“Tone Deaf Racist Boring Gay Artist” — A Brief Explanation of Song Inkollo

It’s an annoying little truth online these days that sometimes you’re cooked before you even really get started. While some creators get lucky and find a following, or a hate-following (yikes…) others end up just fizzling no matter how much content they manage to churn out. Sometimes this is no fault of theirs, they’re just in the wrong place, wrong time, or creating for an unstable niche. Consider me, for example, drawing pin up Nazi kink for the like 7 people who like it on BlueSky while everyone else is there for my reposts of Leftist hopecore. Unfortunately for some creators, they’re looking to be ubiquitous and it is their fault that they’re not. They treat themselves as a commodity like some wannabe Taylor Swift might, turning themselves and their image into a product that should be easy for a broad audience to consume without becoming problematic or even in any way interesting.

Inevitably these people can’t keep up the song and dance of bland conformity. We all have personality and opinions and if you’re really trying to repress them, they end up leaking out the sides and taking your audience (or prospective audience) by surprise. This very thing happened to cartoonist Song Inkollo (inkollo.bsky.social), a slice-of-life queer illustrator in France who creates art that is at best a comfortable normalcy and at worst a dull hum-drum of stiffly-posed diary comics. As the main character, Inkollo draws mostly three to four panel blocks that highlight elements of his life as a gay man. Unfortunately for Inkollo and his audience, his life is really fucking boring. Worse than being really fucking boring, our intrepid cartoonist has shocked his mostly-queer audience with some rancid hot takes that missed their mark big time.

It turns out that if you’re a queer artist, most of your audience is going to be other queer people, a lot of whom are also creators whether they be artists or writers or hell, woodworkers or bookbinders. Birds of a feather flock together as they say, and most of the time you’re going to cultivate a decent following just by the nature of your identity and how you present yourself to others who think that maybe one day you’re going to understand them enough to be relatable and fun to be around. The malleability of that audience and what they’ll put up with when it comes to absolutely shit ass motherfucking takes is variable…especially when your art isn’t all that great to begin with. Unlike those who’ve made some massive missteps in the past (here’s to you, Snegovski), Inkollo doesn’t have an already-massive following built on a portfolio of beautiful, solid artwork and can’t coast by losing a decent chunk of audience. So when he came out with a highly-offensive drawing denigrating the trans community (specifically trans women), it didn’t matter that he was mildly successful among his fellow queers—he was just some guy being gross on the internet.

In addition to right-wing trash posting, some of his other comics feature elements that don’t land well with a large amount of the queer crowd. While it’s understood that gay men have their own kinda “thing” going on in certain places and their culture can definitely have some gaps in acceptability, it probably isn’t a stretch to say that outright misogyny is usually looked down upon. At least one of Inkollo’s comics featured a side character referring to a woman as a “vagina” while also decrying her ugliness and unworthiness to land an objectively good-looking husband. This blatant dehumanization of women, and especially women who don’t match up with current standards of beauty, hit pretty sideways with the general public on Twitter.

Alongside his problems with the LGBTQ+ community, he’s been cultivating a pretty strong reaction among critical POC users, especially those of Asian descent. Inkollo, after all, is allegedly a Chinese man living in Europe who draws himself as white. Twitter user @theobromic_ referred to the way he draws himself as “the blue eyed crackersona” and implores, “t’es pas un blanc my brother in rice”. Another user expressed shock at the discovery that Inkollo was POC, stating “This is how i find out that he’s not white??? This is the first time i seen someone racebait as white” [sic]. After one particular round of criticism a year or so back, he decided to put out a t-shirt design with his character flashing a thumbs up, his shirt listing him as “Tone Deaf Racist Boring Gay Artist” which is apt, I suppose and I figure he should just wear this shirt wherever he goes so he can find his people.

Former followers and patrons to his Patreon have lamented that though some of his comics were entertaining in the past, they had to leave him simply due to the boundary-crossing he does when it comes to what some users call “brain rot” and “anti woke nonsense.” Every so often his real thoughts would slip out from between the cracks in his wholesome “white” gay man persona and when they did, it was often far too much too quickly. Whole comics about how much he hated the reboot of Sex and the City because it’s “woke crap” (did he watch the original series???) and an instagram post about how much he doubts women who accuse high-profile men of sexual harassment have been brought up when former followers chat about their negative impressions of his politics, their disappointment in his conduct apparent in their tweets.

If this all wasn’t embarrassing enough for him, Inkollo has taken all of it a step further in his attempts to mitigate his increasingly negative online presence. In August of this year (2025), he posted an alleged spread of an article which featured an interview where he addresses “rumors” circulating about him on SocMed. He states, “[…] I’ve felt like a punching bag for a part of the gay community online. […] I don’t like rumors, and I don’t know how to make them disappear. […] the more you try to explain yourself, the more people believe it’s true.” Ironically, it’s rumored that this spread was a complete fabrication and that no one actually even interviewed him. More than that, the photos utilized have been accused of being crated with generative A.I., with some users on Twitter and BlueSky suggesting that he specifically asked it to give him less Asian features so that he could appear more “white.” Even his alleged boyfriend Joe seems almost a fabrication. Evidence used to back this up included several shots in which the A.I. was unable to keep a consistent height differential between the two of them and leaked former profile pictures which show him to look wildly different to how he’s portrayed in the alleged magazine photos.

Sadly, the nice people of BlueSky now have to contend with this guy (oh, brother), though they don’t seem to be taking to him very well as the “rumors” of his past transgressions have preceded him. If these statements weren’t made by Inkollo himself and he didn’t draw the comics that have been found tactless and off-putting to his potential audience, I suppose he’ll have to somehow overcome these wild falsehoods. If he didn’t use A.I. to alter his appearance for a fake magazine article, I suppose he could put that to bed quite well with an unaltered image of himself posing with the open article in front of him (with a hand-written index card with his name and the date on it of course). Barring that…well, what can he say? His own merch professing himself as a Tone Deaf Racist Boring Gay Artist seems to say right out loud everything we might need to know about him, doesn’t it? I mean, god, I’ve been called “racist” often enough but I certainly ain’t reveling in the accusation, am I?

Some advice for Inkollo, not that I’m qualified to give it: It might behoove you to talk to a professional about this. A real one. Not Chat GPT. And if you want an interview (a real one), I’ll send you over some questions. Everyone loves a good dumpster fire.