If this is true, you are hurt from your own actions of hurting another person.
And thus, by putting her face all over a piece of art than fans liked for not having a face, Cynthia’s hurt arises from her own actions of hurting the fans of the original.
If this is true …
Congratulations! You detected my sarcasm. But if you’d like me to engage seriously, I’ll bite.
Cynthia is allowed to be upset. She made some art and people didn’t like it. It hurts to put yourself into something - in her case literally - and have people not like it. But that’s the risk you run when you make art for other people. People are allowed to engage with art how they want.
What she is not entitled to do is pretend that this is degrading, or in someway offensive. If people were going round scratching out her face from random images, she might have a point. But that isn’t what is happening here. She engaged with the original piece of art by making her own version and putting her face in it. Others engaged with her art by making their own versions and taking some of her face right back out of it in order to make it closer to the original. That’s no more or less wrong than what she did. They’re both perfectly fine. If her feelings are hurt, that’s unfortunate, but it is incidental. And she is entitled to express that her feelings are hurt, but she is not entitled to pretend that that is anything more than incidental.
I daresay Peter Jackson might be upset when people make fan-edits of The Hobbit trilogy by removing a lot of his artistic vision to edit it down to a single watchable film. But if he came out and said it was personally degrading to him, people would call that ridiculous. If Evangeline Lilly said fans were “erasing women” by cutting out Tauriel, people would call that ridiculous. Everyone has their own visions when it comes to making adaptations of other works, and if people disagree with yours, it’s not a personal attack, even if it feels like one.
That being said, I have no beef with Cynthia. She is no doubt getting a lot of grief from racist and sexist weirdos mixed in with the more legitimate negative feedback, so while I think that her statement above is ridiculous, I understand her feelings are hurt, and she is “lashing out” in what is ultimately a very small potatoes kind of way. I hope the movie does well.
As an aside; I’m a fan of musical theatre but an un-fan of the cost of musical theatre tickets, so I was very concerned that no one would attempt to adapt a Broadway/West End musical again after what Tom Hooper did to Cats. I saw Wicked in London and enjoyed it, so I’ll probably watch this film if the reviews are at least halfway good.
People have known that water fluoridation is an international communist plot to sap and impurity our precious bodily fluids since at least the 50s!