Posted on: 2024-02-14T22:12:22.629Z
Welcome to Soleruin - Inspiring "Creativity" since 2009. How well does that hold up in 2024?
This post is licenced under CC-BY-SA, and is not written with the intent to offend anyone.
Welcome to Soleruin, the place where dreams are born, and subsequently crushed by the residents of the discord server. Here you can interact with the creators of most of your favourite Kirby Fan Character (Kirby FC for short) sprite animations, and also get dogpiled for having an opinion like in Twitter. You can also make your own Kirby FC and get called out for it being a recolour of one of the default copy abilities. Want to learn the ropes of sprite art? Get good before asking for help, or you’ll just be dissed for it.
So, where to start?
So, you just got home from school after a rough day, you feel like “hey, I should draw my kirb”. After hours of drafting, sketching, drawing lines, colouring, and shading, it’s finally done! You admit to yourself “it’s not as great as what this person may draw, but I’ve still got alot to learn”, you check art showcase to see if anyone has posted recently, you post your art and eagerly watch the reactions. 10 minutes later (cause 10 mins between posts) BOOM, some stupid sh_tpost art is uploaded, completely overshadowing yours, it gets 7 star reactions while yours only gets 3 stars.
This is only one of many possible scenarios that can happen, but there are many other things that I have witnessed. Most of which occur in the art wip channel and animation channel rather than the showcase channel. A newer user at the time uploaded a preview of an animation they were making, only for PhantomAkira to criticize how many times one of the characters was flipping, suggesting it should flip a max of two times instead of three, despite the three flips being a reference to a trait of that character.
In the end, the real problem I noticed was that the character was spending too long doing the flips, but Akira didn’t care. Another thing that happened was someone made an animation with a sprite from someone else and got criticism fire involving the sprite, when they didn’t even make the sprite. Another time, someone else got zero help with character design because their character was a swordfighter and it was apparently “too basic” despite their goal was to “be unique”.
As I may have mentioned in an earlier paragraph, Soleruin has an overshadowing problem in it’s art showcase channel. Since the introduction of the starboard, the art showcase channel has become similar to twitter’s race for likes and validation, except with stars instead of likes. To get onto the starboard, you need a post in any of the art channels to get 5 “star” reactions, but due to almost every post having 5 stars, the starboard is basically just a repost of the “valid” art.
Many people, like myself, have began wondering why we should even post art in the first place if all that happens is it gets overshadowed by someone else. This has been the case since the introduction of the starboard.
Cap of think will not be mentioned here, so please read this Google doc if you want to know more about him. The members I am talking about are still in Soleruin, and are also some of the most active members.
Below are some of the more significant ones.
Phantom Akira, previously banned from Soleruin was recently unbanned, yet he still acts rather toxic and starts unnecessary arguments, especially towards newer members who haven’t really gotten the ropes yet. According to DJW, he was unbanned after an appeal and from his friends saying that he was improving, but they are having second thoughts about giving him a second chance. The mods are currently observing his actions and waiting for something to happen, so the mods have evidence to ban him again.
Addendum: He was banned from the server once again, but he still continues to target members of the server in spite of that.
During a part of 2022 or 2023, Embalyn was made the second in command to DJW, who later disappeared due to personal reasons for an extended duration of time, meaning that Embalyn was technically the server owner during that time period. Some of the things that she did was abuse the “Gerber” role, which was basically the dumb idiot role. It even included a nice kirby butt emote next to your name.
This reign of terror was the reason why the server was less active for the period of time that DJ was away, but eventually DJ returned and Embalyn lost her admin privileges after some time. She started acting more chill when she stopped being admin, but the reign of terror still impacted a few members like myself.
Not really a bad apple anymore though.
Now I’ve had a few personal issues with him, but the below issues are more significant than anything what happened with me.
His issues even predate Soleruin, and he hasn’t really changed that much since then. Some time ago in another server, known as Pixaria, he wrote an erotica fanfic of an FC that was owned by a minor, and even continued despite the owner making it underage so that he would stop. Not to mention his modern artwork, which involves “woopers” or “axolotls” most of the time, with giant thighs, and shaking their butts in some cases. He got banned from Pixaria, and the mods even warned soleruin about what he did. But still today he exists on soleruin, and even after attempting to convince the mods to remove him from the server, they still continue to praise him for what he is not.
Now those are some of the biggest issues myself and many others have faced on Soleruin, but there are alot more that aren’t as significant, which all add up when you think about them.
I myself am a victim of Soleruin’s dogpiling problem thanks to the Jiggly Water Bottle incident. The meme channel was being spammed by this gif of a jiggly water bottle, and it’s name was even changed cause the mods were in on it. I was even in on it for some time, but then I got bored of it and pinged the mods saying it had gone too far. They did notice the ping, but everyone else just kept on spamming until they had to add a 30 min slowmode to stop it.
After that, I was dogpiled for various reasons like being a killjoy and ruining everything. It got so bad that multiple mods even DMed me about the situation and how they went a bit crazy dogpiling me. This scenario is but one of many when it comes to dogpiling in soleruin, and alot of the time, people get dogpiled for equally stupid reasons. One of which being animating in Aseprite instead of Flash 8 or Animate.
One of the main reasons I am writing this post is because CatKirby had noticed Flame was acting quite distant around her. He eventually convinced CK to join Soleruin after saying he was being more active there. Akira then came along started accusing Flame of grooming CK, when both of them were of legal age in their respective countries, and have been together for 3 years prior. Apparently Akira dislikes a two year age gap.
Addendum: When this document was originally written, I was unaware on what flame was REALLY doing. Turns out he was cheating on Catkirby and sending fart fetish content to a minor, in addition to commissioning NSFW artwork of his character with another’s character.
As said by DJ, the mods “can’t control who likes what art” but raising the star requirement for the starboard could make it less of a race for validation, and more of a channel for the really good art. (Fulfilled)
Another problem faced by the moderators is real life problems such as exams, which is why they should probably recruit more moderators to help catch the bad apples before they go too far. (Unfulfilled)
As seen multiple times across this post, Akira has been frequently causing trouble. The moderators have been saying that they’re having second thoughts about unbanning him, and are waiting for something to happen. That something has happened, and is written in this post, which is why they should take action and ban him once again. (Fulfilled)
Nobody is perfect, and if you punish people for experimenting with their artwork, they may never come back to it. Rather than just telling them what they did wrong, also tell them what they can do to improve. Sometimes this involves showing them what to do as well. This applies to everyone, not just the mods. (Plausible)
In recent times, dogpiling has become quite a significant problem for many people, which is why I ask that the mods take action to minimize this happening in the future. It is mentally damaging for the one who is being dogpiled, and reminds many of twitter cancel culture. (Plausible)
Soleruin needs to make some changes in order for new users to feel more welcome and so that older users are more active, cause without a supportive community, people will dislike it. This server is almost comparable to Twitter just before Elon bought it.
Either way, I’m probably not gonna be as active there, not really posting any wips and only really posting finished art that I’m actually happy with, until some of these changes come to fruition.
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