Coming to a conclusion about "the furry problem"
Or at least I think I might be getting closer to a conclusion. It's difficult when all you can really get on the internet, unless it comes directly from someone involved in the industry of concern to you (in my case animation / games) is anecdotal evidence at best, and at worst, completely unsubstantiated assertions. In other words I've been basing my entire assumption of the Furries vs. The World conflict on hearsay (assuming there's much of a conflict to be had). For a while, I had resigned myself to the belief that furries are for all intents and purposes The New Queer. What I mean by that is it has grown beyond a fandom too many people and is an emerging subculture, lifestyle and for certain members, even a sexuality. One which many are disgusted by and/or resentful of. Of course there's those who have political and religios reasons for their feelings towards furries. For now, I'll call them The Disgusted and The Resentful. Think of them as analogous to assault and battery in that the two are closely related enough to share a definition even though technically they're two different things. To The Disgusted, furries, much like homosexuals and liberals fly in the face of everything that is decent and moral, whether that sense of decency and morality is dictated by the Church or the State. Their might be a hint of The Resentful in there in the form of those who complain not so much about the fact furries are the way they are as much as the ones who are actually comfortable publically depicting their furrydom either verbally and visually. But strictly speaking, The Resentful are angered the association that's been made between works of anthropomorphic art and furries. This is a little more ambiguous since the specific gripe is slightly different depending on who you ask. But in general, The Resentful take issue with various creative media (including art, movies, animated films, cartoons, comics, games, you name it) being tainted by furries in some variation of the following:
-Anthro art is cool, but furries ruined it for me
-Anthro art sucks, and furries are shoving it down everyone's throat
-Furries are responsible for the cold-shoulder anthro stuff recieves
-Anthro stuff is too popular and it's furries' fault
There might be an element of Digust in The Resentful, but often the issue isn't with furries being sick freaks so much as them not keeping their sickness in the closet, and more important out of the creative sphere. They like 'em just fine, long as they know their place mm-hmm!
Now, since I'm making such a big deal out of this, it's probably only right that I explain the background story behind my concerns.
My story pertaining to how I grew to even give a crap about furries and what the world thinks of them isn't too different from the story of how a lot a furries become furries in the first place. Like a lot of kids from my generation, I grew up watching Disney movies and TV shows, along with other anthrocentric media of the day (like Ninja Turtles, Gargoyles, Sonic and the like). I never had cable or videogames until rather late in my childhood, so most of my entertainment came directly from my imagination, which is how I got to be so dedicated to art. And naturally, as a kid, what I'd think of and create was heavily influenced by whatever I saw elsewhere. So it follows that I'd have an affinity for cartoon animals and mythical creatures. I had no knowledge of what was on the internet until well into my adolescent years, but when I did eventually find out about the furry fandom, it seemed pretty awesome because there was this huge potential future fanbase for my work. I was pretty grossed out / morbidly amused by the adult work at first, but I got over it pretty quick by the time I started reaching adulthood (I become an adult and stop having a cow over the fact that there's adult art out there, go figure. Wonder what's taking the rest of the adults so long). I never really got into the fandom as a member, mainly because I haven't got the time or the means to go to cons and at the time my art wasn't on the same level as the better, more well known artists. But I'd always intended to make a name for myself as my skills progressed, and always had the furries in mind as a group with whom I'd love to share my work since I thought they'd love it right back.
It wasn't until I began persuing a post-secondary education that I had doubts about that. In fact I had created the shell for a website, was seriously shopping around for domain names and hosting, even began selecting some of my better older art to submit to Yerf and DeviantArt around the same time a graphic design teacher looked at some of it and suggested I was on a one way street towards unemployability doing what I do. None of this was "yiff" either. In fact I could count on one hand all the works I've created which you could reasonably call adult. That was of no substance, however, as I'd learn that in some peoples minds, anything fantasy or furry was on its way out, by hook or crook. Since this was the shit I was practically raised on, I figured it had to be more than just some antifad since it wasn't like Beavis and Butthead where a certain degree of crudity was intrisic to the style. There was nothing inherently offensive about cartoon animals. There had to be something more to it than that, I thought, so that's when I started asking around, albeit mostly in the wrong places - ones with a pronounced anti-furry bias. And of course, other people would tell me the exact opposite, that furry is "the in thing" right now. None of it backed up with any hard evidence, of course, since this is the internet where frivolous things like facts don't matter when finding the truth.
