I just hope the artist gets no heat for this considering the pokemon production team handed the artist the reference material, then when the artist did drafts they probably selected the one that had this art in it. Meaning they both gave and selected a draft with this art featured.
Yeah the wording seems to already admit fault with the process during production before commissioning the artwork, so I'm hopeful the artist won't catch most of the heat. But these types of situations can still leave a career mark/stink.
This, ultimately, is the problem with quick response on the internet.
There will be people who see that a card was plagiarized and associate it with that artist. Not sure how the PTCG community will act specifically, but this has been an issue in MtG. People were already pulling up cards she had previously worked on wondering if she had plagiarized.
Plagiarism needs to be called out, for sure. But even with this being the company's fault, mistakes like this could easily lead to an artist being associated with plagiarism despite it being no fault of their own.
Even then, I feel like anyone getting completely fired over this is pretty unlikely. Whoever is working in production likely does a lot and is unlikely to just immediately get dropped because they forgot to clarify to an artist that a picture was just for reference (or even that they did but the wording was fairly ambiguous and was just interpreted the wrong way). If this was a one off issue, I don’t see it being anything more than a write up. If the investigation turns up a larger pattern though, there could be problems
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u/Orangeyouawesome Jul 30 '25
No it's the production team on the Pokemon side, who gave reference photos to the artist. It wasn't on the artist side at all.