The real reason why we can't have nice things, as the saying is modified, is that every nice thing is followed by a hundred miserable knockoffs. Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery, it is an affront to the dignity of the one being flattered.
And this is why we risk our future employment and the scorn of our soon-to-be ex-colleagues by mentioning the one truly troublesome aspect of Ellie The Elephant, the iconic mascot of the New York Liberty. A number of the comrades are in deep stan communion with the Libs due to their geographical proximity and the entertainment provided by the team, but they are even more fully of a hive mind about Ellie, the queen whom all the other bees must protect at the cost of their very lives. The love these bloggers have for this sassy elephant is pure, and fierce, and as undignified as any sincere love invariably is. Good for them for finding something to love unconditionally, and shame unto them for sharing their joy with the rest of us. Now let’s get to besmirching.
For the record, your author is agnostic about Ellie, accepting that she exists and that she provides an exceptional value in the area of mascotry to those who partake. She is heading toward Chicken/Phanatic/Gritty canonization status for those who worship, and she is a core feature of the league's new popularity—not quite on the level of an elite player but not very far behind, either. In a league growing almost too fast for its seams—the players union and Cheryl Miller are already griping that the new $2.2 billion media deal being proposed is way below market value is a particularly positive sign in this regard—Ellie is not just part of the landscape, but an instantly identifiable feature of it. This elephant is a landmark in ways that pretenders to the throne like Caitlin Clark can only hallucinate.
The problem with this, of course, is that whatever Ellie's virtues, she still reminds us of how many sports mascots are monumentally lame, and how many more defective mascots will be generated as a pale twerking echo of her apparent genius. Again, your honor, we will stipulate to Ellie’s merits without actually recognizing any of them, but we can also say with certainty that almost no other mascots ever follow one of genius with more genius. The mascot business is mostly a cavalcade of forlorn, unfunny, and demonstrably unclever dustmop impersonators that serve only to scare children and remind all right-thinking people that mascots interfere with rather than enhance enjoyment. Although scaring children has its obvious merits.
Mostly, though, this is a matter of the imitators condemning the mold-breakers. We noticed this during the WNBA All-Star Game And Business Festival when all the other team mascots gravitated towards Ellie in some organized hell-kabuki, none of which was good because none of those other mascots are either interesting or memorable in any way. Because every team's marketing department wants to capture an idea someone else executed, Ellie has spawned a new corporate interest in mascots; this is good for the justifiably moribund mascot business and no one else. Gritty did not improve the entertainment value provided by Harvey The Hound. The Phanatic did not give to the world a new and more dynamic Mr. Met; in fact, it got us Mrs. Met, creating a horror parody of domestic relationships surrounding, ick, the Mets. Imagine a married couple that work together at the Losing To The Marlins Factory. This is the shame that mascot arms races produce.
We still get abominations against humanity like the NHL’s Mascot Showdown, all because when one mascot hits, every other team fabricates and shamelessly promotes its own tepid copy. That is where we stand with Ellie—she is still the best of the elephant mascots, and by a wide margin over felt-and-fabric landslides like Bilal or Stomper, but she is also a gateway to new and more dispiriting knockoffs. Ellie is the industry's new Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles' groundbreaking 57-year-old concept album that became the antecedent of hundreds of awful ones, until Sly and the Family Stone saved us from our own chameleonic attraction to tastelessness. This would be where we’d propose some sort of punitive response to Ellie's role in this disturbing new mascotolalia, but we can see the rest of the Defectoriat rising up from its morning torpor and approaching with unholstered staple guns and French-pressed malice in their eyes.
But the truth cannot be hidden, denied, or ameliorated. Ellie's inadvertent but very profound role in the stilted mascot hijinks to come cannot be minimized or excepted from the greater blight. She did this by being good in an industry dominated by the paralytically bad, and she cannot evade responsibility by batting her coquettish trunk—no matter how anthropomorphically alluring it might be.
