Why We Left DA (January 2, 2026)
On New Year's Eve 2025, Fin deactivated his DeviantArt account (for the second time, the first being in early November). He reactivated on January 2, 2026, so those who purchased his work over the last twelve months do not lose access to what they paid for.
Then, we both posted our respective farewells to DA. We did this so there is no room for rumors, whispers, or speculation about suspensions, breakups, or anything else. This is a deliberate decision we made together as a couple.
Over most of 2025 — beginning in March, escalating in June, escalating further by August and becoming severe by November— the culture of DA has actively contributed to exacerbating Fin's PTSD symptoms. Alongside sustained harassment and targeted bullying, there has been ongoing art theft since August, repeated sexual harassment, exploitation, impersonation, and a complete failure by the platform to act when these issues were reported. This was not subtle, and it was not accidental.
People who had never worked with floral animals before suddenly began producing work closely imitating Fin's floral animal concepts and visual language, making what can only be described as knockoff versions of Fin's work and charging 2-3x his rates. Notably, Fin does not use public prompts, coming up with his own ideas from scratch (he uses ChatGPT and everything is private). The people selling the knockoffs are better at sustaining heavy amounts of social interaction including the ass-kissing "dear friend" games, and participate in groups Fin avoided due to the active presence of people who harassed him. Thus, with their work gaining more exposure, the knockoffs began tanking Fin's sales way down.
People who had never shown any interest in ships or trains abruptly began making work that was obviously copying Andy's ideas and concepts, and charging 2-3x what he does. Andy's sales also suffered as a result for the same reason Fin's did.
In early November within hours of Fin and our friend Nadia calmly and politely requesting that people refrain from imitating our designs, Fin received a barrage of hateful comments and DMs, some of which made triggering and sexually violating comments about Fin's body, some of which were also threatening in nature to both Fin and Andy. These comments and DMs were sent from fake "burner" accounts, but we believe we know the parties responsible based on the timing, the writing style, and assumed familiarity with both of us, as well as the since-deleted public admission months prior from one of the suspects that he had over 100+ accounts specifically for trolling purposes.
In November following the troll attack and Fin's return from the first deactivation, our ex-friend Cynthia initiated a “don’t buy from Fin and Nadia” campaign and said asking people not to copy or steal makes one a bully (and yet Cynthia has her own work double-watermarked 🤔 funny how that works) — and then Cynthia began suddenly appropriating wolf and phoenix imagery, both separately and together, knowing full well that the wolf is a long-standing symbol of Andy and the phoenix is a long-standing symbol of Fin's, and that we have created wolf-and-phoenix art for each other. That included wolf and phoenix ships and trains to get at Andy who had done literally NOTHING to her, and sometimes her wolf-and-phoenix art was accompanied by throwing shade and explicit witchcraft curses in the descriptions. This was not coincidence, homage, or parallel inspiration. It was targeted harassment using our own symbols back at us. (And yes, we know, people have told us things and given us screenshots.)
(EDIT Jan 8th 2026: We were also told by a friend that after we left DA, Cynthia began copying our designs even more frequently and blatantly for a bit, as if to celebrate the fact that we quit DA and "whatcha gonna do about it". So now would be a good time to mention that Cynthia leaves a rather obvious trail to her presence as an Etsy witch, where she shut down her shop in late October 2025 which we're sure was for the nebulous "health reasons" stated and nothing to do with getting multiple bad reviews on different platforms as a fake psychic fraud and subsequently deciding her new career path at age 51-52 is to live her life on DA 24/7 stalking a gay couple, imagine being fiftysomething and this is what you do with yourself. Sad. )
Multiple fake accounts were also created to keep tabs on us and rapidly imitate new ideas as they appeared. Under those circumstances, setting things to watchers-only does nothing.
There was also direct exploitation. A couple of people, especially a woman named Ana, called Fin and Andy “dear friend,” shared sob stories about being broke or on a fixed income, and pressured us to sell our work to them for only $1. Those same people, and again especially Ana, then turned around and spent $5+ per piece — sometimes $50 or more in a single day — buying art from the very people who were bullying us. The assumption was that we were too dumb or naïve to notice. We're not.
