Art Fight is an annual month-long online art competition between two teams. Anyone can join, and they can choose which team they join, or be assigned a team randomly. Artists are meant to submit their original characters (OCs) to the website, and other artists are meant to submit drawings of those OCs (called "attacks"). There are no restrictions on whose OCs can be drawn. Drawings of OCs gives points to the team of the artist who made the piece, and the team with the most points at the end wins, of course.
Art fight is meant to encourage people to draw more and for people to receive art of their OCs instead of being a serious competition, but there are people who take it very seriously and want their team to win. There are no prizes or rewards for Art Fight, monetary or not.
The way artworks are scored is that the artist who submits the artwork chooses which scoring criteria apply to their own artwork. So all the artworks are self-scored. Different scoring selections affect the final point total of an attack. For example, when evaluating the shading, the artist would select between "unshaded", "minimal shading", "single-tone shading", and "multi-tone shading". In general, more detailed and polished artworks score more points. Additionally, drawing more characters in the same artwork gives more points. Full rating guide here.
For example, a half-body character artwork that was a rough sketch, uncolored, and with simple shading and no background would score 0.93 points, which is on the lower end of points. Meanwhile, a half-body character that had clean lines, clean color, multi-tone shading, and a simple background would get 42.79 points, which is on the higher end.
Before I describe the drama, there was a previous post about the topic, but I don't think the author of that post really conveyed why people were upset about the situation. I'm doing this write-up to hopefully clarify it.
In 2019 (Dream vs. Nightmare) (wrap-up blog post), the artist sunminny submitted the drawing (CW: fuzzy toy worms) "wormy night" (link without login) for team Nightmare, a version of van Gogh's Starry Night made out of fuzzy worm-on-string characters. It scored 16651.39 points and had 3,296 characters in it. That is absurdly large compared to all the other artworks submitted. The next highest-scoring artwork (link without login) by petdoom had only 2580.46 points and 230 characters. However, those 230 characters were all different characters. "Wormy night" had 3,296 instances of the same character. And it was a simple worm that took a lot less time to draw than the more complicated characters in other high-scoring artworks.
However, "wormy night" technically did qualify to earn all those points. There were no rules regarding multiple of the same character in one image. There was a character limit however, and "wormy night" exceeded it, so it initially had to be broken up into three different submissions to fit all the characters. The moderation team of Art Fight ended up approving of the artwork's massive character count despite that.
Now, the next part is about the community reaction to this. However, most of the info I have is from Discord messages from the Art Fight server as that's where the community seems to be. It seems that some channels that were around in 2019 are no longer available, so I was unable to find Sunminny's posts from the time. I've screenshotted all the Discord messages I did find and linked them, removing identifiable information.
It definitely still took a lot of effort for sunminny to draw all 3,296 worms - in the description of the piece he says it took him three days straight to finish it - but some people felt that it was unfair for it to have such a high score compared to all the other artworks with much more detailed characters. [1] Also, "wormy night" was on the winning team, and the final score of Art Fight 2019 was 2,029,075 to 2,044,246, a different of 15,171 points. If "wormy night" wasn't submitted, it was possible that the other team might have won instead. [2] There were also lower-effort copycat submissions with lots of simple characters meant to gain lots of points for minimum effort. [3] Additionally, drawing thousands of the same character seems to some people to go against the "spirit" of Art Fight, as people are encouraged to draw different people's OCs. [4] And then there were people who just felt the image was uncomfortable to look at. [5]
However, it seems that most people in the server today don't mind "wormy night." [6] [7] [8] [9] After all, art fight is a low-stakes competition, there are no prizes, and it's made clear in the About page that the point is to have fun drawing, not to win. In fact, a worm mascot was created for Art Fight! [10] Nowadays, "wormy night" is brought up in the Art Fight Discord as an example of a complicated, detailed, and impressive piece. [11]
Currently, the Art Fight rules only allow up to 100 characters per submission, possibly to prevent it from happening again despite the mods allowing it the first time. Sunminny is still active on Art Fight and drawing art for it as of 2025, despite the initial negative reception to "wormy night". He also made a sequel to "wormy night" in 2020, called "the great wave off catagawa" (link without login), featuring several distinct characters with many more details than the worm. Additionally, the owners of the site have changed two times between 2019 and 2025 today, and the views on artwork like "wormy night" have probably changed based on the new character limit. So in the end, it's unlikely that there will ever be another piece like "wormy night" in Art Fight.
