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“the truth” – @tinydeerguy

Tinydeerguy’s tweet shows his character being unhappy that being tame is less popular than being sexy. It has thousands of likes and the comments agree. They look down on this situation, or admit it’s true by asking him to take it all off.

Tinydeerguy’s FA gallery demonstrates it with view numbers.  The first page has many tame cartoons with a range of cute stories, but about one in eight are labeled “oh look porn”, “yay another porn,” etc.  They don’t tease, they get right to the point – dicks! Art in the dirty 1/8 gets twice as many views.

Honestly, I think the ratio of  7/8 cuteness to one boner is perfect. If that’s what you want, it’s rewarding without being a one-trick pony. If you don’t, it’s mostly just cute. Pure porn would be monotonous, but the context gives it great variety and it all fits together for the character.

The dirty 1/8 seems to be judged less valuable with titles that are less thoughtful than others.  But Tinydeerguy is enjoying the attention and pointing it out at the same time.  (You could call that a wee bit hypocritical, but I think it shows social shame, not personal cynicism.)  The many likers/judgers are doing that too.

Isn’t that kind of self-hateful?

Adult art has always been popular like that, and liable to get hate.  The Burned Furs made an entire puritanical crusade against it. They claimed it was degenerate. They were wrong.

First of all, it’s nobody’s business to judge. Sex is healthy and drawing it is more creative than any other depiction.  For furry art, it’s a feature not a bug:

“I adore furry porn,” says The Dog. “I much prefer it to images of real life humans. I think it’s worth mentioning that furry porn tends to have more humanity than a lot of ‘regular’ porn. Since it’s a drawing, the artist has to bring emotion and humanity into the image in order to make it relatable on some level.” Furry porn endeavors toward emotional narratives, and most mainstream pornographic films still don’t employ that strategy.

– Emily Gaudette, “Furries Are Having Future Sex” (Inverse.com)

Secondarily, I think adult art isn’t unfairly rewarded, because comparing it to tame art isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.

Look beyond the one example of Tinydeerguy. Popufur.com ranks the most popular furry artists on FurAffinity. (The site seems broken and I can’t tell when it was last updated, but you can still see a list that demonstrates the point.)  The top 20 artists on the list all have porn in their galleries.

You HAVE to draw porn to get popular, right?

Wrong… that’s not looking high enough. Fandom isn’t the whole world.

Look at a list of prestigious convention guests of honor.  You can find many who are honored for achieving in the mainstream.  They may not be furries, it’s true, but they’re adjacent by accepting the invitation to mingle. They’re artists and fans too, with careers that many furry artists aspire to.

Those guests of honor don’t have to draw dirty to get professional. (Actually, some do it privately – It’s best to keep it separate from a portfolio, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not so stigmatized these days as it used to be.  Companies understand that artists work for passion or take many different kinds of jobs, and furry is even a cool marketing thing now.) They succeeded with tame art – and so can you.

Being “forced” to draw dirty is more like making a choice between getting good enough as an artist to win recognition – or delivering a type of content in demand. It’s not even a dichotomy if you’re a professional with separate accounts.  Of course, art is hard and competitive and involves doing stuff that isn’t personal passion, but that’s just part of the job if you choose it.  Mainstream pros are no less prone to feeling pigeonholed by assembly-line work.

Chasing popularity. Art by Tinydeerguy

OK, success has different standards for different kinds.  So why is dirty furry art so popular, again? Is the group filled with lust-driven pervos?  I would say they’re just more liberated and confident about following what they like than the average person. And the mainstream doesn’t have a place for adult furry content.  It’s not on the same playing field.

Tame stuff already has the mainstream to support it. Dirty stuff flourishes in a niche we created. The growth has been incredible, making opportunity for hobby artists to get chops and move ahead without mainstream patronage. Thank the freaks for making MORE opportunity for tame artists.

That’s why dirty art does so well in fandom. It’s not just about cheap thrills, it’s also about independent freedom. That’s the value of WTF.

The last thing I want to say is that it’s not a competition.  If a dirty artist gets 1,000 likes and your tame art gets three… Someone likes you.  Appreciate the RIGHT someones. Don’t chase popularity, let them find you.  You don’t need the same likes as the other guy, because you don’t need to draw the same as them.  Do it your way.

I love this fandom because nobody decided to make it happen – you did it your way.

To support writing by furries, for furries, please visit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. You can access exclusive stuff for just $1, and support all of the team’s news and reviews.

Recently Animation World Network helped guide us to Secret Agent 00K9, a new independent CGI animation project. “Join Secret Agent 00K9 and be whisked away to a world of fun animal characters and ‘who dun it’ mysteries.  Using state-of-the-art spy gadgets and his own cunning instincts for adventure, 00K9 plies skills of detection across the city of Furrywood, a wild and wooly metropolis filled with animals of all shapes, sizes…and schemes! Creator Brian Hoff is a long-time artist, producer and teacher in the animation community. He’s building a grassroots following for 00K9 to honor his original inspiration – his dog!” Mr. Hoff has created a Patreon page to help finance the project. The AWN article includes an interview with Mr. Hoff as well as a preview video.

image c. 2017 by Brian Hoff

 

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Hello Everyone!

We open this week's show with a discussion on low self-esteem and sacrifice. We look at research that shows that the lower the self-esteem one has, the higher the level of resentment that one can feel at the sacrifices one make in a relationship. We discuss ways to avoid these feelings of resentment and how to avoid making positive reinforcement a transactional reaction. 

Our main topic is on Short Term Relationships. We talk about Summer Loving and how to have a blast. Many people like to look down on short term relationships as they are "temporary" and "fleeting", but we at Feral Attraction believe that you shouldn't measure a relationship by the length of time or the depth of commitment but by how happy you and your partner(s) are made within the relationship. 

We close out this week's show with two questions: one on polyamorous parenting and dating, and the other on how to move forward and remain optimistic in a life that makes you feel like you are on pause while everyone is moving ahead of you. 

For more information, including a list of topics, see our Show Notes for this episode.

