TWISTING THE SCRIPT

THE HUMAN URGE TO CORRUPT WHOLESOME CALICO CRITTERS

- STORY: CHANTEL TATTOLI / NYT

When Paul Welander, a healthcare worker in Britain, heard about a lawsuit that the maker of Calico Critters toys recently filed against a social media content creator, he wasn’t totally surprised.

The critters, introduced in 1985, are tiny velvety-bodied animals — rabbits, mice, moles, bears, beavers, badgers, pigs, penguins — dressed in modest clothes and sold in sets as families.

The lawsuit alleges that the creator committed copyright and trademark infringement by making videos that portray the twee toys in scandalous situations: having affairs, driving drunk, taking drugs. Videos not unlike the crassly captioned pictures of the toys, also known as Sylvanians, that Welander, 51, started sharing on social media back in 2016.

One of his posts, featuring a photo of two squirrels in cottagecore attire near a pile of leaves, had the caption: “Cover the feet, we have till spring to get our story straight.” Another, featuring a bushy-tailed rodent sitting at a piano, was captioned with a lyric from the song Baby Got Back. It read: “I like big butts and I cannot lie, you other brothers can't deny?”

When Welander began sharing the posts on X (back when it went by Twitter), his account, called Sylvnianans, amassed some 10,000 followers within a week, he said. He attributed the interest in it to the humour of imagining the squeaky-clean creatures engaged in “adult topics’, as he put it.

Soon after, his account was suspended. The reason Welander was given, he recalled, was for “misrepresentation of a product” A representative for X said it would be hard to confirm the reasons for actions taken against accounts as far back as 2016.

It wasn’t long before Welander started posting again on another account, called Forest Frlends.