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back from sabbatical
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Death to Furries
ok, I have seen, on the internet in general, and on this board, to a lesser extent, what I will politely call 'furry bashing'
This is something that really bothers me, especially considering the accepting, or at least tolerant nature of the TFP in general.
The following is a verbatim post from a LiveJournal that I read on a regular basis (reprinted w/ permission) that I think addresses the subject quite well.
RHJunior's Journal
Quote:
I'm starting to wonder....
See, there's this thing, a fandom called anthropomorphics. It generally goes (or went, anyway) under several different names, primarily "furry fandom" or "funny animals." It covers a pretty wide spectrum, ranging from more "serious" scifi to fantasy to junior or juvenile literature to graphic novels and comics, and includes such things as writing, cartooning, sculpture, costuming, puppeteering, and more--- all centered around the theme of intelligent animal-people. Basically it boils down to lots of people who prefer their escapist entertainment to feature talking critters..... Odd, yes, but there are plenty of things far stranger out there.
One of the interesting things about the fandom is a certain universality to how people reacted upon discovering the existence of the fanbase. See, with mass-production centered fandoms, such as Star Trek or Anime, most fans have an obvious awareness that there are other fans out there--- if you're sitting there watching a TV show, you can be pretty certain that somewhere, out there, someone else is watching too. But with anthropomorphics, there isn't any real central movie or show or book or what have you. You just find that, all else being equal, you enjoy things that feature anthropomorphic characters more. You'll pick a werewolf flick over a vampire movie; you rate Disney's animated "Robin Hood" over "Prince of Thieves" simply because the lead characters are talking foxes; anime with catgirls in it gets your attention first; Secret of Nimh, an American Tail, and Cats Don't Dance are in your top ten movie list; you have the entire Spellsinger series by Alan Dean Foster on your bookshelves.... and so far as you know, you're just one lone weirdo.
Going online and discovering that there are entire webrings, forums, chatrooms and conventions of people like yourself can be a shocking experience. The best quote I ever heard for summing up the impact came from a webcast puppeteer: "I was like Tarzan seeing other human beings for the first time!"
Now, we address the fact that, being a loosely connected amalgamation, the "furry" fandom has gotten more than it's fair share of disturbing weirdos and messed-up shizzle.... much to the consternation of many who considered themselves to be fans.
If the first emotion upon discovering the fandom is: "My God, these people are like me!" Then the second, much later reaction is "Oh God, am I like these people??"
To say the "furry fandom" has gotten some rather unpleasant and, yea, even repulsive institutions under it's 'big tent' is to candy-coat the issue. The fandom got its nascent start as an actual entity online; It swiftly snowballed from there--- unfortunately gathering every nasty bit of detritus--- mud, filth, rotting leaves, buried dog poo--as it went. To be sensitive to more delicate souls out there, we shall sum up by stating that a lot of seriously disturbed people--- people who would have been medicated, committed, or just plain beaten shitless in an earlier, more enlightened decade--- glommed on at an early stage, and it has been one helluva job trying to winkle them out.
It did, in fact, eventually generate a hellacious backlash. Various groups bent on cleaning up the fandom--- e.g. the Burned Furs-- surfaced (and petered out, eventually...) . Much drama was vented on the forums, many feelings were hurt and the bloom was knocked off the rose for many a newbie. Thankfully, some minor sanity has crept into the major outlets for the fandom (the conventions, primarily, where--- surprise--- financial considerations have forced a lot of careful rethinking about what was "acceptable" ) and a lot of things that were a horrendous shock for newcomers and outsiders, and a hideous embarrassment for all involved, are being firmly shown the door. Not enough, not by far, and not nearly soon enough, but a comforting sign of progress.
All this said and evaluated, I'm starting to wonder who's cornflakes the Furry Fandom peed in.
So far, I've seen two sites dedicated to nothing but, well, loathing and wishing death on furry fans of any and all types, or anyone suspected of being a furry fan. There have been multiple articles and blog columns published about what freaks furry fans are; Something Awful and Portal of Evil dedicate reams of webspace to savaging Teh Furry Lozers; a google search renders 193 hits for "Anti Furry." Dozens of different webcomics have featured 'anti furry' story arcs ranging from the mildly lampooning to the viciously grotesque. And further searches reveal dozens of "Furries suck" sites that up and died, leaving their immortal husks behind on the internet.
What the hell, people.
Just answer me this: what, precisely, is making people thrash the everloving hell out of this feeble little fandom to the exclusion of all others? I've had time to toddle around the internet a few times and get a good look at the freakshow, I just cannot grasp it anymore.
