#afamiliars

[noonalt]

To vibe like a Troodo... revisited Updated bases (previous post from last year) of my Troodo adopts for Afamiliars! (Troodos are familiars on Flight Rising, not my own design, cough cough) As a bonus, some already finished adopts on this base and a baby version! And fun fact, the nudibranch one (15316) and shark one (15360) are obtainable as prizes in the currently running Halloween event 👀 (Though iirc these two are discord exclusive)

[flightdescending]

tangentially Flight Rising related! Since 2020, i have been part of a community called Afamiliars. It is a primarily Discord-based "petsite" based on FR familiars that can be bred, dressed up, and mutated. There are many different artists who make the pets. Every pet is hand-colored/edited so it's absolutely wild that as of writing this there are 15,000 of them. The ones I have drawn here are some of the ones I own, and here are their actual Afam images:

You can see every Afamiliar that exists on the database website!! Also, this is the FR forum thread for Afams but if you're interested in checking it out, I would recommend hopping right into the Discord. 5 years of a kind of insular community has made the whole thing a little complicated for newcomers but it's genuinely very fun to see what the artists do with these creatures!

[deer-rising]

On rare occasions, when a familiar spends several years bonded to a particularly elementally charged dragon, the magical energy will slowly transform them 

⚡ Lightning Peryton  ▪ Wind Moth 🌫 🔥  Fire Tadhop  ▪ Shadow Runic Bat 🌙  ☀  Light Moth  ▪ Super Loves Being Beastclans Foo 🐯

[sentimental-bottlesnake]

Afamiliars beware

since I’m banned I don’t really care anymore. Buckle up, its long and I’m not gonna put it under a read more because :))) these girls have broken my spirit for the last time.

If you’ve ever seen a community around called Afamiliar: don’t join it :)))

For those who don’t know what Afams is. Its where you can order a little drawing of a familiar from FR and it comes with unique colors and markings and can dress it up, breed, it and scavenge with it. Artists make them in a queue and fill orders as they come in.*

The admins are INCREDIBLY toxic. They can’t take any sort of criticism and they play favorites with who and how people get punished. You aren’t even allowed to say you’re unhappy about anything. Ever. Or if you do you get a strike. If you call out the team or admin’s hypocritical behavior you get a strike. If you stand up for yourself when the admins are clearly doing these things you get a strike.

I was part of Afamiliars for two years and was part of the team for a year and during that time I watched the entire thing fall apart. They really try to make it seem like they’re one big family but its just not true. The admins and owners Myndris and Sketchanie are both pretty toxic and talk about people, members of their community and their staff of artists and other team members, behind their back and make snide comments about them constantly. And while everyone else is held accountable to the rules neither of them or their friends are. Myndris talked so much shit about someone she had the entire team convinced they were a terrible person just because they didn’t like some art they got. The best part is when the admins agree with you about things you have problems with in Afamiliars in private over DMs and then publicly renounce everything you say. So hypocritical AND completely two faced. My absolute favorite :)

I was fired from my position as artist in July because another team member antagonized me into telling them to shut the fuck up because I wanted to be able to have open dialogues about the actual stuff that was bothering me. I ended up leaving for a week I was so furious at the state of things and why the admin team had such shitty conflict resolution. No negativity. Nothing in any way could be perceived as negative or you got a strike, so long as you weren’t a friend of the Admins. If you were they’d just tell you to stop. It was full on ‘no war in Ba Sing Sa’ in the Afams server and still is. Which is why I left and then for a week not a single member of staff reached out to me to see if I was okay. In fact after I left the community noticed and they started deleting messages asking what happened and where I was and where I’d gone and why I’d left.  Their most prolific artist had just LEFT and the only way they thought to respond was to delete every message that asked what happened. :)))) They also lied to the team about how many strikes I had and my ‘behavior issues’ to convince them to vote me out. Which is hilarious bc there are way worse actors in the team than me.

But saying anything that might be slightly confrontational got you a warning or a strike. So it was literally impossible to have any sort of adult conversations that might make people upset. Things that had been bothering me for seven months. Things the admins agreed with and refused to do anything about. They just let it sit. And stew. Agreeing with all the problems you have with X thing in private while publicly acting like it wasn’t a problem at all.

