Bah... yeah, but there's nothing wrong with pursuing greater economic opportunities, either. Quite sure all of our resident artists would agree.
Correct. There are characters I have created that I sometimes won't even share with any of you because I would never want them associated with a tickling gimmick, narrative, or used as a tool or prop (in this case a tickling prop) and thus cheapened and restricted somewhat in how they can evolve. Tickling stories and plots are very shallow (and often times so are the characters themselves), and they oftentimes never make the character all they could be, which is why artists do occasionally take their characters to different places or recreate them so that they might have a new lease on life. My characters mean alot to me, and I'm sure 316 feels the same way, which is most likely the sole reason Jipsy is no longer available to the fetish community. Same thing with Tomato Dragon's Stipplewitz character. We make these characters, and whether we introduce them to you or not, they are creations we hold dear, and creations we would never want to jeopardize in any manner, both now and in the future.
It isn't even necessarily so much about wanting to make money off of these characters or going professional with them. That would be just one reason. There are any number of reasons that would make up a decision to pull a character, and you're all smart enough to guess what at least a couple of them are. One thing that is certain, however, is that even characters made as tickle toys can become more than they were intended to be and become more special to the creator as time passes. In any case, we feel a need to protect our creations because in our fantasies and minds they are real, and creatively speaking, as artists, they are just as special to us as a real person would be, but they cannot represent or defend themselves. Therefore, we have to make the decisions for them and we act in their best interests.
I consider all my characters a part or facet of me, so I would hope others can appriciate and respect what artists like 316 and myself are doing...whether the reason is simple, personal, complex, or a little bit of everything.