Korean artists pretend to be Japanese to draw Blue Archive art

Have you ever stumbled upon an artist on Pixiv who draws like the gods themselves, has a Japanese name, and zero personal information on their profile? Well, hold on tight, because you might be admiring the work of a terrified South Korean. It turns out that a ton of high-level Korean artists are pretending to be from another country for a rather dark reason: if they are caught creating NSFW content in their homeland, they could literally end up behind bars.

The real risk of ending up in jail for a drawing

The legal situation in their country is no joke. While in Japan freedom of expression is much more relaxed regarding adult content, in South Korea, strict laws are an absolute nightmare. To give you an idea of the level of risk, police recently arrested an artist in the middle of an in-person event just for selling an 18+ doujin of Blue Archive. And we're not talking about a simple fine to scare people; there are already records of illustrators who served sentences of up to three years in prison for crossing the line. Over there, censorship shows no mercy, even when it comes to purely fictional characters.

In order not to abandon their passion and continue making a living on the internet, these talents took the only logical way out. They completely erased any trace of their mother tongue. Nowadays, they create fake accounts with pseudonyms in English or Japanese and communicate exclusively in those languages. This whole drama exploded a few days ago when a Japanese user innocently asked why there was almost no Korean erotic art, sparking a wave of confessions that left the otaku community speechless upon discovering who was actually behind the screen.

Did you imagine that your favorite illustrators had to operate almost underground just to be able to draw in peace?