Photoshop Skephalo Kiss

Fan Art
Title:	miss you
Artist:	Abandoned by Creator who wishes to remain Anonymous
Date(s):	2023
First Published:
Medium:	Photoshop Digital Art
Genre/Style:	Romantic Shipping
Fandom:	MCYT RPF BadBoyHalo & Skeppy
External Links:
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A piece of digital photoshop art depicting MCYTers BadBoyHalo and Skeppy kissing (see Skephalo for more about their ship). It caused brief drama in the Youtubers' combined twitter fandom known as HappyTwt. The drama was centered around the reoccurring argument of whether it's boundary crossing to produce romantic RPF fanworks (which it is not with these particular creators) with the added spice of if it was specifically boundary breaking to make realistic fanart or use AI (although the artist said it was not AI done and produced the original photo they photoshopped from to prove it, as there was some question on if it was AI from the shadows on the fingers).

One of BadBoyHalo's twitch mods, and who also collaborated with him in designing official merch, named Mid_Daze, deactivated their twitter account after getting into arguments with happytwt over this image. Mid_Daze was concerned that photoshopped images, AI and deep fakes like it could be used to trick people into thinking Bad and Skeppy were actually a couple.

Happytwt took their concern for how it could be boundary crossing to make photorealistic Skephalo art into Mid_Daze simply being against romantic Skephalo shipping in general, calling them homophobic and a hypocrite for having drawn romantic Skephalo art in the past. It also started a brief trend mocking them by tagging Skephalo kissing art with "/p" for platonic.

Another one of Bad's mods, Rurus, asked Bad specifically what he thought and reported back in a Twitter thread.

Hi Happytwt,

I have been taking stock of the current situation on the timeline. As it seemed prudent to have clarity on this subject, I have had a conversation with BadBoyHalo on hyper-realistic edits, drawings, along with pieces otherwise passing as a ‘deepfake’.

Currently, Bad isn’t sure yet how he feels about hyper-realistic or convincing photoshops/art that could be mistaken as a genuine photo of himself and/or Skeppy. This is a new degree of complexity to his stated ‘fanart’ boundaries, that he has not previously seen/come across.

It might take him some time to come to a definite conclusion on how he feels about it. He is not currently strongly against it, but neither is he completely okay with it either.

Regardless of where he eventually lands, when having discussions with other Happytwt members, it is important to incorporate Bad’s first and foremost request when dealing with ANY member of his community, or those outside it - with kindness and respect.

We need to remember we're all a part of the same fandom and we all have the same goal. Even when we disagree on how to handle things, it is not okay to attack people over it, especially his friends, because his number one request is that we be kind to each other and others.

Even after things had calmed down, some people believed Mid_Daze was being overdramatic for deactivating and also for insulting happytwt by saying happytwt's priorities were fucked. People also said Mid_Daze overstepped by assuming and trying to speak for Bad and Skeppy, insisting that Bad or Skeppy needed to be the ones to set any boundaries and that the manip was fine since only explicit NSFW would be breaking Bad's boundaries.

the reason mid deactivated was cuz when they said that making those edits are something fucked almost noone agreed with her so she said our priorities as a fandom are fucked up and decided they were done with their twitter account /gen

Tweet summarizing the situation posted Feb 25, 2023

The artist also deleted the work and apologized for having made it.

Romantic RPF Skephalo kissing fanworks seem to spark a fresh debate a couple times a year, usually because of new fans or outsiders clashing with old fans and simply because of the stigma around RPF in general. This work was unique in that it was old fans clashing with other old fans over it and debating the morality of the rarer manip artform and AI art that's not often seen in this particular subfandom.