Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right:
Inside DeviantArt, the Toxic Village from Hell
(written January 25-29, 2026)


​​I signed up for DeviantArt in September 2024. A few months into my sobriety, I had started seriously making art again, and I wanted a platform that was openly AI-friendly where I could share that work. At first, I kept to myself. For the first couple of months, I posted quietly, watched how the site functioned, and didn’t interact much at all.

In late December 2024, I began engaging more deliberately with DeviantArt’s AI art community. I commented here and there, responded to people who reached out, and slowly came out of my shell. By the end of January 2025, I had a small circle of people I considered friends, and I started selling my art on the platform.

By June, I began to realize something was off.

At first it was hard to articulate—just a persistent sense of unease, patterns that didn’t quite add up, and social dynamics that felt performative rather than genuine. By November, both my partner Andy and I had independently come to the same conclusion: DeviantArt wasn’t just flawed or messy. It functioned like a Potemkin village. On New Year’s Eve 2025, we mutually decided to leave the site. We posted our respective farewells on January 2, 2026.

A Potemkin village refers to a story from 18th-century Russia, in which fake villages were allegedly constructed along a travel route to impress a visiting ruler. These villages consisted of painted façades and temporary structures meant to give the illusion of prosperity, stability, and contentment where little or none actually existed. Whether the story is literally true matters less than what the term has come to mean: a system designed to look healthy and thriving from the outside, while hiding instability, exploitation, or decay beneath the surface.

That metaphor fits DeviantArt disturbingly well.

It’s worth noting that DeviantArt already has a poor reputation if you look at mainstream review sites—but those critiques largely miss the point. Complaints on sites like Trustpilot tend to focus on things like the mere existence of fetish content, claims that the site is “overrun with” or “promoting” LGBTQ+ people, or objections to the presence of AI art. In my view, none of those are the real problem. Fetish content that is clearly marked and aimed at consenting adults is not inherently harmful (though it's not my cup of tea either). AI art is a legitimate medium. And while I’m a gay trans man, my experience on DeviantArt was not that it is especially welcoming to LGBTQ+ people—quite the opposite, as I’ll discuss later.

What those reviews fail to address is the actual toxicity of the community itself: the cyberharassment, the manufactured social dynamics, the cliques, the exploitation, and the systemic behaviors that make the platform psychologically unsafe, especially once you’re no longer just quietly posting and observing.

That is what this essay is about.

Until I left DeviantArt on January 2nd—and scrubbed most of my profile bio—I stated openly that I’m a gay trans man. I didn’t do this because I’m invested in identity politics (I’m not), but because I learned the hard way that being upfront about who you are on social-networking-adjacent sites helps screen out assholes early. It’s a form of self-defense. And no, I wasn't otherwise in-your-face loud about it, I didn't have any DNI lists (which I doubt people would have read and adhered to anyway), it was mentioned in the same breath as being late Gen X.

Even so, the pattern was unmistakable.

At least a few times a week, someone would favorite my work—often my floral animals or flowerscapes—and give me a watch, only to immediately unwatch and block me. Nine times out of ten, if I bothered to check who they were in a private window (because I return-block), their profile would contain some kind of overt religious messaging. I want to be clear here: I am a religious person myself. The issue wasn’t religion per se. It was that these people were clearly reacting to my being openly trans and gay, and choosing silent rejection over simply not engaging.

That constant micro-cycle of approval → discovery → rejection wears on you. It’s not dramatic. It’s cumulative.

I also learned very quickly that the gay male portion of DeviantArt functions almost like its own ghetto. Gay men mostly watch and interact with other gay men, and that boundary is policed more aggressively than people like to admit. When I first joined DA, I was posting more explicitly gay-themed art, and I ended up receiving hateful private messages from cis gay men about being a gay trans man: they still saw me as female, as an interloper, as someone who didn’t belong. That hurt far more than random bigotry, because it came from people I might reasonably have expected solidarity from. (It definitely wasn't everyone, and there were several cis gay men I did have positive interactions with who appreciated my art and expressed support for my relationship with Andy as well as for trans rights. But it was enough to be disheartening and made me wary of joining DA groups geared towards gay male content.)

