Abstract

Fandom communities can gain especially toxic qualities online, harboring hatred towards others, their media, and their own members. The social media platforms that these fandoms communicate using are algorithmically focused and designed to generated large quantities of content to power their “feeds”. Both of these can be detrimental to those involved, but especially artists. The frustrations and hurt involved can significantly slow an aspiring digital artist’s career if they fail to find a positive community online and learn to accommodate social media platform shortcomings.

Paper

Introduction

This paper stemmed from personal use of the X platform and becoming frustrated with the difficulty of finding artist’s older works on the platform. It is a social media platform designed for networking, not artists. I’d also noticed frustrations within the “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” (MLP) fandom from artists in regards to expanding their portfolio into other fandoms and original works. Many received negative comments when posting fan art of different media and sometimes distanced themselves from the fandom entirely in order to focus on their own work without such ridicule. I wondered if this was an exception of that particular community, a result of how fandoms on social media interact, or the social media itself. It is possible that Fandom communities on social media platforms like X strain the growth of fledgling digital artists through pressure and platform limitations.

Fandoms birth artists

Fan-art is the way that nearly all artists have started, even long before the inception of the internet. Its easy to learn the techniques of creating on mediums by mimicking another piece, and fun to do so while also showing appreciation for something already loved. Social media has introduced a new avenue for sharing that art to potentially thousands of other fans, allowing a fledgling artist to easily find and join communities of similar fans. Fandoms are communities of people who appreciate a piece of media, discussing, creating and appreciating that media together. Tisha Turk believes that these communities exist primarily because of labour from the fans within in the form of fan-works, encouragement and sharing (Turk, 2014). The coordination norms of these fandoms further encourage the creation and sharing of fan-works by making them such a normal and core component of the community (Hetcher, 2009). Creation, constructive criticism, learning and sharing are all encouraged as ways of giving back to the community (Turk, 2014), but especially creation of any skill level. It can be a safe space that’s particularly beneficial to a developing artist, with the artist’s work contributing to the growth and sustaining of the community. It’s a relationship that works very well as a social activity and hobby.

Art on Social Media

Social media platforms were designed as a way to communicate and share between different people. They’re a space to facilitate networking, with sharing, commenting and tagging as common features to connect like-minded individuals together. X is a social media platform focused on interaction, especially with its “quote-repost” feature allowing for extended discussion. Art isn’t directly part of this focus, and as such encounters some difficulties. While Instagram is considered a better platform for artists (Kang et al., 2019), it is less suited to the deeper social interaction looked for when joining a fandom. Instagram may be where an artist moves eventually, but X is a more likely place for an artist to begin experimenting after joining a fandom. X’s use is powered by algorithms and feeds that prioritise currency over quality. It can become incredibly difficult to explore an artist’s portfolio if they also use their account socially, as the platform is designed for. The art posts are inseparable from other posts, so they can easily become diluted amongst the rest of an artist’s profile. Even sources that proclaim X to be a good art platform (Frey, 2022) admit to the need for an alternative space that acts as a portfolio, such as a personal website. Finding past posts can only be done through text searches or scrolling backwards through an accounts posts one at a time. On average in 2012, a post on X was only seen by others for eighteen minutes after its initial posting (Peter, 2012). This number has likely decreased as the platform has continued to expands its userbase. As a result, the platform punishes infrequent posting and discards the past, making it difficult for a younger artist to retain popularity without continuously creating and potentially sacrificing quality. This lack of portfolio makes it hard for an artist to continue growing their popularity, taking commissions, and making art their career.

Restrictions on Growth I: Legality of Fan-work

Once an artist is satisfied with their skills and still excited to draw, online spaces have allowed for an artist to start their career through easy commissioning. They have also brought to light the potential copyright breaches of an artist taking commissions within a fandom. Sometimes requests are of a particular, copyrighted character or in a style inspired by the media. Designs are often copyrighted, as are artworks. It’s uncommon for fan-works to be met with legal action due to the untested nature of fair use and the general benefits awarded to a brand for allowing its fans to create. Legal repercussions for copyright breach are expensive to conduct and generally not worth pursuing if profit margins and brand reputation aren’t affected, but that doesn’t change the legality of monetary gain through fan-works. It should be noted that music sampling, hip-hop and some works of literature have grown into cultural acceptance and adoption despite being illegal (De Kosnik, 2009). As an artist grows, pursuing legal action becomes more and more viable. While fandoms have social norms that encourage fan-works (Hetcher, 2009), those norms discourage the selling of those works (De Kosnik, 2009). This causes a large gap between art as a hobby and art as a profession that is difficult to navigate. Larger projects such as video projects and “game modding” can lead to notice of skills from companies and subsequent hiring (De Kosnik, 2009), but this is uncommon in those fields and even less common with art.