Keep in mind, this is all going on within about two years post-9/11. The religious right is gaining more of a cultural stronghold, and with it conservatism, reopening debates we thought were a painful memory by the 90's such as "is homosexuality really more than a lifestyle choice, and if so, do we have to tolerate it?" and "is the whole thing about black people and white people being genetically equal really a closed case?". I'm not kidding about the last one, and will dig up the report if I must to prove it. So I stopped looking for answers and came up with my own. Maybe it wasn't all true, but it may as well be. I'd realized by this time that all the bullshit we were fed in highschool about tolerance only extends to groups the government craves votes from. But me being the kind of person I am, I wasn't going to quit drawing what I love to draw just because "the furries" had allegedly made a pariah out of anyone who does it. I still felt I had to defend my art, though, so I made every effort to distance myself as much as possible from a subculture that I only had one thing in common with in the first place. I scrapped the website, stopped going to the chats and forums I used to frequent, and I didn't go so far as to destroy all of my anthropomorphic art (though there were times when I thought about it), some of it is hidden so well that I've forgotten where it is. Throw in a half-hearted insult towards furrydom amongst my fellow aspiring paid artists now and then, and a feigned new Conservative persona and I'm no more a furry than Walt Disney himself (hey, he might've been antisemitic, but at least he wasn't a furqueer!).
So, what changed between now and then that made me pick up the search once more? Well for one, Libertarianism. Now I know Libertarians have a lot of different views as to what liberty means, but to me it means no one being able to interfere with you living your life however you see fit as long as what you're doing isn't harming anyone. Where myself and other Libertarians disagree is on how that applies to the business world. A lot of people would say if you choose to be a furry (or even if you could argue that it's not really a choice), you choose to risk being unemployable. I say bullshit. To be able to really live (as opposed to merely existing), you have to be able to support yourself. If you have the talent and skill and someone is going to try to coerce you into trying to be something you're not, that's a threat to liberty. I'm not saying greenlight every furry porno movie they try to pitch (let those guys fund their own and sell them on the internet like they probably already do), I'm saying ask people to do the job that's required of them and mind your own fucking business as far as what they do in their off hours goes.
So, with this new attitude I dived into the topic again and looked for more, and better examples. I found a few things out as well. Apparently, Doug Winger (to many screaming eyes the epitome of Furversion... but sooooo sickeningly good at it) does layouts for the same company that does Dora the Explorer, and Shawn Kemp worked for Disney, and currently works for CAAT Studios. Another highly talented artist right there. Both have attended cons, as has Toby Bluth, who was a guest of honor at Further Confusion. I learned what I did about Kemp through a letter he wrote to someone with a question not unlike mine, which he actually encouraged the recipient to post on a newsboard. Again, this would be career suicide if what The Disgusted and The Resentful told me was universally true. Oh, and again, if you doubt any of this, I'll try to dig up the sources. It's just I've been called a lot of bad things, but very seldom a liar so usually people are willing to take me at my word.
I know prejudice doesn't require much logic, but if all this shit about furries is true, why isn't it also true of Anime fans? There's got to be a greater abundance of hentai / yaoi, and that sure as hell hasn't stopped anime from maintaining its popular foothold with the mainstream. Nor has it "ruined it" for people who truly enjoy anime for its art and content and don't simply feel a need to belong to a club. Which frankly, I think is why you get sites like Crush! Yiff! Destroy!. These are furries bashing furries because other furries made it uncool to be a furry. Which is pathetic, because at least the Burned Furs had a real agenda, even if it was misguided, and if what I'm learning here holds any water, based largely on falsehoods. But I have to wonder about the ones propogating these exadurations, scare tactics, whatever they are. What's their agenda? With the Burned Furs, it was pretty obvious, at least on the surface. Make furry acceptable to the mainstream. In other words, create a socially conservative fandom / subculture. This can't be some offshoot of that because those people wanted to identify with furdom, they just didn't wish to do so at the expense of their livlihoods. These guys, if it's furry, want nothing to do with it. Where the hell is it coming from? If I was wrong the whole time (not that I'm entirely convinced that I was just yet), that question still nags me. If someone has this irrational hatred towards furries and furry art, fine, I won't waste time trying to reason with them. But why would some of those same people care enough to try to caution you against doing / drawing anything that could be construed as "furry"? What to they get out of it? It's neither hurting nor helping them if your portfolio gets rejected for having anthros or if you get blacklisted in the animation industry because you drew erotica.
