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When Kit Jaspering was 17, he discovered an online world of anthropomorphic characters; animals drawn to look and act like people. He first stumbled across these drawings in the year 2006 on forums where people were mocking these so-called “furries” for being weird and cringey. But Jaspering noticed that some of the artists could draw “really well.” Soon, he was uploading “all my little furry drawings,” he tells Them, to a growing web community called DeviantArt.
Now 36 years old, Jaspering has been a professional furry artist for the last decade and a half, making a full-time living from that work more often than not. He even met his husband at a furry convention. But the internet has changed dramatically since Jaspering started posting.
“I started the anime club in my high school,” Jaspering says. “Now, every high schooler I know is into that. DeviantArt and Tumblr were the springboard, because it made all that stuff more accessible.”
On August 7, DeviantArt celebrated its 25th birthday. Jaspering’s account has been active for almost two decades, though he doesn’t spend much time there anymore. Instead, he hosts his original “Vampire Hunter Alone”webcomic on Webtoons and he’s active on newer platforms like Telegram and Bluesky. Furries and fandoms are bigger than ever before — and migrating to new areas of the web, away from DeviantArt. But the platform founded at the turn of the century made that all possible.
From the very beginning of DeviantArt’s history, a blend of erotic poetry, roleplaying, kink, and fan art formed the foundation of the niche platform’s original content. The community spawned several notable memes and, more importantly, entire careers for artists who have gone on to work for such established institutions like The Simpsons and DC Comics. But alongside the proliferation of more heteronormative art, DeviantArt also flourished as a virtual home for queer, trans, and nonbinary teens and young adults seeking an online haven.
DeviantArt was part of a burgeoning internet ecosystem that encompassed transformative fan works, which also included websites designed for publishing fanfiction, like Archive of Our Own; in fact, those stories were sometimes accompanied by DeviantArt illustrations. While some of the most popular shows and franchises on DeviantArt centered on straight characters, their online fan communities often reimagined them as queer. For example, the anime Naruto was one of the most popular fandoms on DeviantArt, and the gay ship “SasuNaru,” which paired the characters Sasuke and Naruto, was once one of the most-taggedkeywords on the platform. There was also a deluge of drawings on DeviantArt featuring the characters Dean and Castiel from Supernatural, Sherlock and John from Sherlock, and Tony Stark and Steve Rogers from The Avengers. Fans also obsessed over canonically gay pairings, like Kurt and Blaine from Glee.
“There’s no such thing as a quote-tweet on DeviantArt. There’s no such thing as a downvote.”
“It would allow people who were growing up to become exposed to these things that are now being deemed ‘Not Safe for Work’ and ‘adult,’” the online NSFW artist Wootmaster, 33, tells Them of the sort of discovery that could happen on DeviantArt. “You would see a picture of Freddy kissing Foxy from Five Nights at Freddy’s. It would show you that a wider world was possible.”
By 2010, DeviantArt had surpassed more than 100 million works uploaded, making it the largest online art gallery ever created. It was bolstered by thriving fan communities on other platforms like Tumblr, then one of the most prominent online spaces for LGBTQ+ teens and college-aged users, where artists could build social profiles and link back to their DeviantArt portfolios.
“You don’t have to be good to post on there,” Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who specializes in meme and fandom culture, says of DeviantArt. “You don’t have your real name attached. It allows people to explore queerness and fetish content, these taboo things, without having to connect it to your IRL life.”
From “God I wish that were me” to the drawing of an unsettled-looking Tom from Tom and Jerry to the iconic images of a cat-monkey hybrid stuffed animal holding its arms up incredulously, DeviantArt is responsible for many of the visual and text-based memes that make up the modern vocabulary of the internet, whether people remember their origins or not.
Fandoms for Sonic, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and Zootopia all thrived on DeviantArt, Brennan observes. Amid a thriving queer shipping culture, DeviantArt creators often got creative with their pairings. They drew Sonic in a relationship with his best friend Tails in addition to shipping several different My Little Pony characters in a whole host of sapphic arrangements. But the art and comics that emerged from the space could get much weirder, too. Recently, an infamous anti-abortion Zootopia fan comicfeaturing the movie’s main characters (an anthropomorphic fox and a bunny) has made the rounds online again in anticipation of Zootopia 2.
