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The 'Avant/Gay'* Scene - A Genesis

  • info56598806
  • Aug 23
  • 5 min read

It’s extremely hard to talk in concrete terms about a scene that is still emerging. It’s also much harder to pin it down when it is emerging online and the information is haphazardly scattered across Tweets, X Spaces, Discord servers, private DMs and group chats.


It should be of no surprise then to find out this week that people have no idea about the scene I am a part of: the ‘Avant’/’Gay’* scene – a collection of artists making works mainly on Solana, held together by a vague ‘sensibility’ and taste that has kept us banished to underground status. In spite of over 100 collections and some notable press (multiple Spike Magazine features, Brian Droitcour think-pieces and Parker Ito interviews), the works are still yet to break containment. Those who do know seem to love it, but all others on the periphery are completely blindsided.


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I found the scene through Milady – the neo-chibi PFP (profile picture) collection by Remilia. The cult status surrounding Remilia really caught me at first, as it seemed like the art school answer to Bored Ape Yacht Club’s attempt at ‘creating a persona’ related to trading. Milady was infinitely more nuanced – gate-kept to a certain extent by the references that informed it’s inception, and where the ‘Millennial’ ‘Rugcore’ aesthetic of BAYC attracted a certain type of audience (think ‘finance bros’), these doll-like anime figures fit perfectly for a Gen Z audience that grew up on online: browsing 4chan; locked into Discord servers; fluent in ‘computer’ almost as soon as they could walk. The most important lens to view Milady through is that of ‘Performance Art’ for an online generation. It’s a club membership, you are ‘a happy customer of the Remilia Corporation’, but it also gives you an identity and community that other anonymously ran places often struggle to maintain. These PFPs are now worn by everyone from 3 follower bot accounts to CEOs.


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Pretty soon after this discovery I was eager for more, and by pure chance stumbled across two of the seminal collections of our scene: Mifella and Drifella. Milady was not just the way I came to the scene, but it acts as a genesis for many of the key collections in our space, as well as being a forked path away from Remilia and towards a more autonomous way of working (there is no central, consensus ‘group’ within this scene, certainly none that lead in a way that Charlotte Fang (Founder of Remilia) and the rest of the core team do).


‘Mifella is about Milady’, reads the collections description. It’s the piss and cum stained trouser wearing lover (brother?) of Milady. The cuck of the chain. The aesthetic is fuzzy, punk, harsh: chinese characters and frowny faces as tattoos; smears of paint and blood cover their faces; eyes that sparkle or swirl. They wear Merzbow and Sutcliffe Jügend merch, they carry guns and cigarettes, they LARP as Russian Officers, they kill Bored Apes. Where Milady is an optimistic view of the future on-chain – a cute, ‘white-pilled’ love-letter, MiFella comes with a certain nihilism which may reign as a truer reflection of a life spent involved in crypto. The collection is an answer to a feeling I believe many people experience deep in the ‘trenches’ – that ruthless place of backstabbing, draining and rug-pulling where you are made or broken. Violence appears throughout, but there’s still hope: the sort you found in youth culture of the 80s with the genesis of punk and hardcore (there are Black Flag and Whitehouse shirts lovingly adorned by the Fellas). The importance of the collection is clear in the many spin-offs and traits inspired by it.



If Mifella is set in a corrupt reality, Drifella is where the reality collapses in on itself. Created by Evil Biscuit/Bis Cut, a prolific artist who has created some of my favourite collections by far, Drifella is one of the earlier examples of ‘traitmaxxing’. Traitmaxxing is a staple aesthetic in the Avant scene, consisting of 10s of layers and 100s-1000s of traits compiled together by the art software Hashlips into one composition. The central figure is a Dratini, who has had the soul of Mifella, ‘a local figure of great power and mystery’, injected into it. This lore is pulled directly from the collections page, but there is actually great swathes of literature about this dynamic duo already written in the form of ‘The Jofella Saga’: an epic, 13 chapter fan-fiction based on the NFTs. Written by artist Earl, it is one of the strangest yet most incredible stories to come out of a community online. ‘His gf was a milady, so would the gods of life bless him in this divine order of the universe, being a mifella.’ opens Chapter 2 – and continues in a similarly esoteric fashion, fleshing out an intensely NSFW narrative of a trader/’average Joe’: his crushing despair, ecstatic wins, Dratini companions, war, love and lust. It also features many elements of the Tojiba world (a series of collections created by two incredible artists and important figures in the scene, Tojiba Brand Manager and Tojiba CEO, whose works stand out as pixel-art masterpieces paying homage to a nostalgia of old tech - 90s PC systems, floppy disks and altars, all produced in their 1000s). The Jofella Saga is, in PDF form, almost 200 pages long, and Earl plans on continuing the story from here.


Where Mifella is about Milady, Drifella seems a work borne of a broader depth. Overlays such as ‘BORED APE NAZI CLUB’, ‘THIS CAT IS NOT DRIVING!’ and Playboi Carti’s Vamp Anthem Instrumental Score show the collection to be pulling from a variety of sources, flitting between crypto, meme and general online culture, with many other traits relating to art history, gaming and fashion. There are 9/11 hats, Party Hats from Runescape, McDonalds hats from the ‘THEM Hats’ collection. The Dratini characters themselves are made up of album covers such as ‘Pulse Demon’ and ‘Icedancer’, as well as blood-stained plushies, bright lights and a Rothko painting. It’s an immense way of turning a collection of personal references and internet esoterica into a new piece of work - a theme that runs throughout many collections in the space. This is expanded on in the sequel, minted on Solana, aptly named ‘Drifella 2’. Mifella 2 also exists, and took traits from 10 artists in the scene to work together and create the explosive images.

Parker Ito summed up why this aesthetic works and the importance of this group of NFTs and creators in an interview with Archetype, saying, ‘The more time I spend in this NFT space, the more I think these are some of the first successful artworks to fully address the cultural and creative force of the internet in a truly authentic way…NFTs are, in a way, the first time we have a true memetic art. So, instead of trying to paint memes or something, artists should just make NFTs and people should learn how to value that.’ I truly think this sentiment is captured in some of its strongest form in the two collections above.


- Lowbie


*the scene was coined ‘Gay’ in a series of tweets between Tojiba and New Art Program, and who decided upon ‘Avant’ is still up for debate – Jared Madere explained to me that supposedly it was coined by Spiky DJ or Milady/Charlotte Fang, Milady using it sincerely, and then Spiky laughing at it and running with it. This was cemented after an interview with Jared where he said ‘the circuit we’re part of jokingly refers to itself as ‘avant nft’’, but the interviewers cut out the ‘jokingly’ part.)


Links:

Mifella Website (so much lore here): https://cuckcore.de/

Tojiba Brand Manager: https://x.com/m_m_____m____mm


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Originally published here August 23rd, 2025.

 
 
 

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