#the sad truth of being an oc artist 😔

[haliaiii]

I love planning 😁😁 (it's been a week and I haven't started)

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

hello I don't understand, like homophobia and racism, etc. in the twst fandom? :00 Did a problem happens? I'm not aware ;-; or I didn't realize it idk, could you tell me what happened, maybe you know something because the truth is that until now I haven't seen anything that rare :'v

[Referencing this post!]

I'm not 100% sure if that Anon was referring to specific incidents, but these things do occur (especially the larger the fandom). You're just statistically more likely to encounter "rotten apples" if the pool of fans is larger to begin with.

I'll do my best to list some examples that happened through the years, though again I don't know for certain what events the Anon was referencing.

In the initial ask, the Anon refers to this hatred being directed at their favorite TWST content creators. I'm sad to say this, but I've witnessed far too much of it, both personally and directed toward my peers. The most common and far-reaching example I can think of is that some fans push the concept of "female Yuu" rather than accepting that any Yuu is possible, which inflames fans that don't identify as female. A lot of fan content also caters to females over fans elsewhere on the gender spectrum. This has led to a lot of feelings of alienation and feeling like the fandom doesn't accept anyone that doesn't conform to the majority. In one extreme case, an artist was told that a TWST character would never love their OC because that OC 1) was a guy too and 2) had dark skin. However, when non-female identifying fans defended themselves, some took this to be “discriminating against female OCs/fans”, which only further heightened tensions.

There's been plenty of harassment too 💦 mostly over ships (ah… ship wars, a staple in fandoms 😔). Some fans get overly possessive of their favorites and go around telling others they aren't "allowed" to like those characters or to ship their OC with that character. There are also some popular TWST ships that are immensely popular, and simply saying that you don't care for it gets you marked as a "hater" and relentlessly harassed. (This, unfortunately, happened to various mutuals and friends of mine.)

Another issue that happens a lot is accusations of plagiarism or copying just due to how popular OC culture is in the TWST fandom. A lot of times, fans will create characters “twisted” from Disney inspirations, which leads to a lot of overlap in powers, personalities, and backstories. However, I don’t think everyone realizes this and tends to point fingers at each other. Genuine plagiarism does happen, but people are just way too quick to jump the gun about it.

On the subject of OCs, sometimes there is a heated situation because someone makes an OC from a culture they don’t understand or don’t make an effort to understand. Thus, the culture is watered down or used for just the aesthetic. This, quite understandably, offends people from the culture that is being misrepresented.

Lastly 💦 this isn’t something I like to talk about often, but as I mentioned before, I, too, have been harassed. It was over something very minor too (saying that I don’t like a particular character). This led to about a year of anonymous asks demanding if I “liked [character] now” or “what do you think of [character] now” every time new content was released, as well as sometimes up to 6 long asks a DAY (from the same individual) defending that boy. They would gaslight my understanding of the game and its characters, talk down to me and other people and characters’ intelligence, and claim I didn’t “understand” him yet because if I did then I would actually like him. Every time I blocked the harassment, they would return on alts or pretend to be new people “discovering” my blog for the first time before continuing the asks. It really took a toll on my mental health and it’s a part of the reason why I am more hesitant to do creative writing for the public or to entertain certain asks these days.

I hope those were sufficient enough to give you an idea of what the original Anon was talking about. As I said in the original post, it’s best to find a group of friends to enjoy this content with. The fandom on a larger scale is so much scarier 😔 We’re all here in the fandom to just have have fun and enjoy cute boys and a magic-filled world, so I wish we could all get along a bit more 😅

vhbn

plagarism

clarifying lore about vil defending his actions

tracism

possessive of characters and defending them poorly or reacting badly when people say thy don' like ships.