In hindsight, there were also people who presented themselves as caring, concerned friends — asking probing questions about how Fin was doing, what was happening behind the scenes. With distance, it is painfully clear that some of those conversations were not about concern at all. They were information-gathering, and that information traveled.
In addition to this, Fin was sexually harassed by multiple people on this site, both men and women.
One of the men who sexually harassed Fin, named Luke, began commenting on exclusives Fin owns, tagging Fin's username so he'd receive the notification, demanding that Fin unblock him (one example). Luke was reported to DA with screenshot receipts of block evasion. Nothing was done. When Fin reached out to the creators explaining to them what was going on with their comment spaces becoming unsafe, they didn't take it seriously, presumably because this Luke individual buys from them often.
One of the people who sexually harassed Fin — an ostensibly lesbian woman who calls herself Sofia or Blenke, and maintains multiple accounts and personas — repeatedly insisted that Fin was “both female and male,” refused to accept that Fin is a trans man, could not wrap her head around the fact that Fin is gay and attracted to men, and continued flirting with Fin anyway. This included sexualized comments. When Fin made it clear he was not interested, it did not stop, and "I'm autistic" was used as an excuse for the boundary violations despite the fact that there are plenty of autistic people who understand no means no, ourselves included.
When people we believed were friends asked who had sexually harassed Fin and Fin told them about her specifically, they shrugged it off and continued being quite friendly with her and even financially supporting her.
Andy has endured his own parallel campaign of harassment. A different woman who goes by Lizzy/Elizabeth/Ely aka Skylizzy, SkyessenceS2, Auraveth and Skyessence1982, from Italy, became obsessed with him, could not accept no for an answer, could not accept that HE IS GAY, called him "her soulmate" in front of Fin to try to break us up, and repeatedly appropriated Andy's titles — including “Eternal Beloved” — and produced work badly imitating Andy's likeness. She escalated to block evasion to send Fin harassing messages directly on different accounts (link is to one example), and on a since-deleted account borrowed Fin's face to put on the bodies of sexualized women with titles like "Evil Queen" and "Destroyer", which was among other things a transphobic attack. As of December 2025, Lizzy was still badly replicating Andy's likeness with work entitled Soulmates; Lizzy/Elizabeth/Ely aka Skyessence has been doing this since the end of March 2025. It is fixation, stalking, and boundary violation.
On top of this, with one of several people producing knockoffs of Andy’s ships and trains, a buyer appeared using a username that was an obvious impersonation of Andy’s account. That meant Andy was also dealing with impersonation layered on top of theft and harassment. This was reported. Nothing was done.
We both reported multiple people to DeviantArt, including for clear and documented violations of the site’s own Terms of Service. We came with extensive receipts, including screenshots of ban-evasion messages, impersonation, and other violations. Again, nothing was done. If we got a reply at all, we were told to simply block people we'd already blocked.
One example is particularly telling: an art thief literally reposted Fin's exact artwork with only minor modifications. This same person also stole from a few other artists, including some of the very people who had bullied us. The stolen work taken from our haters was removed within hours. Fin's takedown request, for the same behavior, made the same day, took close to two weeks to receive any response from staff at all. That disparity further corroborates our conclusion that enforcement on DA's platform is not neutral.
Based on repeated experience, it is impossible not to conclude that people who hold multiple paid alternate accounts — and thus generate enough revenue for the platform — are effectively untouchable. If you have enough money on DA, you can get away with behavior that would result in legal consequences in the real world, including harassment, theft, impersonation, and abuse.
Fin is a disabled creator. Fin was using DeviantArt to try to earn a little extra income to supplement a very limited financial situation. Instead, Fin's livelihood was actively undercut by art theft, exploitation, and algorithmic favoritism, while the toll on Fin's mental health kept mounting. Whatever crumbs Fin was managing to get here were simply not worth that cost.