Thank you for your submission to r/HobbyDrama !
Our rules have recently been updated to clarify our definition of Hobby Drama and to better bring them in line with the current status of the subreddit. Please be sure your post follows the rules and the sidebar guidelines, or it may be removed; this is at moderator discretion. Feedback is welcome in our monthly Town Hall thread.
Please be aware that NO AI generated posts are allowed on this subreddit (per rule 8)
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
This may be the ultimate hobby drama. I care so much about something I had never heard of until five minutes ago.
lol thanks i'm glad you like the write-up!
I'm so glad I know about this now.
Also, Wormy Night is, while indeed uncomfortable to look at, quite brilliant.
Do you think it would be less uncomfortable to look at if they were different coloured worms? (E: Or more colour variety)
Yes, I think it would be!
That would ruin the joke of it being 3,296 of the exact same character, though š¤£
It couldnāt be 3,296 of a blue-green worm character?
E: it really is uncomfortably fleshy
Nice to see some relatively chill drama for a change. I have some level of respect for people who bend the rules to the point of absurdity while still colouring within the lines, thus exposing a flaw in the rulebook. Especially since Sunminny is a legitimately good artist who still whole-assed the piece.
No, wormy night didn't have any lineart, so Sunminny was coloring outside the lines š¤£
Same opinion of it. I think they deserve the full points for being damn creative not only in the art itself but in playing with the rules and scoring system. Bonus of getting to name a new rule after them for next year.
as a Certified Artfighter i get why some people were bummed out by wormy night (and it does set off a weird fear in me just looking at it) but in the end its harmless
Yup! Though there's Art Fight drama that's slightly less harmless than this one, I might do a write-up about it in the future.
Me: aww, I like a fuzzy worm on a string, I don't think I need that content warning! Let's go look at the image!
Me, shortly afterward... this makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable. Too many. Too many!
Yeah š¤£ on the surface it looks like an orange version of starry night, but instead of brushstrokes we have worms. And sunminny made sure to detail the eyes on every single worm! š is there a worm version of trypophobia?
I think itās just a bit too close to flesh/meat colour so itās giving offĀ āmade of human skin leatherā vibes
Yeah, the colours not being the brighter Starry Night colours I was expecting really didn't help - it's like everything's made of worms and also we're in Hell, which is an uncomfortable combination! Genuinely impressive execution, though, which I think justifies it (as when I saw the premise I was expecting something way lower-effort)
Ok my new canon for this art is that it depicts a new circle of hell, where you are tortured by infinite spirals of skin worms until you give in and become a skin worm to torture newcomers.
IDK what sin one commits to get to this circle of hell, but I welcome suggestions.
It also almost looks like it's moving.
as someone who participated in art fight that year, talking about wormy night always manages to make me a touch bitter, but maybe that's just me being terminally online lmaooo
it made me feel like it was a little more pointless to keep participating just because there was no way for my team to catch up. like, wormy night was impressive but it was literally just worms on a string!! it kind of put a damper on the rest of the event that year, but subsequent changes to how points are tallied and displayed over time really did help to prevent a wormy night 2: electric boogaloo.
this is not an indictment on your write up by the way, i love seeing art fight drama outside of the art fight community!
Thanks! It's nice to hear from someone who was actually there at the time!
āWormy Nightā is giving Junji Ito in the best way haha
Yes!! Thatās exactly what it is! The spirals!
iāve always wondered why āwormā is considered a prominent character type on artfightās little profile cards! the more you know
Worms were just popular in general at Art Fight at the time, it's probably why sunminny chose a worm to draw
Looking at Wormy Night and the runner-up, the worms are a lot more impressive to me on technical level?
Petdoom's piece is just a bunch of characters slapped into a drawing, like a five-year-old putting stickers of cartoon characters onto a previously-empty landscape painting. Obviously not without effort, but clearly trying for the same "fuckload of characters" score manipulation that Wormy was criticized for.
Wormy is a re-imagining of a famous piece of existing art, sure, but it looks to me like the placement of each worm had a lot more thought put into it than Petdoom's character placements did. And that Catagawa piece is genuinely excellent.
The complaints about it come off as quite silly to me.