Restrictions on Growth II: Clingy Fandoms

Through personal experience, art of favourite characters is more popular than original characters and concepts based on the beloved media, and artwork of completely original ideas by fandom artists is considered unrelated to the rest of the community. Literary works can also have this prejudice, with favourite pairings and locations favoured over original characters exploring new areas of the media’s world. Interestingly, there is little research into this topic about fandom creators leaving over harmful views and discouragement. There is no research that reinforces my personal experiences, nor is there any that refutes it. Most documented leavings of fandoms are done as fans, not creators. Fans leave their fandoms most often because of discourse and hatred towards the media, its creators, other fans or the saturation of hate speech and harassment unrelated to the media (Trendacosta, 2019). Within the MLP fandom, there are examples of artists distancing themselves to further their careers, but they are difficult to find. There were only two web search accessible instances of creators leaving that fandom, The Living Tombstone and Phonybrony. Both are musicians, not visual artists, and only Phonybrony announced their departure before doing so (phonybrony, 2013). The Living Tombstone instead retained their name and history as starting as a “brony” musician and gained enough popularity to sign a contract with music label Warner Music (Regan, 2021). Neither cited fandom negativity as their reason for leaving. The inconclusive nature of these findings suggest that fandom communities can harm artists, but only to the same degree as any other member of that community.

Restrictions on Growth III: The Content Machine

Social media’s preference for continuous content generation and social interaction contrasts with its problems with algorithmic bias toward homogeneous posting and permanent reputations. Social media platforms operate based on interaction between users through various metrics. X uses likes, comments, sharing and tags. A large portion of interaction between users is arbitrated by the algorithm, which categorises accounts as themselves an interest. The platform attempts to show people to other people they might like by building relatively static internal profiles of their interests and posting habits. This works very well for forming and maintaining communities, but makes it hard to expand an online presence to outside of one community. An account that tries to diversify across multiple topics, without being popular enough to be itself a topic (it needs large amassing of followers), will be seen by the algorithm as less popular than a more homogeneous social media account. An account in one fandom with more likes and reposts will be shown to a greater audience than an account with less total interaction but from a greater number of unique users and across more topics.

An Artist’s Options

After all of this, the easiest solution to pursuing a professional art career is to create a new account, leaving those foundational communities behind in order to be recognised by the platform as distinct. Some artists have abandoned social media altogether over their careers, creating personal websites and recommending that others do the same. “I urge all artists to consider whether all the effort and downsides are really worth it. My personal answer is no.” (Heimkreiter, 2021). While it’s difficult to search for, previous posts and art still exist as a “Digital footprint” that can make it hard to disassociate from younger fan works. Artists can become known for and labelled by the fandoms they have contributed to. Fandoms such as the those of MLP even proudly maintain archives, keeping old works available long after their owners have attempted to delete them or their entire accounts (The Pony Archive, 2024). Some artists adapt within their fandoms, many do not. Many artists and other creators that post their work to social media now have separate personal accounts and art accounts, sometimes even segregating their art across several accounts based on topic. Artists such as The Living Tombstone (The Living Tombstone, 2024), Renn (Renny, 2024), YumKandie (Kandie/Dash, 2024) and Bobby Schroeder (Bobby Schroeder, 2022) on X and Vris (LIGHTLY SALTED, 2024) on Tumblr have separate art and personal accounts. Navi (Navi, 2024), Guucha (Guuchan, 2024), FuzzyStar (Lumi, 2022) and others do not have private accounts, but instead link to off-site for their art portfolios, commissioning services and more private social spaces. Irusu (lRUSU, 2024) has a separate account for their explicit artworks, alongside a website, but no private account. It is not well documented how effective content segregation is but its adoption is widespread across fandoms and general digital artists, particularly on X and Tumblr. A fledgling artist wouldn’t have realised all of these considerations when starting, so they are left with either stagnating within their fandom or following the apparent path of success and spend large amounts of time and effort rebranding rather than creating. This damages those communities if members leave, while halting the progress of leaving artists as they are forced to rebuild their popularity before continuing to progress their artist career.

Conclusion

In conclusion, fan communities on social media can be detrimental to any fandom member, including artists, but the platforms these fandoms communicate across are the primary issue. Platforms with similar features to X are not designed for use as portfolios, taking commissions or diverse interest sharing to followers. Leaving these platforms for more professional options means leaving the community on that platform. The fandoms themselves can sometimes discourage experimentation with other interests and original works, but this can vary between fandoms and individual cases. Artists may distance themselves from the communities they grew up in or give up on their interest entirely because of social media’s shortcomings.

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