Help Mewza Save Purple: Legal Battle

Hi, I’m Mewza. I'm a small-time developer who made the FNF Mod VS. Rainbow Friends and the Roblox game Become Tiky and Everything Else. When I'm not doing that, I just like to create models and character designs for fun to improve my skills. Right now, I’m facing a tough battle. I could lose all my rights to Purple, a character I created and deeply care about. Purple is my fan creation inspired by Rainbow Friends, a popular Roblox game, and now I’m in the middle of a legal struggle to protect my work. Here’s my story and why I need your help.

On my birthday, my friends and I decided to create an FNF mod, which is basically a free modification for another free video game. I wanted to create a fan mod that did justice to Rainbow Friends and captured the best aspects of the original world of the game, while avoiding the trend-based, low-effort mods that were common at the time.

That’s where Purple came in. I don't want to show my own design I created directly due to legal reasons, but it's something that many people may have already seen online. Purple’s design came from the idea of making her unexpectedly large, with big eyes taking up most of her face and long, rubberhose-style limbs, which is something I love incorporating into my character designs. The idea for her trashcan-lid mouth was to create a surprise. When you look at her face, you’d expect her mouth to be front and center, but instead, the whole edge of her face opens up.

Then, something unexpected happened: I saw toy announcements from Phatmojo (a company that makes toys for popular games), and there it was. My Purple design, in their line of Mystery Minis plastic figures. It was pretty much identical to how they appear in my mod, even showcasing the trashcan mouth—a feature I intentionally created to distinguish my design from the character in Rainbow Friends. They used it without permission, and it hurt. Before my mod even came out, I even reached out to Roy (the creator of Rainbow Friends) to offer to sell my Purple design, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he just unfriended me after I reached out.

Feeling that my work had been used unfairly, I decided to take legal action. Soon after, they filed a lawsuit against me in New York. They also issued DMCA takedowns on many things I published that had my Purple design, leading to the deletion of some Twitter posts and, more devastatingly, the loss of my Roblox game, Become Tiky and Everything Else. Even though I had removed all Rainbow Friends characters months before, they still claimed ownership over Purple.

While both Purple and a pose of Green are part of my work, my main focus has always been Purple. Purple is the character I feel most connected to, and I’ve been fighting hard to protect her.

The outcome of this means I may lose all my rights to Purple and never be able to use her again. This means I will have to scrap the majority of projects I’ve been working on, and they would never see the light of day. It would also mean losing years of work and creativity that I’ve poured into them.

I was scared to talk about this earlier because I didn’t want my personal information exposed. But now, with the possibility of losing everything I’ve worked for, I realize I need to ask for help. My parents are struggling, too. My dad is afraid we could lose our home, and my mom has already given up, saying I’ll create something even better than Purple in the future. Her support means the world, but it’s hard to think I might have to give up on Purple entirely.

I’m not trying to take anything away from Rainbow Friends. In fact, I’m open to licensing Purple to them, or giving them co-ownership, so they can use her while allowing me to keep her for my own projects. This lawsuit could set a dangerous precedent for other fan creations. If big companies can take fans' original designs and claim them as their own without compensation, where does that leave the creators?

That’s why I’m asking for your support. If you’re able, please consider donating to help me keep my family afloat. If you can’t donate, sharing this page and raising awareness would mean the world to me.

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported my work over the years. Your love and your enjoyment of of my creations means everything to me, and that’s why it’s so painful to think it could be taken away. Please, if you can, help me save Purple. Every little bit helps, and I’m so grateful for your support.