There were no points granted for composition. So the placement of the characters doesn't matter at all for scoring.
If I understand correctly, this is the dumbest aspect of this whole thing: a scoring system for art that has no qualitative assessment.
EDIT: no Iām wrong - it seems like the self-chosen scoring is qualitative somewhat in the categories e.g. unshaded, partially shaded etc. Weird way to assess art but I imagine not without precedent. But it is weird if these categories preclude an aesthetic assessment beyond this categories, whether thatās character placement, conceptual value, or just an overall sense of impact.
There were 369,057 drawings submitted in 2019. I assume the scoring is the way it is so the organizers don't have to score all the artwork themselves.
Haha yeah ok Iād do the same if was the organiser.
Anyway, thanks for posting this. Itās pretty interesting how the comp got āhackedā. I like the winning piece btw, and the later cat-wave one even more.
lol the submissions have increased, this year had 2,753,001 submissions š¤£ Nowadays, there are so many contestants that a single art piece won't make a difference, no matter how many worms it has.
Hi I can answer this! Itās based on the idea that level of rendering is correlated to time and effort spent on a peice. Think about how artists charge different amounts for a sketch vs a fully shaded and coloured piece
It's not supposed to be.based on quality it's supposed to be based on effort
Efforts a valuable criteria, but weird to exclude quality for an art competition. Some artistās effort is more skilled than others.
art fight is less about being a competition and more about drawing other peoples ocs and getting your ocs drawn.
There's a lot of amateur artists and/or children on art fight. I don't think it would be a good idea to score them on quality because most of the artwork would have a low score, and all the scores are self-reported. I think that keeping the scoring criteria based on more strict stuff like sketch vs clean lines is better since there's no reward for winning art fight. And the goal is get people to draw, and having to score your drawing as "awful" or whatever might make people not want to draw.
Fair. My experience is with more traditional art awards. These donāt get publicly scored, but the judges can use private scoring to find the winner and commendations, shortlist etc. More often than not they just argue with each other until the loudest voice gets their way.
I both agree and disagree with you. So much of the online art community is really elitist and exclusionary, so it's nice for a no-stakes event to not really score on quality, which is subjective.
I mean, plenty of people would say a Rothko is a very quality piece of artwork. Is it?
Since the prize is pretty much just getting fanart of your OCs I think it's fine the scoring is more based on the most objective metrics they can be.
Yeah I agree. I think Iāve said in another comment that my experience is at the other end of spectrum with visual art prizes that are very competitive. But yes itās important that art is accessible and also finds non-judgemental appreciation. There should be a range of forums. Using quantitative metrics is a bit weird but if it encourages artists to work free of the fear of being subjectively judged thatās all good.
It's not a competition for an individual piece of art, its just a fun chill competition between two giant teams. Quality itself isn't scored to make it accessible for everyone, and also because assessing quality on that level would be an insane undertaking.
But yeah that just isn't the kind of competition it is. It's just something to encourage people to draw more regardless of their skill level.
It's scored the same way an artist would charge for commissions online (cheaper to have a sketch vs fully shaded, chaper to have a headshot rather than fullbody, extra charge for props or backgrounds or additional characters", it makes more sense if you are in that community. it's not meant to be like an art student event it's for people to draw each others' sonic OCs and fursonas
It's so ingrained in that community that I believe in the first few years you used to get way less points for doing lineless art (as if you put in less effort just because you don't use lineart) and there was no category for 3D submissions, but they do take people's feedback into account every year and try to make it more fair as it gets more and more popular
Sorry for replying 12 days late but art fight is a for fun competition not a technical skill competition. Itās supposed to be friendly for artists who are like 12 years old and have eyes taking up 80% of the face. It would be kind of a turn off for younger beginner artists if they could only get a max of like 10 points while other artists were churning out 100s of points. The whole idea is putting in effort is what really matters (this is why there is a polish option that basically just says you worked really hard for this result)
Art fight really is more just an art gifting game that has a silly competition attatched to it to encourage peopleās competitive spirit. There is a lot of people for example trash talking the other team and threatening to gift them art. But I donāt think most people are really in it to win. The only āprizeā is a little badge on the website you can display that says you were on the winning team.