As today’s mainstream social media platforms become more hostile spaces for independent artists, many DeviantArt creators reflect with fondness on the aughties heyday of fan art platforms that were best experienced on a desktop computer. Wootmaster says that algorithms on mainstream social media apps prioritize negative forms of engagement, surfacing conflict and controversy over original content.
“There’s no such thing as a quote-tweet on DeviantArt. There’s no such thing as a downvote,” Wootmaster tells Them. “As a learning artist, a growing artist, it was a more positive environment [...] You now suddenly have people dunking on artwork, being like ‘Oh, look at this trash. This is garbage.’”
These platform functions aren’t the only thing that separated DeviantArt and its era of the internet from the current online environment. Brennan described DeviantArt as a “museum” compared to the platforms of today, where posts are frequently lost to time. Last year, Pew Research found that a quarter of webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, while former DeviantArt users who spoke to Them said they’re still able to find decades of archived content there.
“Now people will just post stuff on social media, and they won’t post it anywhere else, right? It’s given this almost temporary quality to a lot of art, because you almost can’t go past a certain date to find certain artworks,” Wootmaster said. “On DeviantArt, you can find stuff posted twenty years ago, ten years ago, almost [like] historical documents of fandom.”
The decline of DeviantArt was slow but certain. According to Google Trends, searches for DeviantArt peaked in 2013. Brennan links that period to the rise of smartphones and the decline of interest in platforms that performed best on desktop computers. DeviantArt only launched its app at the end of 2014, and like Tumblr, it was still best utilized on the traditional web.
“A really interesting thing about these aughts websites that lost momentum in the 2010s is that they were built on such convoluted code bases… and when it came time to build the app there wasn’t a great one-to-one experience,” Brennan says.
“I miss the old internet so much. There are things you can do on a bigger screen that you can’t do on a little one."
AMANDA BRENNAN
That transition to apps has made it harder to market traditional artwork, too. Jaspering has watched the furry community shift from niche internet forums to influencers with millions of followers on platforms like TikTok. The new generation of furries is growing up in these spaces alongside queer fandom communities. While some queer shows like Interview with a Vampire still have large Tumblr fandoms, queer fan art for pairings like Louis and Lestat can also be found on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok, where algorithms largely select what people see.
“What was kind of neat about the old internet was that it wasn’t all algorithmically fed to you,” Jaspering said. “You could find a new thing or meet someone and talk and share each other’s interests. I think that’s the biggest difference I’ve noticed, is people don’t share their findings anymore. They just let it be fed to them. And I’m guilty of this too.”
The DeviantArt of 2025 is a dramatically different experience today. When you join the platform now, it asks you to specify what kinds of art you’re drawn to, including fandoms and subcommunities of kink. You can set a filter to block explicit content, if you’d like. And it asks if you’re interested in creating AI art. A significant chunk of DeviantArt’s user base had already started to migrate elsewhere before it embraced generative AI in 2022, but since then, Wootmaster said “it’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to DeviantArt.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t so much of it,” he says. “AI completely overwhelms the output of any individual user with endless pictures, endless variations.”
Wootmaster says that AI tools put NSFW artists who work on commission at an even further disadvantage, because customers who don’t want to pay for original work can have infinite versions of their kinks generated for free. Last year, Slate reported that AI bot networks had been able to scrape and harness DeviantArt for material and profit over the human artists who built it into a success in the first place.
Some prominent creators have shut their accounts down in protest. A French NSFW artist who goes by Vocaloid-13 on DeviantArt and draws fandom characters in bondage tells Them that introducing AI was “the dumbest thing” an artist-focused platform could do. He describes it as an “invasion” on the website he’s used for the past decade.
