We don't often dive into this side of the fandom, but since so many of the people we post every single day have ventured into the NSFW world for extra income to fund their art careers, it has a pretty big effect on art as a whole.
I'm keeping this one below the page break. This won't be going into any kind of explicit details, but like the Tumblr ban a few years ago, it does cover a mature project. Read more below.
Patreon is apparently in the process of shutting down one of the biggest pony pages. A project dedicated to creating a NSFW VR game called Besti. With well over a thousand patrons and a pretty massive pile of income every month, it has been going strong on the site for about 4 years now, albeit not always in this form.
Skunk Frakker, the creator of Besti, apparently received the green-light to keep the project active there back in 2018. He even worked directly with them making changes to be sure everything was up to code, including sending DMCA's to a few websites for featuring content that Patreon was not alright with.
Apparently as of March this year, they have changed their mind on the matter. The Besti team has had limited access to post to their patrons, causing a lot of people to think updates have been abandoned. Patreon contacted the team with a warning. For specifics:
"Per our guidelines, we have zero tolerance for the glorification of sexual violence, and this includes depictions of sexualized minors, non-consensual sex, incest, and bestiality. This extends to any shota or loli content, since this type of content exclusively references characters who are minors. - Patreon
The warning continues on to request that Skunk Frakker contact them when the necessary changes are made. At first it was the human and pony interaction that they were not on board with. After a few back-and-forths with Patreon support, including asking if swapping the characters to furry versions would be alright, they eventually landed on the idea that the pony model in particular is the issue. Two furry characters or a human and a furry would be fine.
They eventually pulled up old tickets with someone Skunk worked with back in 2018, followed by apologizing that the information he received back then was incorrect. Apparently the employee no longer works there, and according to current management, Besti never should have been approved in it's current state due to the characters being too horselike, particularly in contrast to the human characters.
Unfortunately in the end, they simply asked him to either make a brand new game, that has nothing to do with Besti, or leave the platform entirely.
Unfortunately this leaves Patreon as a whole in a weird place for artists. It's no secret that adding NSFW content can make or break an artist there. Quite a few of the best in the fandom have started off making almost nothing until they added it. While the Besti case was largely focused on the human interacting with a pony aspect, they do seem to consider the My Little Pony model in general to be a form of bestiality.
Like most company PR groups, it once again looks like we are in a situation where they can't explicitly say specific things are acceptable or not, keeping it vague so they can freely remove things, rather than giving artists a solid foundation on what is and isn't right. Especially when different employees at the company seem to approve of different things.
For now at least, "clop" seems to be in a weird place for Patreon. If you are an artist who tends to draw ponies with humans, it is most likely a good idea to no longer include that content on your Patreon. For everyone else, being branded as violating their guidelines for "bestiality" seems to be somewhat of an unknown unless you only draw furry versions of the characters.
