How do you take the measure of a man?

[Merle]

Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends fans represent!

Hear, hear!
The trifecta of awesome between Faust, McCracken and Tartakovsky has given us much to be thankful for.

[Alex Starkiller]

People always get mad when Foster is associated with Faust, because it was mostly McCracken, but she still helped and was involved. I really loved it a lot. And then she did the impossible and made My Little Pony fun for literally every age. It's almost hard to believe that someone could be intelligent enough to realize that it didn't need to confine itself to society's definition of "girly", sadly. Faust's a badass.

[Horizon]

Honestly, I always wondered about Foster's, and the implications of the imaginary friends. They're corporeal, intelligent beings that don't require any mental effort on the creator's part to maintain. And they're created just by thinking about what it should look like, what abilities it should have, and then it solidifies from nothingness. We know they need to eat, but we also know they can be eaten, and we know that a single child can make more than one imaginary friend, unless Goo was a freak of nature. And we know that they can be a large danger to civilization, and that they can conjure up items from seemingly nowhere(Don't tell me Coco uses up body mass laying those eggs. She layed a fucking dinner table for 8 people, and 8 meals to go with it, all in one go, in the wilderness.). So, where am I going with this? Well, wouldn't terrorists be using imaginary nukes? Imaginary suicide bombers? Oh, that's not the half of it. Wouldn't the militaries use imaginary soldiers? Wouldn't farms use imaginary livestock? Wouldn't hospitals use imaginary surgeons? Wouldn't pharmacies use imaginary chemical generators? Or, possibly, imaginary medicine generators? Wouldn't you decide that it would be cool to have gold, and create the imaginary goose who lays golden eggs(So THAT'S Coco's origin story!)? There are many implications of what went on in the show, or rather, what allowed it to happen.

[Alex Starkiller]

Is it only kids that can make them, though? I suppose evil people could force them to create creatures they want, but who's to say it would work? And at that point there's raising up kids to be monsters, which may work.

[Horizon]

No, no, no. Remember the extremosaurs, the imaginary friends made by teenagers to participate in imaginary cockfights? This means that imaginary friends can be made by teenagers, too. Unless you're saying that the brain's stabilization at the age of 22(or thereabouts) removes the brain's flaw that allowed imaginary friends to be created.

Or maybe the answer to all this is "A wizard did it." "Yeah, but how?" "He's a wizard, and he used magic."

[luislsacc]

Since we're talking about Fosters, let me hop in on this thread and give my theory. It's probably fueled by the fact that I was a little older than the "designated target audience" when the show made it to where I live and my overthinking it, but here it is:

The imaginary friends in Foster's are real. 100% real, in the same manner any fictional character is real, they exist in the mind and their personal traits and even stories are percieved by others, namely the "non-imaginary" characters of Foster's.
That reminds me of an idea I had for a short story, that I can't think of a title for, in which the reader is a vicious murderer simply by being the reader. Think of it as an a contrario interpretaion of Schröedinger's Cat, if the cat is neither dead or alive until he is seen, then looking into the box and seeing a dead cat equals killing the cat. Of course, if this interpretation was true and fictional creatures in our minds had as much value as real, independant people whose existence doesn't require the knowledge/ observation of their actions then anyone who ever read the phrase "The world of Schloobidoo has ten billion people - they all died when their sun exploded" is a mass murderer, or read/ saw all of the Harry Potter series killed Dumbledore but now I'm really deviating from my point.

I'd like to start by saying this isn't a theory of "It was all in one character's head and they were crazy/ depressed/ in a coma!" or anything like that.
The imaginary friends that live in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends start off existing in the mind of the children that make them "real", that conceive the character. Sometimes a child's parent/family will enable the child's imagination and even make a place for the creature in their homes - e.g. Bloo's bed in Mac's house. This also happens relatively often in real life. Eventually, an imaginary friend becomes a nuisance to the family, or the parents decide that the child should grow out of the period in their lives when they have an imaginary friend, or they grow out of it themselves, resulting in an abandonment of the imaginary friends. There is, of course, another option. A wealthy old lady who has always had a very creative imagination and still remembers her childhood imaginary friend wants to treasure children's creations and also wants to give them a way to cope with losing their imaginary friend creates a sort of imaginary friend orphanage, a foster home (hehe, get it *snort laugh*) for imaginary friends. When children go to the home to leave their friend they are introduced to the character of the imaginary butler rabbit who helps the humans sign the "official papers" as a sign that this will be a home where their friends will be able to live happily with other imaginary friends. To children who are looking to adopt a friend, they're introduced to the concept of the characters left behind by other children, being "adopted" by those children. Nobody here is hallucinating: Madam Foster just collects the descriptions of the characters, happy to be helping children, and Frankie is helping her grandmother with her daily life, keeping the home clean, etc. The outside human charcters that interact with the imaginary friends are either enabling the children who are there with them because in Foster's universe it is viewed as normal for a child to have an imaginary friend. Teenagers can still imagine friends because they haven't grown out of the mentality for making imaginary friends and thinking that their imaginary fights matter, therefore making up the extremosaurus fights. Heck, there probably can be adults who can still make imaginary friends.
The zany antics that the friends in Foster's get up to can be seen as a portrait of Mac's imagination, and the sense of childlike wonder he still isn't ready to let go off. Mac isn't crazy, he is just a child with a remarkably crative imagination imagining things. And of course, that explains why criminals can't use imaginary friends in order to comiit crimes - they exist, but only in the mind of those who recognise them, and affect only those - they have no real impact otherwise.

Welp, I've spent probably more time than I should've in this post. I hope it at least entertained you.

[Horizon]

So, about the movie... Ed turned out to be the imaginary friend of a woman currently in the police force. When criminals had entered the Foster Bus, with her inside, Ed went into an ALL CAPS RAGE and shook the bus something fierce. Also, her motivation for creating Ed had partially been one of protection. She grew up in a bad neighborhood, and used a figment of her imagination to provide actual protection from physical harm.
And then there's Coco... Discovered on an island, rather than made. By biologists, no less, who are trained to observe the world as it truly is.
So, take your "shared hallucination' theory and stuff it up your- wait, I'm not allowed to say that? But this is the internet, dammit! I say what I want!

[RyukaTana]

The biologists were imaginary friends also.... Doo doo doo doo *Twilight Zone music*

[Merle]

So, about the movie... Ed turned out to be the imaginary friend of a woman currently in the police force. When criminals had entered the Foster Bus, with her inside, Ed went into an ALL CAPS RAGE and shook the bus something fierce. Also, her motivation for creating Ed had partially been one of protection. She grew up in a bad neighborhood, and used a figment of her imagination to provide actual protection from physical harm.
And then there's Coco... Discovered on an island, rather than made. By biologists, no less, who are trained to observe the world as it truly is.
So, take your "shared hallucination' theory and stuff it up your- wait, I'm not allowed to say that? But this is the internet, dammit! I say what I want!

The favored fan-theory for Coco's origin is that she was created by a girl marooned following a plane crash. Her head's a palm tree, body is an airplane, her beak resembles a deflated liferaft, and her feet are sunburned-looking human feet. That's the idea, anyway.

[Horizon]

And did this girl just die of old age or something? Probably not, actually. It would surprise nobody that Coco could lay an egg containing a DIY Organ Transplant Kit.
EDIT: My point is, where is the girl?