But AI isn’t the only problem facing NSFW artists, and recent age verification laws in the U.K. and beyond have required users to upload IDs to view all kinds of content with the intention of stopping children from viewing pornography. This kind of legislation, which is also spreading across the U.S.,
disproportionately hurts queer youth by restricting them from safety resources and avenues of self-discovery — but it also has a general censorious effect, making LGBTQ+ content more difficult to access for people of any age.
As a result, Vocaloid-13 stopped posting on X and resumed posting strictly on DeviantArt, a Japanese platform called Pixiv, and Bluesky. “I don’t want people to share their faces or personal information to get to my content,” he wrote in a goodbye post on X. “Those laws are seriously hurting freedom of expression to ‘protect children.’”
Mike Stabile, the Director of Public Policy at the adult industry trade association Free Speech Coalition, says that furry and other NSFW artists have been some of the most vocal activists in fights against censorship and cultural homogenization.
“On the internet we’ve all been corralled into a few public spaces, and there has been a gentrification of the internet,” Stabile tells Them.“Like we see with Pride, once corporations start showing up, the communities that were there originally get targeted, get de-platformed, get demonized, and eventually get pushed out.”
Jaspering says he has had to branch out in his work since 2020, after furry conventions briefly shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Even when the conventions reopened, he found it much harder to work full-time as a furry artist within the changing social media landscape.
“I don’t want to play the algorithm. I want to make good comics,” Jaspering says. “I’ve had to censor my comics, even my non-pornographic ones, you’d still have to jump through hoops and you’d get in trouble and have no idea what to do. It’s a hassle. I’m just trying to tell a story.”
For people who grew up on DeviantArt and early internet spaces like it, there’s a nostalgic twinge to seeing the 25th anniversary of the platform pass by. It’s an artifact of a bygone era, one that set the stage for everything good and bad about modern internet culture. It was also the setting for countless queer awakenings and the place where many LGBTQ+ artists got their start.
“I miss the old internet so much,” Brennan says. “There are things you can do on a bigger screen that you can’t do on a little one. Maybe that’s a dying thought, but to me, I’ll always need to see DeviantArt on a giant screen. Because I need to see every detail of that Sonic fan art.”
Queer Smut Made DeviantArt Great for 25 Years. Can It Survive AI Slop?
When Kit Jaspering was 17, he discovered an online world of anthropomorphic characters; animals drawn to look and act like people. He first stumbled across these drawings in the year 2006 on forums where people were mocking these so-called “furries” for being weird and cringey. But Jaspering noticed that some of the artists could draw “really well.” Soon, he was uploading “all my little furry drawings,” he tells Them, to a growing web community called DeviantArt.
Now 36 years old, Jaspering has been a professional furry artist for the last decade and a half, making a full-time living from that work more often than not. He even met his husband at a furry convention. But the internet has changed dramatically since Jaspering started posting.
“I started the anime club in my high school,” Jaspering says. “Now, every high schooler I know is into that. DeviantArt and Tumblr were the springboard, because it made all that stuff more accessible.”
On August 7, DeviantArt celebrated its 25th birthday. Jaspering’s account has been active for almost two decades, though he doesn’t spend much time there anymore. Instead, he hosts his original “Vampire Hunter Alone”webcomic on Webtoons and he’s active on newer platforms like Telegram and Bluesky. Furries and fandoms are bigger than ever before — and migrating to new areas of the web, away from DeviantArt. But the platform founded at the turn of the century made that all possible.
From the very beginning of DeviantArt’s history, a blend of erotic poetry, roleplaying, kink, and fan art formed the foundation of the niche platform’s original content. The community spawned several notable memes and, more importantly, entire careers for artists who have gone on to work for such established institutions like The Simpsons and DC Comics. But alongside the proliferation of more heteronormative art, DeviantArt also flourished as a virtual home for queer, trans, and nonbinary teens and young adults seeking an online haven.