By contrast, the only form of LGBTQ+ content that seems broadly supported on DeviantArt is lesbian-themed work—and not because the platform is especially progressive. It’s supported because a large subset of cishet AI bros find it sexually appealing. If you’re posting stylized anime women, “hot lesbians,” or presenting yourself as a lesbian—especially if you publicly perform or narrate “steamy” lesbian relationships on the site—you will attract attention, validation, and fans. A few people figured this out very quickly and learned how to capitalize on it, which I’ll discuss later.

That dynamic creates a deeply distorted environment where queerness is tolerated or rewarded only when it’s consumable, eroticized, and non-threatening to straight male sensibilities. Gay men are marginalized. Trans people are scrutinized. Gay trans men are treated as illegitimate by multiple sides at once.

​On DeviantArt, the illusion of "community" is reinforced by how the platform’s algorithm and social economy actually work. Visibility is not primarily driven by originality, quality, or even sales history. It’s driven by constant interaction: commenting, liking, gifting, joining circles, participating in group chats, and being publicly visible at all times. If you are not socially embedded, you are effectively invisible, regardless of the work itself.

Within the AI art community in particular, this creates an intensely cliquish environment. The same people repeatedly boost one another, often across multiple accounts. It is an open secret on the site that many users operate alternate accounts to inflate engagement, manufacture consensus, and create the appearance of widespread approval. This makes dissent feel isolating and risky, because it looks as though “everyone” agrees—when in reality, much of that agreement is synthetic.

The language used inside these circles reinforces that dynamic. People routinely refer to one another as “brother,” “sis,” "bestie" or “dear friend,” even when they have never interacted meaningfully outside the platform. This isn’t harmless friendliness; it’s manufactured intimacy. Once that language is in place, disagreement is framed as betrayal, criticism as cruelty, and boundary-setting as hostility. It becomes socially dangerous to say “no,” or even “please don’t do that,” because you’re no longer disagreeing with a peer—you’re violating a pseudo-family bond.

Likes and comments function the same way. They are largely transactional. You like my work, I like yours. You comment on my post, I comment on yours. The interaction itself becomes the currency, not the art. A high number of likes does not mean a piece resonated; it means the artist is socially active and embedded in the right circles.

That transactional nature became undeniable once the site started overwhelming me to the point where I couldn’t keep up with my watch feed. When I stopped constantly clicking the like button on other people’s work, my likes immediately dried up. Nothing about my art changed; only my participation in the reciprocity loop did. That alone was proof. In a few cases, people who had stopped engaging with my work entirely suddenly began mass-favoriting my pieces the moment I unwatched them, as if trying to bait me back into watching them again. Engagement wasn’t about appreciation. It was about maintaining the circuit.

I also saw how hollow the numbers were at the highest levels. One of my pieces, Fëanor Creates the Silmarils, received a Daily Deviation on August 1 2025, which I am genuinely proud of. It accumulated over 400,000 views, yet it hovered around roughly 120 likes (small fluctuations up and down). Most Daily Deviations easily reach 200–300 likes or more, including far more obscure fanart than Silmarillion work. The disparity made it obvious that views, likes, and actual resonance are not meaningfully connected on DeviantArt.

That disconnect was made worse by the context of how the Daily Deviation happened. It was suggested by Blenke (Sofia), an ostensible lesbian who had sexually harassed me under the assumption that, as a trans man, I was really a woman. The feature was part of an obvious pattern of lovebombing and boundary violation—an attempt to ingratiate herself with me and, frankly, get into my pants. Knowing that stripped the Daily Deviation of any illusion of merit-based recognition. It didn’t feel like validation; it felt like another manipulation layered on top of the system. (I cut ties with Sofia before the month of August was over, after she crossed lines with making me uncomfortable.)

​Once I fully understood how transactional likes were—and how easily they could be weaponized, withdrawn, or manufactured—they stopped producing any dopamine at all. The numbers didn’t feel flattering or encouraging. They felt meaningless. And that realization alone explains a great deal about why DeviantArt’s engagement metrics fail as indicators of value, impact, or artistic success.

Additionally, outside of a very small handful of accounts that primarily buy rather than sell, people generally do not buy from you unless you are buying from them. Commerce on DeviantArt is reciprocal by expectation, not demand-driven.

