snarkinfestedwaters:

fuzzybagels:

umbalrog:

adriofthedead:

coelasquid:

mattdemers:

beesmygod:

zeiss-manifold:

freshest-toing:

A runway fashion design.

I’ll steal it!

NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW

drat those arkh boys, they drive me to drink

oh boooo booo poor form >:(

i dont like art theft

Not defending it or anything, but is it really “art theft” if they’re taking something from real life and then putting it on a character? Is it art theft if a dude wears a blue t-shirt?

it’s about speceficity. A blue t-shirt on your original character wouldn’t be out of line, but what about a blue t-shirt with a green backpack, dark blue shorts, brown boots, and a bunny hood hat thing? Sure would be. What about a few years back when Buckley introduced a new character that was heavily inspired by another artist’s design? Most people agreed that was bad form.

There’s a difference between referencing a common article of clothing like a business suit jacket or a polo shirt and using it as a piece in a design and taking one-of-a-kind original pieces of haute couture and completely recreating the entire ensemble for your own profit. This isn’t even an “inspired by” deal, this is a designer’s original piece directly copied onto their game character, I assume without permission. If a clothing company “took inspiration” from this in the same way, that would be what we call bootlegging.

The original design is from Lebanese creator Zuhair Murad, from his Spring 2007 collection, I believe. You are more than welcome to go to his site and read the legal section specifying that you cannot produce derivative work from his collections for purposes other than your own personal non-commercial use if you’d lke.

I can’t wait to see how Arkh supporters will try and spin this to make it look like it’s all the fault of the white cis people.

that wouldn’t surprise me in the least

well apparently it’s been brought up with the artist before and will be fixed but tbh if your artist doesn’t have a basic knowledge of copyright then something is off…it’s a gawgeous dress anyway

and why was it published if they knew the dress was a copyright problem?

From what I understand, the artist misunderstood “We want something like this dress.” to mean “Copy this dress.” And they posted the pic anyway because they need to garner hype and prove to people that they are actually doing something.

Brace for a long post, if you don’t want to read my opinions on the Arkh project, get ready to scroll. Warning, I’m going to be really harsh here because I have no tolerance for low intelligence, Liberal or Conservative. For those that don’t want to read it all, the tl;dr is that I liked the Arkh project at first but don’t now for a variety of reasons.

I’ve been pretty quiet on this whole Arkh project thing, but I’m going to jump into the ring now because, quite frankly, art theft annoys me. Now, before I rant, I’ll say that borrowing a pose, referencing a pose, referencing a costume, or doing a subtle tribute or reference to another piece of art is not what I’m talking about. I know I’ve seen a pose, drawn it, maybe posted it (but can’t remember), but I’ll either change it by a couple of degrees or point out the source. Doing a tribute or reference is fine. Complete art theft, like above, just annoys me.

The dress is a unique piece, apparently it’s not used without permission here, otherwise there’d be a link to a comment or blurb of text saying it was used with permission or blurb of text saying it’s a reference to the dress. Seeing as there is nothing of the sort attached to this, I’m going to go ahead and call this is art theft. Hell, if this had been a personal piece of fanart of the dress, then it’d be fine. This isn’t fanart. This is approved and official art made by the artist for the Arkh project and released by them as a piece of original art. In summation, it’s theft.

Okay, now that I’ve established what I’d consider art theft, I’ll rant.

Every post I’ve seen made by either the Arkh project or by its followers gets progressively more-and-more stupid, culminating in this. What do I mean by stupid, you may ask? I mean it in the technical definition, as in, not smart. As in, idiotic. Now, I’m not demeaning transgender people in anyway, I’m talking about basic human intelligence. Something that transcends gender. I’ll explain.

At first, I liked the idea of this game. It had a nice concept and nice goals. I understand that some people have differing views on gender, what gender means, and even the relevance of gender. However, as I thought about the project and as posts were made about the project, I lost interest.

Point 1: I got to thinking about how a game like this would be marketed. More specifically, marketed without white characters through which white people could vicariously play through. This brings to my first point of the designer’s unintelligence. The three biggest video game markets are Japan, America, and Europe. Japan is obviously predominately Japanese, America is 60% white, and Europe is mostly white as well. I have no clue what the figure would be but Russians, Germans, British, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and so on, would be considered white but the standards of whiteness. So, assuming that the uberfans of this game concept are idiots (I’ll get to this judgement later) then they’d assume all those various people are white, so I’ll just say Europe is mostly white.

