my name is keith and I'm sooo emo

let kids have alicorn princess mlp ocs

let kids have rainbow-blood fantrolls

let kids have neon kawaii sparkledogs

let kids have emo edgelord creepypasta ocs

let kids have canon/oc ships

let kids express themselves

people started finding my art and reposting it, to bad art blogs and forums. one of my friends said “i have bad news about your art” and linked me to a bad warriors art blog that had posted my drawing of scourge and i could see all the notes of people making fun of it.

i tried to brush it off, i asked for it to be removed, but it kept happening, and people started leaving comments on my deviations. they started adding my art to bad art folders on da. i was being harassed as a very young child.

at this point i had been drawing every single day, i spent hours drawing my bad warriors art. it was the thing i loved the most at the time. and now? i still draw everyday, but it’s so, so hard for me to post or share it, and i went through a long period of time refusing to draw because i remembered all the things people said about my art.

it didn’t help me. it made me wanna improve my art sure, but on the level that now everything i draw looks bad to me, every idea i have seems cringy to me. i’m terrified of people seeing my work because i am scared everyone will make fun of it again.

I got told the post was there, and got my whole gang of friends to go in there and rag on them for posting my work up just to rip into it. I wasn’t going to do anything but pout at first, but my ~17 year old friends were smart enough to go, hey, this isn’t cool, they’re picking on you and you’re just a kid.

They eventually took it down, but it was under threat from them to report me on FFN for being underage.

For several years of my life, from about 15 on, I viewed my reaction as really cringy. I regretted laying into them because suddenly I realized how young and dumb I’d looked, how stupid my fic was, how awful I was for going in when they were just having fun, etc.

It wasn’t until a few months ago, when I first saw a post like this circulating Tumblr, that I finally stopped regretting it and viewed it as what it was: bullies picking on kids.

It doesn’t matter that their excuse was “We didn’t know you were a kid”; even if I hadn’t been, it’d be easy for a kid to see work that looked like theirs being insulted and decide it’s not worth even trying.

Not to mention, I was 20 before I even tried to write something with original characters again (a single RPG I’d already started getting into nonwithstanding), and I still live in constant fear people will look at a character I make and go “ew, it’s a self-insert”.

Okay, the cake artist here is named Stevie, and she is one of the few I have no respect for. She is an Artiste  and italics can’t quite portray the disdain dripping from my mouth when I say that.

To give you a rough example of why i feel that way, let’s go back to her first time on Challenge. The contest was rice krispy treat (*couch* I mean cereal treat) bridges. What Stevie did was have a wooden frame tilted at an angle with strings for the bridge cables, which she wrapped in seaweed. Notice something I didn’t include in that description? Yeah, no cereal treats in the cereal treat contest. In fact, nothing really edible at all. In a food challenge. Plus if I remember correctly the thing fell and broke.  So yeah, she came in last place and actually complained how the win was stolen form her because the judges were too blind for her artistic vision. Yeah. One of those.

So let’s break down this train wreck, shall we?

For starters, it wasn’t terrible on purpose, her initial plan was to show up Kerry Vincent and make her have to acknowledge her superior skill. But things started going wrong almost immediately. take the Strawberry Spikes. Stevie realized her cake wasn’t going to be as tall as the rules required (apparently she read them this time) so she used those to make up the height. The weird crinkly edging, for I don’t remember what reason she plated the outside of the cake in Sugar sheets. I think it was to make it look smooth but it didn’t work out. Especially when she kinda snapped half way through and just started tossing chocolate syrup, honey, and whatever else she could on.

And then the best part. Stevie decided the cake needed candles. And by candles, I mean little ramikins filled with alcohol. Which she lit on fire. Fun fact about sugar sheets - they are highly flammable. So yeah, Stevie set her cake on fire during the judging.

I honestly think it looks better post fire extinguisher.

On the flip side, let’s talk about Jason Ellis, aka the guy who won.

He’d also taken heavy criticism in the past from Kerry. And he built his whole cake around showing her how much he’d listened and improved. He started his planning process not with ‘Birthday cake’ but ‘what do I know about Kerry and what she values in cake’. And made this

Clean, elegant, and precise.