It has been a hell of a last 3 months. It has actually been a pretty hellish 6 months, but anyway... I will just rip the band-aid off now, and then go into full detail about why this is happening: I am going to be moving on from spicy content (loli/shota). I will be rebranding away from KawaiiDetective, and moving purely to adult content (most likely with a focus more on VN/Games). I fully understand this is not why the vast majority of you are here. I thank you for your support over the last year or two, and understand if you dont wish to support this content going forward. Any paid content I make going forward will be adult (I may finish a couple of pieces that I want to get done during the next couple of months, but they will NOT be released as paid content, and will likely just go up on Baraag/Pixiv for everyone). I havE spoken to Subscribestar and this page will be rebranded, and changed to a new URL. Old posts will be deleted, I am unsure yet if I will keep up old adult posts, but I may just delete everything to start fresh. So why am I doing this? It is not just one thing, it is a bunch of things piled on top of each other. They have just really come to a head for me in the last month, to the point sitting down to work is not enjoyable, and I need to change, even before I feel it inevitably gets changed for me. You may have gotten a feeling this was coming over the last couple of months... I have increasingly felt hemmed in and as if a sword was hanging over my head. The space just gets smaller and smaller and I feel more and more isolated in both professional and personal environments. I have tried to put it out of my mind but within the last few days things kind of went snap.
Personally, I never started with the intent of only making this content (as seen by the animations made previously), it was only a part of the content I made. But monetizing it has meant that I have over time just become nothing but a spicy content producer and I am sick of it. It is not really my preferred content a lot of the time but I have no time to make any other type of content, tied to that the name is now synonymous with this type of thing. There is no way to really start over in another capacity without a hard disconnect from this online persona. I have almost from the start preferred game design (the emphasis I put on the story should allude to that), creating things that have significant stories with characters whom I have given life. That is basically dead. Even the tiny amount of time to work on these has been on existing characters, and even though I try to give them more of a sense of individuality, they are still just other people's characters. My favorite characters are often ones with no real backstory for this reason.
The space I work in is being squeezed closed. There is nowhere left to monetize your work now except for here at Subscribestar, and let me be clear I fully expect at some point that it will become impossible here too. Payment processors will eventually turn their eyes on this site. Something will come up in the news, or someone at one of these institutions will catch wind of something, and the hammer will fall. I firmly believe it is a matter of time. While they will probably always be a bit more tolerant than patreon, I do not think they can let this particular niche exist much longer. Having spoken with them concerning changing the site address, I am even more convinced of this. They were very eager to move current spicy content creators to something else, and I believe they know the writing is on the wall and the time left that they can allow this content is closing rapidly. I was actually convinced that it would be Fanbox that became the last holdout for this type of content, but it looks like over there they are simply going to kill all Western content across both Fanbox and Pixiv (many of these types of accounts have already been removed from public Pixiv itself already). Besides Substar there are no alternatives. Boosty already bans adult work, anyone using it is facing a ban, Crypto is just not a viable option for sustained growth, there just isn't anywhere to go.
As noted, even outside of pay sites, the places where work can be advertised have been drastically reduced. Pixiv is banning standard accounts for linking off-site, Baraag (the main mastodon instance for this content) has closed its doors to any new 3D creators, and we are second-class citizens there at the best of times (you need to tag content etc., which 2d artists don't need to do). I am blacklisted by many of the people and professionals in the space that would be my peers because of this content (I haven't been able to hire a VA for about a year now), and am generally stuck in an ever-shrinking professional pool. Part of my desire to do VN/Game work is the space is just so much easier to advertise in/monetize (even if it is pretty saturated).