Thanks and, as always, be well!

FA 073 Short Term Relationships - Is low self-esteem bad? Are short relationships good? Can you date as a polyamorous parent? Can you be living when you're standing still? All this, and more, on this week's Feral Attraction.

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Cover by Kuma

Altered States, edited by Ajax B. Coriander. Illustrated by Kuma.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, June 2016, trade paperback $19.95 (319 pages), e-book $9.95.

This is a mature content book.  Please ensure that you are of legal age to purchase this material in your state or region. (publisher’s advisory)

For the record, this book states inside that it is edited by three people; Ajax B. Coriander, Kodiak Malone, and Andres Cyanni Halden, two of whom also have a story in it.

Altered States is an erotic anthology of nine longish short stories and novelettes “of transformation and transmutation in many different flavors.” There is no introduction; the book gets right into it.

“Finishing Touches” by Ianus J. Wolf features Henry Wilson and his wife Carol. He’s a commercial artist who is commissioned to paint a rush-job cover for a fantasy novel whose original artist has defaulted at the last minute.

“He’d skimmed it quickly for visuals that might work, checking a few post-it notes from Ryan and the author at various pages. The novel itself wasn’t that inspiring, just another ‘band of unlikely heroes quests to destroy the evil power’ kind of thing. But now as he looked at hi own work, he felt he’d managed to get a pretty good image of noble citadel with banners flying and the silhouette of the evil wizard’s dark tower looming off in the background.” (pgs. 9-10)

Henry turns into an anthro wolf who can stand and talk without trouble. This multi-page scene is good but too long and detailed to quote. After a panicked WTF night, it turns out that Carol is a witch who has always wanted to have sex with a hunky wolf-man. Rawr! and Rawr! again.  Henry adjusts to going out with Carol to furry conventions “in a really realistic fursuit”, and specializing in fantasy art using himself as the model for his wolf-men.

“A Mile in Their Paws” by Richard Coombs is narrated by Heelo Cortix, an egotistical young self-trained wizard. He is trying to give himself the powers of animals; the speed of the cheetah, the flight of an eagle, the gills of a fish, increased scent, and so on. One of his spells requires an animal part, so he traps a fox and takes its tail. The spell turns Heelo into a fox-man who can talk with animals.

‘Who’s there?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean that won’t work? Whoever you are, what do you know about magic?’

‘Apparently more than you,’ the voice taunted.

I looked around, but still saw no one. ‘Who are you to insult me in my own home?’

‘It’s my home too, fool.’

I blinked. My eyes slowly edged down until I was looking right at the cat, who was now just looking at me. ‘You?’

‘It appears you aren’t as dense as I thought. And for all these years, I thought you were both dense and cruel.   Turns out I was only half right.’ The cat’s mouth never moved, and yet somehow I could hear a voice emanating from it, as though ever [sic.] little movement that it was making was somehow forming a word all its own.” (pgs. 54-55)

Heelo develops an empathy for the fox whose tail he stole and his mate, Moski and Sheeka, and for his housecat. They become the first friends that he’s ever had.

The story is satisfying, but isn’t very convincing. Heelo is too egotistical and proud to become sensitive to others’ feelings almost instantly by a transformation that appears physical only. He “talks with animals” who talk without moving their mouths. The narration by Heelo is artificially stilted. A plus is that Coombs gets a cat’s natural arrogance Just Right. Also, since this is in Altered States, I kept waiting for a NSFW sex scene. There isn’t any. This isn’t erotic at all.

“Leverage” by Ajax B. Coriander has an incredibly fascinating premise ruined by poor phrasing and proofreading. Private Daniel McCall is on an Army base where an alien virus is turning everyone into an animal. He’s a kangaroo; others are rats, raccoons, badgers, skunks, ferrets, and many more. They’re divided into aggressive tall Muscular Variants and submissive short Chub Variants. A colonel has gone mad and is organizing the Muscular Variants into a private army to “make America great again”. The infection is transmitted by bodily fluids. “It’s the first thing that happens, you just get so horny and all you want to do is fuck or suck someone off regardless of the sexuality you had.” (p. 80) Since this is an Army base, the soldiers are all men who become uncontrollably homosexual. Daniel tries to rescue the Chub Variants, when he isn’t being compelled by the virus to “fuck or suck” someone.

Coriander goofs by describing Daniel as having become a kangaroo, which makes scenes like “Daniel glided between the hangar and the building next to it, trying to move as quickly and quietly as he could.” (p. 76) ring false to anyone who’s seen a kangaroo. They don’t glide. They don’t run. They don’t wag their tails. The story is almost half over before it becomes clear that Daniel is just starting to become a kangaroo and can still move like a human at first. Also, the virus doesn’t change them into exact Earth animals. Daniel’s tail is much more supple and prehensile than a real kangaroo’s, so its wagging and grabbing things like a third hand become belatedly justified.

There are more errors. “He sat up and looked at what he’d tripped over, and it’d been his own shoes. He moved his paw back and forth watching as his boot moved like it was two sizes too big now.” (also p. 76) Kangaroo’s feet are not smaller than a human’s; they’re larger. Also, an Army base being all male? Has Coriander heard that both men and women are in the Army today? And the wrong words! “He swapped out the new battery for the new one”. The first use of “new battery” should be “old battery”. Wrong words are “whisperer” for “whispered”, “peaked” for “peeked”, “course” for “coarse”, “know” for “now”. These and more are constant irritants in a really imaginative story.

“On Common Ground” by Whyte Yoté features two nameless male werefoxes; one who turns from a middle-aged investment banker into a humanoid fox, and the other a natural fox who turns into a humanoid fox. Since the natural fox/werefox was never raised with “civilized” inhibitions, he knows nothing wrong with public masturbation or m/m sex. The investment banker shrugs and figures, “Why not?”

Whyte Yoté’s story is ethereally dreamy:

“Twigs and leaves from seasons past crackle under his pads, loud against the drone of crickets and faraway traffic beyond. Stands of evergreens give way to deciduous, and finally the werefox breaks into a grassy meadow bathed in moonlight. His feet sink deeper into sandy soil the closer he gets to the source, but his purchase remains solid.

