In a tale as old as time, or at least since the dawn of social media, a relatively small yet utterly obnoxious portion of a dedicated fandom has decided that harassment is an appropriate form of behavior. The latest festival of cringe does, at least, have its roots in akind-of-benevolentstance. But by targeting a completely innocent employee with insults galore, the action has moved far beyond calling out a company’s act of plagiarism, and descended into embarrassing and genuinely harmful drivel.
You might have heard, butPokemon TCG Pocketjust landed in hot water over a Ho-Oh mishap. The upcoming Wisdom of Sea and Sky expansion features the majestic phoenix-themed legendary bird in a beautiful stance. It gracefully soars, skybound and full of passion. It’s downright lovely.And completely plagiarized.Thatis well worth calling out, but since some people lack any grasp of nuance, there’s now a targeted hate campaign against an illustrator who would have had no idea they were doing anything wrong at all.
I Am Once Again Asking People To Be Normal
Over on the Japanese Twitter account for Pokemon TCG Pocket,the developers have kindly requestedthat no further slander against their employee’s artist be made. While that post is - natch - in Japanese, we have a couple of key ways to get the message across to our English-speaking readerbase.
For starters, PokeSuutamie has helpfully translated the post.
“Basically the message says that the problem arose because the card production team sent the mistaken fan art to the artist as reference materials,” PokeSuutamie explains. “And while they usually give artists freedom to use their creativity and uniqueness to create artwork, sometimes there are cases where the production team ask illustrators to create exactly following the reference materials sent.”
This translation tracks with a fellow Twitterer, Godzly, who has offered a separate conveyance effort:
As I said earlier, calling out the company’s act of plagiarism was the right thing to do. It prompted a swift response from social media accounts in several languages,including English. The artwork was immediately yanked, leaving a plain-text placeholder for the Ho-Oh card until further notice (which, honestly, lookshilariouslybland).
There should be a zero-tolerance policy against plagiarism, especially when it leads to financial gain. And uh,Pokemon TCG Pocket sure does have financial gain in spades. This Ho-Oh art is100 percent pilferedfrom its original artist, Lewtwo. That doesn’t mean the employee involved in the transfer to the finished (digital) product had any idea what was happening at the time. So, yeah. Please be normal about this.
