Billy Herrington’s model used for Ultimate Muscle roller is sourced from MMD video asset repositories where he’s exclusively used to dance along to Idolmaster & Touhou music. The ultimate muscle roller vehicle’s visual “source” is from a video that is nonerotic & parodying an anime. Herrington isn’t popular because of pornography, he’s popular from abstract memes. If you even want to go extremely far back, you could even say that the real “Source” of the most modern and ubiquitous representation of Billy is a bunch of japanese dudes on NicoNicodouga who love Postmodernism & the kirby soundtrack. None of those things are pornographic or designed to be viewed as such. Implications otherwise sure seem like people are very willing to say a queer person who happens to have done sex work can only be seen as an avatar of such which is uh, insanely dehumanizing & homophobic lol.
Moreover, I’d like to try and distinguish between of the literal history of a cultural icon versus the reality/popular/practical reality of said cultural icon. Take for instance Pepe the Frog. Pepe the Frog’s origin from silly stoner indie comics. Pepe’s modern & culturally ubiquitous icon is one of white nationalism/hate speech/etc. Now, as far as I’m aware, any Pepe avatars on the workshop are banned for insanely obvious reasons, agnostic of the reality of his “source” and its factual legitimacy. On the inverse side of this, you have someone who you’ve labeled strictly as porn star, who has facets of his career that for obvious reasons wouldn’t be kosher for inclusion on the workshop, but who is known far and wide for particulary nonerotic, nonpornographic things & is popular because of those things - hence my point with Link. The insurmountable amount of pornography of Zelda characters does not mean Zelda is pornographic. The comparatively small amount of pornography of Billy Herrington does not mean what is ostensibly a reference to Gachimuchi, or his body, or you riding him in the racing minigame in towers is pornographic either. Something can have a problematic facet & not be strictly defined by it. Look at the intent behind the people who engage with it, that’s the only “context” that practically matters in this case.
Continuing that sentiment, if someone tries hard enough they can locate some element of something being problematic but all that would do is make them insanely pedantic & probably not very fun at parties. Does the Hong Kong/Blitzchung incident mean every Activision/Blizzard model is inherently political & shouldn’t be allowed on the workshop? Does Hollywood Hulk Hogan’s bizarre racist tirades mean his model should be taken off the workshop despite being known as widely as a wrestler? Think about the “Death of the Author”, reading a book and only interpreting meaning through how the author’s identity relates to the text is imposing an arbitrary limit on interpretation. Books, artwork, cultural iconography and memes exist agnostic of their “authors”, or “sources”, to imply otherwise is, to put it politely, lazy as hell.