Why am I saying all of this? Quite simple, white people make up a huge demographic for gaming. You see, one aspect about playing games, especially RPGs, is to vicariously live through the story. The safest main character for a game to have is a white (white by the definition of “white person”, as in peach-ish colored skin) character with dark hair (because brunettes and black hair is more common then blonde). This covers much of the American demographic, much of the Japanese demographic, and much of the European demographic. The character can be male or female, because that’s a 50-50 shot on maxing demographics. He or she will also be right handed and straight.

Now, since I’m assuming people who’d read and attempt to counter my words are idiots, I have to say this: I don’t think all games should be like this, nor am I saying all games are absolutely like this now, but from a makin’ money perspective, it’s the safe way to go. Not all games should be the same or follow the same pattern, but since game developers are businesses, they need to think about these things. I mean, even if we aren’t talking money here, getting the game to the most people as an art form requires thinking about these things. For the Arkh project, they should have, at the very least, put token white people in. By not doing that, they’re missing out on getting their game to as many people as possible, both financially speaking and artistically speaking.

Point 2: If you’re emphasizing a variety of ethnic groups in your game, for fuck’s sake learn to draw ethnicities correctly. As someone who’s actually trying to draw faces different, which is extremely tough and I’m not the best at it by far, it irks me that the “black” person up there looks like a generic anime character with a dark skin tone. If you want people of color in the game, at least make the art look like a person of color, not this blackanese crap. Now, if ethnicity is not important to a game (which here it definitely is) or if there’s a reason for a lack of specific ethnic groups (example, people of the future being an ethnic soup of backgrounds due to race mixing through hundreds of years of human growth and features are muddled and mixed) then that’s fine. I can tell that’s not the case here. I’m not saying the female character above has to be ultra-super-ghetto-black-a-lish-ious, but at least make her look black beyond her skin tone.

Point 3: The fans. This point will probably be the hardest for me to articulate in text, but here it goes. Fans of something can’t really be controlled, but very vocal, very stupid people should never be your fanbase. Honestly, they’re the Liberal counterpart to the Fox news audience. By that comment, I mean they’re fed a belief system by others and don’t know why the believe it. I know why I believe what I believe and could write long posts like this on it. I could do it without using trite euphemisms, using limited buzz words, and actually making a little sense. Now a lot of sense mind you, but a little sense. Everytime I see the words “cis white male” (whether related to the Arkh project or not) I know the rest of the post is dribble.

Unrelated: While I’m here, can I request that the word “cis” not be used anymore. I know that it started as a term to counter “trans” but it’s turned into an insult. I have yet to see a positive post with the word “cis” anywhere in it. Every time I see it (this is in my Dashboard mind, your results may vary), it’s about “cis white men” trying to keep some ethnic or sexual group down. You might as well say “cracker” or “breeder” or “honkey”. As of writing this, the first post found in searching “cis” on Tumblr related to gender is titled “shit cis people say”. I think it’s at the point where you might as well say “shit crackers say” or “shit breeders say” or “shit honkies say”.

Point 4: I’ll end here, I’ve written enough and I want to draw something now. In reading the about stuff on the Arkh project’s main page, I can only surmise they have no clue what they’re doing. Based on this, I can tell they’re pretty dumb. Really pretty dumb. The gaming industry is as big as the movie industry now and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s not falling apart because there are too many white lead characters. It’s almost laughable how dumb that whole page is.

Finally, they seem to not understand the “game” part of “video game”. All I see on their site is the backstory and no technical aspects of the game other than it being an RPG, having some sort of reincarnation mechanic, and there’s magic involved. Is it going to have a dice roller system? RNG? Tactical? Final Fantasy style? What are the stats? Are there weapons or weapon groups? What’s the limits on magic? It’s all important to game design, but they aren’t talking about it. I’m guessing they’ve got a Lucasian development process: Get the polish down as much as possible but pay no attention to the structure or technical details.

So finally, I’ll mention this. If someone actually makes it through my ranting and rambling, I’ll point out that I am bisexual, an Atheist, a Liberal, and I’m left-handed. Hey, if trans people think they have it bad, you should look at lefties in the gaming world. There are two characters I can think of off-hand (no pun intended) that are canon lefties: Sol Badguy and Link, and Link was made right-handed in the last game. If he’s a righty in the next Smash Bros, I’ll consider him a non-lefty from then on.

Hate my viewpoints or like my viewpoints, this is my opinion on all this.

(Source: anarcho-moomin)