A Look Back on 2022 and Concerns for the Future

Hey there, Oxdarock here.

Happy New Year everybody. This is gonna be a long post, so if you’re not interested, no worries. Just me reflecting and, mostly, venting. Starting off with a look back at 2022, aside from realizing that I can improve my productivity by foregoing a normal sleep cycle, I can say… that nothing’s really changed for me, which isn’t really good.

I’ll be frank: I’m very anxious about my future, particularly financially. I’ve essentially stagnated in terms of increasing my supporters on both my Patreon and online store and I’m not sure how to improve things. I’ve taken some commissions privately and have started uploading translated works on Pixiv Fanbox, but I’m having trouble keeping up with the former at times and I’m at a bit of a loss with the latter. I’ve often contemplated if keeping so much behind a paywall has been detrimental, but then I’m reminded that trying to mass release my works publicly would most certainly be disastrous, especially as of late.

For one, I’m not as popular as I’d have liked to believe and my audience… well, let’s just say I have a love-hate relationship with you all. I greatly appreciate the monetary support and do what I can to make it actually worth something rather than a glorified donation jar. On the other hand, I don’t get much praise in terms of comments, views, and likes. I’ve slowly released pages of my MikoXMonster comics and Lusty Lamp Tours comics over the year and I don’t feel it’s garnered any sort of attention (though that could also be because I just found out that the image gallery of my website is busted and no one thought to tell me this, cause why would they?) and I was painfully reminded of how much of a nobody I am after posting my recent “Dual Chris” picture on Twitter. It’s the same no matter what I post publicly, whether it’s Patron Pick previews or the gacha game anniversary pictures I made. It’s a vicious cycle in which keeping things behind a paywall garners less attention to my works while posting publicly does nothing for my financial situation and doesn’t bring me the amount of praise that I desire.

As far as solutions go, the only thing I can think of is being more productive. The small number of private commissions have helped, especially since I’ve finally decided to charge hourly ($15ph), which has little to no chance of leaving me feel like I’ve been severely underpaid. However, I can’t suddenly switch to doing a bunch of commissions to fix my problems cause that’d be the equivalent to a dead-end job and would chip at my sanity over time.

I could also do a lot more works that feature mainstream characters, but I can only tolerate that for Patron Picks, and just barely (not to mention, I’m largely known as the conjoinment guy, and there’s actually not a lot of people in my audience who care for that). I really didn’t care for a majority of the ideas for the final round of last month’s poll and two of the three pictures I drew felt really bland by the end. It really hits home how little people care about what I actually feel passionate about, again, like the “Dual Chris” picture, which I’ve yet to finish, yet puts a smile on my face when I see it. There’s not a lot of pictures I’ve done, especially as requests or commissions, that have done this.

And then there’s the upcoming poll for January. I’d actually intended to select a batch of characters myself that weren’t limited to what’s popular. However, I just couldn’t do it. Don’t get me wrong, I like mainstream stuff as much as a lot of people, but I also like a wide variety of other characters that, unfortunately, people have no knowledge or attachment to (like Symphogear for example). And in trying to select characters, the fear of accidentally picking characters that would sweep a poll in both suggestions and voting made me lose motivation to do so at all, hence why I asked patrons to do so earlier. I’m honestly considering widening the scope of what I’d choose as a personal pick to the top 20 suggestions, rather than the final 10, or simply choosing two from the HE request list, particularly the latter, since I don’t have to feel the disappointment of mainstream ideas winning by a landslide cause they’re mainstream.

It also doesn’t help that a decent amount of suggestions thrown my way all have some kind of elaborate setup that I can’t take seriously. I’m not sure if people are doing it to assist in the dialogue I tend to come up with or they really think they’re idea is creative and that I’ll be more interested in choosing it or have more enjoyment drawing it, but 90% of the time, it has the opposite effect. And then there’s the giantess related ideas, which I don’t think I can tolerate anymore. I like GTS, or macro-micro pictures, but I feel that nobody really understands what I like about it, nor due they take into account everything else that I feels needs to be considered when drawing a decent picture in which the GTS element isn’t an afterthought, namely backgrounds, which I really don’t care for unless I feel particularly motivated. I don’t know, I think I’m just inherently bad at working with, or for the sake of, others.

On the pixiv side of things, I don’t even know where to begin. I still don’t know the language very well (cause of kanji, of course) so I have to rely on a dictionary to translate my works (yes, I actually do this, no I don’t use Google Translate). Even then, I’ve no idea how to get my name out there on the JP side of things Ultimately, I’ve come to the conclusion that easy access is key, so, unlike my Patreon, I’ll most likely post and leave everything up in the Fanbox gallery. That said, what separates it from my Patreon and my store items is that I’ll only post the finished images with dialogue in Japanese. That’s it. No sketches, no textless/cropped versions, no commentary, no voting polls, no thank-you picture, and I intend to make it a point to keep it several months behind my Patreon in terms of content. Most of this is to work with JP’s silly censorship laws, and to discourage English speakers from switching to it rather than the current options available. Much as it bothers me, I have to give a bit to get a foothold over there. The bigger concern I have is making time to progress in the language itself. With how much time I’m gonna need to put into my work, I can’t imagine how long it’ll take me to finally be fluent in the language, due to the enormous learning curve that is kanji (seriously, the language itself isn’t that hard, it’s just their writing system that’s stupid).

All of this has made me feel pretty depressed lately, especially, again, when I think about my financial situation. I’m not in particular danger of not being able to pay my bills, but I don’t feel like I’d be able to sustain myself on my own (I have to rely on roommates), primarily due to income requirements to rent an apartment. I’ll be frank, I’m unable to make even $2000 a month and that’s just about 2/3rds of what’s needed to rent out an apartment where I live. And no, lowering my standard of living even further isn’t a solution, since it comes with the covet of being in a less safe and comfortable environment. I’m frugal enough as is and I’ve no desire to live like a pauper just so other people can casually enjoy my work, a lot of which I highly suspect already do without actually supporting me.

Soooo… yeah. That’s everything that’s been eating me of late. It’s funny, a lot of what I mentioned I shouldn’t have since it could have a negative impact on my relationship with my audience, but on the other hand, making it seem like I have no problems is just as bad. Besides, I highly doubt there are many who have the time, interest, or patience to read all of this anyway, lol!

Anywho, I hope everyone has less anxiety going into 2023. Hopefully, things will improve for me as well. I just gotta hand in there, I guess.

That’s all for now! Happy New Year, everybody!