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IS UMBREON A TOP?

A meta-analysis of NSFW furry artwork.

Part I

Introduction

I struggled, for a few days, to figure out how I was going to present this particular piece of media. At first, I thought it would be funny to try and do an entire professional academic paper, with citations and footnotes and an abstract. Of course, that was hampered by the fact that I had never, in my life, ever really written an academic paper. At best, I had one essay that was forced to comply with MLA style guidelines, that I wrote in high school.

I do not remember the grade I got on that paper. I don't even remember the subject matter. The teacher at the community college who read it said that she "liked my voice," so that still makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

In any case, attempting to learn an entirely new genre of publication, from scratch, is a tall enough order, without the subject matter being something as horrendously inane as "how prevalent is a particular kink in a specific subsection of erotic furry artwork?" Therefore, I'm just going to try and tackle this project as I would a typical essay, albeit one that is very specifically well organized. Those of you with actual backgrounds in academia are still perfectly free to criticize my methodology and organization efforts. With that in mind:

PART ONE-A

What am I doing?

I access a fair amount of spicy artwork, being a person with Internet access and a collection of friends who also access a fair amount of spicy artwork. Considering the readers of this essay are (most likely) doing so on a repository of furry art, it is a safe assumption that you, yourself, are in a similar situation. Among those spicy artworks in my feed are specifically ones of the Eeveelutions. You know the ones. If you don't, don't worry. I will be providing definitions in the next section. In any case, in my time on the Internet, I have had opportunity to see every variant of every Eeveelution, and during that time, I have always maintained one thing:

Umbreon is a top.

Like many cursed ideas, that come out of the furry fandom, this started off as a joke. I happened to observe a pattern, in most of the artwork I had seen, up until that point. Much of the artwork featured Umbreon as a male, being the one doing the fucking, and often being pretty dominant about it. At first, it was just a fun pattern I'd noticed, and joked about. However, the longer I have said it, the more firmly I have maintained it. As more and more evidence came in, it seemed to me to be an inescapable truth. The vast majority of artwork of this particular dark fox-thing tended to be very specific, and while exceptions certainly exist, it felt like the preponderance of pictures I'd seen would only confirm my suspicions.

However, is this really the case? Has the Internet collectively decided that Umbreon has a default position in the proverbial bedroom? Or was this a case of my own personal biases coloring my perceptions? I endeavored to find out, which is why I am now rambling into a text editor about my plans.

In between other projects, I shall be combing through the archives of furry artwork repositories, searching all artwork tagged with this one particular creature. I will be starting my search on e621, it being the one I feel has the widest variety of artwork, but I will consider expanding to other platforms if and when:

A: I have my methodology down for cataloging the artwork shown, and

B: It can be reasonably determined that other sites have a sufficiently different collection of pictures as might skew my results, one way or the other.

In an effort to give myself the most amount of leeway, I will be looking at all pictures, in posting order. I will also, regrettably, have to disable my blacklist for this project (pray for me, Internet). This will unfortunately mean that, while I am comfortable publishing the results of my data gathering efforts, I will not be publishing a list of the artwork referenced. I am fully anticipating that some of these pictures are going to be ones that are unsuitable for certain audiences. So, preemptive apologies to anyone who was expecting that I would be giving them a free list of Bre lewds.

PART ONE-B

Can you define your terms, please?

Umbreon is a character from the video game and anime series Pokemon. They are a species of quadrupedal animals, similar in shape to a cat or a fox, with dark fur coloration and gold ring motifs. They are one of several "Eeveelutions," fox-creatures of wildly varying designs and elemental themes, that all evolve from a single base creature known as Eevee.

I am going to be using the word "top," in order to describe a very specific trend in artwork. However, it is possible that my definition of "top" is going to be different from yours or even the general consensus. It is just a shortened word, used for convenience (and to make a snappy title). Therefore, allow me to define the word as clearly as I can. For the purposes of this project, a "top" is defined as:

1. Male, or any equivalent able to engage in penetrative sex

2. The active partner in a sexual encounter (that is, the one doing the penetrating, if any)

3. The dominant partner in a sexual encounter

Room is allowed here, for edge cases, but those three criteria are what I have specifically nailed down as being common among Umbreon art. Because of this, there are going to be several borderline rules, that will need to be decided one way or the other. A not-at-all comprehensive list is as follows:

Non-dominant penetration: Femdom and Power Bottom works are disqualified from being classified as "top." While an Umbreon who is being held down and rode may be said to be the active partner, they are not the dominant one. This would cover any situation in which context would imply they are not the dominant partner, potentially including basic acts like cowgirl.

