From the very beginning of DeviantArt’s history, a blend of erotic poetry, roleplaying, kink, and fan art formed the foundation of the niche platform’s original content. The community spawned several notable memes and, more importantly, entire careers for artists who have gone on to work for such established institutions like The Simpsons and DC Comics. But alongside the proliferation of more heteronormative art, DeviantArt also flourished as a virtual home for queer, trans, and nonbinary teens and young adults seeking an online haven.
DeviantArt was part of a burgeoning internet ecosystem that encompassed transformative fan works, which also included websites designed for publishing fanfiction, like Archive of Our Own; in fact, those stories were sometimes accompanied by DeviantArt illustrations. While some of the most popular shows and franchises on DeviantArt centered on straight characters, their online fan communities often reimagined them as queer. For example, the anime Naruto was one of the most popular fandoms on DeviantArt, and the gay ship “SasuNaru,” which paired the characters Sasuke and Naruto, was once one of the most-tagged keywords on the platform. There was also a deluge of drawings on DeviantArt featuring the characters Dean and Castiel from Supernatural, Sherlock and John from Sherlock, and Tony Stark and Steve Rogers from The Avengers. Fans also obsessed over canonically gay pairings, like Kurt and Blaine from Glee.
The DeviantArt of 2025 is a dramatically different experience today. When you join the platform now, it asks you to specify what kinds of art you’re drawn to, including fandoms and subcommunities of kink. You can set a filter to block explicit content, if you’d like. And it asks if you’re interested in creating AI art. A significant chunk of DeviantArt’s user base had already started to migrate elsewhere before it embraced generative AI in 2022, but since then, Wootmaster said “it’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to DeviantArt.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t so much of it,” he says. “AI completely overwhelms the output of any individual user with endless pictures, endless variations.”
Wootmaster says that AI tools put NSFW artists who work on commission at an even further disadvantage, because customers who don’t want to pay for original work can have infinite versions of their kinks generated for free. Last year, Slate reported that AI bot networks had been able to scrape and harness DeviantArt for material and profit over the human artists who built it into a success in the first place.
