BadEgo Puts the ‘Rated R’ in Avatar

In the brave new world of digital communication, one of the newer phenomena to surface into the lexicon of expression is the Emoji, which are used in electronic messages and web pages and exist in various genres, including  facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals.

Originally meaning ‘pictograph, the word emoji comes from the Japanese language and its origins date back to first appearing on Japanese mobile phones in 1999, becoming increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after being added to several mobile operating systems.  Amazingly, today they are considered to be a large part of western popular culture; indeed, back in 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the ‘Face with Tear of Joy’ emoji the ‘Word of the Year’.

Given the richness, depth, and range of the English language, one major downside to the use of emojis to express oneself has always been the narrow and one-sided range of their focus and content, largely limited to safe pleasantries and benign topical renderings that to the developers of the ground-breaking new digital application BadEgo, do users a disservice by limiting this form of expression to the narrow squeaky-clean realm of the safe and the sanitized.

Just as life itself is about dualities - the yin and the yang; the alpha and the omega - the revolutionary creators of BadEgo, a company called Saginawty LLC from Saginaw, MI, hope to remedy this situation by giving users a fun-based and humorous panoply of expressive diversity intended strictly for adult users, and guaranteed to poke fun at everybody with the range of their adult-oriented avatars and renderings.

Recently The Review caught up with Nasty Nate - a quick-witted little red devil who happens to be both the ‘face’ and mascot for BadEgo - so we could find out more by having him address our questions and expand upon the nature and philosophy of this newly christened application.

We hope you find our exchange both fun and informative.

Review: According to psychologists one’s personality is determined by three factors:  the ‘Id’ which is that instinctive portion of the mind; the Super-Ego, or part that acts as a self-critical conscience, reflecting social standards learned from parents and teachers; and the ‘Ego’, which acts as a mediator between the two.  What exactly is a ‘BadEgo’?

Nasty Nate:  You don’t need me at this point because you answered your own f#*ing question. You described what the Super Ego is, what the Id is and how Ego balances the two, so you’re a normal person.  This is the ego gone bad when it doesn’t work and this is what happens when it goes bad - you express what that emotional side of your personality wants to say all the time - without the filter.

Bad Ego doesn’t need a filter - the filter is gone. You describe Sigmund Freud’s theories, but Jonathan Haidt,  a psychologist at the University of Virginia, describes the two separate portions of a personality as the elephant and the rider. The elephant is more emotional; and the rider is the portion trying to stay in control. In this picture, we want to be the elephant's tusk, if you get my drift.

Review: As the ‘face’ of this new company known as Bad Ego, who exactly are you?

Nasty Nate: I’m more of an attitude - a fun attitude - not a ‘face’ so much. You can build faces in the App and I’m essentially a red devil face - very mischievous and that’s just everybody’s inner devil.  It’s not really about who am I, it’s who are we? We’re all about ego.

Review:  Why did you decide to embark upon this endeavor and what are some of the goals you hope to accomplish with the launch of this new app? 

Nasty Nate: Honestly, the initial voyage of this idea was christened from the fact  everybody is sending emoji’s and little avatars to one another when expressing themselves in online communication.   I don’t know if everybody else’s tool is an eggplant, but mine is not.  I need more appropriate and realistic ways to communicate visually what I’m thinking.

There definitely is a market for this type of animated language when it comes to the subject of communication and sadly, everybody plays it way too safe in every world right now.  People are afraid and feel this is inappropriate, or that’s too extreme, or tell people they can’t do certain things; but they’re still making ‘R’ rated movies and pornography is the most googled topic on the internet, so if there isn’t a place for this in society every movie would be PG and porn sites wouldn’t exist.

People out there get it when their ego goes bad; and our goal is to supplement that part of the market - it’s supply and demand, or more a case of demand but no supply. A void in the market so to speak, and I love filling voids! If we give people a platform to say what they really want to say - give them the stage, as it were; we believe we’ll be successful.

Review:  What are the biggest challenges that you’ve encountered in bringing this project to fruition? 

Nasty Nate:  The biggest challenges we’ve faced are multiple because you run into a lot of unexpected technical difficulties. It’s not like we embarked upon this app journey being savvy professionals and knew all the inner workings of seamlessly pulling things together. We’re basically four monkeys that said we’re going to make an encyclopedia and had to figure out how to do it.  And lo and behold here we are standing upright now giving naysayers the finger. But that’s been the most challenging element - trying to decide upon the content and how to best represent it.

Review:  There is a school of thought that says if you can’t say something nice about a person you shouldn’t say anything at all; obviously, you feel honesty is the best policy - are you concerned about people abusing this platform that you are creating? 

Nasty Nate:  I’m more concerned about people not abusing this platform. It’s made to be rude and it's meant to be a comedy.  It’s not like you’re sending an actual photo when you use one of our avatars. Frankly, anything or product can be abused or seen as being dangerous.  Take the typewriter - one could say the man who invented it was evil because he created something you can insult somebody through. Yes, we’re providing a bit more in-depth opportunity to be insulting; but it’s still a cartoon. If you’re offended by a cartoon ever, than my response is ‘What is wrong with you?’ Look at Bugs Bunny - the violence depicted in those early cartoons was amazing; but it was acceptable even back then. So from the beginning cartoons have been about pushing the envelope; but its still comedy. If you’re offended by comedy than we’re here to bring it back. We have enough content to offend everybody.

Review:  What are the biggest assets that you bring to the realm of social media interaction? 

Nasty Nate:   The honest voice. Our cartoon styles are more realistic than most, which makes it more fun. There’s a gap in the market for this kind of stuff and other platforms have backtracked from what originally made them unique.  Nowadays you can’t even use a gun in your little emojis - the ones they have look like a squirt gun.  Are we all children? Are you kidding me? It looks like a toy - a damn toy. They’re just pacifying and treating everyone like a child.

Review: What steps are you taking with this new app to assure not offending certain segments of the population?

Nasty Nate:  Zero. If we haven’t offended you yet, we’re working on it; and if we don’t offend your group let us know because that’s offensive. If we’re going to offend everybody else except one small demographic, that’s more insulting to the other demographics.

Review: Is the ‘BadEgo’ app LGBT friendly?

Nasty Nate: Yeah, I love lesbians. It’s definitely friendly to these groups, but it’s also offensive because we’re not going to hold back on any group - they’re all fair game. We believe in equal opportunity.

Review: Is Nasty Nate based off a real person and if so is that person a convicted felon or registered sex offender?

Nasty Nate:  No, but if he was you might want to google and check. We’ll make sure to have our board meetings a certain distance from schools and churches just be safe. Frankly, this app is meant for adults interacting with adults. The lines we don’t cross are lines that aren’t funny. But anything between adults can be funny.

The team that birthed this devil child of an app has targeted users that enjoy comedy and humor.  Everybody will find a unique use for it and I expect the unexpected from our users. I think they’ll be more creative than we ever were.

In terms of features we have way more expressions for every pose and will launch with 500 expressions, which is what sets us apart.  Other apps of this nature try to find a million different poses with silly different things; but we found there is so much you can say with one simple pose.  A picture says a thousand words and we’re putting those thousands words into each image. There’s a thousand things you can say with a middle finger, you know?

Available on:
iOS - https://apple.co/2RNrt7C
Droid - https://goo.gl/3u5A71
Web - https://badego.app