The purpose of this thread is to share and discuss creative figures we consider to be inspirational or exceptional in some positive way, even if they may have other flaws. I want to talk about a number of people but it seems like a bit much effort to write a whole thread about some semi-obscure person, especially when I don't have that much to say about each one. I use the term creative instead of artist to allow a broad category of creation that some may not consider art. I have a bias towards modern independent artists because what they create tends to be a part of their identities, and I find the sacrifices they make for the sake of their work interesting and sometimes tragic, but feel free to discuss professional, famous, or dead artists if you like.
Wildbow/John McCrae:
Breathed life into the heavy carcass of the superhero genre by writing his epic Worm, which was published serially from 2011-2013 on his blog. Not only does he write at an astounding pace that makes novelists considered to be prolific look lazy, while compromising very little in the way of quality (some typos fixed after publishing and occasional repetitive phrasing), he also evidently must do a lot of planning behind the scenes to develop his realistic worlds with immense casts of hundreds of characters, each with fleshed out personalities and motivations. He managed to repeat this feat by writing two more stories and two sequels of equivalent length and quality (the sequels are bad, albeit) set in other elaborate original worlds that depart entirely from capeshit. Worm's characters and setting are compelling enough that a person who thinks they hates capeshit such as myself can easily enjoy it (although it's a harder ask to commit to reading something so long). Worm was his first major work and was intended as something experimental, before it started receiving attention. The way a web serial is published is similar to a fanfic, and there was nothing special to begin with about a superhero setting, so only Wildbow's talent and discipline could have been the distinguishing factor that elevated Worm above AO3 fanfiction. I think Wildbow created something great simply by being very good at core writing fundamentals and trying very hard, I couldn't point to any single plot decision or trait of the story that is especially innovative or amazing without the surrounding context, and I suppose that is just how writing works.
Pseudolonewolf/Tobias Cornwall:
Released the Flash game MARDEK RPG (Chapter 1) in 2007 at the age of 17, and over the next few years went on to release 2 more chapters (but not the 8 chapters that were originally planned). For a Flash game from that era, MARDEK was impressively polished and had a lot of content with at least 30 hours of playtime. He drew, animated, composed, wrote and programmed everything himself, and appeared to possess effortless talent in all of these domains. He programmed his own forum from scratch which went through various iterations and had some unique features. He was a very sensitive individual and consciously posted about this, developing an interest in personality typology. He at first engaged deeply with his fans and posted rambling, obsessive blog posts about his thoughts and projects. However, he ended up alienating himself from his community who he perceived to be insufficiently sensitive and "young thinky males" ("thinky" here means the "T" in the MBTI personality typology). He secretly created other forums with the intention of attracting the type of woman who would accept him after a Deviantart lesbian broke his heart, but this proved unsuccessful. For a while he only responded online to posts made by women, citing a "phobia" of men. In the more-than-a-decade since MARDEK, he made promising-looking progress on other projects, but never managed to finish anything impressive. Recent and not-so-recent posts on his blog (all forums were taken offline years ago) portray a Tobias that is as isolated, tortured and neurotic as ever. Since he may read this, I should clarify that I don't believe his struggles result from any sort of personal failing, in fact I view it as a failure of modern society that he has been reduced to this state. An artist with this much potential should have been given the resources and institutional network to achieve his creative visions, as well as social status which he could use to obtain a wife and prevent tick damage from social isolation.
Andrew Hussie:
Wrote Homestuck, which you have probably heard of. The work began as a webcomic casually posted on a forum which took reader-submitted commands and later direct suggestions, but escalated into an elaborate and incomprehensible epic that was constrained only by Hussie's ability to continue publishing pages. His productive output was characterized by periods of intense activity followed by hiatuses. During his longest hiatus it seemed like he lacked confidence in his ability to write a satisfying conclusion to the story, and the released ending was somewhat unsatisfying. It isn't surprising that the latter half of Homestuck declines in quality given how much he attempts to pull off, but even though Homestuck does not deliver on its promise I find his ambition to create and endlessly expand the story's scope inspiring. The original premise of the story (a boy bored in his room) was Perfectly Generic, although the story incorporates a large number of references. I would argue that the fractal genre-defying mass the story became was not meaningfully derivative of other works as much as it is a product of both Hussie's passion, as well as that of the fanbase (who contributed a lot of Homestuck's art and music under his direction).
EthosLab:
A Youtuber who started uploading Minecraft videos right around the advent of the game's beta in 2010. He has a Let's Play series which has been running since then with over 500 episodes, although this is not especially interesting on its own. What I find notable is that his videos are the opposite of clickbait: the titles are always plain and descriptive and he almost never uses thumbnails. He only uses simple editing techniques also. However this is not due to laziness, since he demonstrably puts a lot of effort into ensuring his videos' content is entertaining. He discovered the "hopper clock" which is a widely used redstone structure, and on occasion shows novel and innovative designs for farms and machines in his videos without making a big deal of this. He seems to live by some intuitive, aesthetic, ethical sense which has allowed him to resist the Molochian MrBeastifying drift of modern Youtube (and its particular sway over gaming-related videos). I think EthosLab is a serendipitous accident who can only exist because he happened to start making Minecraft videos at the exact right time before the game took off in popularity. Someone of his immaculate moral character could never have run a successful channel if he started uploading even a year later. It takes years after his first video for him to stop speaking monotonously and structure videos more efficiently. If he was not fortunate enough to collect his free Minecraft Beta following a decade ago, he would not have made the morally and aesthetically disgusting sacrifices necessary to compete with other Youtubers, and would have remained unknown. He most likely did not even plan on his videos achieving modest popularity (they took off pretty quickly), since the description of his very first video suggests that he was recording so his friends could watch. He also used the headset he mentions buying in that description for almost a decade until it fell apart.