This is where the Potemkin village becomes economic. The site looks busy. It looks successful. It looks supportive. But much of the activity is people circulating money, attention, and validation within closed loops.

The AI art itself reflects this. Large portions of AI work on DeviantArt are nearly indistinguishable from one another—people are using the same generators, recycling the same prompts, repeating the same subjects, and copying whatever is currently getting attention. Without a username attached, you often cannot tell one person’s work from another’s.

Andy and I did not work that way.

From the beginning, we deliberately did different things. We built recognizable themes and visual languages that didn’t look like anyone else’s. You could, and still can, identify our work without seeing our names attached to it. I have used ChatGPT exclusively since June 2025, specifically because it is a private environment. None of my prompts or images are public. I do not use prompt-sharing or regeneration platforms. Every concept comes from my own imagination, developed through my own process.

In August and September, I began to see my floral animals imitated by people who had never made that kind of work before. These weren’t vague inspirations; they were direct thematic lifts, except without my attention for detail and precision. The knockoffs were then sold for two to three times what I charged. The same thing happened to Andy in September and October with his ships and trains—work he had been doing consistently, suddenly replicated by accounts that had never touched those themes until they saw his success, and also without his level of care and imagination.

Our sales dropped sharply, not because interest disappeared, but because the people selling the imitations had more exposure. They were active in the circles and groups we avoided—spaces dominated by people who had harassed us. The algorithm rewarded their visibility, not our originality. Buyers followed what they saw most often, and the money flowed to the knockoffs.

In November, after my friend Nadia and I politely made posts asking people to come up with their own ideas instead of cloning our work--and notably, I didn't name names, I didn't call anyone out publicly, I didn't send DMs, I just made a public post explaining my position--the response was not reflection or restraint. I not only received a barrage of hateful comments and messages a few hours after I made a post (since deleted) about the copying, but a person named Cynthia made a public post telling people to stop buying from us and claiming that calling imitation “art theft” was bullying.

This was especially revealing, because Cynthia’s own work is double-watermarked, and when someone copied her work outright, it was taken down within hours of her filing a report. In other words, the system worked perfectly when she objected. The problem was not that imitation was acceptable. The problem was that I objected—because I was expected to be quiet, grateful, and compliant.

In a space that claims to value creativity, originality was treated as disposable.
In a space that claims to value community, boundaries were treated as aggression.

After Andy and I left DeviantArt in early January, a friend let us know that for a few days Cynthia appeared to be celebrating—posting a flurry of new work that very obviously ripped off our styles, as if our departure were some kind of victory. That behavior mostly stopped once it became clear that our withdrawal from the site was real and not a bluff (though our friend tells us Cynthia and her friend Shannon still occasionally post art resembling ours, like they're trying to let us know they're checking up on our site and provoke a reaction which if so, how absolutely pathetic and they need to get lives).

At the same time, most of the other people who had been copying my floral animals and Andy’s ships and trains quietly reverted to the same indistinct, generic AI work they had been making before they started imitating us. That timing matters. If the similarities in themes had been accidental or coincidental, they wouldn’t have vanished the moment we were no longer present as targets. The fact that the copying spiked while we were visible and profitable, and then ceased once we were gone, only confirms what Andy and I already knew: our work was being deliberately mined.


​Another factor that reinforced all of this is that many people on DeviantArt are not really there for art at all. They use the site the way other people use Facebook or Instagram: as a social arena. The art is secondary. In many cases, it feels almost incidental. What matters is visibility, validation, and the emotional payoff of feeling popular, admired, or respected.

You can see this in the work itself. A lot of it is rushed, repetitive, or clearly unconsidered—especially when it’s copied directly from others. The goal isn’t expression or exploration. It’s participation. Posting frequently, getting reactions, staying visible, and maintaining status within a social hierarchy matter far more than whether the work is thoughtful, original, or even coherent.

Some people take this well beyond basic engagement farming. Alt accounts aren’t just used to boost likes or comments; they’re used to construct entire social narratives. Fake relationships, fake friendships, fake drama—anything that generates attention and emotional investment.

