yellowmoth replied to your post: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
* is confused* Care to elaborate?
Briefly, sure. It’s okay to commission fanartists. It’s legal and it’s it’s heavily encouraged in fandom. People pay for fanart. You’ll always have the asshats who feel entitled to it for free, but people are generally willing to pay for art of their favorite characters and in fact in droves encourage fanartists to up their prices because, and I quote, “their craft is worth more than they are charging.”
Meanwhile you have fanwriters. Writers can’t even ask for COMMENTS as compensation without people yelling at them to tell them they should write because they enjoy writing. Stop being such an attention whore! Write because you’re passionate about the craft! Stop begging for attention--it’s embarrassing! The idea of a fan-writer accepting commissions is somehow ludicrous (even if it weren’t toeing the line of being illegal) and embarrassing in fandom in a way it’s NEVER been for artists.
Like trust me, I get that there is a BIG difference between writers and artists; writers are limited heavily by fandom whereas artists can draw a character from a fandom they’re not part of if they have a reference to work with. Still, the important takeaway here is this:
Artists in fandom are expected to take commissions when their craft gets high-quality enough and they’re expected to charge fair prices to account for time spent on their work.
Writers in fandom are expected to produce content for free and it doesn’t matter how good you are. If you even think about making a post to try and take emergency commissions for yourself, you won’t get reblogs--you’ll get messages, and not from concerned people who are afraid you’re toeing the line of legality by taking fanfic commissions, either. No, they’ll be telling you to stop trying to get paid for your hobby.
Because especially in fandom visual art is a skill and a career, and writing is something that everyone can do if they just sit down at a computer and open Microsoft Word.