Yes, the furries are knee-deep in weirdos, sickos, and socially dysfunctional human wreckage. Yes, there are people selling smut at the conventions. Yes, there are people who insist that this is some sort of spirituality for them. Yes, they gots the freak.
Have you taken a look at the other fandoms lately?
Buttered bluegreen hell. The anime fandom alone is ten times bigger than the "furry" fandom-- and has fifty times the weird and sick. Tentacle porn? Oh, no, you ain't even trying yet, kid... I've had the incredible misfortune to stumble across anime cannibalism porn. There are entire reams of manga that feature rape, mutilation, amputation, and disembowelment as erotic turn-ons. Incest? Pedophilia? They got it. Bondage? Torture? They got it. Think of the sickest, most vile fetish you can imagine: the manga boys in Japan are selling it already in vending machines on the cherry-blossom strewn streets of Nippon.
And baby, if you think fursuits are 'disturbing,' then don't go to an anime convention. The sight of the cosplayers will probably kill you.
Or we could talk about Trekkies. Think a fanboy fantasizing about being a werewolf is freaky? Hell's bells, at least he has some sort of pseudo-mythological roots to his delusion. Try running into someone who insists he's a Klingon Warrior. Worse, try dealing with some dingleberry who thinks the world would be Utopia if we just adopted the principles of the fictional interplanetary government designed by a bunch of TV-land hacks for a late 60's/mid 80's TV show.
And let's add three more words that will probably have you gouging out your own frontal lobe with a dull spoon: Trekkie Slash Fanfics. Yes, there are people out there who actually fantasize about doing something disgusting to Kirk and Spock with a tribble. Cope with the horrifying knowledge; I have to.
Shall we touch on the Lovecraft fandom? God help me, I've seen Cthulhu porn. My inner child is now suing me for child abuse. I suppose we could roll them in one big ball with Goths, and their various death fetishes, "Dress like a crossdressing corpse" fashion tips, and love of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac comics......
Even the Society for Creative Anachronism has its own freakshow... not the least of which are people who insist they are reincarnated fairies from "the burning time...." (Burning Time: See "non-historical bullshit made up by pouty teen wiccan wannabes.")
So what, in all the blazing green fires of Sheol, makes the FURRY fandom so special? What makes people who collect plushies or watch Bugs Bunny cartoons obsessively or make animal costumes for a hobby or draw anime catgirls on the side so much more loathsome than people who think they're persecuted pixies, dress like Gay Death, window shop for the Necronomicon, picture Kirk and Spock as the Ambiguously Gay Duo, forego bathing before a convention so they'll smell like a genuine Klingon, or collect porno of prepubescent-looking girls with fluorescent hair and impossibly huge eyeballs getting violently raped by tentacles?
Seriously here, folks. There's nothing, absolutely nothing featured in the slimy cellar of the furry fandom that isn't seen in spades, and even surpassed in awfulness, in every other fandom on the map. the only difference being is that it wears bunny ears when it's at a furry convention.
So what, precisely, makes it more offensive when it's anthropomorphically themed?
Is it some cultural thing? In the West, so far as I've seen, people tend to regard "talking animals" as "kid stuff...." something reserved for the realm of children's literature--- much as Uncle Disney's efforts made people inflexibly regard all animation as "kiddy stuff," even as other cultures, most notably the Japanese (in their better moments) regard it as a full-fledged storytelling medium, equally valid for all ages. I suspect for some of the detractors, anthropomorphic art and stories taps their inner child on the shoulder--- and these otherwise lassez-faire types suddenly find themselves rediscovering their long-buried squeamishness.
I've seen also that a lot of the people online who are attacking the anthro fandom (quite exclusively, one might add) are generally former furry fans or one-time nascent fans themselves. There are reportedly dozens of posts on the SomethingAwful and PortalOfEvil forums from people admitting that Lola Bunny or Gadget Hackwrench was "hot"--- immediately followed by a signature marked (NOT FURRY!), of course. The attacks from these quarters are especially vicious--- less the reaction of the staunch outsider, than of the innocent whose expectations were betrayed.
No fury like a fanboy scorned, perhaps?......
There are those who have speculated that "furrydom" is getting reamed so thoroughly for no more complex reason than that it's the new kid on the block. New grist for the scandal salesmen in the media on one side; fresh meat for the trollers and habitual social mockers on the other. Someone new to make fun of, is all.