One user maintained a long-running fake girlfriend persona supposedly based in Moldova. Over time, it became increasingly obvious that both accounts were operated by the same person. The “Moldovan” account spoke near-perfect English, with occasional errors that felt deliberately inserted—mistakes no genuinely fluent speaker at that level would make. The two accounts took turns going on hiatus: one would disappear for weeks, then return just as the other vanished, as though maintaining both simultaneously had become too difficult. I was once in a group chat with “both” of them, where they spoke to each other for a few minutes before one abruptly “had to go.” Despite the supposed location, the Moldovan account consistently kept American West Coast hours, not European ones.

Another user ran what amounted to a lesbian harem of accounts—multiple personas presented as women in relationships with one another. Over time, it became obvious they were all operated by the same person, and a man. The evidence wasn’t just the badly written smut posted under those accounts, which routinely got basic details of cisgender female anatomy wrong; it was also the art itself, which was strikingly similar across accounts, and the commenting style, which followed the same patterns, including heavy emoji abuse and identical tonal quirks.

There were also a couple of male “simps” in close orbit around these accounts who were deeply invested in fetishistic narratives involving women humiliating or killing “inferior” men—content that most cisgender heterosexual men would find embarrassing or degrading rather than arousing. These men were presented as romantically or emotionally involved with the main persona, despite that persona otherwise being framed as a lesbian.

Across all of these accounts, the same interests kept resurfacing: sci-fi settings, worldbuilding, original characters, Scandinavia and Vikings (including an alleged Finn identifying as a Viking, which is historically inaccurate at best), warrior women and superheroines, femdom, the military, and dragons—creating a web of shared obsessions and hyperfixations that pointed clearly to a single author behind the curtain.

After I made a snarky post—without naming names—pointing out how common fake relationships and sockpuppet romance were on the site, that user’s entire slate of relationship content, including a “wedding” post and much of the poorly-written and obviously-written-by-a-man smut, suddenly vanished and nobody even asked what happened.

The effect of this environment is that real relationships get flattened into just another performance. When everything is potentially fake—friendships, outrage, affection, romance—genuine bonds stop being legible. I strongly suspect that some people assumed my relationship with Andy was also fake, staged, or exaggerated for attention, and therefore treated it as a free-for-all.

It wasn’t.

Andy and I were, and are, genuinely together. We were in love then, and we are now. But in a space where manufactured intimacy is normalized and authenticity is optional, real relationships don’t receive more respect—they receive less. They’re treated as props, not boundaries.
​
That context matters, because it shaped how people felt entitled to behave toward us, and why violations that would have been unthinkable offline were brushed off as normal online conduct.

​Another thing that became increasingly obvious to me on DeviantArt was how many people there were who openly referred to themselves as influencers. They posted selfies**, thirst traps, videos of themselves talking to the camera, and personal branding content—often more of that than actual art. The art, when present at all, felt secondary to cultivating attention. That is not what I signed up for. If I wanted to be on Instagram or TikTok, I would be on those platforms. I’m not, very deliberately. I don’t use social media precisely because influencer culture disgusts me: it encourages shallow validation loops, rewards narcissistic performance, and contributes to unhealthy body image and self-worth issues. Watching DeviantArt quietly slide in that direction—where visibility of the person eclipsed the work itself—was another signal that the platform’s priorities were fundamentally misaligned with why I was there in the first place.

**To be clear, I’m not talking about self-portrait art. I make self-portraits occasionally myself—as a form of expression, a kind of emotional or psychological mood ring—and I’ve made art of me and Andy as gifts for him. That’s not influencer behavior. That’s art. And I've never done the self-portraits for validation, to be told I'm attractive, etc, because I'm too autistic to give a shit.

Another pattern that became impossible to ignore is one that’s common to cults and cult-adjacent spaces: when someone leaves, the group rewrites them.

That absolutely happened after Andy and I left DeviantArt.

To be clear, the shit-talking didn’t start after we left. It was already happening while we were still there—whispers, distortions, people making assumptions instead of asking questions, narratives forming in private channels we weren’t in. But once we were gone, it escalated. At that point, we were no longer present to contradict anything, and the stories no longer needed to be tethered to reality at all.

Even Ana—someone we had considered a friend—started running her mouth. What she told people bore little resemblance to what had actually happened. Context vanished. Motives were reassigned. Boundaries we set were reframed as malice. This wasn’t misunderstanding; it was post-exituration narrative control. Once we were out, we became safe targets for projection.

