I never said artists could change their style to hide from bad reputation. I understand that they can't. I just said that it's not easy for buyers to do that, either. As a general rule, furries are very emotionally invested in their characters. They're not going to deliberately create a generic one just to repeatedly "hide", or create new ones and drop the old every time they need a new name, because most furries aren't wired that way. Their characters are their preciouses. And while furry is large-ish fandom, it's also a pretty small world. Even fairly generic characters will be recognized - look at Allen, who is basically just a plain black wolf in a doo-rag.
White knights kind of prove my point. Public complaints are the only recourse a buyer has when a commission goes badly and the 45 days are past, and public complaining is really pretty useless. Popular artists will draw a ton of defenders and whiteknights, every letter the buyer ever typed will be scrutinized while the knights make a ton of excuses for the artist, etc etc etc.
That's why people get so twitchy about the 45-day window. Because if it passes they are basically just screwed.
To reply to your comment below, I'll repeat that I never buyers shouldn't be expected to pay until the work is done - just that the "pay in the full upfront" system does kind of screw buyers over and leave them without any protection, and a split system (i.e half upfront half on sketch approval) is much fairer and doesn't put the artist at any additional risk (because even if the second half of payment never shows up, the first half is enough to cover work done on the sketch).
no subject
As a general rule, furries are very emotionally invested in their characters. They're not going to deliberately create a generic one just to repeatedly "hide", or create new ones and drop the old every time they need a new name, because most furries aren't wired that way. Their characters are their preciouses. And while furry is large-ish fandom, it's also a pretty small world. Even fairly generic characters will be recognized - look at Allen, who is basically just a plain black wolf in a doo-rag.
White knights kind of prove my point. Public complaints are the only recourse a buyer has when a commission goes badly and the 45 days are past, and public complaining is really pretty useless. Popular artists will draw a ton of defenders and whiteknights, every letter the buyer ever typed will be scrutinized while the knights make a ton of excuses for the artist, etc etc etc.
That's why people get so twitchy about the 45-day window. Because if it passes they are basically just screwed.
To reply to your comment below, I'll repeat that I never buyers shouldn't be expected to pay until the work is done - just that the "pay in the full upfront" system does kind of screw buyers over and leave them without any protection, and a split system (i.e half upfront half on sketch approval) is much fairer and doesn't put the artist at any additional risk (because even if the second half of payment never shows up, the first half is enough to cover work done on the sketch).