The whole vibe of art fight is more about gifting art to others, and usually itās an agreed upon unspoken rule that you only count each oc in a piece once. If wormy night used 3296 different worm on string ocs I guarantee it would have slipped by without much controversy. The catagawa piece is considerably more in the spirit of the event. Not arguing the technical aspects at all, just hoping to provide some insight on the āspirit of the eventā and community norms
Is that really an unspoken rule? Everyone I've seen says the opposite, if you take the time to draw a character multiple times you deserve the points for both figures, it's just like if you had done 2 attacks and submitted them separately.
Iirc there's even an official rule somewhere that if you draw generic characters that aren't even anyone's OCs, you can include them in the score by resubmitting the OC's id
Yeah seconded, it is highly encouraged to add the character multiple times if drawn as such in my experience
i don't think there are even 3295 other worm on a string OCs even if they were popular at the time š
omw to make 3295 worm ocs
Maximilian
Minimilian
Middlemilian
I actually want a print of The Great Wave off Catagawa. Like, immediately.
I completely understand the reaction others had, especially since it was a near last minute entry, that many worms whilst impressive is absolutely a pain to have lost against
smh my head someone on the other team should have drawn Self-Portrait out of 3296 worms to even it out
I think you may be a victim of your own success; none of the no-login image links are loading for me.
Thanks for letting me know! I didn't want to use imgur since UK users wouldn't be able to see the images, so I used imgbb, but I guess it's pretty slow.
As a UK user and sometime ArtFighter, thank you. They loaded fine for me, but maybe I just lucked out.Ā
If you have Discord, message the links to yourself. Whatever this imgbb is, it's ridiculously slow but somehow discord's embeds bypass whatever artificial slowdown the site implements
This is hilarious. I loved Worms On A String as a kid and I'd buy prints of this if I had a place in my flat to hang it, lol.
And hey, art fight sounds kinda fun, maybe I'll participate next year. It was mentioned now and then in the scuffles, but I hadn't understood what it was really about. The "draw other people's OC" part. The most interesting part.
Thanks for the post, that's what this sub is for.
Djwormo Unstringed
omg I was team Dream that year but don't interact much in the discord (I'm only in it for pings so I remember the competition starting + know the theme!) I had no idea we lost because of this haha
That's hilarious actually, sharing this to my friend who was team Nightmare as a petty thing (if you see this Pearl, Hi<3)
I would hang Wormy Night on my wall
Iāve never heard of any of this before, but Wormy Night seems evidently superior as an actual work of art. I can imagine seeing this piece in a modern art museum. The other one shows some technical skill and obviously hard work, but itās exactly the same quality-wise as half the drawings on Deviant Art.
Personally, I think there are many other artworks submitted to Art Fight that year that just as good as "wormy night." I just chose petdoom's piece because it had the second most points that year.
For example, PrizzaCJ's piece (called ALL. WOMEN. ARE. Q U E E N S) with 162 characters and 2408.9 points is great as the artist posed most of the characters in a way that reflects a personality. Additionally, there are lot of small details like ruffles on clothing or braids (though it might be hard to see since it's all jpeged). The overall composition is just a bunch of characters standing in a line though, so it's sort of the opposite of "wormy night". "Wormy night" has a good composition, but not much detail was paid to each individual character. Meanwhile, PrizzaCJ's has a boring composition but all the different characters and posed and detailed.
You should probably include that in the post, that's genuinely incredibly good
IDK, i thought it would be too subjective to post artwork i personally like
Sure, but wormy night succeeds not only on a technical level, but as performance art. Itās a genuinely transgressive piece that yielded a passionate response from viewers, yet likely wouldāve been disqualified had it not been so well-executed. People feel things when they look at it, theyāre fascinated or repulsed by it, they want to talk about it. It started a serious conversation within the community that led to changes in scoring. Itās become a historical event worthy of retelling.
It sounds crazy because the stakes are so low, but those are all hallmarks of genuinely great art. One might even argue that Art Fightās quantitatively calculated score, in this case, was also an accurate reflection of wormy nightās quality.
Remember kids, it's not how you place, it's how many paragraphs you add to the rule book!
Honestly, 'wormy night' may be god-tier shitposting. I love it. Fucking peak.