DeviantArt was part of a burgeoning internet ecosystem that encompassed transformative fan works, which also included websites designed for publishing fanfiction, like Archive of Our Own; in fact, those stories were sometimes accompanied by DeviantArt illustrations. While some of the most popular shows and franchises on DeviantArt centered on straight characters, their online fan communities often reimagined them as queer. For example, the anime Naruto was one of the most popular fandoms on DeviantArt, and the gay ship “SasuNaru,” which paired the characters Sasuke and Naruto, was once one of the most-taggedkeywords on the platform. There was also a deluge of drawings on DeviantArt featuring the characters Dean and Castiel from Supernatural, Sherlock and John from Sherlock, and Tony Stark and Steve Rogers from The Avengers. Fans also obsessed over canonically gay pairings, like Kurt and Blaine from Glee.
“There’s no such thing as a quote-tweet on DeviantArt. There’s no such thing as a downvote.”
“It would allow people who were growing up to become exposed to these things that are now being deemed ‘Not Safe for Work’ and ‘adult,’” the online NSFW artist Wootmaster, 33, tells Them of the sort of discovery that could happen on DeviantArt. “You would see a picture of Freddy kissing Foxy from Five Nights at Freddy’s. It would show you that a wider world was possible.”
By 2010, DeviantArt had surpassed more than 100 million works uploaded, making it the largest online art gallery ever created. It was bolstered by thriving fan communities on other platforms like Tumblr, then one of the most prominent online spaces for LGBTQ+ teens and college-aged users, where artists could build social profiles and link back to their DeviantArt portfolios.
“You don’t have to be good to post on there,” Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who specializes in meme and fandom culture, says of DeviantArt. “You don’t have your real name attached. It allows people to explore queerness and fetish content, these taboo things, without having to connect it to your IRL life.”
From “God I wish that were me” to the drawing of an unsettled-looking Tom from Tom and Jerry to the iconic images of a cat-monkey hybrid stuffed animal holding its arms up incredulously, DeviantArt is responsible for many of the visual and text-based memes that make up the modern vocabulary of the internet, whether people remember their origins or not.
Fandoms for Sonic, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and Zootopia all thrived on DeviantArt, Brennan observes. Amid a thriving queer shipping culture, DeviantArt creators often got creative with their pairings. They drew Sonic in a relationship with his best friend Tails in addition to shipping several different My Little Pony characters in a whole host of sapphic arrangements. But the art and comics that emerged from the space could get much weirder, too. Recently, an infamous anti-abortion Zootopia fan comicfeaturing the movie’s main characters (an anthropomorphic fox and a bunny) has made the rounds online again in anticipation of Zootopia 2.
As today’s mainstream social media platforms become more hostile spaces for independent artists, many DeviantArt creators reflect with fondness on the aughties heyday of fan art platforms that were best experienced on a desktop computer. Wootmaster says that algorithms on mainstream social media apps prioritize negative forms of engagement, surfacing conflict and controversy over original content.
“There’s no such thing as a quote-tweet on DeviantArt. There’s no such thing as a downvote,” Wootmaster tells Them. “As a learning artist, a growing artist, it was a more positive environment [...] You now suddenly have people dunking on artwork, being like ‘Oh, look at this trash. This is garbage.’”
These platform functions aren’t the only thing that separated DeviantArt and its era of the internet from the current online environment. Brennan described DeviantArt as a “museum” compared to the platforms of today, where posts are frequently lost to time. Last year, Pew Research found that a quarter of webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, while former DeviantArt users who spoke to Them said they’re still able to find decades of archived content there.
“Now people will just post stuff on social media, and they won’t post it anywhere else, right? It’s given this almost temporary quality to a lot of art, because you almost can’t go past a certain date to find certain artworks,” Wootmaster said. “On DeviantArt, you can find stuff posted twenty years ago, ten years ago, almost [like] historical documents of fandom.”
The decline of DeviantArt was slow but certain. According to Google Trends, searches for DeviantArt peaked in 2013. Brennan links that period to the rise of smartphones and the decline of interest in platforms that performed best on desktop computers. DeviantArt only launched its app at the end of 2014, and like Tumblr, it was still best utilized on the traditional web.
“A really interesting thing about these aughts websites that lost momentum in the 2010s is that they were built on such convoluted code bases… and when it came time to build the app there wasn’t a great one-to-one experience,” Brennan says.
“I miss the old internet so much. There are things you can do on a bigger screen that you can’t do on a little one."
