'FAN ART CONSPIRACY' (High Sarcasm)

This journal is written in a highly sarcastic tone and is not intended to offend anyone despite the rather tight focus of what is written.

The sarcasm is intended for humorous effect only and to help demonstrate my point and represents my personal opinion on the subject and my opinion only.

If you experience feelings of Butthurt from this or think you have been personally insulted this was not my intention, my apologies in advance and please try not make a habit of reading the journals containing the high sarcasm warning. I need to do them sometimes because deviantART won't pay for my counseling and this is more therapeutic than ranting at my coworkers

If you are easily offended please skip to the bottom, view the stamps, and return to what you were previously doing.

Allow me to outline exactly the official deviantART plan to destroy fanart and drive fan artists away from the site in droves because we hate them:

    1. Allow honest-to-goodness fan art to be submitted in the first place.
    2. When people respond well to this, give them their own sections in the galleries.
    3. When people respond really well to that create an entire root level gallery structure devoted solely to housing every conceivable form of honest-to-goodness fanart that we can possible think of and assign it it's own Gallery Director to oversee and nurture the fan artist community it was specifically designed to house.

That's the big fan art conspiracy you may or may not have heard.

Oh, wait- that's not what you heard? Well then I think you've probably gotten sucked into the latest over-reacting-hyper-drama-fest-of-the-month. Don't be embarrassed, it happens to a lot of people- especially when they get so absorbed in their own genre that they lose perspective or forget to actually check their facts and rely mainly on rumor and pissed-off journals as an information source.


Well quite simply about 1% of the fan art submitted to deviantART (not counting the horrible copyright violations attempting to pass themselves off as legitimate fan art- that's an entirely different rant so don't get me started) has OMG been deleted.

Yes, this incredibly small percentage of fan art deletions has somehow been interpreted as an all out attack on the entire tens of thousands of you fan artists, an attempt wipe your gallery clean, drive you from the site and probably call your mother dirty names.

I can assure you that this is not the case and if you've somehow managed to get offended this early I advise that you stop reading and go watch Naruto or Inuyasha or Kim Possible or something which will make you happy again.


Well, again completely discounting the copyright violations, the type of fan art which has been deleted is mostly pornography.- and some of you people out there are already jumping down to the comments to type something like "HOW F****** DARE YOU ACCUSE ME OF..." so bear with me before you freak out.

Now I understand fan art; hell I used to draw it myself way back when but that was before we had all these cheesy, lowest-common-denominator Japanese imported cartoons to choose from but we won't get into that now. And yes- I actually do watch and enjoy Japanese animation; I just restrict myself to the stuff which is actually good.

It is an unavoidable fact that people will draw what they like and in this television saturated age it's natural that this include the popular things shown on TV networks and I also understand that most teens who draw this stuff have more hormones than most low-grade beef at the supermarket nowadays.

So yeah, I understand fan art; been there, done that, got better, moved on.

What I don't understand is where the sex gets injected here.

I mean Naruto's aimed at little kids for the most part and I've been unfortunate enough to have seen an episode or two and I just don't recall Sakura getting anally raped or Naruto and Sasukewhatever having graphic homosexual sex or any of the other really incredibly twisted crap some of you people force me to look at.

I mean, our rules against pornography are really clear aren't they? We've written it on everything everyone is supposed to read haven't we?

It's stated on our Submission Agreement, our Terms of Service, our
Etiquette Policy, and it's in the FAQ too! I mean it's not outrageous of us to expect people to read these incredibly vital documents is it?

It never fails to amaze me when these people act shocked, just SHOCKED when we remove their porno of Goku and Vegeta from DragonBall Z getting it on. I've seen that one too- a bunch of puffed up glowy people with big hair screaming and tensing at each other for 15 minutes at a time blowing up stuff while some outclassed on-looker drools all over himself in open mouthed amazement. I just don't get where the graphic homosexual porn factors in. Can someone please explain that?

So anyway- before I get completely off track, that's it; most of the removed fan art is pornographic. We've never allowed this stuff, nothing has changed, we haven't become "more strict", we aren't targeting individuals and no, you cannot Matured Content/censor/disguise/disclaimer/triple warning/whatever excuse you can think of to get this stuff to be allowed or snuck in under the carpet.

