(Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Admins)

Over a year ago, I uploaded a JPG of the Mona Lisa to my deviantART account, and titled it “my anime dream girl.” Over the course of a year, it received a scattered few comments, including one by dA admin $Stykera, who saw it for the obvious joke it was and left it up. On the 14th of April 2011 – seemingly out of nowhere – I started receiving angry comments en masse. Tartlets were furious that my act of art theft had remained unchecked for so long, and began to voice their complaints to me… And to Stykera.

Commenters were unable to fathom how Stykera – a deviantART administrator – could have seen my submission and not immediately have deleted it. Many cited deviantART’s policy against “Art Theft,” and claimed my work was a clear example of a violation. Stykera attempted to explain to the angry masses that the Mona Lisa isn’t protected by copyright: It belongs to what is known as the public domain; and as such, my submitting it does not actually constitute as theft. Amazingly, this response failed to satisfy enraged users, and the empty threats continue to pour in.

Do any of you remember when I promised I would “do a proper piece on dA critiques” in the Gawking at GAKING article? You do? Well, shit: I was hoping you lot had forgot. Alright then, fine! Here you go!

Before we get started, I need to reiterate a recurring point: That dA should no longer be considered an “artistic community.” I believe fellow DCQC contributor Lmte put it best, in his introduction to a previous article:

“dA’s habitual nature of allowing bad art along with the accompanying bad artists to thrive is seen clearly in the deviantART community’s forceful assimilation of turning all members into the back-patting-let’s-be-friends-disregard-all-criticisms-be-nice pillars of goodness and all-that’s-rightness. [...] If you’re constantly being praised for something you either put little to no effort in, or tried your best and the end result was a steaming pile of shit, why should you try and improve?”

Today’s article was suggested by deviantART user midnight-oyl. If you are interested in suggesting an article, please consult this page.

What prompts some deviantART users to deactivate their accounts? Perhaps some give up on art altogether, and look to erase all trace of ever having had an interest in it. Maybe some tire of the constant coddling and blind approval from their peers, and move to a site where they may actually receive the constructive criticism they desire. More often than not, however; tartlets shut down their accounts in an attempt to evade trolls (Or, at least, what they consider to be trolls).

The subject of today’s article claims his latest account to be his “10000th”. Obviously, this is an exaggeration: My estimates peg this as his 6th or 7th account (Give or take 2). His last account went by the name of King-Kaz, during the life of which he opened his new GAKING account; the subject of today’s article. I will attempt to detail GAKING’s activity over the course of the past three weeks: From the date of the account’s registration to the day I will be posting this article.

deviantART is many things: A social networking site, a repository for blogs, and on occasion, an image-hosting service. The latter function, though dA’s staff has evidently been making strides towards phasing it out for years, is nothing if not well-organized. There exist a number of categories and subcategories which so-called artists can classify their work as, and which patrons to the site can browse.

There do exist a few “oddities” within the category system, which stand out as being out of place within their tier. For example: “Anthro“, which even furries will admit is a genre of of art, is listed alongside mediums of art such as “Digital Art” and “Traditional Art”. Further complicating the situation, selecting the Anthro category yields two subcategories of it’s own: “Digital Media” and “Traditional Media”. A bit redundant, isn’t it? Clearly, the Anthro category was a last-second addition, and wasn’t thought out as well as the rest of the categories of the sorting system.

Having stumbled upon a group on dear old deviantART dedicated to “destroying us,” I remembered that we ourselves had started a dA group a while back (8 months ago, to be precise)! The thing is, we never actually used it for anything, and so it was forgotten while our website continued to update and expand. So, in the spirit of “better late than never,” I figured I’d wipe the dust off of the group-thing and see if we can’t put it to some use!

The problem is, I have absolutely no idea what possible use we could derive from this dumb thing. Which is why I now turn to you – the viewer – to tell us what the fuck you would want to see on the group page (If anything). Drop us a comment on the page, and we’ll see what we can do about obliging your requests.

Alternatively, if you hate our goddamn guts, we encourage you to join the opposition! They need all the help they can get in their holy crusade against us. I tried joining, but got rejected for some reason. I even sent them an affiliation request, but they rejected it! I can’t help but shake the feeling the group’s creator has some kind of a personal grudge against me or something… Me! Of all people!