A Note from Dov

When I started making anime Sims characters, I did it because I thought it would be fun. I'm a big fan of the Tenchi Muyo OAV series so I decided to try to make Sims characters for the Misaki household. They came out really well and I had fun making them and playing with them in The Sims.

Then I posted them on Otaku World and people tried them out and loved them so that was fun too.

Soon I started getting requests for more anime Sims characters. Some were polite. Some were enthusiastic. Some just said "fuck you for not making the character I wanted you loser you better make sephiroth right now". But most were polite.

There were a LOT of requests for Sailor Moon Sims.

I like Sailor Moon okay. It's not my favorite series or even in my personal top ten. I've only seen the first couple of seasons and some of the movies but it's an okay series. I knew I'd keep getting a lot of requests unless I went ahead and made some Sailor Moon Sims and I thought it might be worthwhile to try to make so many people happy.

More the fool I.

In March, when Otaku World's financial problems became so severe that we had to choose between going to a subscription-based system or shutting down the site completely, I hoped that some of my Sims fans would enjoy my work enough to try to help us out. And some did. Some.

But other people decided that it was somehow wrong and unfair for me to want to survive by selling my own artwork. I received a huge number of angry letters calling me every dirty name in the book.

Many people started pirating my Sims characters. Never mind that every single one of them contained documentation that very clearly said not to distribute them anywhere else. No, to those people it was more important to stop me from selling my own artwork.

For a long time, that really took all the fun out of it. I started to feel that, if my work was not just unappreciated but deeply resented, if people actually hated me for making high quality skins and then not being rich enough to give away bandwidth for free, I felt that I should just quit making skins.

I changed my mind.

It took time to get over those bad feelings and, while I still feel the pain of that time, I'm getting over it and finding my way back to the fun of skinning again.

As I write this, I've just finished adding Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus. I'm planning to make Pluto, Saturn, and the Starlights too. Maybe I'll go back and try to make some casual outfits for everyone as well.

After that, I'll probably switch to some different series. If I tried to to everyone from Sailor Moon, I'd never finish!

I'm thinking about Ranma 1/2 or Oh My Goddess for my next project. Or maybe Child's Toy. I'm still deciding.

Don't ask me when the next skin will be done! You can't rush these things and still expect them to look as good. So I can't tell you when they'll be done but I will tell you that they will be done.

Respectfully,
Dov Sherman