Art's beauty comes from meaning. Robbing art and using it without meaning loses that beauty. Yet people still choose to bathe in it. URIJIN, a monster that does not know what it is. It steals body parts, organs and skin from its victims, ridding them of natural beauty, as it sews it onto itself in a fruitless attempt to achieve even a fraction of the beauty of an individual to. It attempts to ressemble a Scratch Cat, striving for the iconism and fame that comes with the mascot of Scratch. Everyone who encounters it does genuinely view it as Scratch. But underneath, there is nothing. No sickly intestines or a beating heart of passion. Just nothing. No feeling, no empathy, no thought. Only the desire for beauty without an understanding of what that means.
if its not obvious (or you cant read) its a big ol metaphor for how i view the current state of sehs and scratch exes, AND and why i hate it (and maybe an anti-ai message now that im looking back lol) sehs was really important to me. its been how ive made close friends and most importantly, grown with my art and writing skills. HOWEVER, its since been riddled with shameless and poor attempts to "scratch-ify" pre-existing media (cough cough popular sonic exes) with little to no original ideas even considered. i have never liked scratch mixes, exes/characters/creations that attempt to riff off the popularity and good elements of a piece of media and steal it for your own, and while there have been a small handful of cases where a scratch mix has had its own original way of adapting a concept to be its own unique thing, the fact that this is all the community is reduced to saddens me greatly when there was once a time where people actually cared about original works instead of using half a brainfart to create 2011x but scratch for the one millionth time i am the owner of scryptepedia but i am tired of attempting to enforce a standard that is ignored in favour of easy to make, soulless slop. many of the managers and former members share this view which is the reason many have moved on despite still caring somewhat about silly stupid evil scratch cats. all i can really do is ask that, to whoever read ALL of this (good job you get a gold star), please strive for something uniquely you in your works, and dont simply rely off the works of others. generic cliche? lean hard into that. scratch mix? either adapt it further to scratch or make it original. many creators have done this. unoriginal? no you arent. everyone has originality and creativity within them. take INSPIRATION rather than copying someones homework. like someones style, their ideas, their elements? take multiple inspirations and create your own identity, rather than take, take and take.
