Character Theft

Though it was a different medium and a long time ago, I've had people steal my characters for their roleplays, graphics and faceclaims. I've had to report many people for use of mine and my friends' images and worse yet, when people just straight up drew fanart of my characters, they'd eventually just start claiming their appearances for their own ocs.

Watermarks at least decrease the chance of taking an image/character because it looks nice. But people can be assholes no matter what sometimes. It pays to take those measures nevertheless.

No it personally hasn't happened to me. 

But if you feel protected by watermarking everything, then by all means you should do so!

Or another option others do, is set their characters to private?

Hasn't happened to me, or at least I'm not aware of any! I feel like character theft is usually a burden of people who are actually known and/or have really unique looking OCs, neither of which I am nor have haha. But yeah I think watermarking decreases the chance, even though people can and will crop and edit images with varying degree of quality to make it seem like they did it / they're off the hook.

I haven't had it happen. Kind of. I've had someone take a person from one of my OC's past and make a character out of them without permission just so it would be a forced love interest? I've also had people start talking like my character unironically at one point.

Although I'm constantly paranoid about that lol

I just recently had someone on DA steal one of my ocs and it was found out because of the watermark...:'3

I'm so paranoid of this happening ;_; I generally keep all my stuff watermarked (aside from head shots/busts) to decrease this but it has happened to a few of my good friends and it's honestly just frustrating to see all around.

I chose not to watermark chibis I commissioned of my characters and someone immediately uploaded them to dA to try and sell them as adoptables.

Many years ago, before I even signed my art, I posted an adopt preview on tumblr (background and everything on it too) and it was posted up to dA 2 hours later with someone trying to sell that character.

While watermarks may not discourage all forms of theft (aka people who trace and sell art on merchandise :/) it can discourage people looking for a quick buck like the aforementioned issues.

I commissioned someone to draw a character of mine. It was a chibi, and someone decided to rip the chibis since the artist uploaded them in batches. Then try to sell them. I had to go through this whole thing with the person who had bought them. It was not a fun time.

@sakuragx4nina

Omfg, that's awful and scary! Especially about the person you commissioned, that's all kinds of awful.

Thieves suck. I've had my OCs bashed but not stolen

Not recently (I only started commissioning for my ocs earlier last year) but when I was younger and roleplayed a lot, people would steal my rp characters often. To be fair, I had them all open to the public on that website so it was really easy to just copy paste their info and pictures lolol. In certain cases, they were blatantly copied and pasted, while in others people would take "inspiration" and use the same name, picture, and general history + personality but at least written differently.

I always confronted them (when I caught them or if my friends told me about it), and they would wither under confrontation lol.