Passive dominance: By the same token, a female Umbreon engaged in Femdom, or a PB male, is disqualified from being a "top" for largely the opposite reason. They are the dominant, but not the active partner. This is contentious, but remember that my specific definition of "top" is mostly centered on the common trend showing Umbreon as penetrating partners.It is not meant to imply that that is the only valid definition, or even the correct one.

Non-penetrative images: To be decided on a case by case basis. A lot of room for judgment calls will have to be afforded, but as a general rule, if the tone or context of the art would imply that Umbreon is the dominant partner, then it will be defined as "top."

Lucky Pierre situations: Fucking... I don't even know.

Solo art: Again, really open to interpretation. In situations where the context is unclear, we will be erring on the side of "not a top," in order to give the experiment the greatest chance of falsification.

PART ONE-C

Why are you doing this?

I have way too much free time on my hands and a propensity to let stupid questions live rent free in my head.

PART 2

The Audit

Life is all about answering important questions. Who are we? Why are we here? Am I really that determined to catalog a ton of random Bre lewds, with no blacklist protection, to satisfy a question that literally nobody but me ever thought to ask? What does the "Ejaculating Cum" tag mean? Ejaculating cum as opposed to what?

As opposed to what, e6?

As curious minds, it is our duty to get to the bottom of as many of these questions as possible. Even if they are completely pointless and one's time would probably be better spent trying to figure out the stock market or something actually productive. With that in mind, here are the results of my first sweep of the Umbreon tag on e6.

PART 2-A

The actual information.

I scanned through one hundred images on the furry image board e621 with two key tags: "Umbreon" and "Rating:Explicit." The latter is meant to assure that only images that are unambiguously NSFW are counted. There is really no way that including a lot of safe images wouldn't throw off the count. Unless I was somehow able to determine sexual proclivities from every single refsheet. And I can't do that. As for why I'm including Umbreon in the tags for my research...

Anyway, the following are the broad strokes of what I have learned.

*Of the 100 images scraped, 56 were images with 2 or more actors in them, while the remaining 44 were solo shots. Of those, 23 of the solos and 14 of the multi-actor images featured an Umbreon that was anthro (that is, they were drawn as a humanoid, instead of as the default quadrupedal feral creature that Umbreon normally is).

*Of those 100 images, 55 featured a male Umbreon, 36 were female, 3 were some kind of intersex or hybrid, and 5 were defined as "ambiguous." Only 2 artworks featured multiple Bre's, and both of those featured two male Bre's.

*There are 41 images, in total, that feature Umbreon as a top as I have defined them in the first section of this paper. Of those, 28 were in pictures with 2+ partners, and the remaining 13 were solos. The percentages of pictures that qualify as top, for each category, are as follows:

Total: 41

Solo: 47.6190...

Solo Non-Feral: 13.0434....

2+: 54.7619...

2+ Non-Feral: 35.7143...

*The most common tags were, obviously, descriptive tags that indicate things like body parts, objects in the scene, and things like that. Most of those were ignored, in the name of not having a list of tags longer than the Silmarillion, but the two I decided to keep were the biggest by far. Those two were "Anthro" and "Feral," with 26 and 49, respectively.

*The most common tag describing a sex act was "vaginal." "Anal" was a close second, and "Oral" trailed behind with about half of Anal's hits.

*There were 30 entries for "Animal Genitalia," and 17 entries for "Knot"

*Most importantly of all, two images in the list contained the tag "Blep."

PART 2-B

Interpretation

Unsurprisingly, the majority of artwork about Umbreon depicted them in their feral state. This tracks with what I've already seen, as well as being in line with how they look in canon. Something I noticed during cataloging (but didn't manage to properly document, so take this as potentially biased) was that many of the solo anthro images tended to feature Umbreon as female. I guess the fur coloring just really vibes with a feminine body shape.

A majority of pictures made Umbreon male. That by itself is a point in favor of my theory, but it will need to be verified with some kind of control (more on that later.). Even the intersex varieties tended to be of a kind that could, feasibly, qualify as being a top. Of course, that's largely because andromorphs are underrepresented, compared to their counterparts, but still.

