– vampires vs xmen
– god damn it where is [insert xmen]
– youre a better leader. no youre a better leader. no youre a better leader. no youre a b
– someone dies
– someone comes back to life
– THE XMEN GO TO SPACE
– magneto is in the yard and wont leave
So someone tried to man-splain Shatterstar to me because I made a joke and they didn’t find it funny, or the humor escaped them. They began it with, “Well, if you had actually read the earlier comics, you’d know….”
Bitch, please. I suffered my way through the art of Liefeld, where every woman had legs that went on for 72 inches, sixteen year olds looked like they were forty with the mumps, and I guaran-fucking-tee you, I know more about Shatterstar than you. Child didn’t even know about the whole Benjamin Russell/Shatterstar-body fiasco.
I see a lot of positivity posts about 12-year-olds just learning to draw. Posts cautioning us to be mindful of 11-year-olds with no grasp of anatomy and 13-year-olds whose characters are all the same person with different hair and clothes, and I love those posts. Those are great posts. Keep those posts coming, tumblr.
But can I ask, what about the 25-year-old who just bought their first ever sketchbook? What about the 32-year-old who’s been drawing for a month and has just about got the hang of a human-looking face? What about the 67-year-old who finally has time to sit down and learn how to paint like they’ve always wanted?
Not everyone starts drawing as a child. Not everyone learned as a preteen. Some people start in college. Some people start when their career is going well and they feel like it’s time for a new hobby. Some people start after they’ve retired.
Not all beginner artists are kids, and I just think the adults ones deserve some encouragement, too.
There is currently a content creator blackout in my fandom, and seeing all those posts about art theft brought back some memories.
(Go and read @hchano‘s brilliant post, by the way. I’d have replied to it but then my reply turned into a novella.)
The art theft stories resonate with me, you have no idea.
You know, if someone was to check my ‘rules’ pages right now, they’d see this:
Fanart: I don’t care about reposts, don’t worry if you spot my drawings somewhere else
Now, it might look like I’m super chill about this. That I’m not ‘whining’ like those artists who ‘care too much, it’s just drawings’.
The truth is I don’t care because I haven’t posted an artwork I gave a fuck about since 2011. I do not want to bother with that. It’s thankless. It’s an endless source of stress and discouragement. Why would I spend effort and time when I know the end result is that I’ll be – for lack of a better term – pissed on by entitled jackasses and by thieves?
Story time.
I used to run a flash minigames website. It didn’t have much content, since I had to draw it all myself, and figure out how actionscript worked, and so on. Still, I put ads on that website, and not only did it pay for itself, it brought me a tiny bit of income too! For my own content that I had made myself, just imagine! I planned to make that little site grow and grow until it could support me and drag me out of the hell that is unemployment.
It’d see cute stories on Stumbleupon by parents who said their toddler had loved the games. That made me super happy. It was real nice for a while.
And then I got an email from a girl in Israel telling me she had seen my art sold as coloring books in her area.
That was a blow.
I mean, I’m literally an artist by trade. I have a diploma to prove it and all. I’d have loved to get paid for my art, seeing how I couldn’t fucking find a job using those skills that were apparently good enough for commercial use.
But I kept the site up for a little while, as well as my profiles on art websites, though I barely updated them. I’d ignore the thieves that sold IMVU stuff with my art on it. I’d pay no mind to the brats who sold it on Gaia Online, because it was just virtual coin. I tried to ignore the fact that some of my stuff got popular under someone else’s name.
Just drawings, right?
Anyway, my flash games could be stolen. Actually, in the general sense, it was pretty much the goal. There was my website’s logo on them, a direct link. Having them redistributed meant traffic coming back to my site, and advertising income for me.
Can you see where this is going?
Back then, there was a flash game monetization network, called MochiAds. It was cool. It allowed you to insert ads into your games, and a great many flash games websites would import MochiAds’ feed, which made for a fast and widespread distribution of the games. It was a neat service.