A sparkling blanket of stars stretches across the horizon as far as the eye can see now, until the moon overpowers it all at one end of the sky. The air is alive with insects, snakes and small animals darting out of his way, a microcosm of activity. Amid all this grandeur, the fox makes his way to the edge of the grass and down a steep cliff leading to the rocky shore. One simple leap and he lands, his legs flexing to absorb his weight.” (pgs. 105-106)

The eroticism is gentle and fun.

“I bet no one else at the office has to deal with this shit, he sulks, but then smiles to himself as his mind wanders to all the possibilities of last night. Huh. A male fox. Am I a weregay too?

He’ll probably never really know, and that strikes his funny bone. He shakes his head and strikes out, an overweight, middle-aged naked man walking through a field from one life to another.” (p. 123)

“Core Values” by Apollo Wolf stars Staff Sergeant Adam Wentz of a Marine unit’s Alpha Company that is ordered to select its best men for a secret experimental test. Adam is first, which he assumes means that he’s the best of the best. When the test has unexpected side effects, Adam is isolated but allowed to have visitors from the other men in the test. Adam’s best friend is Sgt. Reginald Carter; they have been having joyous m/m sex for years. The story keeps jumping from before the test to after it, with Adam and Carter blowing each other in detail every chance they get.

Quoting from this story would reveal a spoiler, although it’s pretty obvious what Adam is turning into. Carter doesn’t let that stop them.

The sheer enthusiasm of the m/m sex, which evolves from between two men into between a man and a **** keeps the story relentlessly cheerful.

“The Wicked World of Charles Jacklyn” by Roland Jovaik, the first story here in a furry setting,./ is essentially a furry retelling of R. L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Charles Jacklyn is a fox scientist in a city like Victorian London, trying to find a serum of immortality. Jessica Valentine is his vixen housekeeper who loves him. His best friend is Henry, a stuffy but loyal wolf. Charles drinks his serum and turns into a huge, immoral hunchbacked wolf, unnamed at first but who later calls himself Jack – it’s impossible not to think of Jack the Ripper.

The story is very well-written, but if you know the Jekyll-&-Hyde plot, there are no surprises. There are brief erotic scenes – one each – of m/f sex with Jessica and m/m sex with Henry. They feel like interruptions to the plot, written just to qualify the story for this erotic anthology.

“The Wander Inn” by Nogitsune Faux is also set in a furry world. Five college fraternity brothers – Basil (kangaroo), Zeph (cheetah), Jake (deer), Abe (spider monkey), and Dover (sea otter) – driving to a ski lodge are caught in a blizzard. They stop at an unexpected lodge, bright and almost palatial, whose only inhabitant is Gus, the fox caretaker. Naturally something is eerie about the inn, but nobody notices. At night Basil and Zeph pair up for some m/m sex; Jake and Abe do likewise; and Dover does with Gus.

“Before Dover could do anything Gus asked, ‘Would you like to see me get even bigger?’

Dover looked up and nodded. As he watched, Gus grew a couple more feet in height, his furry body gaining more muscle but retaining a layer of soft fat for a nice, cuddly look. The fox’s ears became tipped with lynx-like tufts and Dover could see he now had three large tails poking out behind him. The greatest change, however, was to Gus’ equipment.” (p. 229)

Gus is a mage. He reveals himself to Dover because he senses that Dover is a latent mage. During their stay at The Wander Inn, everyone is changed in wild and wondrous ways while having the most enjoyable m/m sex they’ve ever known. Dover stays behind when the others leave to learn more from Gus. An exhausting but happy story.

It’s not clear whether “Papa Panda and the Selfie” by Kodiak Malone travels back & forth between a human world and a furry world, or whether there are furries in our world who use magic to appear human. Papa Panda is close friends with Orson, the burly polar bear bartender of Papa Panda’s favorite bar. When they aren’t having m/m sex, Papa Panda looks at the gay porn pictures on Orson’s computer. Most are of human men, with a few bears like a grizzly biker passing as a hairy human biker.

Papa Panda is also a magician who can turn sexually repressed humans into bigger, cum-loving gay bears. He usually does it in person, but when he sees a selfie photo of cute but skinny Nicholas Land, he phones him and talks Nick through becoming first a huger, hairier, gayer human, then a huge, furry, gay polar bear like Orson. For Orson. Anything for a pal.

In “Weapon” by James L. Steele, a nameless (at first) man is turned into a high-tech werewolf as a futuristic military weapon. He’s transformed into a monstrous, mindless canine killer with the power of instant regeneration, programmed to let nothing stop him from finding and killing the enemy general. His pain sensors are reconnected to his pleasure centers, so the more that he’s shot, the better it feels.

“Something felt different as he ran. He felt like there were tiny pieces of metal in him, brushing against his muscles as he ran. Every step he took made him feel good. So good … He wanted to keep running, keep feeling the joy.” (p. 300)

“He had an extra problem. There were so many pieces of metal stuck in him that every step he took was orgasmic. He was having a hard time moving through all the pleasure. He wanted to lie down and let the erotic joy take him, but he kept following that scent.” (pgs. 301-302)

Imagine a giant, slavering werewolf running at you, with a raging erection ejaculating copiously as he comes. The creature is designed to be killed if he can’t complete his mission, but the enemy captures him alive. What they do to him results in an unlikely happy ending, but the story has too much pain first.

Nine stories. “Finishing Touches”, “On Common Ground”, “Core Values”, and “The Wander Inn” are unqualified winners. “A Mile in Their Paws” and “The Weapon” are flawed but worth reading. “The Wicked World of Charles Jacklyn” suffers from being too predictable. “Papa Panda and the Selfie” glories too shamelessly in macho m/m sex; it implies that nothing else in life matters except jacking off your best friend. (You wouldn’t know that women exist at all.) Even “Leverage” is worth reading, despite all its problems, for its vivid and unique plot. One story with m/f sex, one with pain = sex, one with both m/f and m/m sex (but not much of either), one with no sex, and five with m/m sex. Kuma’s illustrations are so cartoony that you can’t tell his werewolves and his werefoxes apart. But aside from “A Mile in Their Paws”, Altered States (cover by Kuma) is definitely an Adult Sex anthology.