They also don’t listen to feedback like... at all. I’m not expecting anyone to be perfect and I know we’re all only human but they keep making the same comedy of errors again. And again. And again. To the point that now they’re two most popular artists are either gone, or about to be gone. They’d been given feedback from multiple people multiple times about how a trial mod on the team makes certain people uncomfortable and instead of removing that person they doubled down on them and did not remove them. And then when people went to other admins about the problem THAT WAS SHARED with the person in question. Admin specific information saying how people were uncomfortable with someone with that person. Probably with their name attached. When I brought THAT to an admin again nothing was done.

In the past few months I’ve just watched the team and the server completely fucking implode. The admins doubling down on zero negativity even as more and more people realize... something isn’t right. More people, people I don’t even talk to!, mention things that are a bit more aggressive than the admins would like. Someone even got muted on the server for telling a mod that an admin had dealt with the problem and the mod was then continuing to antagonize the original problem; which is against the rules. Someone got harassed over DMs by another member, asked where they could submit a report and posted proof of it, and they were the one given the strike and told that the admins do not moderate DMs. But they do sometimes feel the need to moderate and condone certain discord servers run by people they don’t like :) Which is a true thing.

In the past week the second most prolific artist left because one of the admins called the afams everyone makes ‘a miserable pile of pixels’ in reference to how much drama they get in the server and feedback form. This obviously upset some people and so said artist is taking a break for a month. I know she’s not a fool. She also sees what’s happening. She might go back but I doubt it and I hope she’s much less stressed out whatever she chooses to do. Then another artist stepped down the next day. Then just today a third artist stepped down, both of which were admins. So within a week 3 artists felt the need to step down to focus on themselves and mental health issues.

I’ve never attacked any of these people by the way except when they say shit about me that is categorically untrue. Or they show up trying to bully me. Which they also do. I was friends with all these people in the team while I was on the team until one day they just decided I wasn’t :) Not allowed to be friends with the admins anymore if you call them out on their hypocrisy.

And then today they finally banned me from the server. Which I wasn’t really a part of anyway and didn’t participate in much. And people have said worse and done worse to the team and admins but because I’m the designated server villain everything I do is worse.

This is why I was banned

from the latest admin artist that stepped down after giving their message they were stepping down. And I said ‘that seems pretty call-outy and overly negative to me’ which is... against all the rules on the server. But I’m the villain. So I’m not allowed to point it out.

The other admin said this to me pointing out that THIS ADMIN was breaking the site rules

Even tho I’ve legit gotten a strike just for saying ‘I don’t like this thing you’ve done. I’m not gonna talk about it but I want you to know I don’t like this decision you’ve made’.  And these rules also exist in the team only area and it says that  NO ONE is exempt. And I said as much. Because that’s bullshit.

At least unless you’re the owner’s wife. Than you can do whaaaatever you want :)

But yeah. Fuck Afamiliars. I’ve seen the writing on the wall for the past year. They’re gonna implode, or explode, and the admins are gonna be busy finger pointing at everyone but themselves for the problems. In Sketch’s stepping down message she said this exactly

I understand there have been many fuck ups on our end, and I apologize for those, but we have always strived to learn from those mistakes. And I'd like to think that we do a little better each time. 

Which is not what I’ve seen the past few months. Instead they’ve doubled down on Being Right at all costs, not listening to community feedback, lashing out at people who call them out on their bullshit and hypocrisy and I know they still talk shit about their community members in DMs with their stooges.

It’s been a BEAUTIFUL fireball to watch the past 3 months since I was fired.

*Lots of artists don’t actually fill their orders. They just let their queues fill up into huge ribbons on trello and then once a month maybe fill 1-4 orders. One artist has been around 10 months and made so little art their orders can’t even fill 4 pages on discord search. So you’re stuck waiting months, or sometimes YEARS, for a project you want to fill. A friend of mine just gave up on a project because they’d been waiting two and a half years. But the queues on all artists except for maybe... idk, 3-4 artists (including me at the time) were so slow you would be waiting and waiting and legitimately no progress was made. There used to be a rule of 1 afam a week to keep queues moving but sometime around the time Sketch decided to stop making afams that rule was quietly removed.

[thewhispen]

My favorite afam I’ve made so far! This one was a double classic for a secret santa gift!

[scribblygryphon]

bird bird bird bird bird bird bird

[afamiliars]

HAfamiliars Delivery Batch - New and customized Afamiliars that have been delivered to their owners! For more information about Afamiliars, see our pinned post.

#4187 Heckling Hydrena, G1 #4188 Heckling Hydrena, Bred #4189 Heckling Hydrena, Bred #4198 Heckling Hydrena, Bred

[tomswifty-fr]

Artfight attack for Risenwolf on FR! Posting here instead of on my main blog bc it’s an afamiliar