Tops, generally, have to be defined by their relation to other sex partners. With that in mind, it was surprising to see that we still managed to stay so high up there, in numbers. 41 percent of the total list is significant, when you consider that most of the solos had to basically be boiled down to context and gut feeling. More importantly, we have the one statistic that matters: something around half of the artwork featuring two or more participants turned out to match my limited definition of top. Assuming that a lot of "fringe" tags (the kind that are normally caught by blacklists) are of fetishes that are more often than not independent of traditional sexual dynamics, it is my completely unfounded, pseudo-educated guess that that percentage might be even higher, depending on how "vanilla" your tastes are. It might be higher still depending on how you define top, as well (recall that my definition for this study is exclusively that of an active, dominant partner).

So, we're good, right? We scraped a little less than one percent of the total amount of Bre lewds, and discovered a clear trend that proves a theory. Job done. We did a science. Well, not quite.

PART 2-C

Possible Criticisms and Next Steps

In a vacuum, it seems obvious that I have proved what I want to prove. Perhaps expanding the number of images sampled will cause the numbers to normalize, a bit, but new artwork is added on a daily basis, and I'd already lost my place more than once thanks to power cuts and other problems. Part of the reason it took so long to compile this information was the fact that I eventually decided to wait a few days between scrapes, and go back to the newest image. As a result, my list is reasonably current, though far from complete.

Organization has been a major problem. I reiterate that I have never actually written an academic paper, before.

The most obvious criticism I can anticipate is for people to refute the notion that "most Bre's are male" is somehow significant. Even knowing nothing about the furry community, that statement is a silly one to post up, by itself, with no backing. When you take into consideration that a disproportionate number of people in the furry fandom tend towards homosexuality and bisexuality, and that the majority of furries tend to be male, the statement "most Bre's are male" could just mean "most Bre's appeal to a large chunk of the fandom." I'd still maintain the significance of the top bit, but in order to be truly sure that all this information is significant, it is important to have a control group to compare it to.

In the next section of this paper, I'm going to try a similar sampling of a more generic species tag. I'm currently thinking "feline," since it has the widest variance in body types and (as far as I'm aware) isn't overwhelmed by any particular furry memes like you would find in, say, foxes. I am fully expecting the numbers to be more "normalized." That is, closer to proportions you would find out in a random sampling of images. If that is the case, then the theory is proven. We will have successfully done a science.

Unless this methodology turns out to be horribly malformed for a reason I cannot currently conceptualize. Only time will tell.

SIDE NOTE

Some thoughts on tagging

There seems to be two schools of thought, when it comes to people tagging new works. Either one tags the bare minimum required to describe the broad stokes of the work, or they go way far out of their way to include every single possible permutation of whatever is being shown on screen. On more than one occasion, I found myself archiving tags and finding examples on my list of things that could have been put in. The former was often associated with more amateur artworks, ones that clearly looked like just somebody posting up their latest DeviantArt doodle or what have you.

Among the works that had more complete taglists, it tended towards either more industrialized works by professionals (commissions, comics, alternates of a template image that were made to cater to different fetishes), as well as artwork containing "fringe" concepts. I am just going to write candidly here, for a second: foot fetish artists and watersports enthusiasts want to make damn sure you have no problem finding a tag that points you to their picture. I've had to include several variants of the same tag in my own list, to make sure pictures like that don't normally come through, because all it takes is for one artist to put in "foot_focus" instead of "foot_fetish" and suddenly you find yourself staring straight into a secretary's soles in 4k. This is not a condemnation of anyone who's into those subjects. More power to you guys. Artists who are trying to get discovered on the massive content mill that is the internet have few enough advantages, so my advice to anybody trying to get more eyeballs on their work is to take a cue from the spicier side of the lewd boards. Tag your works as aggressively as a foot fetishist does, and you'll make it.

Okay, tangent over. Next!

PART 3

The Second Audit I Did in a Vague Attempt to Give the First Audit Even the Vaguest Shred of Context

A common refrain, in the comment section of the e621 image board, is that complaining about the artwork you are looking at is a waste of time. Instead, it is more efficient to appropriately set up your blacklist, such that artwork of themes that you find distasteful or objectionable do not show up, on your feed. This is a true statement, even if it's rendered moot when an image shows up with six tags, and none of them are properly telegraphing that the artwork is cub. But, again, this is a minor complaint against what is otherwise a perfectly valid stance.

After all, it's not like anybody would deliberately scrape through images at complete random, with all blacklist protections removed, in an effort to, say, prove an incredibly arcane trope in furry smut.