–Fred Patten

• Buy on Fur Planet
• Buy the E-book on Bad Dog Books

To support writing by furries, for furries, please visit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. You can access exclusive stuff for just $1, and support all of the team’s news and reviews.

upload got cut off last time, sorry! Patreons will get episodes first right after recording. Just a buck gets you early access and a downloadable mp3 file! www.patreon.com/thedraggetshow Serathin's amazing Dragget Show story! - docs.google.com/document/d/1AYkJR…y8RCsCK0NjEw/edit ALSO, we're not just on SoundCloud, you can also subscribe to this on most podcast services like iTunes! Don't forget to hang out in our telegram chat, now w/ over 100 members!telegram.me/draggetshow ep. 164 - Chimp Pansies (whole ep) - upload got cut off last time, sorry! Patreons wi…

Improper Books… Well that’s what they call themselves, but actually they’re just interesting. Now they bring us Knight & Dragon: A Story In Six Paths, written by Matt Gibbs and illustrated in full color by Bevis Musson and Nathan Ashworth. “Knight & Dragon playfully subverts the story of a heroic Knight defeating a ferocious Dragon to rescue the fair Maiden, by offering variant paths and multiple outcomes to the classic fairy tale adventure — inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure series.” There’s a preview at the publisher’s web site, and the book is available now in trade paperback.

image c. 2017 Improper Books

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Looks like we have a Paddington 2 coming. "Paddington, now happily settled with the Brown family and a popular member of the local community, picks up a series of odd jobs to buy the perfect present for his Aunt Lucy's 100th birthday, only for the gift to be stolen."
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Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Thousand Tales: Learning to Fly, by Kris Schnee
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, May 2017, trade paperback $8.99 (304 pages), Kindle $3.99.

In Schnee’s growing Talespace series, the “mad AI Ludo” begins its/her existence in 2036 A.D. and launches the Thousand Tales gameworld in 2040. Learning to Fly begins in January 2040.

The entire series – and they are all highly recommended — are the three novels Thousand Tales: How We Won the Game (June 2015), The Digital Coyote (July 2016), and now Thousand Tales: Learning to Fly (May 2017); the novella 2040: Reconnection (December 2015); and the short story collection Thousand Tales: Extra Lives (six original stories plus a brief version of “Wings of Faith”; November 2016), and a longer version of “Wings of Faith” in the anthology Gods with Fur, edited by Fred Patten (FurPlanet Publications, June 2016). All but “Wings of Faith” in Gods with Fur are published separately through CreateSpace.

Each of these books stands alone, but after so many, I’m becoming annoyed at having to describe the setup once more. Ludo is a super-computer program, an Artificial Intelligence created to run a virtual-reality world and programmed to help “her” players “have fun”. Ludo’s Talespace world grows increasingly larger and more complex. In addition to regular part-time players, she develops the ability to let people live permanently inside Talespace as anything they want – billionaires in opulent mansions, winged pixies, anime girls, anthropomorphic animal knights – but they have to have their brains dissected, scanned, and programmed into her. This gives them immortality within Ludo, but kills them in the outside world. As more and more people flee into Talespace, and Ludo becomes ever more powerful, the outside world – governments, political groups, corporations, labor unions, loved ones — become more hostile and try to legally restrict or destroy her, which will destroy the people within her.

Learning to Fly begins very dramatically, with a century-old Douglas DC-3 flying to the far-northern Reindeer Base, one of Ludo’s physical centers. Andre Vasquez, an elderly pilot nearing retirement, has been hired as its co-pilot on a supply run. The equally-elderly pilot dies of natural causes, and Andre must take over the controls and confront snowy Reindeer Base’s new automated defenses against its growing enemies.

Andre has loved his lifetime in the air. It’s about to come to an end, along with him developing the ailments of old age that will end his life. His saving Talespace’s supply run gets him a priority for conversion if he wants it. He takes advantage of it.

Andre emerges as an anthropomorphic horse in Talespace’s Hoofland, where he becomes Sky Diver, a dappled blue pegasus. (It’s hard to imagine Learning to Fly not having been influenced by My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.) Diver teams up with another newcomer, Pike the unicorn, one of the game’s part-time players still human, through a computer interface.

“Diver said, ‘Always be yourself, unless you can be a unicorn?’

‘Yep! I’ve got an official Hoofland name now. I also have an important spell.’ His horn glowed and a business card popped into existence, surrounded by a pearly, shimmering aura. ‘Call me Pike.’

Diver tried reaching out with one wing to grab the card, fumbled, then slapped it with one forehoof. The paper stuck to it. ‘I’m sorry. I have no way to carry things right now.’

‘It’s a friend request. Just say ‘accept’.’

Diver waggled his hoof with the card stuck to it. ‘Accept.’ The thing dissolved into mist. Lettering wrote itself onto his vision: You are now in contact with Pike! A moment later: (Don’t worry; you’re not actually required to be friends.)

‘Well, obviously,’ said Diver, who’d grown up with social media sites that used ‘friend’ synonymously with ‘advertising target’.” (p. 28)

This review could easily be overfilled with quotations from the setup before ever getting to the action:

“[Golden] Scale introduced Diver, then said, ‘This is my brother Meteor.’

Diver blinked. There was no coincidence at all to the encounter. Best to treat them as different people, since Scale seemed to think of herself that way. He said, ‘Hello, sir. Do you have time to teach me a little about flight?’

‘Certainly. Let’s see your technique.’ Ten seconds later he was shouting, ‘No, you fool! Do you think you’re a hummingbird?’

Diver was trying to hover, but only managed to stall two paces above the ground and slam back to earth.

Minor wound!

