I don't know what oustins was thinking with the star system. I can't find one likeable thing about this image and I'm sorry if you don't agree but I'm going to give you tips so hold your horses on rejecting this critique.

First off your anatomy needs some work, I would suggest doing speed paints of people posing using the Gesture Tool: [link]

It helps with on-the-fly learning and flowing poses. He just looks... Stretched, like you took a pre-existing image, stretched it to meet canvas proportions, then it looks like you traced it while zoomed in too much.

A great way to fix proportion issues is to zoom out frequently and check things over, it helps stop the character from looking like Nacho Libre under that suit.

Another thing is camera angle. And yes, there IS a camera angle. It's the perspective that you choose the audience to see this image from and straight on is a bad bad choice. The picture looses all sense of dynamic action, the fox looks like it's buttfucking Naruto which can come off as horrific. By angling it to a 3/4 perspective, viewing slightly from the side, you allow the viewer to see a dynamic angle of Naruto's pose as well as establish a distance between the fox and Naruto.

Next, and last subject before I get too long, is the colouring and shading. I'm sorry but you're attempting to copy the shading done by Masashi Kishimoto. It just adds to how flat this image looks. I don't know what Oustins was referring too when he mentioned "vector gradient" because I'm not seeing any proper gradient of any kind. The lines you put on the Foxes' neck make him look like he has pecs and abs and that makes the darkened area down there look like fatrolls over his legs.

You might want to go for that cell shaded look, but you need to learn better techniques than just dropping the colour saturation and then shading. Consider a lighting source, where is it? Is it above? In front or behind? You leave no room to show that source with the fox taking up the whole background. Next is "What is the lighting source?" If it's the moon then consider cold shading light low opacity blues and purples, the sun then you consider warm shading, like low opacity orange or red (even extremely low opacity purple works in some cases).

Now, I hope you know that rejected critiques are still accessible by the public and can be voted on and commented on. I'm a little disappointed in the Deviantart Community for picking content over quality and I would like to say that they're all pretty stupid. But I think you can improve, everyone can it just takes some hard work and willingness.