Artist: pawsta (locked)

Staff members involved: Lafcadio, spe, IsFaputa

Pawsta's work was first brought to attention by janitor Song on 2025-07-16 after the upload of post #5711757. They theorized that a recent takedown by the artist may have been done to avoid AI-related accusations. Lafcadio could not find supporting evidence for this theory, but instead found evidence of a Bluesky post by the artist commenting on Alex Taylor's suicide by cop, describing it as "natural selection" before being deleted. The e621 takedown was filed on the same day as the post and screenshot.

On 2025-11-25, Lafcadio brought Song's message back to attention after seeing post #6001397, considering it immediately suspicious based on stylistic resemblance to other generations of Asriel. Further investigation revealed nearly three-hundred posts with suspicious metadata in addition to the stylistic issues. Other points found included:

• depictions of Lucario that flipflopped between more amateur and more suspicious, with some depictions being more on-model and others being pokémorphs with specific hair styles.
• depictions of various other Pokémon and characters consistent with generative materials.
• a small number of posts with a "painterly" style that was notably distinct from much of their gallery.

The deletion of these posts was then handled.

On 2025-12-12, the artist reached out to Strikerman, looking to clear the record so that they wouldn't have any "AI-assisted/generated" deletions when they finally decided to stop posting art to e621. As part of this message, Pawsta shared a link to their Picarto stream.

This was shared with Lafcadio, who then spoke to Pawsta to facilitate the appeal process by explaining how submitted files were handled. The artist sent a pair of compressed archives including some source files and works-in-progress for post #5976747 and an unpublished piece depicting Red XIII. Although the artist had described them as sketches, the WIP for post #5976747 demonstrated similar linework to the final product, and the unfinished Red XIII art had no such thing: the existence of human-made sketches was not proven.

Lafcadio responded saying that he considered other posts to be more suspicious. He asked about artistic history prior to the artist's first upload on 2024-02-09, source files for several suspicious posts including Asriel, Lucario and more, and potential recordings/VODs of past streams. Secretly, he watched the stream, confirming that Pawsta was still working on the Red XIII fanart submitted as evidence.

Pawsta submitted a reply with:

• an e621 account name and a few Discord screenshots tied to an alternate alias of theirs, showing a few drawings that were not in-style with their current work. While these did demonstrate prior artistic history, there remained a lack of consistency.
• an offer to make a recording of the stream.
• testimony explaining stylistic differences as being self-taught, and eyeballing character and pose references.

Noting that the artist did not make any mention of the request for source files, Lafcadio gave an ultimatum: the new works were matching generative media in a couple different ways, the new timeline still couldn't prove the artist's legitimacy, the lack of sketches was concerning, and the stream failed to prove legitimacy in other works. At best, only the Red XIII art could be accepted as human-made.

Just before Lafcadio sent his final DMail, the artist put up a Fur Affinity journal titled "Stream Idea for new Artist (especially for Neurodiverse)", where they invited artists to join them for a stream where they would be finishing uncolored bases and sketches. While the artist themself justified this as a way to have multiple people work from the same starting point, it would create a convenient excuse for them to start another stream by having skipped the sketching process.

The artist sent a final reply accusing him of flawed methods, not watching the stream, etc.