I'm not a big artist at all (I'm hardly an artistontumblr in particular) but I do REBLOG a lot of art, and I just want to say bc I've gotten a massive influx of new followers...
Don't tag beautiful art with character-critical stuff. More than one person in my notes is doing this.
If a beautiful piece makes you feel regret because "I wish I liked this character but they're a pig"... Don't put it in the tags. The artist sees tags, sees someone criticizing this character who they clearly might like, considering they put effort and talent and care into a piece of art about them.
Your tags are telling the artist "wow, it's a shame that YOU, this gorgeous artist, like this TRASH CHARACTER." It is not the solely-character-critical tag you think it is.
Even if it was, even if the artist agreed with you about the flaws of a character, it still sucks as an artist to think that that's the emotion that garners a response about their art... a response that's not based on their art at all.
Fandom could all be just a little bit nicer if you make a separate post about character critical opinions and tag that appropriately. Fandom would retain more artists if they weren't made to feel shitty for their passions, and underappreciated for their work. It contributes to their mass exodus to twitter, or the closing of their commissions, or worse, leaving the internet all together.
Fandom would be a better place if we were a little bit more thoughtful about how our engagement with material is tied to engagement with the fans who like and create based on that material.