If you have this stuff in your gallery, get rid of it before we do otherwise you'll be wondering why you've been suspended while writing whiny emo journals about how unfair we are deleting your picture of Kim Possible giving oral sex to one of the Power Puff Girls.

I mean, I'm positive that out there somewhere some producer who labored over his children's oriented programming has shed tears over the way it's been treated and twisted into some B-rate porno.


Okay the other part of the non-copyright violation related deletions are for underage nudity, underage eroticism and other subjects relating to the sexualization of what are essentially children.

Our policies clearly state that we don't draw a distinction between fictional and real children in these situations- the law might but we don't.

This isn't new people- it's written in the Etiquette policy (go check the previous link I'm too lazy to hyperlink it again) and it's been detailed in the FAQ for ages.

People are going to try to tell you it's "unwritten" or "new" but the fact is it's not new and the rules haven't changed or somehow gotten more strict.

Now I've enjoyed my share of cartoons in my time, animated features can be very enjoyable. I've even been subjected to the shows that my daughter watches and I simply cannot understand this obsession, this driving need, for some people with drawing the fictional child stars of my daughter's favorite shows having sex or adopting poses straight out of some fifty cent porno magazine.

I've seen porno of Lilu and Stitch- I mean c'mon she's what, eight years old? Pardon me if I apply the "Freak" label to anybody I catch drawing that stuff and I'll be completely honest with you with the fact that I will toss you off the site forever if I catch this stuff in your gallery.

So we've been strictly against this particular type of perversion for quite awhile- and trust me in that no children's cartoon is safe.

Now one new wrinkle which has come up is that the people who feel this driving urge to draw these child characters nude or in some erotic pose thought they hit on a loophole;

"Pretend" they're eighteen years old in your picture. "Age them up" they say- they don't have to look any different, "just say they're 18 and they can't touch you" was the advice given in journals complaining about the deletion of young Kim Possible bare-ass naked with her legs behind her ears and her high school cheer leading uniform tossed to the side.

So now we're playing that game.

How lovely.

So, much to the horror of these people we continued to delete their images despite their frantic claims that they "aged" the character before they drew her bent over a railing with her legs spread wide and her underwear around her ankles.

Give me a break.

Let's get something straight here-

I'm certain we can all agree these are cartoon characters. Now, I don't know if you've noticed or not but cartoon characters don't age in the series, oh they might have birthdays during the series or pass certain life milestones like graduating from highschool or whatever, but the character design stays unchanged.
This means that, for example, the 15 year old Kim Possible looks exactly like the 16 year old Kim possible which looks exactly like the 17 year old Kim Possible and so on.

Our solution to this conundrum is to consider any character who is presented as underage to always be underage if the character design is essentially unchanged.

This means that you can't just slap a rack and hips on that nasty blond girl in Hey Arnold! and expect us to buy that she's magically 18 now through the wondrous miracle of air-pump inflated b00bs and butt implants.

Now I've seen a journal where someone has presented a stupid example. In this journal they claim, which much paranoia and hysteria, that if you age a six year old character to thirty and give her three kids we'll still delete it.

Please, for pities sake stop freaking out.

The one type of aging which we can except is one which completely redesigns the character. A six year old drawn one way will not look like the complete reinterpretation of the same character at age thirty. As an example just last month I saw a picture of a 20-something Dora the Explorer in the jungle with exposed cleavage. Guess what?

It wasn't deleted.

I might question the rather odd set of mind you probably have should you feel the need to age this child into her twenties, completely redesigning the character in the process just so you can stare at the cleavage you gave her but I didn't delete it.

If you people can stop and take a breath long enough to pretend that we're reasonable people and not mindless flame belching demons out for blood I'll promise to treat you like intelligent people instead of the like the screaming child who was in the back row when I went to see the Transformers movie the second time.

If you're going to "age" the character, then age the character- reinvent it and show us that you are trying to make a valid fan work and you just aren't cranking out fap material of Kim Possible with watermelon tits, cleavage like the grand canyon, protruding nipples the size of teacups and a cameltoe crammed up into her nether regions while presenting her ass to the viewer while showing how she can touch her ankles to her ears.

If you draw that stuff, expect for it to be deleted. Find something other than children's programming to pillage.

Thank you, and good night.