Or perhaps, quite bluntly, it's just a bunch of wanks who are suddenly capable of moral posturing... so long as it isn't THEIR fandom-- or fetishes--- they're sermonizing about. There is a certain hypocrisy about freaking over people having sex dressed in animal costumes when you live in and actively participate in a society that has sex everywhere else and every other way imaginable, and considers itself more enlightened for it. There's an especially succulent hypocrisy writing articles calling people who draw "furry" pornography the disgusting scum of the earth---and posting said article right next to the banner ads on your site advertising "free barely legal teen slut" porno. O physician, heal thyself?
There are those who bring up other nasty associations; namely, the association being made between furry fandom and zoophilia (that's bestiality to us non PC types. A Politically correct term for bestiality. Kill me now.) That's probably the worst accusation placed on the furry fandom's doorstep.
This may come as a surprise to you, but it's also a rather jarring shock to most anthropomorphics fans when they hear it.
Let's clarify something: although the fantasy characters in anthropomorphic art, stories, comics and the like are based off of features of wild creatures, they are still utterly fantastic beings-- no more real than elves, fairies, dragons, sentient robots, mutants, or aliens from the planet Mars, Vulcan, or Krypton. The operative word when you are referring to "anime cat girls" is GIRLS. aka HUMAN. Though the anthropomorphic characteristics and attributes lend exotic nature to the character, it is their humanity and their human-like features that intrigues the anthropomorphic fan. Much as our caveman ancestors would dress in animal skins and masks to take on the admired attributes of the animal in question, and painted the egyptian gods with the heads of animals to associate them with the attributes they themselves associated with the beasts in question, so the anthropomorphic fan dresses his characters in animal 'skins' to endow them with what he finds intriguing or admirable in that species--- or to associate them with whatever stereotypes are culturally given that species.
Furry fans do not view or create their characters as beasts..... A subtle point unfortunately lost on many people.
No other fandom, admittedly, is so openly accused of this, or frankly so vulnerable to the accusation--- when you have people who are attending your convention drawing and trading porno pics of cat and bunny girls, it's not hard to guess what some few people are going to think based on first perceptions.
But the problem was further inflamed by the "big tent" approach of several convention and forum administrators, who frankly let anyone who said "furry" in without a whimper of protest. This led to the presence of several outright bestialists..... who loudly proclaimed themselves "furry," and made a deliberate point of showing up at conventions, confronting the media, and putting out their "lifestyle" as being part of the fandom, even when most of the fans in attendance would have happily doused them in gasoline and set them on fire for abusing an animal----- and then peed on the ashes when the flames died down.
Though the bestialists and some of the other freaks were eventually shown the door, the stigma remained--- and the fandom was left with a quandary. There is only so much you can do, after all, to disassociate yourself from someone who insists that he's "family," no matter how you shun him.
Still, all this being said, it should still be apparent to even the most dense individual that there is a decided difference between fantasy stories--- no matter how lewd--- about a talking, humanoid cartoon creature and an actual real-life animal.
And again, other fandoms could be arguably accused of such deviancy--- considering Anime Hentai regularly features girls being assaulted by tentacle animals, plants, aliens, demons and more; and scifi is often argued to feature "bestiality" with aliens and humans, and other fantasy detritus.
So again, what makes furry fandom so especially deserving of ridicule?
Could it be, at the end of it all, that the detractors just need something to feel undeservedly superior to?
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at the request of the author I will also post Impenitence, by C.S. Lewis.
Quote:
All the world's wiseacres in arms against them
Shan't detach my heart for a single moment
From the man-like beasts of the earthy stories--
Badger or Moley.
Rat the oarsman, neat Mrs. Tiggy Winkle,
Benjamin, pert Nutkin, or (ages older)
Henryson's shrill Mouse, or the Mice the Frogs once
Fought with in Homer.
Not that I'm so craz'd as to think the creatures
Do behave that way, not at all deluded
By some half-false sweetness of early childhood
Sharply remembered.
Look again. Look well at the beasts, the true ones.
Can't you see? ... cool primness of cats, or coney's
Half indignant stare of amazement, mouse's
Twinkling adroitness,
Tipsy bear's rotundity, toad's complacence ...
Why! they all cry out to be used as symbols,
Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature
Formed to reveal us
Each to each, not fiercely but in her gentlest
Vein of household laughter. And if the love so
Raised--it will, no doubt--splashes over on the
Actual archetypes,
Who's the worse for that? Marry, gup! Begone, you
Fusty kill-joys, new Manichaeans! Here's a
Health to Toad Hall, here's to the Beaver doing
Sums with the Butcher!
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__________________
You're not fat,
You're just a giant ball
of love, covered in anger.
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