Dignify this, buddy!

[chipotle]

I was bumbling around Yahoo! Groups the other day and came across a group called the "Dignified Furs." Allrighty then, I thought. A little exploration showed the most recent messages to be--and I know this will surprise all of you in the fandom--mournful complaints about the state of the fandom. Having nothing better to do, I dived into the muck and did a little raking there, chiefly with a gentleman who seemed to be arguing that furry fandom was small and pathetic and smut-oriented compared to anime fandom and comics fandom and what-have-you fandom. Now, setting aside the cries of "hentai! yaoi!" aside, there's a surface truth to it--within the last 15 years, anime has burst onto the mainstream and the fandom has grown exponentially. The red herring here, in my book, has nothing to do with pornography: it has to do with the fact that anime fandom exists because of a huge body of work created outside the fandom. So does comics fandom and Trek fandom and most other what-have-you fandoms. Sure, those fandoms are old enough that people have in fact moved from fan to professional--but furrydom is unique in that the majority of its content is fan-created.

But, my erstwhile opponent chose to ignore this central point of the argument, and to mostly ignore examples I trotted out of creative people and companies within the fandom. My last response--which may well be my last one--was this short piece.

On Feb 3, 2004, at 10:55 AM, Erstwhile Opponent wrote:

Creativity without focus isn't creativity. There are plenty of wanna-be creators in the fandom who, let's face it, haven't moved on because they simply couldn't survive outside the fandom. The fandom has always been focused on artwork, you see a heck of a lot of people who want to be artists but couldn't really draw to save their lives. Creativity and talent are two different things.

Okay, I'm calling your bluff here. Your definition of furry seems to include "cannot be creative," so there's really no point in looking for any silver linings, is there? Dark Natasha, Susan Van Camp, Heather Alexander, Heather "Kyoht" Baeder, Michael Raabe, Shawn Kellner, Herbie Bearclaw, Goldenwolf, Terrie Smith, Michael Payne, John Nunnemacher--all undoubtedly to be explained away as either not really creative or not really furry!

If this is NOT part of your definition of furry, then stop throwing the puppy out with the bath water. Admitting that there are things of quality and worth in furry fandom doesn't mean you can't believe that there's vast room for improvement, but steadfastly denying their existence makes it appear that you're not interested in surveying the whole of what's out there--your real interest is in calling attention to what you consider sludge, and nothing else. "But there's so much of it" is not an adequate defense; one good novel in a shelf of a hundred dreadful ones is still one good novel, and an honest critic must acknowledge it.

Whether the fandom is "obsessed" with sex and whether the fandom is capable of producing creative artists and writers are two separate issues, and they are not intrinsically related. A lot of great art has been produced by people who were obsessed with sex, and sometimes pretty kinky to boot. What I think you're trying to say by scrambling those arguments together is that, for a creator, it's a much greater risk than it should be to say "I'm a furry fan." And yeah, it is. And that's unfortunate.

But the only way--the ONLY way--that's going to ever change is when people ARE willing to say it, and are willing to say, "And here's what that really means."

The Burned Furs never got this. You can't lead by crusading against the "undesirables" and get very far--you'll only polarize people. If you want to be an AM talk radio host, maybe that's all you want, because being hated just increases your ratings (at least for a while). But if you really want to lead, you do it by example. If the BFs had taken all the energy they put into pissing and moaning and ranting and mocking and put it into creating something lovely and wonderful that they could hold up and say, "This is what furry can be," maybe they'd have actually been the force for good they seemed to picture themselves as.

. . . What can be done to change [the fandom]?

Create what you would like to see more of, and promote what you would like to see more of. You're concerned about the content and quality? You can kvetch on mailing lists all you want and maybe you'll get arguments and maybe you'll get sympathetic ears, but the one thing that you won't get is a measurable effect. If you really want that, work to create, distribute and/or showcase quality content.

Comments

[mordrul.livejournal.com]

I suspect, based on that very small bit of knowledge, that Mr. Erstwhile M. Opponent, Esq. is mostly just looking for arguments first, sympathy second, and to actually accomplish something meaningful not at all. He/she (I'm betting on 'he') seems to justify his existence through conflict, or at least ranting and raving, which is related but not the same thing. Not that there's anything wrong with conflict -- I'm a combative kind of person, myself. But I prefer competition, where I and my opponent(s) both come out the better for the incident, as opposed to this guy, who seems to just want to tear down Furry and anyone that supports it. He probably needs to spend a few hours a week on a nice soft couch in a room with dim lighting talking to a very nice soft-spoken lady while very large men with a very white jacket in their hands and a needle loaded with horse tranquilizer wait in the corner. But I digress.

As for mainstream, well, the question asked is an appropriate one: what exactly is Furry? And for that matter, how do you define 'mainstream'? That was a rhetorical question, of course. I've run across several definitions since I first joined this fandom about a year and a couple months ago. I could go on several long rambling philosophical tangents about this subject, but won't, since this is getting long enough. But to me, Furry first hit the mainstream roughly 70 or so years ago when a mouse piloted a steamboat down a river. The rest, as they say, is history. Yes, the vast majority of what the public knows and accepts is cartoons, which I think for some people makes it easier to accept/tolerate/ignore/whatever. Although I'm not quite sure why people think of cartoons as being "kid's stuff". Hell, Bugs Bunny and co. was originally never intended for kids, it was all aimed at adults. That kids rather enjoyed it as well was pretty quickly picked up and pounced on like a pack of wild dogs on a three-legged cat (that's really not a bad analogy for many international corporations, I think). There's just so much more to Furry than just that. So. We have cartoons, and we have fursuiters being featured on ER and CSI. We also have our own channel, Animal Planet (yes, I know it's not about the fandom, but hell, it's a 24-hour channel devoted to animals. I think it counts). The rest will, slowly but surely, seep out there. What we need are, as Chipotle said, leaders, and we also need to, as Brerandalopex pointed out, make ourselves known as both a force with money to spend, and a force that can cause other people to spend more money. It won't be done by E.M.O. Esq., however. It will be done by Dark Natasha and others, and a very good friend of mine who also is an artist (he drew my avatar here) who seeks to get into the animation industry. Say what you will about love, it's money that greases the wheels, and if the wheels don't turn, neither does the planet. I say, placate EO and other Burned Furs so they will settle down and get out of the way, and let whatever leaders we have have the room to make themselves shine. I'm sure in another 50 years, Paul Harvey III will be telling 'the rest of the story' about Furry.

And if you really want to get picky, as far as I'm concerned, Furry was not only approved, but made into a religion a long time ago, when some king decided the Nile really needed some pyramids next to it. Maybe we can have that again. Who knows? At the very least, it's worth a story.

Re:

[brerandalopex.livejournal.com]

[Brer] Actually, along the lines of the expansion of Cable TV options being a vehicle for Furriness, I must admit that there is certainly a lot more opportunity now than there ever was for exposure to this stuff. When I was a wee little sprog, it was a big thing to gather in front of the TV for the local PBS broadcast of "Nature" every Sunday night to get my dose of wildlife documentaries. Now there are 4-5 whole cable channels devoted one way or another to it, and something like the Westminster KC Dog Show makes "must see" headlines in the TV guide.

Not that either of these things denote the mass Furrification of the country's population, but I do think that a great many things have become more available than they used to be. (Especially in terms of the Internet.)