I know the tides are sort of turning on the value to this reference work on the site because antrace made a post and he's popular so the whole site turn into lemmings the moment he says anything even if they joined a week ago and have no CLUE what 2017 FA was like, and I agree that using this work as a springboard for fake likes is not what I want people to be doing, but I also implore you to not witchhunt people that might be doing it for real. Either they want to improve their skills or they have real emotions they convey. These people exist. Not everyone are the promagmas and the memeplates of the site, posting things for the sake of other people liking them.

I said in my other fancy language post that I do not believe that a work becomes good because it is aesthetic, and that is true. I would much rather look at something a 7 year old put a lot of thought into than anything in memeplate's catalog (I'm trying to not talk about promagma because I have a feeling they're going to get dogpiled and they don't post crappy fake tankie memes that make me gag) The opposite is true, too, though. A work does not become bad simply because it is aesthetic. A work does not lose emotions because it is aesthetic, and claiming that it might reeks of jealousy of either their clout or their mediocre skill. I want people to stop being disillusioned by reference artists, but I also don't want people to avoid doing a reference work if they have something to say because they fear they'll be attacked. People here should be allowed to do high-skill work and not be harassed for being a clout chaser.

Half of this is because I have genuine real feelings on the topic and half because I feel as if me and some of my acquaintances are going to get harassed in the future for not lowering ourselves to the level of furries who draw triangles on perfect circles and call that a head. No one should have to do that. Fact of the matter is, some of us have a lot of years on some of you. I have 7 years on the 10 year olds using this site, so naturally we will be in entirely different places skill-wise. It also doesn't help that every time I try and give these 10 year olds advice that I would have wanted to learn at that age, they either ignore me, use their age as an excuse to not learn, or just try and shout me down as if I haven't been sworn at on the internet for 5 years already. But that's a topic for another day and I am starting to feel frustrated and I don't want that lmao

Anyways that's my ratchet essay feel free to tell me I'm wrong and all realism is bad, or I'm wrong and memeplate is TOTALLY not clout chasing and Jeffrey Epstein definitely killed himself

I take back what I said the site must NOT be lemmings to antrace if he can make multiple posts about annoying "ok" comments and people still do it

It is easy lol speaking from experience You need to put time in sure but as you learn the skills it gets faster and faster. And it IS overrated because a lot of people doing it do it for clout instead of for genuine emotion Like, tell me all those people on the popular page doing it are doing it because they love it and want to impart an emotion to the viewer. No. They want likes.