Fin will be okay. Andy and a couple of close friends are helping him outside of DA if he needs it, and once Andy is finally in the States, money will not be as tight. Staying on DA and continuing to absorb this environment, however, was not sustainable.
Fin turned off comments after the troll attack in November. Once DA changed its messaging system in December so you could restrict messages to only those you watch, Fin did so. Even so, the patterns did not stop. Watching people knock off our work, exploit our labor, impersonate Andy, get rewarded by the algorithm, and actively discourage others from buying from us was not something we were willing to continue absorbing — financially, emotionally, or psychologically.
We both agree that staying on DA and "fighting the good fight" and "not letting the bastards win" would mean continuing to harm our mental health for diminishing returns: fighting opaque algorithms, scraping for crumbs, and being expected to tolerate conduct that would never be acceptable in any offline professional environment. We are not interested in doing that anymore. We are no longer interested in giving DA our money for the "privilege" of selling when the company's policy is not merely sitting back and doing nothing about an unsafe environment but also letting people buy themselves out of TOS enforcement by running multiple paid accounts (which they use to troll and game the algorithm).
And honestly even if all of that hadn't been an ongoing problem, this site was already stressful and overwhelming for us both. The site UX is just genuinely bad. Among other (multiple) issues:
We really don't like signing on every day to hundreds of notifications from all of this bullshit. We've both been burned out for some time now just from that alone, and the drama amplified the burnout to a ridiculous degree.
We will continue making art. We will do it here, on our own website, on our own terms, without algorithms determining our worth and without a culture that rewards theft, sexual boundary violations, exploitation, impersonation, intimidation, and quiet sabotage. We don't regret meeting each other on DA, and we're still going strong almost a year later as of the writing of this post (January 2026), but we are ready to put DA behind us as a bad memory. We're moving onto bigger and better things, together. We both already feel relief at quitting DA.
Goodbye, DeviantArt, and good riddance.
Then, we both posted our respective farewells to DA. We did this so there is no room for rumors, whispers, or speculation about suspensions, breakups, or anything else. This is a deliberate decision we made together as a couple.
Over most of 2025 — beginning in March, escalating in June, escalating further by August and becoming severe by November— the culture of DA has actively contributed to exacerbating Fin's PTSD symptoms. Alongside sustained harassment and targeted bullying, there has been ongoing art theft since August, repeated sexual harassment, exploitation, impersonation, and a complete failure by the platform to act when these issues were reported. This was not subtle, and it was not accidental.
People who had never worked with floral animals before suddenly began producing work closely imitating Fin's floral animal concepts and visual language, making what can only be described as knockoff versions of Fin's work and charging 2-3x his rates. Notably, Fin does not use public prompts, coming up with his own ideas from scratch (he uses ChatGPT and everything is private). The people selling the knockoffs are better at sustaining heavy amounts of social interaction including the ass-kissing "dear friend" games, and participate in groups Fin avoided due to the active presence of people who harassed him. Thus, with their work gaining more exposure, the knockoffs began tanking Fin's sales way down.
People who had never shown any interest in ships or trains abruptly began making work that was obviously copying Andy's ideas and concepts, and charging 2-3x what he does. Andy's sales also suffered as a result for the same reason Fin's did.
In early November within hours of Fin and our friend Nadia calmly and politely requesting that people refrain from imitating our designs, Fin received a barrage of hateful comments and DMs, some of which made triggering and sexually violating comments about Fin's body, some of which were also threatening in nature to both Fin and Andy. These comments and DMs were sent from fake "burner" accounts, but we believe we know the parties responsible based on the timing, the writing style, and assumed familiarity with both of us, as well as the since-deleted public admission months prior from one of the suspects that he had over 100+ accounts specifically for trolling purposes.
