I would also like to look at the bigger claims OP has made in a response to an anon ask about this issue.
that OP was the first person to bring in liu qingge as a white tiger
that OP popularized white tiger liu qingge
that OP brought the concept of the tigertaur to Scum Villain fandom
and, that it is difficult to believe anyone who posts white tigertaur liu qingge is uninfluenced by OP's work.
These claims could be true. I'll evaluate them.
Was OP literally the first person to bring the concept of white tiger Liu Qingge to the fandom?
No. White tiger Liu Qingge dates back to May 2019. OP didn't even join the fandom until early summer 2021, two years after this art was posted:
sure, @neon_starrzify's post wasn't popular, but we're starting simple here.
There's also this art in May 2021, riiiight around when OP joined the fandom, which didn't have much reach but had 83 likes:
There are also a handful of pre-OP textual mentions of tiger!lqg both with and without the color white specified. Here are two:
This is just what I was able to find using twitter search. (Tumblr Search is, of course, fucking useless.) The point is that "Before me, people only compared him to a cat!" is simply not true.
Did OP popularize white tiger Liu Qingge with their fic and their art?
I believe OP contributed to the trend, sure. But I think it's most accurate to say they coincidentally happened to be a week or two ahead of some far more influential tiger!LGQ art & fic that came out around the same time.
OP's liushen fic, "of sharp claws and grey eyes", was posted on December 13, 2021. The fic currently has 10,891 hits and 1,039 kudos.
A week later on December 21, popular bingliushen writer acernor also posted a tiger story, "Tiger, Tiger." At this time it has 29,358 hits and 2,874 kudos, nearly three times OP's fic engagement.
To be clear, this is not meant to be a direct comparison between the two fics, because Tiger, Tiger features bingqiu, giving it a major engagement boost. My point here is mainly that if people in SVSSS fandom were thinking about a fic where somebody on Cang Qiong is a giant tiger and letting it inspire them to make SVSSS tiger art, they were statistically more likely to be thinking of acernor's fic than OP's.
Side note: OP claims that acernor copied them.
When it was pointed out that acernor's fic (which, while not long, still posted nine chapters on its first day) was hardly likely to have been written in under a week in response to OP's fic, OP was unmoved.
OP believes that acernor—a chronic bingliushen shipper with only 3 liushen-only bookmarks out of 118 SVSSS bookmarks—follows the solo-liushen tag so obsessively that acernor must have been aware of OP's fic. OP believes that there was no way acernor came up with the idea "Luo Binghe can turn into a tiger" on their own. In a canon where Binghe is repeatedly called "beast." In the month leading up to the Year of the Tiger.
OP, I think you need to recalibrate your sense of how much attention everyone else is paying to you, and consider giving other people credit for having an ounce of their own imagination.
Anyway. Let's talk about the art. Did OP's art establish the norm of White Tiger Liu Qingge?
OP's first white tiger lqg art post in December 2021 has 135 notes. Fanart for the story drawn by someone else has 69 notes (nice.) For the new year, OP posted a New Year's post with white tiger lqg and 218 notes. And there's a cute comic of SQQ petting white tiger lqg: 106 notes. If we count both "by OP" and "inspired by OP" white tiger lqg fanart for both December and January, we get a total of 528 notes.
Reasonably influential, perhaps? For comparison we can look at this 2022 New Year's post by @lunalema, which has 7/9 and liushen as tigers, liu qingge as a white tiger specifically, currently with 105 total engagement notes:
I just want to make it clear here to OP that lunalema did not copy your white tiger lqg idea to come up with "what if all the characters were tigers?" for a Year of the Tiger post.
Now let's flip over to soursoppi's white tiger lqg art in late December 2021, a brief two weeks after OP's story and art were posted!
The total engagement notes here come to 11,489. On this one post. Note also that acernor, the writer of Tiger, Tiger, is interacting with this post; soursoppi reads and sometimes recs acernor's bingliushen fic. The odds that soursoppi saw their twitter mutual was posting about SVSSS tigers and was inspired to draw their own SVSSS tiger are decent (though given soursoppi's propensity for drawing tigers I think it's entirely possible it was a coincidence.) Soursoppi, however, doesn't have any connection to OP that I could find.
This same "soft and sharp" piece by soursoppi was also posted on tumblr, where it currently has 4,757 notes. And this was only the first of a series of 8 additional posts over the course of the following year in which soursoppi drew Shen Qingqiu as a white cat, Luo Binghe as a grizzly bear, and Liu Qingge as a white tiger. On tumblr, the note count across all 8 pieces is 42,425 for a total tumblr note count of 47,182.
The engagement on the Twitter versions looked to be about triple the tumblr ones, and there were also some bonus pieces, so I could make a conservative estimate of 150,000 twitter enagements with soursoppi's twitter-based white tiger qingge art.
