If you take a screencap, trace over it with vectors, and apply the color and shades identical to that screencap, can you really call this "original art?" The way I look at it, it comes off as making anime fanart while someone is holding your hand. In other words, you're just tracing. You're not putting any real effort into doing anything more than just a mere duplication.

This sort of thing has been spreading around like wildfire for the past months, and I question how something so cheap can be passed off as art. I love how I have spent so many years of my life struggling to draw my own stuff in my own style, only to be overshadowed, along with many other talented artists, by people (not artists) who trace screencaps from Naruto, Bleach, and every other freaking Japanese cartoon that lacks any form of plot or substance, if not both.

Of course, there are lots of that stuff floating around, and I know that I do rag on anime styles (thanks to biased tards who try to tell me how to draw because they don't like western styles). Some of these artists are actually good at it, and they will at least do it by drawing, inking, and coloring the work in their own style. I can think of many who do this and are overlooked thanks to wannabes who really have no business doing art in the first place.

But I can't entirely put the blame solely on those who try to pass off these anime vectors as art. I mean you got the otaku floating around DA, ready to kiss the asses of anyone who submit this garbage. A good reason why something is lingering around like a bad stench is because of the audience; along with their lack of artistic sense and taste in anything related to it.