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I was also going to speak of my latest archive-binge on Mark Watches: Avatar (it's great), and post a sketch-comic involving frying pans and alarm clocks, but I think I'll save that for later because I had a really... weird experience this weekend.
So, this weekend I was poking around deviantART looking for cool stuff and I got looking at fan-art of How to Train Your Dragon because I too am a fan of the movie (Toothless and Hiccup are both incredibly adorable/adorkable in their own ways).
Now, I myself don't make fan art. None. At all. Zip. The last character I probably ever drew that belonged to someone else was probably a pikachu. And that was probably back in middle-school (which was about the time that I discovered the magical experience of creating original characters and building my own worlds around them. How do fanfic writers live?) However, I am still totally capable of admiring fanart by other people.
So I found a beautiful wallpaper of Toothless that someone made and I instantly added it to my "favorites" jar. I asked the artist if downloading a copy for use on my own desktop was allowed (still learning the rules of the internet art, always best to check) and he gave the thumbs-up. So I did. I had Toothless on my desktop background.
Then a weird thing happened; I felt bad about it. The Toothless wallpaper just felt wrong being on my macbook screen.
Now I don't believe I actually did anything wrong, but it felt like I had. Like I had crossed a personal moral horizon somehow. And since I'm prone to analyzing my own behavior, I have several theories as to why I felt so bad about changing my desktop background that night.
- I decided to browse the rest of the fanartist's work. Let's just say the "mature content filter" was blocking a lot. And some of the remaining works had just enough for me to surmise that the blocked content was slash-fic. Hiccup/Toothless slash-fic. I just... um... wow... er... zax. My vocabulary does not have words to fully convey what I felt at the revelation that a fellow artistic mind has gone there. Anyone got a pint of brain-bleach on them? Anyone? Please??? Again, the wallpaper as a stand-alone piece is perfectly rated-G... but still. It's the knowing.
- Overtones of idol-worship. And I'm just speaking about my own heart here. I actually stopped and asked myself "By making this image my wallpaper, am I putting the How to Train Your Dragon franchise on a pedestal where it doesn't belong?" Having to ask that question in the first place was setting off red flags.
- My friend Kristen. Practically since I got my laptop I have had one of my own artworks or original photographs as my desktop background. Every time I showed a friend something on my laptop, that was the first thing they saw. An "E.Y. Original". Then one day I changed the background to an image of Earth that was in my computer's default background folders. Kristen noticed. She was instantly annoyed. "You changed your background," she said accusingly. "Yeah," I shrugged, "I decided it was time to change it." "But it's not something you made." I was a bit surprised. "It matters?" (note: that's the general gist of the conversation, not an actual transcript.) Now I finally realize what she (might have) meant: I'm an artist, it's my laptop, and my desktop background is an expression of "me". If it isn't wallpaper from my own hand, it has no business being there.
So Yeah, that one image of a nightfury flying joyously through a cloud of sparkles had left me with a totally guilty ick feeling. It was totally irrational, but that's how I felt. I turned off my computer, sat and analyzed what had happened for a bit, then went to bed, realizing I'd learned a little something about my identity as an artist.
The next morning I changed my wallpaper back to Bunny Field.
The next morning I changed my wallpaper back to Bunny Field.
Earworm of the Day: For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her by Simon & Garfunkel
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