u/Vampirebitez

I haven’t been doing well lately and my decision making and thought process was affected. Anyone I ever got short with, understand it’s not your fault. I was just in a bad headspace and was acting irrationally.

I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone for, it could be weeks or a whole month but I really need to step back until I’m less crazy.

I’m sorry.

I remember seeing a TikTok a while ago from someone with a chronic illness discussing how relatable body horror is as a person with a chronic illness because of the fact that your body is betraying you and hurting you.

And I won’t deny that it has happened at least with one of my ocs since some aspects are influenced by me having chronic fatigue and issues with my back and hands (scoliosis and fine motor issues) since the thing he suffers from is treatable but not curable.

What do y’all think?

I want to make comics and I'm dealing with something super frustrating.

I've started making refs for them and either me or others keep noticing issues big or small, or my skills change and I feel like I have to start over or else it'll just piss me off.

Ik its ultimately my art and I should just trust my instincts on if it looks good enough because I can't please everyone.

But its frustrating as shit to work on stuff for hours, days, or MONTHS working on designs only for it to not look good and starting over from scratch.

What do i do bc I don't want to burn out or end up in a mental institution. Like I just want to be done and move on.

1. People are VERY weird about curvy bodies in art. And what I mean is that people either get SUPER pearl-clutchy and treat it as gooner bait and misogynistic regardless if whether or not it’s meant to be depicted as sexy (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with a curvy person drawn sexy, just that they have to have a good personality to match ie. Jessica Rabbit and Bayonetta) (it’s even worse if the character is fat as well because then people treat depicting a fat person as attractive as being analogous to having a fat fetish bc I guess fat or chubby people can’t be attractive). Or they don’t know how to act around curvy characters in art and end up sexualizing them and forgetting they have personalities.

I say this as a curvy person who also draws women/femmes with fairly curvy, stylized bodies because my influences were older/some newer cartoons that also drew women that way though I do try to branch out and draw chubby and muscular ladies as well, and I have definitely gotten people being weird about them in the ways I described. Not to mention how a lot of people see a character having big boobs or a big butt and immediately jump to “this is misogyny and oversexualizing women!”

And as a feminist, it’s complicated.

Yeah, the way some people draw women’s bodies is gross and weird sometimes, but a character being curvy while ultimately being not sexualized is not a bad thing and is imo misogynistic to treat women, real or fictional, with double d’s and an ass that won’t quit like they’re automatically sex objects, regardless of they are sexualized or not, because real women DO have those and I get so sick of people body shaming women but doing it “wokely” (ie calling curvy women whores and redesigning them with “ugly features” to desexualize them which is also body shaming).

There is also the clothing aspect because people also get weird about revealing clothes, even if it’s no more revealing than a swimsuit because some of it borders on slutshaming and racism oddly enough. But I feel like I’d be repeating myself so my point here is that purity culture is rotting people’s brains when it comes to art and the only time it’s okay to get mad at this kind of stuff is if the characters are underaged and drawn with planets for tits and asscheeks.

2. A lot of online art communities mistake personal preferences as criticism because I have gotten people who’s only critiques are something like “I don’t like how this looks, change it”.

Ok and?

No elaboration, no advice, nothing technical, just “I don’t like it”.

Which is some insanely entitled behavior, quite frankly.

Like, don’t say this shit and not explain yourself.

3. As a white artist, we need to STOP coddling white artists who refuse to draw POC and their features and come up with bullshit reasons as to why (yknow the ones). Like, I understand being inexperienced, I wasn’t good at it at first and while I’ve gotten better, I still got some ways to go. But outright REFUSING to try and making excuses like “it doesn’t fit my style” “I’m afraid it’ll look like a caricature” or something else is, at best, lazy. And at worst, it’s racism.

Like, at LEAST make the skin brown instead of grey and ashy looking.

A lot of online communities already have a racism problem, don’t contribute to the culture.

4. Being cringe isn’t a crime and cringe culture is built on bullying kids and neurodivergent people.

5. The Art Commentary Community was always bad, we just didn’t notice because we were kids watching it.

6. People who want more unique styles and get mad at art they think is unappealing are stupid and entitled.

7. Solar Sands has done horrible damage to the way people talk about art. Also, it’s weird af for him to clown on fetish art for being weird and gross while also showing it uncensored/without warning for the world to see.

Btw, these are my opinions and you can take ‘em or leave ‘em.