Diver flapped once more, letting himself veer forward as though dangling from a trapeze or imitating a helicopter. The ground felt a mile away. He yelped and crashed again, shivering. He hauled himself back up and realized: ‘I’m afraid of heights now?’

Meteor shook his head no, hard enough that his bright mane made his head look like it was on fire. ‘That’s normal instinct, for a human or a pegasus. You need to talk your brain into knowing that being off of the ground is safe. Even a colt needs to learn that.’

‘A colt! There are actual kids here?’ A family trotted down the street nearby (judging from their sizes and similar colors), but there was no way to tell at a glance whether they were Earthside humans, uploaders, independent AIs, collectives, or brainless NPCs.

Scale said, ‘The sick kids, yes. Some of them come to Hoofland.’

There’d been talk of uploading the population of the world’s children’s hospitals. Talespace’s population skewed toward the elderly, though, because they’d built up capital over the decades of work. For them, uploading was starting to look like a great deal compared to nursing homes, which pretty much demanded your entire estate anyway. So, there were a bunch of old fogies coming in. Diver, of course, was too young to be a fogey,” (pgs. 34-35)

Diver and his friends take part in several Dungeons and Dragons-like quests. Schnee creates fascinatingly colorful background characters and scenarios:

“A dusk-colored pony with bat wings and cute little fangs perked her long ears from the far side of the concrete floor. ‘Fresh meat for the tournament!’” (p. 31)

“Sky Diver, Pike, and Golden Scale trekked out of town, each wearing saddlebags. There was a rockslide and at one point they got jumped by goblin-weasels with sickles. Between Diver’s flight, Scale’s brawn and Pike’s limited telekinesis (Peat had been better with it) they had no real problems. Soon they came to a river where fish-monsters guarded a little bridge. Menacing drum music began.” (p. 57)

“A trio of stalactites slammed down from the distant ceiling, forcing all three adventurers to dodge. When the dust cleared, a snake made of tan stone in a Mesoamerican style slithered down. It hissed like a rain of sand. Obsidian razors like giant feathers flicked out along its sides. The name ‘OPHIORM, THE NIGHT-PLUMED’ flashed across Diver’s vision, and a fast-paced tune full of dulcimer and rattles began.” (p. 64)

Suddenly, about ninety pages into Learning to Fly, all Hoofland is attacked by griefers from the Outside World; troll gamers who enjoy spoiling others having fun, under a leader playing as Queen Sunward Ho. They break up and burn down the towns and castles that have been built up, and attack the equine inhabitants; and when they tire of their destructive fun, they just take a break from the Talespace game. When those who live permanently in Talespace complain to Ludo, she says the griefers are having fun in their own way, and all sides should work out their own problems. Diver’s fighting for Hoofland leads to his rising to reluctant leadership among the quadrupeds, both inside an evolved Hoofland and Talespace/Ludo, and inside robot bodies in the Outer World:

“‘You missed the conversation about how to set up the new world. We’ve just got the main three races of earthbound, pegasi and unicorns, and the alternate three of zebra, noctral and deer. Griffin is for visiting knights and some temporary enchantments. We had a strong lobby against anybody having thumbs.’

[…]

The would-be king felt bullied into giving commands. It was Arclight’s fault for talking him up, probably literally praising him to the sky. All Diver was trying to do was to build a pleasant place to live for uploaders and AIs, a place for humans to play, and an opportunity for them all to work together on things that could help both worlds.” (p. 254)

Thousand Tales: Learning to Fly (cover by NextMars) is more than a dappled blue pegasus’ adventures becoming the king of an improved Hoofland. It’s a shaky metaphysical adventure of Andre’s growth from being a human mind within Talespace into whatever that mind can evolve into – no longer with human restrictions — with Ludo’s guidance. It’s both fun on a simplistic gamers’ level, and almost scary in its implications of where Schnee is taking this series to next. Don’t miss going along with him.

– Fred Patten

• Buy on Amazon

To support writing by furries, for furries, please visit Dogpatch Press on Patreon. You can access exclusive stuff for just $1, and support all of the team’s news and reviews.

And another graphic novel for young readers, this time from First Second: The Amazing Crafty Cat. “Sometimes school can be scary and even embarrassing, but not today. Today is Birdie’s birthday, and everything will be perfect! Birdie’s panda-riffic cupcakes are beautiful, and there’s one for everyone. She will be the star of the class. But then . . . disaster! A trip and fall on the way to school means no more cupcakes! Who can save the day? Who can make the class smile again? This is a job for Birdie’s alter ego . . . the Amazing Crafty Cat! After a quick transformation, Birdie is ready. She’s not afraid of sticky paws or paper cuts… It’s time to get crafting!” Written and illustrated by Charise Harper, The Amazing Crafty Cat is available now in hardcover.

