The brewing crisis over the pile of poo emoji

An excellent post to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC2 WG2 mailing list sums up critical feedback over recently approved emojis, including a fierce denunciation of the (IMHO) excellent "frowning pile of poo" emoji, which is viewed as a slippery slope to an entire "a range of emotions to PILE OF POO."

MICHAEL EVERSON:
This character is damaging to both ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Standard. It is bad enough
that the ESC came up with it, but it beggars believe that the UTC actually approved it. Organic
waste isn’t cute. The existing PILE OF POO character was added for compatibility with Japanese
telco sets. It is a pity that Apple followed Softbank rather than KDDI in its reference glyph, since
a coil of dog dirt with stink lines and flies is surely the only proper semantic. The idea that our
committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass
absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence. Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO
next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR
EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC? Will we have to encode a neutral FACELESS PILE OF
POO? As an ordinary user, I don’t want this kind of crap on my phone. As a representative of the
National Standards Authority of Ireland, I have to wonder what possible good could come of
encoding such a character. Bullying, perhaps? Requested change: Remove this character from
the PDAM and reject its encoding.

ANDREW WEST:

I'm concerned that this character will open the floodgates for an open-ended set of PILE OF POO
emoji with emotions, such as CRYING PILE OF POO, PILE OF POO WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH, PILE
OF POO SCREAMING IN FEAR, etc. Is there really any need to add a range of emotions to PILE OF
POO? I personally think that changing PILE OF POO to a de facto SMILING PILE OF POO was
wrong, but adding F|FROWNING PILE OF POO as a counterpart is even worse. If this is accepted
then there will be no neutral, expressionless PILE OF POO, so at least a PILE OF POO WITH NO
FACE would be required to be encoded to restore some balance. I recommend removing
FROWNING PILE OF POO pending further study and public consultation on the need for
additional PILE OF POO emoji.