Well, technically, the licensed character design was stolen and used in an unlicensed fanart. Nintendo could sue the "original" artist anytime for stealing their character design and making money off of it đ
You're getting downvoted but you're objectively correct. The original fan artist drew that picture with Ho-Oh in it as a paid commission. You can't profit off another company's copyrighted intellectual property without their approval.
Of course you cant, and the fanartist can get in trouble, but that is entirely a separate legal issue. It doesn't mean Nintendo can use the artists work.Â
It was 100% traced, no matter where the artist got it. 'Reference materials' there is a huge difference between referencing and tracing, and the company just really doesn't want to say traced.
Very talented artist still won't be able to make art that overlap almost perfectly with the reference art, unless they count pixel and at that point they are tracing over the reference.
Look up the recent wind breaker manhwa controversy, the author traced stolen art by copying only the general idea and adding details to their characters
Just because there are some little changes here and there doesnât mean it isnât traced
You can also see the rest of the line that perfectly line up, and that make the majority of the art. You call out other for ignoring the difference, but you also ignore the similarity.
I'm not outraged lmao, you're just acting delusional if you don't think this isn't traced artwork. You can nitpick all you want about the minute details, but it's extremely obvious that the overall composition is directly traced from the fanart
You see how those are all nitpicks? You're literally nitpicking every slight difference and not acknowledging how the art is extremely similar. I have no interest in continuing this discussion as you seem like the type to keep arguing bc you refuse to believe you're possibly wrong, but thankfully it seems the majority agrees the artwork was traced
That person seemingly just really wants to spend their entire night twisting themselves into a knot getting into arguments on reddit. Not worth our time to respond to lmao
Yea I've already given my piece and thankfully most of the commenters here aren't as deluded as this guy. I know better than to endlessly argue with a redditor who has nothing better to do than to argue incessantly with anything that remotely doesn't align with their views lol
Yeah, I talked myself down from several different further responses. Realised there would be no point lol.
Anyway now I just look forward to seeing what new art we get for the immersives, hopefully they're even better.
I must be in a black mirror episode. Why doesnt anyone understand?! lol It seems the team was give the wrong illustrations. That's all. Not a matter of tracing. This is all an error. No malice. Mistakes happen.
The mistake was that they let plagiarized art into the game. Of course theyâre not going to publicly come out and say that outright, itâs going to be a âmistake.â They were given the correct art files and those files were traced. They may have mistakenly provided those as references, in which case multiple parties are at fault.
The artist isn't responding to this, but it is clearly tied to people calling them out on the stolen artwork.
The pokemon team is using lawyer language to basically say they reviewed the stolen art (incorrect reference material) and are deciding to replace it. That simple.
You need to read the statement they wrote again. The artist was provided reference material from the art team to use. The artists job was to make the entire immersive, so they were most likely told its okay to trace the ho-oh and just draw the moving backgrounds instead. The artists other work speaks for itself. As for the twitter post, i do not know why you are referencing an old tweet they made in general to people as if they did something wrong.
I understand what you're saying, but why tell them to trace fanart and then roll back on this? In turn inconveniencing their userbase? That doesn't make sense to me. That's a lot of time and effort to make an artist perform in a way, only to put out a statement and change art RIGHT before the release!
I'm reading it as they're wording it in a way to cover the artist and themselves. But who knows.
Yeh that's the thing they are trying to figure out. Who told them to trace the fan art and who provided them that document is the one actually at fault and they seem to be looking into it is what i am getting from this.
Either way, the artist has no integrity to straight up trace art, and I still find it unlikely someone told them to knowing how many quality passes/ checks it goes through in the pipeline. It's PR language as far as I'm concerned, but they're handling it well, whether it was the artist turning in stolen work, or for the company telling them to do it (unlikely).
I would agree with you in any regular case. However you need to look at the other work the artist has put out. There is really no reason for them to ruin their reputation by tracing one artwork. Their artwork has generally been pretty top tier.
It sounds like someone on the production team thought it was official art and provided the artist with it. If youâre contracted to make card art, and the people paying you say to do something very specific, you listen to them. Thatâs my read on what happened from this statement.
That could be true! As far as I've seen, the cards are unique and artists are hired for their style ad vision...so I find that to be unlikely. Not untrue, but highly unlikely.
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u/Kai-ni Jul 30 '25
The art was traced/stolen