Now, I've had my artwork nabbed before for everything from avatars to banner work to video games (yes, really), and I never felt anything more than vague amusement and maybe a little bit of pride because somebody thought my work was good enough to "borrow" for their own (non-monetary) purposes.
Today that changed.
Someone on another board privately let me know that a DeviantArt user was using my modified Gatchaman artwork without permission. I went to take a look, expecting that someone had edited the images to make my character, Miya, look like their own OC making out with Joe the Condor. I fully expected to check it out, and privately message the artist asking them to give me credit for the original image (since it's fanart, I don't feel like I can scream about copyright infringement too loudly, especially since a lot of the poses in my old work were derivative of advertisements and other poses in images anyway).
What I found was a lot worse. A LOT worse.
I'm not going to name the person here, but this individual has been dumping hate on this one particular character on DA for years. I mean, seriously, I haven't even written any Gatch fic or drawn any fanart for the past fifteen years. But this person has posted hate about Miya all over DA and even tried to start a hate group that focused on her. Because Gatch is so obscure and nobody usually cares about an old OC, it failed.
So what did this person do? She took at least a dozen of my old Gatchaman fanart images (probably more, but I could only easily recognize about that many for reasons later described), edited my character to be as ugly and tarty as possible (heavy makeup, streaked hair, and GINORMOUS breasts), and posted them on her DeviantArt account. This goes beyond plagiarism and way beyond parody. I know I shouldn't be upset, not about a character, but I am. I'm even more upset that she took my art and befouled it for such awful purposes.
I reported all the images that I could recognize, so hopefully they'll be taken down. Even so, it was a horribly pissy thing to do. And this person is NOT twelve; she's been stalking me for the past five years at least. I used to think it was funny. I don't anymore.
I'm going to go curl up in a corner and cry now.