Anyway, I can't speak for anyone else, but I know I would like to give the fandom a chance, to share my work with if nothing else. I'll probably still take measures to hide my identity, but unless someone can show me some concrete evidence suggesting that to do so would be a pretty bad idea, I'm running out of reasons to keep my art and stories in the dark.
-Anthro art is cool, but furries ruined it for me
-Anthro art sucks, and furries are shoving it down everyone's throat
-Furries are responsible for the cold-shoulder anthro stuff recieves
-Anthro stuff is too popular and it's furries' fault
There might be an element of Digust in The Resentful, but often the issue isn't with furries being sick freaks so much as them not keeping their sickness in the closet, and more important out of the creative sphere. They like 'em just fine, long as they know their place mm-hmm!
Now, since I'm making such a big deal out of this, it's probably only right that I explain the background story behind my concerns.
My story pertaining to how I grew to even give a crap about furries and what the world thinks of them isn't too different from the story of how a lot a furries become furries in the first place. Like a lot of kids from my generation, I grew up watching Disney movies and TV shows, along with other anthrocentric media of the day (like Ninja Turtles, Gargoyles, Sonic and the like). I never had cable or videogames until rather late in my childhood, so most of my entertainment came directly from my imagination, which is how I got to be so dedicated to art. And naturally, as a kid, what I'd think of and create was heavily influenced by whatever I saw elsewhere. So it follows that I'd have an affinity for cartoon animals and mythical creatures. I had no knowledge of what was on the internet until well into my adolescent years, but when I did eventually find out about the furry fandom, it seemed pretty awesome because there was this huge potential future fanbase for my work. I was pretty grossed out / morbidly amused by the adult work at first, but I got over it pretty quick by the time I started reaching adulthood (I become an adult and stop having a cow over the fact that there's adult art out there, go figure. Wonder what's taking the rest of the adults so long). I never really got into the fandom as a member, mainly because I haven't got the time or the means to go to cons and at the time my art wasn't on the same level as the better, more well known artists. But I'd always intended to make a name for myself as my skills progressed, and always had the furries in mind as a group with whom I'd love to share my work since I thought they'd love it right back.
It wasn't until I began persuing a post-secondary education that I had doubts about that. In fact I had created the shell for a website, was seriously shopping around for domain names and hosting, even began selecting some of my better older art to submit to Yerf and DeviantArt around the same time a graphic design teacher looked at some of it and suggested I was on a one way street towards unemployability doing what I do. None of this was "yiff" either. In fact I could count on one hand all the works I've created which you could reasonably call adult. That was of no substance, however, as I'd learn that in some peoples minds, anything fantasy or furry was on its way out, by hook or crook. Since this was the shit I was practically raised on, I figured it had to be more than just some antifad since it wasn't like Beavis and Butthead where a certain degree of crudity was intrisic to the style. There was nothing inherently offensive about cartoon animals. There had to be something more to it than that, I thought, so that's when I started asking around, albeit mostly in the wrong places - ones with a pronounced anti-furry bias. And of course, other people would tell me the exact opposite, that furry is "the in thing" right now. None of it backed up with any hard evidence, of course, since this is the internet where frivolous things like facts don't matter when finding the truth.