In November following the troll attack and Fin's return from the first deactivation, our ex-friend Cynthia initiated a “don’t buy from Fin and Nadia” campaign and said asking people not to copy or steal makes one a bully (and yet Cynthia has her own work double-watermarked 🤔 funny how that works) — and then Cynthia began suddenly appropriating wolf and phoenix imagery, both separately and together, knowing full well that the wolf is a long-standing symbol of Andy and the phoenix is a long-standing symbol of Fin's, and that we have created wolf-and-phoenix art for each other. That included wolf and phoenix ships and trains to get at Andy who had done literally NOTHING to her, and sometimes her wolf-and-phoenix art was accompanied by throwing shade and explicit witchcraft curses in the descriptions. This was not coincidence, homage, or parallel inspiration. It was targeted harassment using our own symbols back at us. (And yes, we know, people have told us things and given us screenshots.)
(EDIT Jan 8th 2026: We were also told by a friend that after we left DA, Cynthia began copying our designs even more frequently and blatantly for a bit, as if to celebrate the fact that we quit DA and "whatcha gonna do about it". So now would be a good time to mention that Cynthia leaves a rather obvious trail to her presence as an Etsy witch, where she shut down her shop in late October 2025 which we're sure was for the nebulous "health reasons" stated and nothing to do with getting multiple bad reviews on different platforms as a fake psychic fraud and subsequently deciding her new career path at age 51-52 is to live her life on DA 24/7 stalking a gay couple, imagine being fiftysomething and this is what you do with yourself. Sad. )
Multiple fake accounts were also created to keep tabs on us and rapidly imitate new ideas as they appeared. Under those circumstances, setting things to watchers-only does nothing.
There was also direct exploitation. A couple of people, especially a woman named Ana, called Fin and Andy “dear friend,” shared sob stories about being broke or on a fixed income, and pressured us to sell our work to them for only $1. Those same people, and again especially Ana, then turned around and spent $5+ per piece — sometimes $50 or more in a single day — buying art from the very people who were bullying us. The assumption was that we were too dumb or naïve to notice. We're not.
In hindsight, there were also people who presented themselves as caring, concerned friends — asking probing questions about how Fin was doing, what was happening behind the scenes. With distance, it is painfully clear that some of those conversations were not about concern at all. They were information-gathering, and that information traveled.
In addition to this, Fin was sexually harassed by multiple people on this site, both men and women.
One of the men who sexually harassed Fin, named Luke, began commenting on exclusives Fin owns, tagging Fin's username so he'd receive the notification, demanding that Fin unblock him (one example). Luke was reported to DA with screenshot receipts of block evasion. Nothing was done. When Fin reached out to the creators explaining to them what was going on with their comment spaces becoming unsafe, they didn't take it seriously, presumably because this Luke individual buys from them often.
One of the people who sexually harassed Fin — an ostensibly lesbian woman who calls herself Sofia or Blenke, and maintains multiple accounts and personas — repeatedly insisted that Fin was “both female and male,” refused to accept that Fin is a trans man, could not wrap her head around the fact that Fin is gay and attracted to men, and continued flirting with Fin anyway. This included sexualized comments. When Fin made it clear he was not interested, it did not stop, and "I'm autistic" was used as an excuse for the boundary violations despite the fact that there are plenty of autistic people who understand no means no, ourselves included.
When people we believed were friends asked who had sexually harassed Fin and Fin told them about her specifically, they shrugged it off and continued being quite friendly with her and even financially supporting her.
Andy has endured his own parallel campaign of harassment. A different woman who goes by Lizzy/Elizabeth/Ely aka Skylizzy, SkyessenceS2, Auraveth and Skyessence1982, from Italy, became obsessed with him, could not accept no for an answer, could not accept that HE IS GAY, called him "her soulmate" in front of Fin to try to break us up, and repeatedly appropriated Andy's titles — including “Eternal Beloved” — and produced work badly imitating Andy's likeness. She escalated to block evasion to send Fin harassing messages directly on different accounts (link is to one example), and on a since-deleted account borrowed Fin's face to put on the bodies of sexualized women with titles like "Evil Queen" and "Destroyer", which was among other things a transphobic attack. As of December 2025, Lizzy was still badly replicating Andy's likeness with work entitled Soulmates; Lizzy/Elizabeth/Ely aka Skyessence has been doing this since the end of March 2025. It is fixation, stalking, and boundary violation.
