First of all the people who had Botimals/cures started doing all sorts of stuff to their cures/Botimals that Graham&Swords never would have imagined, mostly going into overload and dacting them in intricate ways or damaging them to get them to act even cuter before they dacted them, and some people got worried about what that meant for society. Like maybe cures were turning people into monsters because that’s what a person who would damage a living thing just to see it do something cute or because it was so cute they wanted to hurt it was—was a monster. And that is still true. So Graham&Swords saw that if they kept talking about the cures/Botimals like they were alive, people would keep believing they were alive, and the backlash against the brand would be huge, because of “Look at what this corporation is teaching our children of today about how to treat living things,” and etc., which would be bad for sales.
And then on top of that Graham&Swords wanted cure/Botimal-users to enjoy the product because enjoying the product is what gets you to keep using the product, and because when other people see you enjoying the product it gets those other people to buy the product and use it so even more other people can see. But if you felt all shady and guilty for using the product in a certain way that you liked, then you might quit using the product even though you enjoyed it, like how smokers stop using cigarettes even though they enjoy using cigarettes, and then most of the other people who would have used the product after seeing others enjoy the product would instead look at the people who were using the product and see that those people were in bad shape and that all those people wanted to do when it came to the product was go back to before they ever got hold of the product and undecide to start using it, and all of that would add up to cures/Botimals sales not just stopping growing, but actually shrinking.
So Graham&Swords stopped lying and started emphasizing the truth about how cures/Botimals were really just robots that whatever you did to them was totally okay, as long as they were your property and not someone else’s.
And then also in addition to all of the above that I’ve written so far, there’s that whole razor-handle/razor-blade thing we learned about where you sell the handle to break even or even lose a little money on and then you make a bunch of money off the blades because Graham&Swords saw that the real money in Botimals/cures was in energizers and accessories. WorkPellets, PillowNests sold separately, CureSleeves, SlumberHardTubes, and later, and most profitably of course, PerFormulae. The cures are the handles is what I mean, and the other stuff is the blades. So the prices dropped extremely for the cures/handles, and then the cost of the other stuff did not. When my dad got his first cure, his dad would have had to pay three hundred dollars for the HatchKit like everyone else’s dad if Xavier Swords hadn’t been my grandfather Jon-Jon’s cousin by marriage, and that was over twenty years ago, so paying three hundred dollars for it was like paying something like a thousand dollars for it these days, and now I can go to any store and buy even the most fancy EmergeRig they make for fifty dollars, which would have been equal to something like fifteen dollars in 1988. And probably I won’t even go to a store to buy an EmergeRig because the only reasons to buy one anymore are so you can get a guaranteed limb-count and/or velvet/skin-color outcome and you don’t trust any of the cuddlefarmers you know, or maybe because you’re giving your kid or your sweetheart a Curio as a gift and you want it to be packaged all new and nice and factory-fresh or whatever. I’m part of the first generation that was born into a world where the Third Cute Revolution was in full effect, and I know kids who’ve never bought an EmergeRig. I’m not saying no one buys them, but most of us just buy clones and marbles off cuddlefarmers or just get them from/give them to/trade them with our friends and use sold-separately sleeves, or old sleeves, or even just cut holes in a sock, “urban”-style. But what I’m saying is that in the 2012 manual, all the extra stuff is advertised, and it’s not only just advertised, but it’s advertised in this way to make it seem like cures are actually kind of a boring pain in the rear to own unless you buy all these extras. So maybe I get the handle for free, but I’m still going to end up buying lots of blades.
Lastly when it comes to shadiness, there’s that answer to the first FAQ question in the 2012 manual, which I think probably takes the most explaining of anything else about the manuals. But before that, I should point out how a lot of the warnings about how to deal with cures/Botimals aren’t built into the answers to the FAQs in the 2012 manual (or anywhere else in the rest of the 2012 manual) because 1) pretty much everyone knows about how to keep cures/Botimals and their clones functioning these days, and 2) no one really cares about the details of all that because cures/Botimals are a) so cheap now, and b) they clone so easily. In place of the warnings, though, they explain a bunch of stuff about hobunks, which Graham&Swords didn’t either really know that much about when cures/Botimals were first being sold to the public and so they didn’t mention them in the original manual, or maybe they didn’t mention them because they thought that mentioning them would scare people off of buying the product because of all the violence that hobunks do to other cures (ha! that is truly ironic). The way they talk about them now, it’s almost like they’re saying, “User: if you don’t do what it takes to make hobunks, you’ll really be missing out on some fun.”
Anyway, there’s this whole thing Graham&Swords gets admired for with the original marketing strategy of Botimals that you have to think about when you start to think about the answer to that first FAQ question in the 2012 manual. This part is almost art, even though Graham&Swords denies that it was on purpose. The thing I mean is the scarcity strategy. Unless it wasn’t a strategy at all.
It goes like this.
Graham&Swords invents/discovers cures/Botimals. No one disagrees about that.
Then they fund a study in Chicago to see if the cures/Botimals can make crazy children less crazy, or at least somehow help the children be nicer or less violent or something. No one disagrees about that.
And then the crazy children who are in the study start taking their cures/Botimals to school and public places and other kids see the cures/Botimals and want them because of how cute they are. No one disagrees about that, but Graham&Swords, even though they don’t say that’s untrue, they say they hadn’t intended that to be a part of the study that way: they hadn’t really thought about it at all, they say.
Meantime, no one except about twenty Chicago-area crazy kids are allowed to even get their hands on cures/Botimals, which makes kids want them even more. And no one disagrees about that, either, though some people say that Graham&Swords could have, if they wanted to, started selling cures/Botimals to the general public way before they actually did start selling them to the general public. Graham&Swords says that’s not true, though. Something about “production flow” and “factory dynamics.”