Undertale Fandom And Crediting Creators

Undertale Fandom and Crediting Creators

Why is the Undertale Fandom so obscenely bad at crediting people when they use their characters? I'm not saying you have to tag the creator everytime a sketch of their character makes it into their post, but general Fandom etiqette says: 'if you want to draw my character, at least credit back to me', and this Fandom just decided nope, never going to happen. I've seen AUs based on other people's AUs that do not once, anywhere on the blog, credit the original AU. I've seen alternate characters of AU characters not breathe a single word of the original creator.

'It's because theyre popular' so? I talk with people constantly who don't know the original creators of aus. Who don't know their blog names. Who have never laid eyes on the original material. And the fact 90% of art I see of these characters is completely uncredited, not only contributes to that, but is just such a basic disregard for other creators in a Fandom space that it's upsetting to think you couldn't take the 2 extra seconds to put 'character by ___ 'at the end of a post

I've never been in a fandom that thinks using other people's stuff should be done without credit. It's just common place. It's common knowledge. Here's an indie creator online, in the same fan base as me, when I use their chatacter, I credit back to them, because I as another indie creator in this fandom would want the same. But nope.

I did a little test, a little experiment, I scrolled through the undertale au tag and counted how many people credited while using a character that didnt belong to them

3/20 had credit.

Absolutely abysmal.

Now again, Im not saying to @ the creators every time a character is used, but simple acknolwedgement of their blog or other social media is all you need, so that if anyone wants to find that character off of your post, they can do so, without having to spend 20 minutes trying to find the 1 post that took the 2 seconds to credit another fandom creator with their own character.

This isn't even mentioning the countless times AUs have been purposefully targeted to be stripped of ownership by people that think they should either own the au, or that the au should not belong to the original creators. Ie x au belongs to the community (when it doesn't). A thing that was/is actively defended by a lot of people. Also abysmal.

There are some creators exempt from this criticism, but for the most part, I think just about everyone still actively posting content does it. And its a terrible habit the au fandom got itself into, and one of by biggest pet peeves about the content made for it.

If you want to use someone else's character, in the fandom, it's the most basic courtesy to say who made that character no matter how popular you think they are, because I know for a fact you'd want them to do the same for you.

So maybe we could start doing that again?