ware-wa-nanji:

I want to circle this post and highlight it and frame it in my house

but hey, if you come to my house, ask if you can take it, and I don’t hear you right away and therefore don’t answer, that means you can steal it and claim it as your own.

I meeeeeeeean! 

Seriously though, maybe it’s the writer in me, and having things like “site your sources” drilled into my head, and remembering having to go to the library and look stuff up in books, put page numbers and people’s last names in parenthesis, and have an entire page dedicated to your sources then got graded on if you sourced them the right way. 

I mean now you can find stuff so easily. You can google it and get a bunch of articles and pictures and instantly it’ll tell you where that stuff came from, who is in the picture, who took the picture, and all that jazz. And if for some reason you can’t, you can ask, pretty easily. I’ve seen cosplayers post pictures of amazing costumes, not know who it is, post on their page, “Who is this,” and get an answer in minutes. “Oh that’s so and so cosplay” or even “they don’t have a page but I know him/her, here is there name.” And there are so many ways to message people. They don’t answer Facebook? Try Tumblr. They don’t answer Tumblr? Try Instagram. Twitter. The list goes on.

But beyond that, let’s say that none of that works, absolutely none of it, and you decide, forget it, I’m gonna use this source anyway. If that person finds out and contacts you RESPECT THEIR WISHES! Whether it’s a simple “hey that’s me, please credit me” (which is usually the case with cosplayers because we want our work shared) or a “please don’t use that pic” respect their wishes. Simple as that. It’s such a basic creative rule to me, but it’s also common courtesy. 

I’ve seen amazing fanart, for example, that I’ve wanted to cosplay. Know what I did? I asked the artist. You know what happened? The artist was thrilled. THRILLED! Did she take a while to get back to me? Yeah, because life is a busy kind of thing, but she was flattered and happy and insisted I send her pictures or at least tag her when the costume was done, and she shared the hell out of it. It took me less than a minute to send a “hey I love your work can I use it” message. It’s not that hard to ask permission. It’s not that hard to be respectful.