People still do this, lol. I've gotten some pretty epic heat from writing a BL.
But yeah, I get both sides on the fandom thing. It's not just writing, either. There's a long-standing awareness in the art community-- particular among those of us who do a lot of commissions-- that crappy fanart will make you more money and attention than really good OC art. Obviously good fanart will get even more money and attention than bad fanart, but still.
All that aside, I've seen beef both from writers and artists in this community for a while now. Artists don't feel valued, writers don't feel valued. It's a bit of a subjective field and naturally, the individual skill level should really be the deciding factor with both sides.
But I do think there's a big discrepancy. Only once in a while do I see artists looking for writers. I very often see writers looking for artists. As was mentioned earlier here, one of the big factors is that most artists who do comics are also writers. Anyone can tell a story.
Problem is, a whole lot of folks don't realize their stories aren't that good, and that goes for both sides. But with art, there's a lot more technical aspects, it's easier to describe what's wrong with a picture. Anatomy or what have you. A story that just isn't good, is harder to critique. It's not impossible to critique, but I feel it tends to take more effort than what the average stranger is willing to spare. So we have a whole lot of bad writers who don't know they're bad writers, who want artistic skill level rivaling Miyazaki films.
If you can draw and you can write, even somewhat decently, then you understand how much time it takes to do both.
If you cannot draw and only write, you are less likely to understand the amount of work it takes to draw a page.
And then the overwhelming majority of writers come in here with no scripts, no real experience outside of fanfics or Naruto knock-offs that are pretty low-level, running auditions for artists of a caliber they can't compare to, expecting everyone to just be aware of their greatness as a writer, offering Exposure Pay(TM).
So artists are generally upset that they are undervalued because... they are. As an entire populace, basically, by the overwhelming majority of 'Looking For Artist' posts that they are constantly exposed to.
Writers are generally upset because they are undervalued because they're constantly reminded they do less work than the artist, nobody is looking for writers, etc etc, which is also true. The overflow of bad writing has drowned the ones worth working for.
Neither group is wrong. The problem is that there are SO MANY abusive/uppity/bad/inexperienced/demanding writers that it's just damaged the experience for everyone.
Sidenote: There's also a lot of really bad art, and I don't want to overlook that. I consider my own work barely at the level of acceptable for a professional comic. The overwhelming majority of canvas artists are just not skilled enough to be publishing and also tend to be oblivious and have a lot of the same issues with the toxic writers mentioned above. But since writers are so much more common than artists, they have to face wading through all this bad art/not skilled artists to find a single decent one and have less options. I actually have a hard time on this site with the way a lot of comic critique goes. I have seen countless critique requests where people focus on all these minor things like, "oh gosh, I think you should maybe just touch up your lighting", when the anatomy is atrocious and the art is genuinely just hard to even look at. But I've rambled enough here.
