About 9gag, sexism and my art

A few days has passed since I hurriedly made my last post. I still feel the urge to write ~~a bloody essay~~ a few lines about what happened to one of my comics and elaborating how I feel about that.

For you who don’t know what happened…

I made a comic a while back. It was intended to hilariously expose how problematic some self-proclaimed allies to LGBTQA+ people can to be. Oh, look, here it is:

It was liked and reblogged by many people on tumblr, which made me very happy! Apparently, queer awareness just wasn’t a 9gag user’s cup of tea when they stumbled upon my comic. This is the version which was uploaded on their site:

….

…….woah.

………………….

…let’s do our best to just ignore how the image quality looks like it has passed through 7 levels of JPEG hell and instead focus on the deeply problematic aspects of this edit…?

Supposedly, the ~~poor unfortunate soul~~ 9gag user who made/uploaded this just couldn’t relate to queer people, and thought the topic of LGBTQA+ oppression was just too boring to have a place on their favorite site. But! They saw great 9gaggy potential in the comic’s art, airbrushing away all the text in the speech bubbles, using my work for misogynic purposes!

This bothers me. This bothers me very, very much. Because this is blatant art theft. Because someone made a comic about something very important a huge mess. Because the original comic has 29,365 notes on tumblr while the 9gag one, well…

And then there was some unspeakable sexism, racism and general stupidity in the comment’s section which bothers me so much I can’t even deal.

The edited version of my comic is being used to ridicule girls in the gamer’s community, girls who already have to put up with a lot of patronizing bullshit for liking what they like. If you have a strong urge to be an obnoxious gamer elitist, stop aiming your elitism at girls only. I know plenty of boys who “only” play cell phone games, but I don’t hear anyone complaining about them.

It bothers me that people think this is funny. Thousands of people have seen the edit which stands for something I can’t possibly stand for myself. It makes me sick to my stomach that my work is being used for sexist purposes.

Thank you to all of you who have reported this mess. I have the loveliest, kindest followers. I hope 9gag will take the edit down.

And perhaps replace it with this…