In praise of the absurd mascot category

Puritanizer has ten categories. Nine of them are, broadly, modest clothing: Victorian, religious, historical, winter, uniforms, cultural, fantasy, grandma, sports. The tenth is Absurd Mascot.

The Absurd Mascot category exists because at a certain point during development we looked at a spreadsheet full of hazmat suits and deep-sea divers and said: this is not enough. We need a T-Rex. We added the T-Rex. The tool got better.

The lineup

• Inflatable T-Rex — the small, wobbly, internet-famous kind. The one people run marathons in.
• Giant banana — the full yellow suit with a little face hole. The classic.
• Walking hotdog — bun included. Mustard optional, but the model usually adds it.
• Full sumo fat suit — with the topknot wig and the belt.
• Teddy bear onesie — adult-sized, brown, slightly sad.
• Chicken costume — the Rocky one.
• Potato sack with arm holes — the simplest possible mascot. A surprise favourite.
• Full Santa — red velvet, white beard attached.
• Walking pint of Guinness — introduced after a pub trip.
• Pigeon — we do not remember who suggested this but we kept it.

There are more. These are the ones that tested best.

Why this category beats the others for sharing

People do not share photos of themselves looking tastefully Victorian. They share photos of themselves as a walking hotdog. The Absurd Mascot category is the only one that makes the comedy visible at thumbnail size. A nun habit and a mourning gown are very funny in context but they require a second look. A T-Rex is funny instantly. A giant banana is funny on mute, on a tiny phone screen, three rooms away.

We did not set out to build a category optimised for social media. We set out to build a category that was unambiguously ridiculous. These turn out to be the same category.

The failure modes

Absurd Mascot has the highest re-roll rate of any category, because the model occasionally decides that a T-Rex costume should be a literal T-Rex and paints dinosaur skin directly onto the subject. That is not what anyone wants. The current prompt includes the word "costume" three times in the mascot branch for exactly this reason.

The giant banana was even worse at first — the model would sometimes just replace the subject with a banana. Not a person in a banana suit. Just a banana, with the subject's face somewhere in the middle looking slightly alarmed. We fixed this by adding the phrase "wearing a banana costume" in three places in the prompt. It now produces a person-in-banana-suit reliably.

The defence

If you are the kind of person who thinks a tool like this should stick to nuns and plate armour, we respect that and gently direct you to the other nine categories. If you are the kind of person who hears "there is a walking pint of Guinness option" and immediately wants to see it, welcome. You are the target user. The walking pint of Guinness is exactly as good as you are imagining.

Roll the dice on Absurd Mascot →