On top of this, with one of several people producing knockoffs of Andy’s ships and trains, a buyer appeared using a username that was an obvious impersonation of Andy’s account. That meant Andy was also dealing with impersonation layered on top of theft and harassment. This was reported. Nothing was done.
We both reported multiple people to DeviantArt, including for clear and documented violations of the site’s own Terms of Service. We came with extensive receipts, including screenshots of ban-evasion messages, impersonation, and other violations. Again, nothing was done. If we got a reply at all, we were told to simply block people we'd already blocked.
One example is particularly telling: an art thief literally reposted Fin's exact artwork with only minor modifications. This same person also stole from a few other artists, including some of the very people who had bullied us. The stolen work taken from our haters was removed within hours. Fin's takedown request, for the same behavior, made the same day, took close to two weeks to receive any response from staff at all. That disparity further corroborates our conclusion that enforcement on DA's platform is not neutral.
Based on repeated experience, it is impossible not to conclude that people who hold multiple paid alternate accounts — and thus generate enough revenue for the platform — are effectively untouchable. If you have enough money on DA, you can get away with behavior that would result in legal consequences in the real world, including harassment, theft, impersonation, and abuse.
Fin is a disabled creator. Fin was using DeviantArt to try to earn a little extra income to supplement a very limited financial situation. Instead, Fin's livelihood was actively undercut by art theft, exploitation, and algorithmic favoritism, while the toll on Fin's mental health kept mounting. Whatever crumbs Fin was managing to get here were simply not worth that cost.
Fin will be okay. Andy and a couple of close friends are helping him outside of DA if he needs it, and once Andy is finally in the States, money will not be as tight. Staying on DA and continuing to absorb this environment, however, was not sustainable.
Fin turned off comments after the troll attack in November. Once DA changed its messaging system in December so you could restrict messages to only those you watch, Fin did so. Even so, the patterns did not stop. Watching people knock off our work, exploit our labor, impersonate Andy, get rewarded by the algorithm, and actively discourage others from buying from us was not something we were willing to continue absorbing — financially, emotionally, or psychologically.
We both agree that staying on DA and "fighting the good fight" and "not letting the bastards win" would mean continuing to harm our mental health for diminishing returns: fighting opaque algorithms, scraping for crumbs, and being expected to tolerate conduct that would never be acceptable in any offline professional environment. We are not interested in doing that anymore. We are no longer interested in giving DA our money for the "privilege" of selling when the company's policy is not merely sitting back and doing nothing about an unsafe environment but also letting people buy themselves out of TOS enforcement by running multiple paid accounts (which they use to troll and game the algorithm).
And honestly even if all of that hadn't been an ongoing problem, this site was already stressful and overwhelming for us both. The site UX is just genuinely bad. Among other (multiple) issues:
- Preparing a post is a pain in the ass. One can only choose a gallery from the draft list in the studio because the drop-down menu on the "edit draft/submit" page is broken both on desktop and mobile, and if one is picking galleries on the studio list, anytime you get a pop-up notification it unchecks the gallery boxes. This ended up slowing our workflow down significantly.
- The notifications we got per day were ridiculous - one gets notified for faves and comments on every exclusive one owns, there's no way to opt out of these at present. There's also no way to opt out of badges, and during snowball season 2025 we were both getting an absolutely insane amount of notifications from the snowballs. One can only turn off notifications for ALL badges which means if you turn off the snowball pop-ups you won't know if/when someone gives you a Quartz or a Hype.
We really don't like signing on every day to hundreds of notifications from all of this bullshit. We've both been burned out for some time now just from that alone, and the drama amplified the burnout to a ridiculous degree.
We will continue making art. We will do it here, on our own website, on our own terms, without algorithms determining our worth and without a culture that rewards theft, sexual boundary violations, exploitation, impersonation, intimidation, and quiet sabotage. We don't regret meeting each other on DA, and we're still going strong almost a year later as of the writing of this post (January 2026), but we are ready to put DA behind us as a bad memory. We're moving onto bigger and better things, together. We both already feel relief at quitting DA.
Goodbye, DeviantArt, and good riddance.
