting.
People don't see eyes-visible suits that often, they don't look like mascots, and so there are no established social conventions for dealing with that. So... let's unpack that a bit! What does it mean to say that there are social conventions for mascot performers? You have sporting events, theme parks, promotional gigs. A mascot is the centre of attention and draws people in, gets them excited. You see the same sorts of behaviour in fursuiters: high energy, bright colors, entertaining.
But just by having your eyes visible, you don't look like a mascot performer. You look like... something else. What happens when you make eye contact? What do you do? Everything changes the moment a pair of real human eyes strikes yours. You're involved! It's personal! A switch in the human brain gets flipped and the neurons that deal with peer-to-peer social interactions lights up. You do the threat assessment. People can't help it, it's the way we're programmed, we compare other humans to what we've been exposed to. We either allow our prejudices to take hold or we fight to overcome them. Ambivalently, we flip wildly between curiosity and fear until we settle on one or the other. The reward for success is that you get to hijack that strong neural pathway and create a really powerful and memorable character. The punishment for failure is that everyone is terrified and nobody wants to go near you, which is not what you want as a performer!
The trick is... well, I don't know the trick to making this style of costume work. It's hard work overcoming that curiosity/fear response... Offer people something they like, maybe, in exchange for the stylistic deviation. Distract them with some other part of the costume so the intensity isn't dialled up super high all the time. I have no clue! I know, though, that I wouldn't be interested in making it work if it didn't provoke such an ambivalent reaction in people. What I struggle with dodging the negative reaction, and I suppose that's as much my struggle as an artist as much as it is everyone else's challenge to get outside their comfort zone.
I think the more "standard" fursuit, mascot-style and whatnot, appeals to me less because they're less expressive. Although in a different way, the thought of it being a giant stuffed animal can be cool...I like the ones that have more obvious signs of life to them.
I'd love to see what you come up with!
Don't take my needless conformist indignation away from me! D=
Some examples of what you talk about are
As for you own choice I think your own eyes would be fine as long as you can blend it well.
Especially if the obviously-costumed person was still being in character as a sentient version of their animal.
You know the lab rat guy in Beakmans World? That. I'd do him. :3
You know, I've never seen it articulated quite that way. It makes a tremendous amount of sense!
When you're accosted by ambivalence, the easiest escape is to go "nope, too weird" and run away. However, being a bit of a xenophile, I have a tendency to try and climb the steeper route toward "huh... actually that's pretty cool!" So the Uncanny Valley (or whatever you want to call that fuzzy terminator) is a challenge, not an insurmountable barrier. And, as you suggest, there are rewards for successfully traversing it! The artist gets to "hijack that strong neural pathway and create a really powerful and memorable character." (Love that description, by the way...) And the viewer gets to expand their mind.
Anyway... awesome journal :)
When I get a suit, I want it to NOT be big and mascot-y and have fake eyes, I wanna use my real eyes. There's only ever been like two things I've ever seen that actually utilized the persons real eyes and it was masks that were a LOT smaller than whats usually done on fursuits (so the eye size and depth does not distract and looks actually really normal and great) or makeup prosthetics. Just no one else really does it and its kinda aggravating x.x
What a costume needs to do is match the concept as much as possible - if you are doing a cartoon character, it needs to look like one. When you put a real human mouth on a cartoon you get the Clutch Cargo/SyncroVox effect - it fails so badly that it acquires a comedic effect.
Real eyes work best on "horror" type costumes, like for example a devil mask. Most "horror" costumes aren't really meant to scare anybody, but to make some sort of imaginary creature come to life, same way "mascots" do. Every detail has to blend in for this to work, and the wrong choice of eyes will make them stick out like a sore thumb and ruin the illusion.
So it's not so much about the uncanny valley, but rather the failure to make the character's appearance believable enough.
It's a real fucking bummer and has rather poisoned the concept of that suit, and essentially that character for me. I'm getting a lot of post-hoc work done to change it. I hope it's enough. It's actually poisoned fursuiting in general for me, even with my acceptably-eyed suits. I might destroy the offensive suit entirely if the fixes don't fix it.
What did it look like, anyway? It can't have been that awful.
I think the effect is more of a "freelance clown" effect. Where you get up close and you just see it's someone's dad with bad facepaint. It's like, it takes the social interaction in this whole other direction than if it was some professional who looks like they know exactly what they're doing.
It's less of an "uncanny valley" thing for me, probably just a bit of a social anxiety thing. I have seen some stunning fursuits that do incorporate human eyes and I've seen some that really were off-putting (but more due to the overall construction). I definitely find myself loving prosthetics and movie monster makeup, so it isn't as simple as visible eyes= bad for me.
i actually attented a nice seminar for prosthetic masks at the last connvention i had attended, learned quite abit about mixing makeup and techniques for such and had grown even more curious to it!
alot of it i beleave has to do with the mask makers style, if they are too used to haveing abit of space between the performers eyes and the plastic mascot eyes of a regular fursuit then theres that tendancey to leave the eyesockets sunken in, wich is what alot of posters here are probebly thinking of when they say the eyes are far too beady and small. another portion for me is if contacts are used to change the shape of the eye...for a reason i cannot explain the contacts that northfur uses when he models a mask gives me the heeby jeebys *shivers!*
Everyone here has said some very interesting comments. I think using your own eyes can work in a fursuit, but it requires different styling to accommodate the size and spacing of human eyes. It can definitely work, and I would love it. I really don't like seeing static, lifeless eyes on well, almost every suit that's out there. It's partly why I'm so into makeup and bodypaint and I'm also a fan of prosthetics.
I guess the big reason it looks so "augh" to me would be that, it looks like someone has photoshopped little bitty human eyeballs onto either a cartoon, or a wild animal. Like seeing an ape with white sclera, or a photo of a dog with human eyes slapped over its own, it just produces this "YEEK" response. I guess the contrast of a whimsical design with real human eyes is too much for me, it looks inappropriately matched.
There's also the matter of fake fur and such looking...fake. The acrylic fur fibers right against these moist real human eyes, I just cannot do it, ahahaha. I can respect that others enjoy the aesthetic, though! I let the details get to me too easily, I can't take it in as a whole-- I'm just upset at how mis-matched everything looks, haha.