Supporting an artist can come in 2 or 3 ways:

• Money
• Attention
• And of course: actually getting invested in their art

This is what anti-piracy people forget: Besides how hard it can be to have access to some things, if you really like something, you want to actually "get into it" even if you don't buy if officially. A lot of stuff I like that even influenced my projects is stuff I didn't really pay for. (Even if deep down I wish I could support my favorite artists more and I wouldn't bring that up if I met them personally maybe, but with the second part it's also because we're in an age the internet made too many people too close to each other). Most people don't get this because fandom culture is more about "socialization" than actually "consuming the media" as they say. So the part of "I actually read this comic/manga series" is thrown out the window to these people if you bring up not buying it. But at some point, lean too hard into the other extreme and you're not even supporting the actual artist but rather the "copyright owners" and you're a few steps away from the MCU Funko Pop guy people make memes of.

"Art is about expression" as a phrase is honestly vague and can be twisted in a lot of ways. One mischievous, almost in-bad-faith way is assuming that every artist supports everything they put in a work. When in reality, artists just happen to explore ideas or concepts that they otherwise don't support/enable/endorse/etc. A complexity of human intellect is that we use art to do stuff like this. But so called "pro art" people don't get this, which is why they suddenly think "fiction affects reality" and act even crazier than Jack Thompson. Essentially, they point out their low IQ and take pride in it. Makes you wonder why people even brag about liking concepts like "morally ambiguous characters" when they have brains behind those of literal children.