Keep in mind, this is all going on within about two years post-9/11. The religious right is gaining more of a cultural stronghold, and with it conservatism, reopening debates we thought were a painful memory by the 90's such as "is homosexuality really more than a lifestyle choice, and if so, do we have to tolerate it?" and "is the whole thing about black people and white people being genetically equal really a closed case?". I'm not kidding about the last one, and will dig up the report if I must to prove it. So I stopped looking for answers and came up with my own. Maybe it wasn't all true, but it may as well be. I'd realized by this time that all the bullshit we were fed in highschool about tolerance only extends to groups the government craves votes from. But me being the kind of person I am, I wasn't going to quit drawing what I love to draw just because "the furries" had allegedly made a pariah out of anyone who does it. I still felt I had to defend my art, though, so I made every effort to distance myself as much as possible from a subculture that I only had one thing in common with in the first place. I scrapped the website, stopped going to the chats and forums I used to frequent, and I didn't go so far as to destroy all of my anthropomorphic art (though there were times when I thought about it), some of it is hidden so well that I've forgotten where it is. Throw in a half-hearted insult towards furrydom amongst my fellow aspiring paid artists now and then, and a feigned new Conservative persona and I'm no more a furry than Walt Disney himself (hey, he might've been antisemitic, but at least he wasn't a furqueer!).
So, what changed between now and then that made me pick up the search once more? Well for one, Libertarianism. Now I know Libertarians have a lot of different views as to what liberty means, but to me it means no one being able to interfere with you living your life however you see fit as long as what you're doing isn't harming anyone. Where myself and other Libertarians disagree is on how that applies to the business world. A lot of people would say if you choose to be a furry (or even if you could argue that it's not really a choice), you choose to risk being unemployable. I say bullshit. To be able to really live (as opposed to merely existing), you have to be able to support yourself. If you have the talent and skill and someone is going to try to coerce you into trying to be something you're not, that's a threat to liberty. I'm not saying greenlight every furry porno movie they try to pitch (let those guys fund their own and sell them on the internet like they probably already do), I'm saying ask people to do the job that's required of them and mind your own fucking business as far as what they do in their off hours goes.
So, with this new attitude I dived into the topic again and looked for more, and better examples. I found a few things out as well. Apparently, Doug Winger (to many screaming eyes the epitome of Furversion... but sooooo sickeningly good at it) does layouts for the same company that does Dora the Explorer, and Shawn Kemp worked for Disney, and currently works for CAAT Studios. Another highly talented artist right there. Both have attended cons, as has Toby Bluth, who was a guest of honor at Further Confusion. I learned what I did about Kemp through a letter he wrote to someone with a question not unlike mine, which he actually encouraged the recipient to post on a newsboard. Again, this would be career suicide if what The Disgusted and The Resentful told me was universally true. Oh, and again, if you doubt any of this, I'll try to dig up the sources. It's just I've been called a lot of bad things, but very seldom a liar so usually people are willing to take me at my word.
I know prejudice doesn't require much logic, but if all this shit about furries is true, why isn't it also true of Anime fans? There's got to be a greater abundance of hentai / yaoi, and that sure as hell hasn't stopped anime from maintaining its popular foothold with the mainstream. Nor has it "ruined it" for people who truly enjoy anime for its art and content and don't simply feel a need to belong to a club. Which frankly, I think is why you get sites like Crush! Yiff! Destroy!. These are furries bashing furries because other furries made it uncool to be a furry. Which is pathetic, because at least the Burned Furs had a real agenda, even if it was misguided, and if what I'm learning here holds any water, based largely on falsehoods. But I have to wonder about the ones propogating these exadurations, scare tactics, whatever they are. What's their agenda? With the Burned Furs, it was pretty obvious, at least on the surface. Make furry acceptable to the mainstream. In other words, create a socially conservative fandom / subculture. This can't be some offshoot of that because those people wanted to identify with furdom, they just didn't wish to do so at the expense of their livlihoods. These guys, if it's furry, want nothing to do with it. Where the hell is it coming from? If I was wrong the whole time (not that I'm entirely convinced that I was just yet), that question still nags me. If someone has this irrational hatred towards furries and furry art, fine, I won't waste time trying to reason with them. But why would some of those same people care enough to try to caution you against doing / drawing anything that could be construed as "furry"? What to they get out of it? It's neither hurting nor helping them if your portfolio gets rejected for having anthros or if you get blacklisted in the animation industry because you drew erotica.
Anyway, I can't speak for anyone else, but I know I would like to give the fandom a chance, to share my work with if nothing else. I'll probably still take measures to hide my identity, but unless someone can show me some concrete evidence suggesting that to do so would be a pretty bad idea, I'm running out of reasons to keep my art and stories in the dark.