>>7665
>You should be able to separate art from the source material.
c'mon now man, this is just silly.
They owe their existence to the source material, its what gave them their designs, personalities and everything. "Separating" the art from it would reduce it to just looking at pretty pictures with zero other thoughts in your head.
Taking the characters for yourself and re-contextualising them or rewriting them is a much better approach. Example: pepe the frog.