I don't know where this intro is going. All I know is that "Cum Bending" is a tag on e6, and now you know this information, as well.

PART 3-A

The Actual Information

To reiterate my previous point, I have scraped a selection of 100 images, posted to e6 in chronological order. There are only two tags to narrow the results down, those being "Felid" and "Rating:explicit." The purpose of this was to try and find a control group, and cats struck me as having the greatest possible variance both in body-types and personality tropes. And, as it turns out, I was pretty much right. Whether it was muscly lions and tigers, willowy house cats, actual, like, four-legged housecats, or anime girls with ears and a tail, I received a significantly wider variety of images. The broad strokes of the data collected are as follows:

*61 of the 100 images involved 2 or more actors, while 39 were solos. 16 of those 2+ images contained multiple felines, and unlike the Umbreon sample there is a much more random distribution of all males, all females, male/female and "other" pairings.

*Of the 100 images sampled, a whopping 95 percent of them featured non-feral characters, with only 5 images containing ferals. (Unofficial statistic: the majority of those ferals were Yuumi, for some reason.)

*Of the images where one feline is in the image, 41 of them were female, while 38 were male, with 4 "other" arrangements.

*This time, there were only 31 images in which a feline was a top, as I have defined it. Of those, 21 were images with 2+ characters, and 10 were solos. The percentage breakdowns per category are shown below, in the same way they were presented before.

Total: 31

Solo: 0

Solo Non-Feral: 21.6216

2+: 66.66

2+ Non-Feral: 37.5

*Again, I ignored most of the tags that indicated body parts, props, or anything else used to simply describe the scene. "Anthro" and "Feral" were preserved, for the sake of tying back to the Umbreon list, but the numbers were so wildly skewed to the former, it hardly matters.

*The most common sex act was Anal, with Vaginal a close second, and Oral lagging behind with only half the hits.

*Animal Genitalia still outnumbered Humanoid, by a fair margin.

*There were no entries for "Blep," in any of the images surveyed. There was, however, a single entry for "These Aren't My Glasses."

PART 3-B

Interpretation

I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much more varied the tags were, this time around. Of course, in retrospect, perhaps I should have expected that. "Felids" are a generic subset of furry art, so naturally any sort of fetishes could be slotted in there, without problem. In the case of Umbreon, however, him being feral usually was the fetish. Beyond that, however, the sheer variety of body types, art styles, and general feel definitely made the whole thing feel like it was as close to random chance as I could get.

A slight majority of the artwork featured a female cat. Based on the almost random guesses I had made, up until this point, I had kind of figured that it would be more of a 50/50 split, and perhaps a larger sample size will bear that out. Then again, considering the average furry is significantly more likely to be male, maybe an over-representation of female characters is just to be expected. If that's true, it would make my previous observations about mostly male Bre's pretty relevant.

And then, of course, there's the meat of the data. The top percentages. As I said previously, it makes sense that the number is going to be less than half. A good chunk of the images I surveyed were solos, and unless I had some explicit bio information, one way or the other, a lot of determining whether or not a picture of a cat with their cock out qualified as top really came down to general "feel." Top, in sex terms, is entirely determined by a character's relation to another character. With that being said, less than half of the images that featured actual sex between two characters featured a cat top. Compare that to Umbreon, where over half the images met the criteria, and I think we finally have an answer.

CONCLUSIONS

In conclusion: Umbreon is a top.

As I have defined "top."

Within the confines of lewd artwork on e621.

Possibly.

If this were some scientific pilot study, this would probably be the point where I make a big sweeping gesture with my hands and say "further testing is required." Specifically, a larger sample size would probably provide clearer and more normalized data. Perhaps even looking into other types of species, just on the off chance that cats are secretly submissive-coded in the furry world, and I've just never picked up on that. However, that is exactly the sort of effort that most normal people would consider excessive, just to prove that a random Pokemon from the Pokemon video game tends to do people doggystyle.

As for why this conclusion might be the case... I have no idea. Perhaps it's just aesthetics. Perhaps a bunch of people independently saw the entire Eeveelution line and said to themselves "Okay, so even though these guys are all foxes, we gotta make one of them the top or else this smutty Vee fanfic can't get off the ground." And then those people all chose the cool edgy shadow fox because he's all dark and mysterious. I can't really say, though apparently I can write fanfic about fanfic writers, in response to it.

In any case, I have successfully done a science. This has been... an experience. Thank you all for coming to my TED talk; I will leave the comment section open for questions and comments.