AMANDA BRENNAN
That transition to apps has made it harder to market traditional artwork, too. Jaspering has watched the furry community shift from niche internet forums to influencers with millions of followers on platforms like TikTok. The new generation of furries is growing up in these spaces alongside queer fandom communities. While some queer shows like Interview with a Vampire still have large Tumblr fandoms, queer fan art for pairings like Louis and Lestat can also be found on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok, where algorithms largely select what people see.
“What was kind of neat about the old internet was that it wasn’t all algorithmically fed to you,” Jaspering said. “You could find a new thing or meet someone and talk and share each other’s interests. I think that’s the biggest difference I’ve noticed, is people don’t share their findings anymore. They just let it be fed to them. And I’m guilty of this too.”
The DeviantArt of 2025 is a dramatically different experience today. When you join the platform now, it asks you to specify what kinds of art you’re drawn to, including fandoms and subcommunities of kink. You can set a filter to block explicit content, if you’d like. And it asks if you’re interested in creating AI art. A significant chunk of DeviantArt’s user base had already started to migrate elsewhere before it embraced generative AI in 2022, but since then, Wootmaster said “it’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to DeviantArt.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t so much of it,” he says. “AI completely overwhelms the output of any individual user with endless pictures, endless variations.”
Wootmaster says that AI tools put NSFW artists who work on commission at an even further disadvantage, because customers who don’t want to pay for original work can have infinite versions of their kinks generated for free. Last year, Slate reported that AI bot networks had been able to scrape and harness DeviantArt for material and profit over the human artists who built it into a success in the first place.
Some prominent creators have shut their accounts down in protest. A French NSFW artist who goes by Vocaloid-13 on DeviantArt and draws fandom characters in bondage tells Them that introducing AI was “the dumbest thing” an artist-focused platform could do. He describes it as an “invasion” on the website he’s used for the past decade.
But AI isn’t the only problem facing NSFW artists, and recent age verification laws in the U.K. and beyond have required users to upload IDs to view all kinds of content with the intention of stopping children from viewing pornography. This kind of legislation, which is also spreading across the U.S.,
disproportionately hurts queer youth by restricting them from safety resources and avenues of self-discovery — but it also has a general censorious effect, making LGBTQ+ content more difficult to access for people of any age.
As a result, Vocaloid-13 stopped posting on X and resumed posting strictly on DeviantArt, a Japanese platform called Pixiv, and Bluesky. “I don’t want people to share their faces or personal information to get to my content,” he wrote in a goodbye post on X. “Those laws are seriously hurting freedom of expression to ‘protect children.’”
Mike Stabile, the Director of Public Policy at the adult industry trade association Free Speech Coalition, says that furry and other NSFW artists have been some of the most vocal activists in fights against censorship and cultural homogenization.
“On the internet we’ve all been corralled into a few public spaces, and there has been a gentrification of the internet,” Stabile tells Them.“Like we see with Pride, once corporations start showing up, the communities that were there originally get targeted, get de-platformed, get demonized, and eventually get pushed out.”
Jaspering says he has had to branch out in his work since 2020, after furry conventions briefly shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Even when the conventions reopened, he found it much harder to work full-time as a furry artist within the changing social media landscape.
“I don’t want to play the algorithm. I want to make good comics,” Jaspering says. “I’ve had to censor my comics, even my non-pornographic ones, you’d still have to jump through hoops and you’d get in trouble and have no idea what to do. It’s a hassle. I’m just trying to tell a story.”
For people who grew up on DeviantArt and early internet spaces like it, there’s a nostalgic twinge to seeing the 25th anniversary of the platform pass by. It’s an artifact of a bygone era, one that set the stage for everything good and bad about modern internet culture. It was also the setting for countless queer awakenings and the place where many LGBTQ+ artists got their start.
“I miss the old internet so much,” Brennan says. “There are things you can do on a bigger screen that you can’t do on a little one. Maybe that’s a dying thought, but to me, I’ll always need to see DeviantArt on a giant screen. Because I need to see every detail of that Sonic fan art.”
