I'm back with another post about Art Fight! This time the drama is not about any specific artwork, but rather the management team instead.

Quick summary of Art Fight: it's an annual art competition where contestants are divided into two teams and anyone can enter. The more artwork the members of a team draw, the more points the team scores and the team with the higher point total wins. There are very low stakes, as there are no rewards for winning. For more information on the rules, check out my previous Art Fight post.

Now, onto this post's drama: A user going by "Takaia" took over the development of Art Fight in 2014 after the previous owner was not able to continue. While Takaia did not invent the concept of Art Fight, they are considered the founder of the current iteration of Art Fight (more info). Takaia was the owner of Art Fight until 2023—nearly a decade—and the reason they stepped down is the drama that this post discusses. (Takaia used they/she pronouns at the time of the drama, but as there's no way to contact them now, I will use "they" for Takaia as I see it used in the more recent news updates.)

Art Fight has grown into a fairly large event over time. In 2023, there were 258,279 participating users and 1,221,665 "attacks" (artwork submissions) made. Additionally, Art Fight accepted donations from its users to pay for costs associated with running the site. Art Fight was registered as a sole proprietorship, and Takaia, the owner, handled all the money. All the other staff members were volunteers. To be clear, they signed up as volunteers and did not expect pay.

There was a noticeable lack of transparency from Takaia regarding the finances of Art Fight. They did not communicate effectively about it with anyone, including with other staff. This caused the users to think that Takaia was embezzling the money—spending it on personal things instead of on the Art Fight website.

Additionally, users noticed that reports on the site were not being addressed, leading to a massive (thousands of reports) backlog. As there were lots of new reports daily, and many lower-ranking staff members did not have the permissions necessary to resolve the reports, users blamed Takaia for not supporting the staff better. There was also a lack of moderation on Discord: some users were banned by mistake, and others were not banned despite violating the rules. Users also questioned if the money was really being spent on the site, as several features, like blocking NSFW for minors, were not fixed for years (source).

A news update addressing financial concerns was posted on Oct 6, 2022. It was submitted from Takaia's account, but refers to them in the third person and is signed as "The Art Fight Team." The post clarified that Art Fight was not a non-profit and had never been. Most of the donations were going to the site, and the money left over that went to Takaia as compensation was not enough to be a fair wage. The lack of money meant that Takaia could not hire an accountant, so it fell to Takaia to do all the financial calculations. Takaia was not good at it, so the Art Fight staff stopped posting the financial breakdowns to prevent harassment. I should also note that Takaia did not post the other news posts around this period; other staff members were the ones giving updates on Art Fight. All-in-all, the post didn't really change the perception that Takaia was embezzling funds instead of helping run Art Fight.

Then, on July 22nd, 2023, two admins, Axel and Turtle, resigned from the team. As Axel was the lead artist of Art Fight and the two had posted many of the recent news posts, people were rather confused why this happened, especially since no reasoning was given initially. People started documenting the situation—I have taken a lot of information from this Google Doc. Additionally, this happened in the middle of that year's Art Fight, so there were a bunch of people who decided to not continue participating (source).

Takaia made a Discord announcement on the Art Fight server publicly addressing the issue. They apologized and stated that people should be respectful of all staff, including former staff, and to not speculate. They reassured people that Art Fight would go on as usual. That was the only announcement made by Takaia about the situation to the userbase (until Takaia announced their resignation later).

Takaia posted a financial breakdown in the staff-only channel on the server, which was then leaked by a former staff member whose permissions hadn't been revoked yet. Takaia claimed that of the $70k of donations Art Fight received in 2022, half of it went into the site, $4,800 went to Axel (one of the admins who resigned earlier)—for artwork, not for admin duties—and $9,000 was paid as taxes. That left $24k (by my math it's $21,200, but I don't know what caused the discrepancy) and Takaia stated that they put the remaining money into savings so that it could be used for Art Fight at any time. Additionally, Takaia stated that they became physically disabled in 2022 and could not work a job outside of running Art Fight.

However, Takaia's statements did not seem to reassure the userbase of Art Fight or the staff. Eventually, 16 staff members left the team in total. On July 25, 2023, Takaia stepped down as owner of Art Fight and gave ownership to Axel and Turtle. Art Fight 2023 then concluded as normal.

On October 6, 2023, a news update was posted that explained the staff members' perspective on the issue. Axel and Turtle stated their reasons for leaving were lack of financial transparency and that the site's development was stagnating. (As mentioned earlier, those were the same issues many members of the community had with Takaia.) The staff denied that Takaia was embezzling funds. They also stated that Takaia being paid from the Art Fight donations was acceptable, and Takaia's pay was only around $12/hr, less than a living wage.

Also, Art Fight was no longer a sole proprietorship. It was now an LLC, co-owned by Axel, Turtle, and a former head admin who had left earlier, Rainy, and they had hired a former volunteer developer to improve the site. Additionally, they would no longer be asking for "donations", but "contributions" instead, to make it more clear that they were not a non-profit. They would also use alternate methods to obtain funds besides contributions, such as merch and sponsorships.

The post ended with a message from Takaia, apologizing to everyone and thanking the staff that didn't resign for managing Art Fight 2023. As Takaia owned several back-end services for Art Fight, the new owners decided to move them into a support role during transferal of ownership, and Takaia would leave the team once that was accomplished (source).

On March 8, 2024, there was a news update posted about the finances of Art Fight. The post detailed the budget for the previous year of 2023, the plans for the budget in 2024, the plans to sell merch, additional features to be added to the site, and stretch goals for funding. The co-owners stated they were not going to be paid for running the site like Takaia had been, and other staff members would be compensated with free merch by those members' request. After that, the staff consistently posted updates about Art Fight's finances and changes and/or new features added to the site. In 2025, Axel and Turtle stepped down from being co-owners, leaving Rainy as the sole owner of Art Fight. Currently, the site is much more transparent about finances and maintenance than it was when Takaia was the owner.