That’s a classic cult behavior.
If someone leaves, they must be discredited.
If they aren’t discredited, their leaving becomes contagious.

This also intersects with the timeline of what the site was doing to me psychologically.

From March onward, DeviantArt became increasingly stressful. At first it was just Lizzy's harassment and also background noise—unease, tension, the sense that I was constantly bracing. By summer it was exhausting (the unmistakable "something is very off here" feeling). By fall it was unbearable. November, in particular, was hell. But I kept pushing through anyway. I told myself it was temporary, that I could manage it, that leaving would mean “losing” something or letting people win.

I stayed until New Year’s Eve.

Andy and I left together, deliberately, after we finally understood how much Ana had been grifting us. That was the breaking point—not because it was the first betrayal, but because it was the final piece in the puzzle of what was wrong and fucked-up about the "community".

And here's the thing:
I have complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

That means I don’t get dysregulated because I’m “too sensitive,” insecure, or lacking self-esteem. I get dysregulated because I have interpersonal betrayal trauma. I’ve been bullied in real life. I’ve been cyberbullied before this. My nervous system recognizes the shape of that harm instantly, and it reacts whether I want it to or not.

So “grow a thicker skin” is not an answer.
And “maybe you’re just insecure” is not an explanation.

What was happening on DeviantArt was not mild stress. It was repeated social threat, gaslighting, boundary violations, and betrayal layered on top of an already injured nervous system. Over the course of that year, my stress responses intensified. I had to keep going up on my meds just to stay functional. My body was telling me what my brain kept trying to override: this environment is not safe.

Leaving wasn’t a tantrum.
It wasn’t avoidance.
It was a survival decision.

And the fact that the narrative about us became more distorted after we left only confirms what kind of system it was. In healthy communities, people can leave without being turned into villains. In cult-adjacent ones, leaving is treated as proof of guilt.
​
That pattern didn’t start with us, and it won’t end with us. But it explains a great deal about what happened, why it hurt the way it did, and why staying would have continued to do real damage.

Leaving DeviantArt wasn’t about being unable to cope, and it wasn’t about drama. It was about recognizing a system for what it was and refusing to continue absorbing damage for the sake of appearances.

Potemkin villages only function as long as people agree not to look too closely. Cult-adjacent systems only hold together as long as leaving is framed as failure or guilt. Once you see the scaffolding—manufactured intimacy, transactional validation, social punishment for dissent, popularity masquerading as virtue—the illusion collapses. Staying after that point doesn’t make you resilient. It makes you complicit in your own erosion.

Andy and I didn’t leave because we couldn’t belong. We left because belonging there required silence, self-erasure, and tolerating exploitation—of our work, our time, our money, and our trust. We left because the cost was no longer abstract; it was showing up in my body, my mental health, my medication adjustments, and the constant sense of threat I carried just to exist on the platform.

What happened after we left—the distortions, the gossip, the rewritten narratives—was not surprising. It was confirmation. Healthy communities don’t need to smear people who exit. They don’t need to punish absence. They don’t need to maintain harmony by discrediting those who walk away.

I’m writing this to document what actually happened, in plain language, without euphemism or distance. If someone recognizes these patterns in their own experience, they’re not imagining things. And if someone has never encountered them, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real—it means the system hasn’t turned on them yet.

And I am writing this to actively warn people against selling on DeviantArt, particularly within its current AI art ecosystem. This is not a neutral marketplace. It rewards popularity over authorship, conformity over originality, and social performance over actual creative labor. It normalizes copying, monetizes cliques, and protects grifters while framing artists who set boundaries as the problem.

It is especially unsafe for artists from marginalized identities. As a trans creator, I experienced direct transphobic harassment on the site, alongside the broader social and economic pressures described above. When a platform already relies on scapegoating, dogpiling, and narrative distortion to enforce conformity, marginalized artists are hit first and hardest. The combination of visibility-driven algorithms, cult-adjacent social dynamics, and inadequate protection creates an environment where harassment is not an aberration—it is an expected outcome.

Andy and I chose each other, our work, and our health over staying inside a façade.
That wasn’t failure.
It was clarity.
And clarity is something no Potemkin village can afford to tolerate for long.