#yes I can grow to appreciate a fankid and/or ship I’m requested that I initially wasn’t interested in

[quibbs126]

You know, I’m debating again whether I should stop doing fankids/fan parents

It’s not necessarily because of recent requests or anything, but rather because of a video I was watching yesterday, which was talking about trends and how they kill an artist’s creativity (it was basically about this one MLP episode about Rarity, if that brings more context). And yeah while it wasn’t exactly what I experience, it did speak to me on some level, and it made me think about my requests

Yes I do enjoy doing them, but I wonder if in some way they stifle my creativity, and sometimes I feel more like a factory line pumping them out, even if my frequency of release says otherwise. Also, I feel like it’s lost some of that “magic” that it originally had for me when I first started. I originally started because I really wanted to, since Cookie Run was something that could scratch that old itch of fankids that first came around in my starting days in fandoms that never really left. I asked for ships to do in part because I wasn’t sure what people shipped, other than the popular stuff, and also because I was embarrassed to do it, and thought that doing them by requests would make it less embarrassing. But somewhere along the lines, I lost that and was just kind of doing it because I had to. Some of that magic returned when I decided to start doing fan parents, but then that went away too

I don’t really want to admit it, but I feel like most of it comes from the fact that these are requests, not so much what I want to do, but rather what other people want. But I feel like it’s mean to blame you guys for that. After all, I literally asked for you to send me your ships to do fankids for, you’re just doing what I asked you to do. And what if you just wanted someone to make some sort of content for your ship? And I blame you for that? Not to mention it’s probably given me more knowledge of ships and what people like, or that people tend to be really nice about it in their asks

So one part of me wants to stop so that maybe I can get some creativity back, or that maybe I can regain things that I think I’ve lost while making them this last year. But also another part of me either doesn’t want to, or doesn’t feel like I can

I mean, if I were to close it now and just do whatever requests I still have, that’d still be over half of my total requests I have to do, so it wouldn’t exactly be a solution to the current problem; I’d still be doing old requests for likely over another year based on my track record. I could just say I’m not doing any more, but that wouldn’t be fair to all the people who requested, especially recently (granted it’s not like I’m fair to them with how long they have to wait regardless). Not to mention I still have ideas for some of them that I haven’t finished. And if I only do some of them, what dictates whose gets finished and whose doesn’t? And again, that doesn’t really solve the issue since that’s already what I do, and it’s not really a distinct stopping point

And then there’s the issue of this being most of what I do, making fankids, and again, this being something I enjoy doing. What else am I supposed to draw? You all know I can’t hold an idea for maybe more than a day or two. But I can’t just not draw, it’s what I do and have this need to create. And fankids in general are some of my favorite things to create

And if I really do stop, I’d want to start again with a clean slate, not just pause and start back up again, since that doesn’t change the issue, just pauses it

*sigh* I just don’t know what to do