So I'm ranting about this in my own journal instead of iconrants because I know some of the people who have problems with this are there, and though usually the rule at the community is to ignore rants you disagree with, I'm not in the mood for offending them or dealing with disagreement.

But god, I HATE it when people post picspams of screencaps, even ones they've color-edited themselves, and then get all betrayed and hurt and cagey and upset when other people make icons out of their caps. And it happens, I swear, EVERY time anyone posts a screencap picspam. If you don't want people to make icons out of caps you've made/colored/posted, DON'T FUCKING POST THE CAPS. Or else GET OVER IT. It's not like you even came up with those pictures yourself, or anything. If you don't want people using them, it's not that hard to not post them or to flock them.

Or it's like when people get all bent out of shape because someone else made an icon in the same style that they did. GET OVER IT. It always reminds me of that quote "good writers borrow; great writers steal." "Liberating" ideas from their initial captors is a part of art. It's going to happen. Besides that, mimicry is how people LEARN, for fuck's sake, so get over the fact that someone else used a similar style on an icon that they made.

ALSO, icontests have taught me that ten different people can totally look at the same picture and come up with THE EXACT SAME crop and coloring. It doesn't mean that the first one was copied by the last nine. It just means that, for whatever reason, they all thought the same thing would look good.

ugh. As Bella Swan said to Edward Cullen after they made hot sweet love for the first time and then he sulked because he HATES HIMSELF (and also had feathers in his teeth), "stop killing my buzz." (This is an actual quote from an actual scene in the actual book Breaking Dawn, which is a gripping and horrifyingly badly written tale of ~true love~ that you should read at your first and every opportunity.)