(pre-emptively: accompanying panel is from Mike Stenbaek's "Dorbo Abodal")
✨A thing I often think about is 'where does kink come from?' Not kink-as-product, that obviously comes out of commissioned smut artists, but the origin points in 'normal' media that serve as nucleation sites for kink formation. Certain things, certain common media tropes, are just... universally acknowledged as a 'Sex Thing' now. Vore, hypnosis, people being tied up, and dozens and dozens more.
But: how does something become a 'Sex Thing' in the first place? How does it transmute from just a Moment in something, into a fetishistic fixation? My answer is usually 'because people get exposed to it in a seemingly-Normal experience.' You saw a scene where there was maybe slightly too much detail on someone's mouth next to a tiny character, and it made you feel weird. The sugarcoating of it being in a mass-market experience allowed the moment to get its hooks in; it doesn't even have to fully-register at the time, but over a period, you get increasingly unable to fully stop thinking about it, and it just sorta lodges in the mind and sticks there. I once heard somebody describe kink as 'the indigestible matter of the mind,' and compare it to the way there's a tiny piece of grit at the center of every pearl. Over time, the brain accretes layers and layers of meaning and symbology around it until it becomes a core part of how you experience desire.
But let's go a layer deeper and ask a slightly different question: how did that weird moment get into the normal thing to begin with? What is the intentionality behind it? It didn't turn up at random. Nobody cut the final reel of the movie and was surprised that scene was in there.
I once asked at a furry meetup 'why are there so many bits in cartoons where characters end up inflating? that can't be completely accidental.' And someone made the profoundly-dull suggestion that it was 'just a stock gag' and 'nobody thought about it.' I find this answer really unsatisfying and very short-sighted. Creative decisions, despite all indications otherwise, are primarily made by people. 'Nobody thought about this' is just patent bullshit. Media does not fall off of a magical media tree. Whatever else you can say about something people made, 'people made it' is usually true.
Lots of people at least THOUGHT about it; the scriptwriter who wrote the scene where a character inflates, the animators who modeled and rendered it, the foley artist who scored it, the musicians who wrote a bespoke accompanying musical piece for it. Stuff like this does not pass multiple stages of development unless somebody inside that production is fighting for it on some level; again, the churn of mass media is not fundamentally-random. If something made you Feel Weird because it hit a particular emotional resonance or had just slightly more detail and care than the stuff surrounding it or had an element of squirm-inducing tension, I guarantee you, the people who made it felt that too, at least a little.
We all know about Osamu Tezuka's hidden drawer of smut content. The Disney vault of pornography featuring officially-licensed characters is a known quantity. The idea that kinky scenes and content end up in media just because 'nobody thought about it' doesn't hold water for me. Nothing that has the qualities of a made thing is just noise. If there's a lovingly-rendered scene in The Jungle Book where a sinewy serpent beguiles someone with a soft-spoken voice into a hypnotic daze and coils them up, I'm pretty sure someone making that enjoyed the process. And why not? Why wouldn't you want to express this stuff, if you had the venue and the resources to do so? Because kinky stuff is more than just a 'Sex Thing,' it's a way of condensing symbolism and personal meaning.
Seriously! I don't think kinks are inherently just describable as a 'Sex Thing.' For one thing, lots of ace people have kinks! But for another, I think they're just what you get when you place people in the context of an incredibly complex world filled with dozens upon dozens of competing influences all vying for their attention and time. The world is... frighteningly-complicated at times! And I think it's only natural to want to be able to boil things down to something personally-meaningful and comforting. Kink is one of many ways people do that, it is a way to simply express complex values of internal meaning. It's a way to describe what fills you with a sense of joy and peace, a shorthand for all those tangled-up bits of identity that would otherwise take a 40-page essay to summarize. Sure, "I like characters who are really stretchy and elastic and inflate sometimes" is a Sex Thing for me, but it's a 'Sex Thing' because it's also an everything thing for me. Humans tend to be kinda into things that are deeply important to our self-conception!
Sometimes, personal meaning comes from faith, or gender, or ideology, or tradition, or artistic values. And sometimes, it comes from feeling funny about the scene with the huge alligator lady from All Dogs Go To Heaven.