OP's reach, by contrast... After December and January's white tiger lqg posts, OP went on to post an additional 21 white tiger lqg posts (if you count the tigertaur ones.) Those additional 21 posts brought in 4,260 notes for a total tumblr note count of 4,788.
That's off by a factor of ten.
So, when you look back at why so many Scum Villain fans are inclined to think of Liu Qingge as a white tiger, what is the most plausible explanation?
A very popular artist who was already well-known for drawing MDZS characters as color-coded animals, frequently tigers, decided to branch out to drawing SVSSS characters as color-coded animals a few days after a friend and fellow bingliushen shipper posted a fic about an SVSSS character being a tiger. This popular artist popularized the "white tiger Liu Qingge" headcanon with roughly a post per month, garnering ~200,000 engagements across two of the largest fandom social media sites over the course of 2022.
A very popular artist happened to read a random fic/see a random fic art post and stole from it the idea to depict Liu Qingge as a white tiger, meaning that all the credit for popularizing the depiction should go to the creator of the hypothetical post the popular artist might have seen
A creator with less than one-tenth the engagement of an artist with a similar body of work is directly the reason Liu Qingge was fanonized as a white tiger, due to lots of people seeing that creator's posts and fic?
The first option has the most explanatory power. The second option is technically possible but you'd need to show me a lot more evidence before I bought it.
I would not buy the third option.
So forget white tigers generally. Let's talk tigertaurs.
Did OP bring the concept of the tigertaur to the Scum Villain fandom? Were they the first to post a white Liu Qingge tigertaur?
I think it's highly likely that OP was the first person to post art of a tigertaur version of any SVSSS character. I looked pretty hard! If someone did post tigertaur art before OP did so in June 2022, then I'll likely never be able to find it, because people describe their monster/hybrid/whatever-taur art very sporadically and inconsistently (and sometimes in other languages.) So yes, OP can claim to have posted the first white tigertaur LQG and in fact the first SVSSS tigertaur in general.
But does that mean OP "brought" tigertaurs to the fandom? Did OP's tigertaur design circulate widely enough that that the fandom both knew about it and remembered it? And even assuming a good number of SVSSS fans knew about OP's tigertaur back then, are those the same people who are now producing similar white tigertaur ideas?
Answering these questions will require analyzing:
original reach of OP's art
recency of engagement with OP's art
current spread of other white tigertaur art
I've got Photoshop and some shit I wanna procrastinate on. Let's fuck around.
First we've got to get a sense of the original reach of OP's tigertaur art.
There's two ways to get reach on your artwork: have a ton of followers or have a few influential followers with their own large audiences. Luckily, tumblr has a built-in way to visualize this! I've included the reblog graphs of every single White Tigertaur Liu Qingge post OP has made so you can see both total note count and the actual spread of the posts.
As you can see, most of these posts are not making it far from OP's followers. If you don't follow OP or someone who follows OP, it's highly unlikely you've seen the bulk of OP's tigertaur posts.
The most influential reblog nodes are via svsssartreblogs, which reblogged several of OP's white tigertaur lqg posts in October of 2023. If the concept of tigertaur LQG was "brought" to the fandom by OP, October 2023 is the most obvious inflection point for tigertaurs to spread to the wider fandom.
But as best I can tell, no other tigertaurs showed up in SVSSS fanart around this time. There aren't any other tigertaurs I can find in any SVSSS activity on twitter or tumblr or ao3, all throughout the whole of 2022 and 2023.
So now we should briefly consider the recency of engagement with OP's art. The most foundational of OP's tigertaur posts from 2022 were last reblogged in 2023. The three more tigertaur pieces posted by OP in late 2023 have been reblogged only 20 times across all of 2024, with 15 of those 2024 reblogs going to this throwback masterpost of OP's original character sheets. But 20 reblogs spread across 9 months is not a whole lot—not enough to indicate a major resurgence of interest in OP's tigertaur design.
And yet here in mid 2024, there are now a handful of white tigertaur LQGs and some other SVSSS cat-taurs popping up! Can we link this to OP in some way? Or can we source it to something else?
I'll do a review of the current spread of white lqg tigertaur art.
In order of appearance, we've got:
May 1, 2024: krowscrawl on twitter (+ tumblr crosspost)
August 3, 2024: bitzi_bee on twitter (+tumblr crosspost)
(August 25, 2024: sov-etsc on tumblr in a compilation post - unsure how much earlier the actual art would have been done.)
August 26, 2024: magabet on twitter (+tumblr crosspost)
August 27, 2024: KuroJesterHead on bsky (+tumblr crosspost)
September 22, 2024: sinn_bee on twitter (+tumblr crosspost)
September 27, 2024: theholepunisher on twitter
September 27, 2024: sinn_bee on twitter (+tumblr crosspost)
At last we can talk about network overlap. Does anybody in this list of artists know who OP is? Can we establish that they've interacted with each other's art?