Wildbow/John McCrae:
Breathed life into the heavy carcass of the superhero genre by writing his epic Worm, which was published serially from 2011-2013 on his blog. Not only does he write at an astounding pace that makes novelists considered to be prolific look lazy, while compromising very little in the way of quality (some typos fixed after publishing and occasional repetitive phrasing), he also evidently must do a lot of planning behind the scenes to develop his realistic worlds with immense casts of hundreds of characters, each with fleshed out personalities and motivations. He managed to repeat this feat by writing two more stories and two sequels of equivalent length and quality (the sequels are bad, albeit) set in other elaborate original worlds that depart entirely from capeshit. Worm's characters and setting are compelling enough that a person who thinks they hates capeshit such as myself can easily enjoy it (although it's a harder ask to commit to reading something so long). Worm was his first major work and was intended as something experimental, before it started receiving attention. The way a web serial is published is similar to a fanfic, and there was nothing special to begin with about a superhero setting, so only Wildbow's talent and discipline could have been the distinguishing factor that elevated Worm above AO3 fanfiction. I think Wildbow created something great simply by being very good at core writing fundamentals and trying very hard, I couldn't point to any single plot decision or trait of the story that is especially innovative or amazing without the surrounding context, and I suppose that is just how writing works.
Pseudolonewolf/Tobias Cornwall:
Released the Flash game MARDEK RPG (Chapter 1) in 2007 at the age of 17, and over the next few years went on to release 2 more chapters (but not the 8 chapters that were originally planned). For a Flash game from that era, MARDEK was impressively polished and had a lot of content with at least 30 hours of playtime. He drew, animated, composed, wrote and programmed everything himself, and appeared to possess effortless talent in all of these domains. He programmed his own forum from scratch which went through various iterations and had some unique features. He was a very sensitive individual and consciously posted about this, developing an interest in personality typology. He at first engaged deeply with his fans and posted rambling, obsessive blog posts about his thoughts and projects. However, he ended up alienating himself from his community who he perceived to be insufficiently sensitive and "young thinky males" ("thinky" here means the "T" in the MBTI personality typology). He secretly created other forums with the intention of attracting the type of woman who would accept him after a Deviantart lesbian broke his heart, but this proved unsuccessful. For a while he only responded online to posts made by women, citing a "phobia" of men. In the more-than-a-decade since MARDEK, he made promising-looking progress on other projects, but never managed to finish anything impressive. Recent and not-so-recent posts on his blog (all forums were taken offline years ago) portray a Tobias that is as isolated, tortured and neurotic as ever. Since he may read this, I should clarify that I don't believe his struggles result from any sort of personal failing, in fact I view it as a failure of modern society that he has been reduced to this state. An artist with this much potential should have been given the resources and institutional network to achieve his creative visions, as well as social status which he could use to obtain a wife and prevent tick damage from social isolation.
Andrew Hussie:
Wrote Homestuck, which you have probably heard of. The work began as a webcomic casually posted on a forum which took reader-submitted commands and later direct suggestions, but escalated into an elaborate and incomprehensible epic that was constrained only by Hussie's ability to continue publishing pages. His productive output was characterized by periods of intense activity followed by hiatuses. During his longest hiatus it seemed like he lacked confidence in his ability to write a satisfying conclusion to the story, and the released ending was somewhat unsatisfying. It isn't surprising that the latter half of Homestuck declines in quality given how much he attempts to pull off, but even though Homestuck does not deliver on its promise I find his ambition to create and endlessly expand the story's scope inspiring. The original premise of the story (a boy bored in his room) was Perfectly Generic, although the story incorporates a large number of references. I would argue that the fractal genre-defying mass the story became was not meaningfully derivative of other works as much as it is a product of both Hussie's passion, as well as that of the fanbase (who contributed a lot of Homestuck's art and music under his direction).
EthosLab:
A Youtuber who started uploading Minecraft videos right around the advent of the game's beta in 2010. He has a Let's Play series which has been running since then with over 500 episodes, although this is not especially interesting on its own. What I find notable is that his videos are the opposite of clickbait: the titles are always plain and descriptive and he almost never uses thumbnails. He only uses simple editing techniques also. However this is not due to laziness, since he demonstrably puts a lot of effort into ensuring his videos' content is entertaining. He discovered the "hopper clock" which is a widely used redstone structure, and on occasion shows novel and innovative designs for farms and machines in his videos without making a big deal of this. He seems to live by some intuitive, aesthetic, ethical sense which has allowed him to resist the Molochian MrBeastifying drift of modern Youtube (and its particular sway over gaming-related videos). I think EthosLab is a serendipitous accident who can only exist because he happened to start making Minecraft videos at the exact right time before the game took off in popularity. Someone of his immaculate moral character could never have run a successful channel if he started uploading even a year later. It takes years after his first video for him to stop speaking monotonously and structure videos more efficiently. If he was not fortunate enough to collect his free Minecraft Beta following a decade ago, he would not have made the morally and aesthetically disgusting sacrifices necessary to compete with other Youtubers, and would have remained unknown. He most likely did not even plan on his videos achieving modest popularity (they took off pretty quickly), since the description of his very first video suggests that he was recording so his friends could watch. He also used the headset he mentions buying in that description for almost a decade until it fell apart.