Except someone decompiled my games, replaced my logo by theirs, inserted ads inside them and published them as their own.
Within hours, you could google the new names the thief had given to my games, and get 500.0000 results. Accounting for all of my games, that made for millions of reposts, all of them defaced, linking to the thief’s website, monetized by them.
Of course, MochiMedia responded quickly when I reported the theft, but their disabling the ads on those games didn’t remove them from the thousands of independent websites they were posted on.
I never made another flash game.
As a matter of fact, I no longer draw.
I was never in it just for the fun. I wanted the rewards. I wanted to make art my full-time job. Hell, I went to school for that. I wanted the compensation for my effort and time. I wanted my website to grow from the ‘sustains itself’ to ‘sustains me’ size.
And then I realized that people could snap their fingers and steal it all. Make me look like I had plagiarized my own work. Bury me in stolen content.
I learned that, on the internet, there was no point giving your heart and soul to something you can’t nail in place.
And, more than anything, I learned to hate drawing.
But, hey! Look at the bright side! Now that I gave up on drawing, nobody will steal my art anymore!
Isn’t that great? 🙂
shit like this is why i can’t stand it when people say art theft isn’t a big deal, because it is a big deal. it’s emotionally draining.
and guess what, our emotional state is directly tied to our inspiration. so if we feel fucking threatened in the one safe place we go to when emotionally wrecked, chances are we will not want to go there anymore. we will not draw. not because we don’t want to, but because we physically can’t.
“you’re an art model does that mean you’re NAKED?” “yeah” “whoa….those lucky artists ;)”
…buddy.
idk who started the idea that life drawing classes have anything sexy going on like. there’s at least ten people in the room and we’re all tired and covered in charcoal.
the dude in front who’s staring at my boobs has been trying to get the shading right for 10 minutes. he’s almost out of paint. he is crying.
Friend: Hey why do you like that character so much?
Me: Are you sure you’re ready for this kind of conversation
Browsing Reddit, I came across an extremely effective post about why some creatives respond very poorly to criticism, or even for those of us who respond well, why it can feel like an attack even though in your head you know it isn’t.
Criticism creates a mental conflict, but not always that kind.
Imagine if you wrote a final essay for your literature class, really
did your best on it, turned it in, and the teacher gave it 100%. Elated,
you take it home to show it off to your dad. Your dad says “You got a
D? You really should have tried harder.” You think WTF, you squint at
the paper and you’re pretty damn sure it says 100%, A+, Good work. But
your dad says “No, it clearly says 63%, D-, disappointing.” Then you
start to realize you’re living in some kind of warped reality where your
dad sees something on the paper completely different than what you see,
and you start wondering if you even know what’s real anymore.
This is what it feels like to get a criticism. It casts into doubt
your own definition of “good” which is probably the basis of your entire
creative process. It’s not even an issue of admitting weakness.
Admitting weakness is easy. What’s not easy is having your instincts
cast into doubt and not knowing whether to trust yourself anymore.
Do I trust this critic?
Do I trust myself? Some combination of the
two?
Do I stand by my decisions or not?
Do I make changes even though I
don’t understand how they will help?
Will the changes completely
undermine the artistic vision I wanted for this?
Will it defeat the
whole point I was going for?
I can’t feel the emotional reasoning behind
making changes, so how will I know if my change is for the better or
worse?
Is the critic just not the right audience for this? Is the critic
biased? Is the critic just having a bad day?
Should I ignore them
altogether, and just keep doing this for the people who like it?
Are my
fans wrong and simpleminded?
Am I even doing anything of significance?
Should I give up here?
These are all questions which artists ask
themselves when they receive criticism. They’re tricky, ambiguous
questions that don’t always have a correct answer. Many newcomers don’t
even know how to approach these questions, so criticism can often feel
like a personal attack even if both sides mean well.
That’s not to say that criticism itself is bad, but if you get a
better idea of what a criticism is doing psychologically to the
receiver, you might find yourself offering more effective, well-received
advice.