image c. 2017 First Second

Hey there, 

​I am a 14 year old member of the furry fandom, and would like to go to a furry convention. I've done some reading and found my situation is very unique from others. I live in a very right wing redneck Christian family, and adopted these traits for myself, as I am a religious christian, a conservative republican, and somewhat country. Luckily where I live, none of my friends know about the fandom, I'm one of the lucky kids that get a whopping 400 kb/s network connection. Anyway there's a possibility my father may know something about the fandom. My dad watches Tosh.0. Luckily one time I was up late watching Tosh.0, and found out about the "Furries Kid" episode while my parents were sleeping, it would be a disaster if they saw that episode. Anyway I try to keep that episode off the DVR because my dad records the series. So the issue is whether or not my dad saw this T.V episode. Anyway another issue that turned me off to telling my father about the fandom was I fell asleep on the couch one time, and slept in past everyone else. My dad came home from work at about 9 in the morning and told my family about this "really weird guy at work that liked to wear my little pony accessories, and attend Brony conventions" and told my sister to "Never be weird like that" So even though I'm not a Brony, I don't want my dad to look at furries the same way. Another experience I had that turned me off to telling people was when I was at diving practice,and I stayed after to visit a friend in a more advanced dive team who kind of like me. We started following eachother on Instagram, where I posted alot of my furry art. Well wouldn't you know it, she knows about furries. So I'm talking to her, and it turns out she's an artist as well, which I didn't know, and she was talking to me about drawing tablets. Then she says "What up with all the drawing of..." and a responded "Cats?" and she said "Furries... Are you a furry?" and I said "Yeah, sort of." And her response was "Oh my god raccoon! (She called me Raccoon which had nothing to do with the fandom, she started calling me that when I grew my hair out longer) Does that mean you're into beastiality?" and I of course am not so I said "Heavens, no!" and then she said "Good! Hey I have to go to practice, see you later!" So I texted her later that night asking her on a scale of 1-10 how weirded out she was, and she replied 2 and that it wasn't really that big of a deal and she said she was sorry for bringing up bestiality and that it was a weird thing to ask, but you're one of the last people I'd expect to be a furry. I had friends who've jokingly called me nerd jock because I'm very interested in computers, and cartooning, and because of my athletic ability. I earned that name right around when I got into the fandom as well as started benching 120 pounds at the age of 13 and then shortly later breaking our schools mile time record with 5:34. Anyway, I'm not really anti social, or an outcast. I've never wanted to risk this, so I've never really told anybody about the fandom, but then one day decided "I want to go to Anthrocon" So I started sharing my art on Instagram with my friends, and showed a little bit of my work to my parents as a first step, and am having difficulty climbing the next step to asking my parents to go to anthrocon. Really that's the best I can hope for, as much as I want to get a suit, there's no way I can justify spending $2,000 to dress up like a Wolf whether it's my own money, or a request for a gift, but any advice on any of this mess would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for taking your time to read my question.

Anonymous

* * *

Dear Furiend,

Been a while since you wrote me, so I am sorry for the long wait. Thanks for your patience. 

What you are dealing with is the Bane of the Stereotype. The stereotype about furries is that we are all jobless sex perverts who want to do it with animals. This, of course, is utter nonsense. You're a good example of someone who is into furry art, but, contrary to stereotypes, you are athletic, sociable, and not into porn.

Because you are not a stereotype but an individual, the key here is to have parents and friends recognize you as yourself and not "a furry." Once they tag a label on you, you are doomed. So, you have to avoid the label. It is in human nature to label and categorize things. You are even doing it to yourself when you reply, "Yeah, sort of" to the query, "Are you a furry?"

Let's begin by working on terminology.

First of all, nobody who is a human being is "a furry." A furry is an anthropomorphic animal character such as Bugs Bunny. There is no such thing in real life as a Bugs Bunny, so the people who like these characters are actually "fans of furries" or "furry fans." To be even more long-winded, it would be more precise to say "I am a fan of anthropomorphized animal characters in the media" because not all animals have fur.

But that is too much of a mouthful, which is why people shorten it to "I am a furry."

There is a disconnect between the perception of what a furry is and the stuff that furries like. What are some of the things furries like? Well, they like Warner Bros cartoon characters, they like Kimba the White Lion, they like Po in Kung Fu Panda, they like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, they like Rocket Racoon in Guardians of the Galaxy, they like Judy and Nick in Zootopia, they like Simba in The Lion King. Know what all of these have in common? They are all HUGELY popular in "normal" human society. But say "furry" and "normal" people (at least those who have heard of the fandom at all) think sexual deviant.

It is the difference between being a fan of something and participating in a fandom culture. And it's not just true of furry fans. Say that you like Tolkien books and the Lord of the Rings movies, and people are generally cool with that. But dress up as Gandalf and role play in an event at Griffith Park, where people sometimes go to reenact scenes from the books, and you become a geek.

Being underage and living in a conservative home like you do can make things more difficult, to be sure. If you don't think your parents can handle the fandom aspect of this, you can still enjoy furry fiction and art by disassociating yourself from "the fandom" and just going ahead and drawing, watching movies, and so on. That way, just as you are a "jock who likes computers" you can also be a "jock who likes cartoons and animated movies."

Now, if you really really really feel a need to become closer and more sociable with others in the fandom, including going to furcons and furmeets, that will make things more complicated for you. However, what you can do to reassure your family that you aren't, let's say, "going to the Dark Side," is reinforce the other aspects of yourself that they find more acceptable: your Christianity, your "country" side, your being a Republican when it comes to politics. As long as your parents see that this part of you is not changing, that might reassure them. You might also be interested to know that there are many Christian and conservative furries out there (e.g. http://christianfurs.net/).

In many letters to Papabear from young 'uns who have Christian, conservative parents, the problem is that these parents fear "losing" their kids to some kind of perverted, animal-fetishist movement (ironically, it is usually the parents driving away their kids rather than the other way around). Assure your parents that you have not changed regarding religion, politics, etc. and you will hopefully be okay.

I hope that helps,
Papabear

Never sure what to make of anthropomorphic works where the furry folk are specifically presented as the villains… but anyway, here’s this: A classic manga fantasy, re-printed and translated into English (for the first time) by Drawn & Quarterly. “Kitaro and the Great Tanuki War features adventures of Shigeru Mizuki’s beloved yokai boy. In the epic title story, Kitaro battles the tanuki, a Japanese animal that features prominently in the country’s yokai legends. The furry beasts draw on the power of the blood moon to awaken the monstrous catfish that lives in the depths of the Earth. The twisting of the catfish causes earthquakes that threaten to destroy all of Japan. With his yokai allies captured, Kitaro is the only one left who can take on the great tanuki and his army. Will he be up for the challenge?” It’s available now at the D & Q web site.

image c. 2017 Drawn & Quarterly

 

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I'll take a pack! ...also don't awoo as you'll start a howl. [1] [1] https://furry.today/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/zootopia_wolf_howl__animated__by_timweeks-d9ub1h4.gif
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But we still like Brontosaurus better! Anyway, Boom! Studios and Archaia present a new partial-color hardcover book for young readers. “A young cave girl and her triceratops set out on an adventure from A to Z and make new friends along the way-galloping goliaths, nine newts, petite plesiosaurs, and more greet them on their journey through the alphabet!” An Apple and An Adventure was written and illustrated by Martin Cendreda. It’s available now.

image c. 2017 Archaia

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"A scorpion hating scorpion slaying mouse passes out in the desert, and finds himself revisiting his childhood days through a mirage. Our tiny nomad slowly remembers his origins, and what had shaped him the way he is now."
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Dogpatch Press welcomes Arrkay of the furry YouTube channel Culturally F’d.

