I hate to be the bearer of bad news, you guys, but:
It isn’t owed to /you/ to be treated positively when you mistreat [steal from] artists.
We are allowed to call /you/ out. We are allowed to /be angry/. It doesn’t make /us/ any less kind or positive.
The pro-recast movement has gotten entirely ridiculous. You believe in preserving your own feelings in poor choices you’ve made, but you will not listen to others when they try to explain to you, using facts and knowledge and true love and passion for preserving a hobby that started without recasts (and was better off without them!), for your shortsightedness in purchasing something you can’t afford legitimately have cost so many their dreams and livelihood. Yet you cry when your feelings are hurt for hearing about it.
I’m not saying you deserve to be taken out into the street and maimed (never ever!), but you deserve to hear the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts. Instead of running around going, ‘baaaawwwwww I’m allowed to be maaaaaadddd I paid for thiiiis’, for the love of anything good in the universe, can you /also/ look around, maybe at the people behind the companies you’re taking from – particularly the artists who’ve crafted the dolls you coveted enough to take the money from theirs hands for! - and realize the scope of what you’ve done?
If recasting persists in this hobby, in this ‘industry’, it will sink it. Recasting is /not/ sustainable for the artist’s economy. If you purchase a recast, you are contributing to the financial depression faced by artists trying to recoup the ridiculously ballooning mammoth that is the cost of ‘shrink’ (fancy way of saying product loss and theft) alongside the already worrying, sky-mounted costs of doll production. Your demand for a cheaper high quality product means extra work loads, lower wages, unpaid overtime for artists, as they struggle to compete with copies of their own design, now taken by someone else and making money for that person. Luo isn’t a ‘hero’ for bringing you ‘affordable dolls’ (legitimate companies do offer many of these, you know!), but that second person embezzling money from a counterfeit good. And you’re supporting this, but can’t bear to hear it for fear of feeling guilt.
How is this fair? How is the artist supposed to just remain positive, while you pocket something they made, but drains their financial livelihood? Because you wanted a cheaper toy?
It’s hard to remain positive, I get it. You feel bullied because you made a bad choice and now you’ve got this toy you feel guilty having. So you huddle around in your groups, more tightly knit than ever where you can enable each other and coo, ‘'but we’re being treated so unfaiiiir why are you hating my dolls I loooove them!’, but this isn’t /about the dolls/. It was never about the doll you now own. This is about the action behind the doll, what that doll you own represents. And the truth is hard to hear, and it might make you feel guilty as heck, but that’s when you should absolutely /remain positive/, think clearly, and /do the right thing/.
Loving an object is great. But loving an object so much that you’re willing to hurt somebody to get it isn’t. Objects can’t appreciate love, anyway. Why not love the beautiful people who make these objects for you? Who continue to satisfy and delight with more beautiful objects? If you love /others/, and not just yourself, then something amazing happens: a community grows.
Back when the hobby started, when it was about the love of both the dolls and awe of the artists making them, there was a respect there for art that we no longer have today. It’s because there’s so many new things, so many popular things, so many different things. It makes it seem like there are too many, so it ‘'doesn’t matter’. But the truth is, that diversity was brought to the hobby by having so many different and beautiful people come and contribute new things to it. They didn’t steal other peoples’ things, and when they did, it was unheard of and made everyone mad. Now, doll theft is so common we just permit it. But it was having all that liberty to create and share with each other that made the hobby whst it was. The arrival of recasts saw an era of distrust and rampant balloon in commercialism that sprouted from the need to create the new, cheap, perfect product that could deter replication for dishonourable resale. It became a new time.
Now it’s a time where we have to change. Please, by all means stay positive, but true positivity stems from seeing the good for everyone. Use this as an opportunity to look at yourself honestly, and what’s happened, and learn from it an a way that actually /changes things positively/.
Don’t love recasts. Love this /hobby/. That means loving /the artists/, someone outside of yourself. That’s actually a good thing.
blakekathryn
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
gracieabrams
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