This ties in pretty closely to the advice I often give on this very blog, about how to deal with negative feedback; above all, trying not to dwell on it. Before you give any response, always take time to calm down.
This is a pretty universal problem that affects all creatives across all media. You’d have to be as emotionless as a stone to not fall prey to it occasionally.
Part of being a writer is building up creative confidence. This is the faith in yourself to be able to write something and put it out into the world, and to know, deep down, that this work has value, to you and to your audience.
You may, later, discover that this work isn’t all that good, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it was a stepping stone to the person you are now, and the work you’re producing today.
Whenever you create a piece of work, make sure you internalise why you made that work. What it meant to you. It doesn’t matter if that work was a prize-winning literary novel or a scrawling of Vegeta from DBZ drawn in pencil on lined paper. If the work expresses something you can’t contain, something you have to get down on paper, over time you’ll develop the creative confidence to accept that even if it’s “bad”, that isn’t what’s important. The end result isn’t as important as the work itself.
Creative Confidence isn’t something you just develop overnight. It takes work. It’ll probably take a few embarrassing moments too, and those will be the hurtful types that’ll lead to “arguments you win in the shower” 5 years later. It takes different durations for different people. However, if you work at it, it’s something I believe is within the reach of everyone.
I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.
Also:
Purple prose: Fic that is excessively flowery and complicated. Basically the “me, an intellectual” meme. If it has the phrase “cerulean orbs” you know it’s purple prose.
Beige prose: The opposite of purple prose. Basically, the plainest (and, if done wrongly, the most boring) type of prose.
R&R: Read & review. Back from when fic comments were called “reviews” and there was no such fucking thing as the kudos button.
*wipes a tear away* I feel so vintage.
Know your history children.
important history lesson
*stares out. breaks fourth wall*
Lemons.
For all you young’uns out there.
Also, I’ve seen people tag a ship-focused fic both M/M and Gen on AO3. Just because it also features friendships doesn’t make it Gen! If the main focus is a romantic relationship, do the Gen readers (which is not me, but they do exist) a favor and don’t tag it Gen.
^^^^^^^ THIS. filters are only useful if things are tagged correctly and i can’t search for non-ship fic when everything is tagged for both ship AND gen 😦
please for the love of god tag responsibly and don’t make people who are looking for non-romance fic suffer
I miss proper gen, and the expectation of it in specific places. I wish that was still a tag that followed specific conventions
I actually had a look at that fandom wank link, and it reminded me of another term that’s gone a bit by the wayside:
TOSsed: when an online community was kicked off a platform for (real or alleged) violations of the Terms of Service. This was not infrequently the result of complaints about queer content specifically.
Never forget why we needed an archive of our own, folks.
In corollary to the “If the drive is romantic don’t tag it gen” thing, if there are romantic relationships but they exist as total background nonsense (example: Character A asks her parents to put together a Princess AND Pirate theme birthday and wacky hi-jinks ensue trying to book a fairy princess actress and a schooner shaped bouncy house on the same day, both parents love each other but wish they’d share details like who ordered the cake) THAT’s gen, not het or slash. Don’t tag it as het or slash, you’ll drive away the pure-gen readers who actually want confetti-canon crisis fics.
just thought about it, and here’s something we don’t talk abt in the bnha fandom.
aizawa. his quirk isn’t rly offensive, its more of a disabling type quirk. we know he attended UA with present mic, but how did he get in?
assuming aizawa faced the same trials as izuku and bakugo, he would’ve faced off with those giant robots yes? and bc those robots don’t technically have quirks like shinso, aizawa couldn’t possibly have used his quirk against them.
so then, two possible conclusions:
1, he went into general studies, or business, or support class before transferring over, or…
2, he defeated them without the use of his quirk at all, which after seeing the end of season one i have no doubt believing aizawa could actually do it
thoughts?
3rd possibility- He may have come to the UA by recommendation like Momo and Shouto did.
Or the test could have also changed over the years and the robots are a newer addition.
A Beautiful Monster 