I am sick of the content I make being a thing that hangs in the back of my mind. It is at best a legal grey area, at worst flat out illegal in places, and it is not worth the angst and anguish I feel from it anymore. I am sick of having to hide what I do from family and friends because of the content - they know I make animations but never the type or what it contains. I constantly skirt the issue and change the subject and it is exhausting. The mental fatigue the whole thing gives me is just not worth it anymore. I have dealt with people with whom I grow concerned that the content I make is blurring the lines of what they think is acceptable. I have seen this increasingly so with the growth of the horrid "MAP" community on sites like Pawoo taking my content and relating it to IRL scenarios or thoughts. I have been asked by more than 1 person to create content on someone they know, or from an IRL picture. I have on more than one occasion had to remove people from the community for linking to or asking for IRL content (to be fair it has only ever been clothed YouTube-style content linked, but that is still a line too far for me). While I, and 99% of you, are capable of differentiating between fantasy and reality, doing this I have been exposed to people who can't. And I don't think I am happy with that anymore. This has all had an inevitable impact on my mental health, how I see the world, and how insular my existence has become, and I am over it.
All of these elements have helped to form the decision here, so it is far from a single element and is impacted by almost every facet of what I am doing here. So where does that leave me? Well as noted above, it basically leaves me needing to restart anew with a new type of content and goal. While I will continue to make animations, I am most likely going to lean much more into the game/visual novel space (albeit done under a different name). I do hope that people will continue to support what I make, but I also understand that for many of you, this is not something that will interest you and that is fine too, I wish you the best of luck and thanks for the support up to now, etc. Will all my content going forward be MILFS? No, not at all. Animations for the foreseeable future will be game girls (almost surely voted on), and game characters will probably be a spectrum, but teen is fine in my book - so long as it feasibly passes for 18. But the super spice will basically be gone.
What will happen to all my content/all the stuff I have made? Well, it will still exist out there in the ether, I can't stop that. I will be opening access to the archive to everyone until I am sure what I am going to be doing with this page (if it can be rebranded, or if it needs to be deleted). As for my goal going forward:
- I have spoken to Subscribestar and they are both willing and eager to have me rebrand the page. I get the distinct feeling they are reaching a rubicon where they will have to drop the hammer on this content as it is.
- To this end I will be removing all of the spicy content on this site. I will very probably be removing all the animations, as even the adult animations here are tied to this current persona.
- I will be unlocking the Archive for all current subs. I will post and send a bulk message to all of you. The link and the password for the Archive will be left for at least a month and will most likely remain active for a while to come.
- I will be rebranding my Pixiv, deleting all the spicy content and reference to this persona.
- The only place left where I will have any presence as this name will be Baraag. There are a couple of pieces I still hope to finish, and I will release all my unreleased stuff over there, but there will be no links back to the new personsa. I may add the archive there at a later date (I dont want to open it publicly until you guys have sucked the bandwidth dry
- I will probably create a companion Patreon. If Substar will not let me re-brand, and/or will not let me create a new account, that will be my main home going forward. I would/will notify people here of what the new home will be, then delete that so that there is no previous connection to online presence.
- What will the content be? Not sure yet. As noted I would like to focus more on games, but as it stands I also still want to do animations (and I don't have a game ready to go).
For the start, I will very likely hold polls/discussions about what people who stick around want to see/do some 1 minute or so animations to get the ball rolling. We may start with some loops to get a feel. I have a ton of game ideas I think are neat, and a few ideas for relatively simple games to get things started. To be honest, I actually look forward to an environment where I can actually SHARE what I am working on and get your feedback on things.
Overall I hope if you are not happy with my decision, you can at least see from my perspective why I need to make this change. There is just no future here, despite how the numbers look, and I admit that I am lucky to have more support than most, and more than I will no doubt get on different content. I cannot see myself working in this space for another year, let alone longer than that, even IF the space was viable, which I am pretty much convinced it won't be. So that's that. As I say I will be contacting Subscribestar to see what they say, but I would suggest that if you want my content, you get it now. At the same time, please be patient with the poor server, I expect it to get absolutely blasted. I don't mind responding to questions but be aware that I have given this whole thing A LOT of thought and consideration. This is not a snap judgment, it is something I have been weighing for over half a year now. If you want to stick around to see what I do next (and tbh it may be a good chance to get something you want if an adult character tickles your fancy since I will start with polls) at whichever home I land at, thank you for the continued support. If you are cursing me out and throwing things at the wall, I appreciate it too, and thanks for the support. If you are just happy to head off into the night, again thank you for any support up until now.
I will address any raised questions or concerns in a later post once the dust settles
For now still KDE
And then real life priorities. Sorry, but at least some got re-upped...