‘Like, really, really shocked’: why are so many people riffing on this sheep’s sex appeal? | New Zealand

Nick, this cute green cartoon from New Zealand is all over my social media. Why are people falling for an animated sheep?

This is a truly online story. A few months ago, Kiwibank, a state-owned financial institution, unveiled a new mascot: Buck, a green-wooled, brown-eyed emblem meant to embody the idea of “better paths, better possibilities and better outcomes” for customers.

A video of Buck riding the bus, drinking a flat white and getting her bangs trimmed made the rounds in the relatively nondescript way any brand campaign does.

Then came the confronting tweet, so far viewed by more than 4 million people.

“I WANT TO FUCK THE KIWIBANK SHEEP”, the post read, alongside a gif of Buck and her freshly trimmed hair.

“Years of effort to convince the world New Zealanders don’t want to fuck sheep has gone down the drain in one tweet,” another user wrote.

Those messages began to ping around the globe, bringing Buck a type of attention Kiwibank very much did not want.

Sounds like a successful ad campaign to me. What did the bank do with this global attention?

Kiwibank was not happy with Buck’s sudden fame.

The bank filed a series of copyright claims against the use of Buck’s image in the initial all-caps tweet and several others that featured drawings described as “sexy sheep art” by New Zealand website The Spinoff.

Buck’s image was quickly removed from several offending posts.

But remember the hydra from Greek mythology? Where every head Hercules cut off would only sprout several more? That’s what happened to these horny Buck posts: the internet went wild and Buck was suddenly everywhere alongside mocking and downright sleazy posts.

“It’s mostly mischief but it’s a deserving target and a warning to others not to try controlling this stuff,” one user told The Spinoff.

The US television presenter John Oliver took on the Buck ordeal on Last Week Tonight, too.

“The thing is, Kiwibank’s aggressive response was completely counterproductive. Basically a lot of New Zealanders are going ‘I am Spartacus’ right now,” Oliver said, referencing a famous scene in the movie Spartacus, where the title character’s allies declare support for their leader.

I guess you have to admire these modern gladiators. But do they have any allies in New Zealand itself?

Kiwibank, it seemed, wanted Buck to champion it as a bank that “bucked the system”. But in bucking the internet and its zeal for jokes, local free speech advocates were quick to voice their annoyance.

“Whether people found those posts funny, offensive or simply baffling, they were jokes about a bank’s mascot,” the Free Speech Union of New Zealand wrote in an open letter to the bank this month. “Kiwibank is entitled to enforce its copyright, but not to use it as a content filter.”

“Using copyright to remove speech a company dislikes is censorship, even when the subject is a sheep.”

Kiwibank spokesman Ben Mabon said the company had been responding to “explicit and harmful content being shared using Buck’s image”.

“Our concern was a serious one, and we believed it was important to address it,” he said in a statement this week.

“We recognise that the response became part of a conversation. We felt doing nothing wasn’t the right thing to do because of the harmful content.”

Love to see the world unite around a worthy cause. But has anyone asked poor Buck what she thinks about all this?

Buck had gone quiet for weeks. Until Tuesday.

“There’s been some stuff made about me – put on the internet. And if you saw what I had seen, you’d be shocked,” the animated sheep says in a video on Kiwibank’s Instagram account. “Like, really, really shocked.

“You know what really ruffles my fleece? This happens a lot, okay? It happens to a lot of people … It could happen to someone you know – someone that it really affects.”

Comments are open on the bank’s post.