For the fourth on the list, it's easy! Magabet definitely has seen and interacted with OP's tigertaur art. I can only get secondhand glimpses due to OP's twitter being request-only, but it's pretty obvious. If anything in this long-ass post is a smoking gun in favor of OP, it's this:
Magabet's last visible interaction with OP was in January of 2024, though. And krowscrawl, the first white tigertaur poster after OP, doesn't follow Magabet and only interacted with Magabet after Magabet commented on their tigertaur art. So is there really a link here?
For the rest of the artists, I couldn't find evidence of relevant interaction. OP doesn't typically reblog art from other artists on their SVSSS sideblog, they don't publicize their main tumblr, and I can't see their twitter. What I can say is that I didn't see OP's tigertaur art in the archived reblogs of these artists. The most overlap I can establish is that OP's art was reblogged to SVSSSartreblogs in October 2023 and some of the other artists have at one point reblogged from SVSSSartreblogs.
Fandoms (and characters within fandoms) don't have hard boundaries. if you recently saw art of purple tiger jiang cheng and art of white centaur chu wanning, you can put them together and get white tigertaur liu qingge without needing any awareness that somebody on the other side of the fandom has drawn white tigertaur liu qingge before. (For example.) Unless the design is really distinctive, like kamkamquat's iconic bingpup, it would take considerable work to establish that a concept introduced several years earlier by one person was the direct influence for the same concept introduced later by a different person.
But if these artists didn't get white tigertaur LQG from OP—seeing as there are zero similarities in the design choices other than "is white tigertaur"—then where did they get him?
The first time I personally can remember seeing white tigertaur liu qingge, it was this spring, May 1, when @krowscrawl posted their art to twitter:
So did krowscrawl get white tigertaur LQG from OP? They explicitly cite a diferrent inspiration.
A few days earlier, krowscrawl mentions they're doodling "tiger-centaur" liu qingge because they had seen "unicorn" sj, and repeats something similar in their tumblr crosspost tags:
Krowscrawl is making a tiger-taur LQG and what looks like a lion-taur LBH with a centaur SQQ, not because they're copying an existing tiger-taur, but because they're aware of a centaur AU that they want to participate in.
Based on the timing and the specificity of "unicorn SJ", krowscrawl definitely means @theholepunisher's unicorn/cervitaur JiuYuan AU. Here's the "unicorn SJ" posted two days before krowscrawl's comment about seeing it:
We're now in the last week of April 2024.
so where did @theholepunisher get the inspiration for that art?
from @paisleybrie, who didn't actually post their work until after @theholepunisher had already been inspired by it:
okay so paisleybrie says this art was inspired by theholepunisher posting about the idea in a text-only tweet on April 22. So what inspired theholepunisher to be thinking of fancy centaurs in the first place?
I stumbled upon this post in bitzi's reblogs and checked the post engagements to find theholepunisher:
Plus a little more silliness. What was this deer pics account that theholepunisher follows posting in the days before April 22?
My mental calculation is now something like 'jiuyuan mpreg brainworms' + 'Gay Sex deer pics' + '"unicorn day" SJ art' = unicorn/cervitaur jiuyaun AU.
This centaur AU continued to grow art and lore (and porn) through the summer and up to Bitzi's white tigertaur lqg post in early August. You'll notice it's mentioned in a few of the later tigertaur tweets, and sometimes is visible in the art itself.
At the same time, nearly everyone in the "late" group (August/September) reblogged krowscrawl's tigertaur back in May.
But it's still kind of odd that so many people all put out a white LQG tigertaur in the space of two months, right?
Well, it is unless you've been combing obsessively through their posts and you realize not only do all the English-speaking August/September posters know each other somewhat, they're often drawing together. That's why so many of them reference magma, a collaborative art platform I'm not personally familiar with.
Starting with bitzi_bee and proceeding chronologically, the magma callouts:
It feels like they're all copying from somewhere because they're collaborating and sharing ideas in collaborative spaces.
But all of the designs look more like a realistic white tiger than OP's monster!white tiger. None of them draw on OP's design in any notable way.
OP, at best you can track down Magabet and ask if they remember your tigertaur. But even if they did, they didn't use your design, and they were drawn into the white tigertaur thing by someone who got there a different way. I spent way too much time looking, and there just isn't any compelling evidence that the recent white tigertaur surge has anything to do with you. As best I can tell, it's a trend in a group of BingLiu shippers kicked off by a centaur AU that was in turn probably kicked off by Unicorn Day 2024.
Is it implausible that anyone drawing white tigertaur liu qingge was uninfluenced by OP?
No. Terribly convoluted sentence, but no.
It is entirely plausible that an artist could draw white tigertaur Liu Qingge while uninfluenced by OP.
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