YandereDev stole and made fun of some little kid’s art...
Or at least, that’s what the anti-YandereDev crowd is claiming THIS week. According to them, he recolored a drawing made by a 10-year-old girl, claimed that it was fanart that someone sent him, and proceeded to make fun of it in one of his videos. So they decided to do a bunch of fanart of this character, try to convince DrApeis to include it in Love Letter as a character named Arya Codinson (no, seriously), and try to get in touch with the original artist so that they can send their love. And yet again, the truth behind this situation amounts to a huge pile of nothing being blown completely out of proportion...
First off, there’s the context behind the whole thing. About four years ago, YandereDev made a video talking about how the number of people who have been sending him less-than-helpful emails has been slowing down development. Here is the clip featuring the art in question:
As you can tell, he is not making fun of a piece of alleged fanart. He never even implies that the picture IS fanart. He’s using an image that looks like it was drawn by a little kid as an example to illustrate how the volunteer requests he’d get often came from people whose artistic talents fell far below his quality standards.
Aside from that, there are a few other things that need to be addressed about this. First of which is the fact that you won’t find this particular video on YandereDev’s channel. He deleted it a long time ago. As far as I know he hasn’t addressed this, so I don’t know the reason why it was deleted. But if I were to hazard a guess: I’d assume that it was either because his policy regarding emails has largely changed in the four years since the video was made, or because he felt that its overall tone was far too negative toward his fanbase. Either way, the fact that people are demonizing him over something they claimed he did in a video that’s been deleted is a little ridiculous.
Beyond that, the way the story is being framed is equally ridiculous. These people are making this claim as though he was publicly humiliating a little kid because their art was trash. Now to be fair, the person in question was a 9-year-old girl when she originally posted that picture... in 2012. On a blog that was abandoned in 2013. So now we have people who are crying out for YanDev’s blood over an old picture drawn by someone who is likely 18 now and has probably completely forgotten that said picture even exists. And then they obsessed over it. They named it. They drew fanart of it. They appropriated it as a symbol for their obsessive hatred for YanDev. They made posts trying to find out how to contact her. They demanded justice for this girl because “that mean ol’ pedophile con-artist who can’t take criticism made fun of a drawing she made when she was a little kid”.
And this all leads to what I feel is the most fucked part of this story: They found her.
Let me repeat that. These people saw a random picture in a deleted 4-year-old video, learned that it was a recolor of a little girl’s drawing from 8 years ago, scoured the entire internet looking for said girl... AND. THEY. FOUND. HER.
Am I the only one who sees how insanely fucking creepy this is? These people spent an entire week tracking down a person based on personal information from a long-abandoned blog, checking email addresses, and going down a chain of old acquaintances that eventually led to them cyberstalking her friends and family; just to tell her that she was the victim of a person that she never heard of who “made fun of” a decade-old drawing that she completely forgot existed. Why? Because they are so desperately obsessed with destroying YanDev’s reputation that they went on a straight-up manhunt to find someone that they could paint as a victim.
So apparently, if you do literally anything that can be associated with YandereDev in any way, you’re not safe. These people have demonstrated that they will go to any length to find someone if they think they can weaponize them against their target. Boundaries mean nothing to them. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, what you did, or how long ago you did it.