I've always been in the camp that Wormy Night is against the spirit of ArtFight on account of the character being secondary to the overall art of the piece (as the character is used more as the medium rather than the subject/focus) but as a rule stickler I do have to admit that technically it's fine
That being said I hope it never happens again lol
Don't worry, there's a limit of 100 characters now! People talk about recreating wormy night on the discord but it just wouldn't be the same without thousands of tiny blob-like characters
This is quite possibly the funniest thing ever
PUT š WORMY š NIGHT š IN š THE š LOUVRE š
I love Wormy Night
Im an artfighter and i love wormy night :3 i think it happened in the first year i participated.
Before reading this, I just have to say it's cool to see artfight mentioned. I got to participate last year, on team Crystal. I was way too busy this year to do anything, as I was finishing up my college studies that month.
Thanks! I made exactly one drawing for Art Fight this year. Not because I was busy, I just forgot š
Thank you for including links to the artworks that don't require login!
Ok but that drawing is amazing though
Wormy night definitely haunting my nightmares tonight
I joined deviantart in 2007 and this is the first time in my life anyone has bothered to explain what the fuck artfight is. Everyone I follow was always joining it and none of them ever said what it was. I always assumed it was something like the invite-only Secret Santa events.
www.google
So THAT'S where the worm on a string memes came from...
worm-on-a-strings were just generally popular at the time, it was probably why sunminny drew one
oh I was well aware of that, I love the little guys. I just noticed they seemed to become their own sort of character type on ArtFight alone and yeah this whole time I thought it was simply just because they were funny and simple
Wormy night gave me a visceral reaction, it's an evocative piece. I wasn't sure what I was looking at in the second image. Admittedly, this is my first exposure to this comp. I think the new character limit is reductive. There don't seem to be any parameters. Wormy nights is unlike I've ever seen before. Others trying to mash up a number of characters into their piece and expecting the same scores is ridiculous imo. Wanting to win is natural but it's wild to compare the two and expect equal marks
Wormy night didn't earn its points because of its composition or technical skill, it earned the points because of the thousands of characters in it. For Art Fight, skill doesn't matter for scoring, only the number of characters. Trying to judge the artwork like a normal art contest won't work since none of the pieces were designed for a normal art contest.
No one expected to get the same high score as wormy night, that's why it was so surprising. I don't know where you got that idea from.
I think a character limit of 100 is far more than anyone is going to draw unless they're specifically trying to draw thousands of characters.
Ah okay. I misunderstood the drama
The one part of this I'm not following is why "worm on a string" counts as an OC and not as an existing IP/character (like Sonic).Ā
Is there a comic or something that features a worm on a string character?
Original characters don't need to have appeared in a comic to be drawn for art fight. In this case, another user drew a worm on a string OC and it was valid for art fight. Worm on a string is just a toy design, not a copyrighted character.
There were lots of bits of art involving worms on a string inserted into classic art, wasn't there? I remember Worm with Pearl Earring being especially good.
Worms seemed to just be popular in general š
Wormy night deserved that W it's so CLEAN! The runner up has such boring character designs and an even more boring composition.
I guess you're right that it was the "runner-up" in that it had the second highest amount of points, but Art Fight is not a traditional art contest where the skill of the artist is evaluated. The artists are not competing as individuals, but teams. Art Fight is meant to encourage artists to draw other artists' characters. It's not fair or relevant to criticize the artist of the runner up for boring designs when they did not design the characters in the first place.
There were many other art pieces submitted to art fight as well that year, with good composition too. They probably had a ton of effort put into them as well. It's too bad that art fight blocks non users from viewing the artwork š
This is hilarious tho!
Do sumth like the 3/5th act when counting them lmao
i mean how many points wormy night got, even a reduction like that wouldn't have made the other team win š¤£
Lol, so basically the person who had fuzzy worm as his OC let his team down by having such a simple to draw OC
the fact that every art fight after this clamped down hard against stuff like this is why it stopped being fun. like what is even the point anymore
I'm not sure what you mean. Most people doing art fight don't want or need to draw thousands of characters.
I wanted to do it! That was some of the fun to me was just figuring out creative ways to jam as much characters from all over the site into massive pieces. They really drained the fun out of doing stuff like that and as a result it just felt like a month of art trades which was significantly less interesting.
I saw someone this year complaining because the mods were removing their artwork due to the 'no point farming' rule, like an attack that was a still life intending to portray the idea/aesthetic of the person's OC with objects (which was against the rules because it didn't technically include the character anywhere in the piece)