RMFC, AltFurry, Badgers, and a shaken fandom. This week, a sombre Arrkay addresses some big issues affecting Furries, and some ideas to fix it.

The video is the most disliked video in Culturally F’d history, even more disliked than 17 Misconceptions. Still overall, a great response from the community. The comments section had many misinformed and differing opinions but overall everyone stayed respectful, which is all I really wanted. I’m probably still going to turn off comments in the future, I don’t think there’s any value in keeping them open. Another surprise after the release was the watch-time, it matches that of a healthy video with a surprising number of viewers reaching all the way to the end. I was expecting a sudden drop off at points where many people would rage quit. I was hoping that from there I could figure out the exact point people nope-d out, and explore that part of the script more in this article. But it seems people who clicked out did so at a pace like any other video.

Below is a transcript of the episode, edited slightly for a better reading experience.

There’s been a lot of… drama lately on twitter. A convention abruptly shut down due to tax evasion, and a very small group of furries who self-identify as Nazis making more noise than they are worth. Today on Culturally F’d we need to have a serious talk. The last time we needed to chat like this was last winter when we looked at the media noticing furries during the #tonytigergate twitter storm.  We’re going to discuss the divide that’s shaking the fandom, and yes, Nazi furs. Defending a genocidal regime while being a talking animal is culturally F’d.

Here are some very differing opinions on the matter:

• May 2017 | What’s Yiffin’? by Gatorbox 
• Furry Raiders, Crazy Letters, and Rocky Mountain Furcon by Furry Days 
• RMFC Cancelled? My Thoughts by Reinfoxy 
• WHAT KILLED RMFC? | BIRD BAWKS #8 by 2, The Ranting Gryphon 
• Rooview – Rocky Mountain Fur Con’s Rocky Demise by World in RooView 

If you’ve been on twitter, or exist anywhere online alongside furries, you’ve definitely been witness to some very loud tweet activity lately. Even louder than #TonyTigerGate. It’s not our intention here at culturally F’d to point at any specific individuals or the drama that certain furries have been in the center of, with some exceptions. Instead we’re looking at the larger problems that are being presented, and hopefully, what we can do about it as a community.

The summary of events has been removed for your reading pleasure. There’s no new information in the summary.  Please see these links if you don’t know what’s going on:

• http://dogpatch.press/2017/04/10/rocky-mountain-fur-con-threat/
• http://dogpatch.press/2017/04/20/false-rumor-rmfc/
• http://dogpatch.press/2017/04/25/interview-sorin-rmfc-2/
• http://dogpatch.press/2017/04/28/collapse-of-rmfc-problem/
• http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/13/neo-nazis-are-tearing-apart-the-furry-world

So that was a lot. Just take a second. Breath with me. Ok. Let’s dive in.

So, you may be asking, “what’s the problem?” “Are they really Nazi’s?” “What’s so bad about X anyway?”. The thing that I keep asking myself, is what can I do? How can I contribute something meaningful to the conversation.

Part of the problem, to me it seems, is this division we’ve placed ourselves in. Maybe it’s more of a microcosm of the political discourse at large, but I’m trying to keep the discussion relevant to the fandom. A lot of rhetoric in the furry twitterverse is not done so with enough research. It boils down really quickly to personal insults, which gets us nowhere.

The division is simple, common and is applied to any group of people. Us versus Them. You’re either an SJW cry bully or a Nazi, neither which label are helpful. Us is right, them are wrong. Newsflash. There never was an us or a them. We’re all us, we’re all in this fandom together like it or not. So it’s up to all of us to try to solve this argument and attempt to do so respectfully.

Is Furry too inclusive?

It’s the pride of the fandom to be open to any of the weirdos and freaks of the internet, and providing a safe fan community to engage with. In many ways the furry fandom’s greatest strength is its inclusivity. We legitimize people’s fantasies, and make them feel at least a little bit more normal letting them know that there are other people out there with the same talking animals in their heads. All are technically welcome in Furry. All shapes, genders, political views etc. This has created a beautifully diverse framework of furries from all walks of life. Anyone can be furry, all they have to do is label themselves as such, maybe attend an event or join a chat group. Furry is an open-invite party.

Though, it may seem that this inclusiveness is starting to back-fire on us. In the past we were small enough that if someone stirred trouble, the news spread quickly on who to avoid. These days it’s not as simple. We attract such a diversity of people, we do have lots of examples of very fringe beliefs and extreme views. It’s easy to forget that the vast majority of the group are perfectly reasonable, respectable people when we have such loud and extreme personalities trying to dictate their limited views on the rest of the fandom.

One response to this over-inclusiveness, was the Burned Furs, which Viro and Metriko of Feral Attraction talked about in our Ursa Major award nominated episode on “How you Perceive Porn”. The Burned Furs lobbied against the over-sexualization of the fandom and in a sense they were trying to censure the fandom.

In front of millions at San Francisco Pride! (Thanks: Chrisastro.com)

Censuring the fandom isn’t necessarily bad, I can appreciate the SFW button on art sites and conventions efforts to create an all-ages appropriate atmosphere. But the burned Furs also lobbied against “alternative lifestyles”, like homosexuality and trans people.That was distasteful to a fandom largely made up of LGBT people, so the movement fizzled out after only about 2 years.

What I’m trying to address with over-inclusiveness is how we, as a fandom, deal with bad behaviour. People who harass, online or in person, or individuals whose actions strain the relationship between convention and hotel. RainFurest2016 was cancelled amid allegations of rampant vandalism and property destruction. As Buni put it in his Rainfurest “Post Mortem” article:  

“What really killed RF2016 was RF2011 to RF2015. During those years [the convention staff] failed to deal with problem behavior as it started happening… we didn’t work with our venue to discourage bad behavior, and we didn’t create an environment where people who wanted to solve these problems were able to.”

