Cali'ika Kenobi Art

The author's proudly displayed fetish

The author's fetish you're pretty sure they don't realise they have

The author's fetish which they're firmly convinced everyone has and is just pretending otherwise

The author's non-sexual special interest which just sounds like a fetish because of their habitually unfortunate phrasing

The fetish the author is making a well-meaning effort to cater to in spite of clearly not understanding it themselves

The author's fetish that never quite makes it into the text because they keep getting sidetracked by the requisite worldbuilding

The author's utterly pedestrian sexual preference which the text treats like a bizarre fetish because they've got shit to work through

The author's seemingly innocuous recurring trope they're going to have a personal revelation about ten years down the road

Sep 1-5 Lineages “Next time, I won’t be here to salvage your wreckage. This is the last time.” OR “What made you think I cared for you?”

Sep 6-12 Synthetic vs Natural Crystals "Don't pretend you didn't know what was going to happen." OR “You could’ve- could’ve stayed. You could’ve helped me fix things.”

Sep 13-19 Sith Ranks “I shouldn’t care for your life, but I’m starting to and it’s becoming an inconvenience.” OR "It'll be for nothing."

Sep 20-26 Building the Lightsaber "Don't be scared, I've done this before." OR "We'll make it alright to come undone."

Sep 27-30 Free Days

I don't think I have to explain to ya'll just how tone deaf this rule is, but I'll do it anyway. With this rule in place, you can't use ANY visual references for poses and anatomy. At all. Even if you make the pose yourself with a program like DesignDoll, even if you take the photo yourself, even if you use a public domain model image, all of it is now "against the rules". All of it. Period. What this says to me is that you use any anatomy or pose references at all, then by AF's standards you are now cheating.

Internet oldies might remember this kind of discourse from circa 2005 on DeviantART. This idea that you can't use bases or photographs (INCLUDING ONES YOU TOOK YOURSELF!!!) for references (even if you're NOT tracing them!!!!) is not only backwards, but extremely out of touch with the process involved in making fine art of any quality.

I could go on, but I found some commentary from a fellow bsky artist (i dunno if you wanna be tagged on here) that sums up the rest of my thoughts pretty nicely:

In short, I hope you reconsider this rule @artfight. Not only does it feel extremely out of touch considering what Art Fight is, but I find that this rule will only serve to alienate people, drive active player count down, and will be completely unenforceable at best. The only way someone would be able to know if someone is using a photograph reference or 3D model reference is if A) they snitched on themself, which they most likely will not do, or B) someone baselessly accused them of using one, which can be used to falsely report other users and cause infighting of untold degrees between users.