The Artists of Askr (Patreon)

Today is a day of great significance for me. 4 years ago, on June 22nd 2017, I began my career, and I would like to share this story.

I was 18 at the time and was pretty much a nobody. I had picked up drawing the year prior or so, and was semi-competent with paint (but far from good, or professional). I had heard of the concept of a zine before on social media and thought maybe it would be fun to do one myself.  A zine is a self-published indie magazine. It can a text-based publication, a photography book, or in my case, a collaborative art book. Most of the zines in that vein had maybe 20 artists or so at maximum, usually less. Being as naive as i was, I decided that it would be a fun and unique take on the idea to work with way more artists than that. So I pitched the idea to the fire emblem heroes subreddit to do just that, drawing every character that was in that game at the time.  I had no experience in a leadership role, or managing, I didnt even have a method for editing the thing and figured I could put it together on an app or something. Shockingly…people wanted to do it and had faith in the idea. I was on the front page and there were ideas and requests to participate filling the comment section! Someone suggested I run the project on Discord.

Not really knowing what that was, I downloaded the app, created the server…and then created a general chat… and sent the invite. So yeah there were 2 generals, and everyone was confused. Great start, overall. Lol Once I fixed that, I started to realize how little I knew and how much I desperately needed help. Still if I was anything I was an absolute moron with boundless, completely unjustified confidence in everything I was doing. Somehow everyone didnt leave immediately, and I got myself a few moderators, even someone to edit the thing once it was done. She was a professional editor and she was willing to do it for free, to boot! Everything was somehow aligning in my favor instead of falling apart instantly.  I thought at the time it was because I was just that awesome but…I was far from it. If I didnt have some of the most enthusiastic people I’ve ever seen and enough luck to win several lotteries, this wouldnt have gotten past day 1.

Things went fairly smoothly at first (I thought) but the trouble started pretty fast, unsurprisingly. See, I did not have very good internet back then. Oftentimes I was reliant on free wifi externally at the office of my community, libraries, gas stations, etc to even communicate. This left very large gaps in the time I was available to talk, which lead to…problematic happenings in the server. Reddit is where I started the project so unsurprisingly, there were some very immature teens and young adults who decided to exploit my absences. Lots of unsavory things happened behind my back, including the harassment of a girl by one of the other people in the server. By the time I found out about that, it had been going on for a long time and it seems like everyone BUT me knew. I of course kicked that harasser out on the spot, and the girl’s family was grateful, but there was some resentment that stayed to this day because of it…and rightfully so, if I’m being honest. Still, all the issues were eventually resolved…very messily (again, I was not nearly as good at this as I thought, and that unjustified confidence honestly made things harder to resolve).

I also slowly realized that many people who I picked to be part of my team were not the friends I thought them to be. I often found myself insulted for my inexperience, and generally belittled to the point I started to just assume I was either wrong or inept on every matter they addressed. That as you could imagine lead to a lot of behind the scenes arguments about authority, roles, and leadership (even ownership). I don’t really hold any ill will towards them though. As I said, I probably deserved that treatment for my foolhardiness anyways. It took a few years but I made amends with most of them.

With a ridiculous amount of work and stress, it was almost time to publish the project! Someone then discovered that a much more well-established individual was doing the exact same thing we were doing. They had just started and we were very clearly the first, but there was not much to be done on the matter. When said artist was made aware of us, they of course denied knowing about us, and really it may have been a standalone complex incident, but that really didnt matter. I was a nobody so it became very easy for us to be mocked by “the big guys” and we in return started to get resentful. Ironically, they did a lot of work for helping us. They had reach but we had grass-roots self-promotion and accessibility. People began to mistake us for them, and we were gaining traction as a result. More artists started to join, be embarassed, then decide to stay. I was even offered an interview. That did not happen, because I was not the interviewer’s intended subject. Lol but that man grew to become one of my closest friends and my mentor whom I still speak to even today. We of course didn’t try and fake our identity, told everyone whee they should go, but they mostly decided to stay, and that resulted in us being able to complete our project.

Sometime in August or September, the day finally came. We released The World of Heroes. It was better than I could have ever dreamed. The art was fantastic, not because of its quality, but because of its diversity. We did not turn anyone away. If you could provide something you were in. (but also because of its quality)

This book was a symbol of what I believed in, and what I still believe in - that everyone can be an artist, and that all art matters. Furthermore, we were raising money for charity. We released the zine digitally on Gumroad, and it was free to download, but you could also give us any amount of money you wanted for the zine. We were the talk of the town, and my humble project was front page news in the community. Small in the big picture, yes, but to someone who had never really known what it was like to be in the spotlight much at all, it was dazzling. There were of course those who mocked the quality variance of the work, but that variance was the point. In the end, our book was downloaded thousands of times, and we earned hundreds of dollars for Americares (the charity we chose) and the collective praise and adulation of the community at large. It should have never existed, but here it was…and it was beautiful.

From there, things only grew. We in total published 16 zines over the course of those wonderful 3 years. We raised thousands of dollars for charity and our rapport and influence grew. We were able to start careers, build friendships and show people that art matters. We helped the other groups that sprung up in our wake so they could also succeed, and the connections we made along the way allowed us to elevate our own platform to do even greater things, even behind the scenes. I may have directed 16 of our projects, but I worked on, managed and was in charge of a total of somewhere around 50. My “I’s” though also started to became “We’s” as I matured and became a proper leader,  my ego slowly replaced with humility. We were able to show people they mattered…that they could be artists.

Still, my own ghosts never stopped haunting me. The grudges against me grew with my own social stature alongside my list of enemies. As it were, trying to make a difference makes a lot of enemies. There came a point last year where the attacks on my character and the verbal abuse grew to become well near impossible to ignore by others. I was called a manipulator, an abuser, and far more grave things. I was even accused of hating transgender people as they attempted to force me out of my own closet. (As many of you know, I myself am trans, and only came out this year in April.) I was able to disprove and fight back against all these claims, but proof is meaningless, the damage was done.

In the end I concluded that attachment to my name would do more harm than good to the Artists of Askr. I in private attempted to step down and pass the role of director to one of my team members, but all of them declined, saying really only I could give our community what it deserved. I guess in the end I did grow into my shoes.

On October 31st, 2020 I said goodbye to the AoA. The server is gone now, as are all the download pages on gumroad. My legacy is that of an egomaniac who drove himself into the ground, with no one to support or mourn him… a laughing stock or cautionary tale. The “one weird job” I took on the side of someone’s pregnancy fetish became all I have…and it grew into what I have and what I am now. I am lowly, I am a fool, I am alone and I am unimportant, but I also have no regrets and I would do it all over again.

So if you have the time, make a girl’s day and take a look at the last remnants of the AoA, so that someone else might know we were here. These are links to all of the zines I am allowed to share with you, removed from our Gumroad and archived on my own account. https://twitter.com/artistsofaskr/status/1322730042305191937?s=21

Remember, everyone can be an artist.