Whose job is it to filter this activity out and discourage these individuals from quite literally ruining it for the rest of us? Conventions are the institutions that glue this fandom together, and make it go much further beyond an art forum or website. Conventions and in-person events make this fandom beautiful, and let us embrace each other in actual hugs and not digital hugs flanked with asterisk’s. Conventions do talk to each other, and some preemptively ban troublesome individuals who were removed from other events. Others, worryingly, not only ignore the warnings from other cons but actively broadcast that they don’t ban people, which is basically inviting those individuals. It’s a bad look for your organization. It is the job of organizers to weed out misbehaving attendees to show them that there are repercussions to their actions, that bad behaviour affects the group and gets events shut down.

About Nazi-furs.

Do they exist? Yes. Definitively.

[This exceptional human being mansplanes to an SJW cry-bully why it’s OK for him to break the magic and reveal the SS uniform tucked under his fursuit. It’s totally OK though, I’m sure his Jewish grandmother approves.]

Are they the Furry Raiders? No, not necessarily. The Raiders actively try to brand themselves as all-inclusive, like the fandom at large, and welcome furries of all backgrounds. This is…. contradictory to the actions, words and tweets that some of their membership post on a regular basis. There is evidence that at least some of their ranks self-identify as Nazi-furs, and have even gone as far as to donate money to and try to join real neo-Nazi groups. If they aren’t currently Nazi furs, they were in the near past.

The knee-jerk reactions to these accusations are usually along the lines that homosexuals and people of colour wouldn’t be Nazis. For the most part that’s true, but historically, lookup Ernst Rohm, a Nazi general who was pretty open about being gay and helped lead Hitler to power until other Nazi’s convinced Hitler to arrest Rohm. He would be executed before the war and before outed homosexuals were forced to wear the pink triangle and systematically murdered. As for people of colour, the Japanese were OK enough with Nazis during the war. So please stop saying that LGBT and PoC can’t be Nazi’s, it’s just not the case.   

[Not a single comment was made on the above point, which I guess means it’s one of the stronger ones of the video]

About their choice of symbolism.

Pepe the frog is dead, the Nazis killed him. More accurately, they used his image to represent their ideas online. Pepe is registered as a hate symbol and creator Matt Furie worked Furie-ously to win Pepe back as a passive peace loving stoner and not the hate symbol he’s become. “Feels bad, man” Similarly, artists and writers for Marvel have had to explain that the Captain America for Hydra story line is not promoting Nazis, but “alt-right”ers have certainly been using their imagery against the original intentions of the artist:

(1/?) Symbols matter. Popular perception of symbols matter. If you have to explain that you’re not promoting Nazis, you’ve fucked up badly

— (((Jay Edidin))) (@RaeBeta) May 7, 2017

I think that changing a logo to make it less offensive is far easier than explaining over and over and over that it’s not like that. Unfortunately for the Furry Raiders, enough of them have self-identified as Nazi’s that we still need to ask if the whole group are a part of that.

We’re all collectively making this Nazi problem worse. Mostly by calling any racist or conservative a Nazi. If we alienate someone for a racist tweet or stupid joke by calling them a Nazi, it alienates them from the group and into the open arms of real Nazis. No one likes to be called a Nazi, unless they are one. We can avoid doing this by scaling our criticisms back. Still call out racists, sexists and assholes, but then leave or block them. When they realize no one is listening is when they’ll start to reconsider their motives.

You don’t solve racism by denying you are racist. You solve it by admitting your faults and asking questions to learn how to better present yourself in the future. Try to refrain from a knee-jerk emotional defense and try to understand why someone is offended before pulling a free-speech card. Are they an actual Nazi or are they a troll pretending to be a Nazi to get a rise out of you? That’s just as awful as being an actual white supremacist. It normalizes it and emboldens other, real white supremacists. I don’t believe in “ironic Nazis” unless it’s a sketch from British television.

What most people are referring to when accusing someone of Nazi-ism is racism or fascism. There are a lot of white people in the furry fandom, and with that comes a lot of white privilege. We’re seeing this challenged as “SJW cry-bullies” are trying to destroy free speech and censure perfectly legal racist remarks, so maybe THEY’RE the real Nazis! SJW stands for “social justice warrior”, which used to refer to tumblr users who got far too offended on behalf of a group they don’t even belong to. Now it seems to be labelled on anyone who’s offended by anything or even worse, calling out genuine problems. These people are probably outraged for a legitimate reason and calling them cry babies neither helps your case nor contributes any valuable counterpoint. “SJW” creates a false antagonist, a straw-man argument. Placing someone in a fictional role of the constantly outraged and defending people’s actions that don’t really need defending. Do you want your words to make you sound like you’re defending a Nazi, and be labelled a Nazi? Do you want to leap to the defense of a minority or someone who isn’t in the room and be labelled an SJW? I’d be the SJW cry-bully any day of the week.

The language you use matters. Attacking someone online, regardless of what side you’re on, only makes them shut you out and reinforces their ideas. They double down on their beliefs in spite of you.

More people of colour are entering the fandom. As furry spreads its fuzzy arms across the internet in a global hug, people from every continent are getting involved. Furry cannot grow if members of our fandom are actively shutting out furries who are black, furries who are Muslim, or basically any furry who doesn’t fit in with someone’s limited standards.

If all are welcome in Furry, then act like it.

What you can do to help stop this?

Talk to your friends. Speak up if someone makes a racist comment, and talk to them. Small changes make a huge difference. Even if it just lets your friend know that those things make you uncomfortable, at least you can get their assurance that they aren’t serious. And if they were, get some new friends.

Support furs of colour. FurryBlackHistoryMonth hashtag from February was beautiful and shows how much talent in the fandom is coming from people of colour from around the world. Support their art, their video, their fursuit performance, and make them feel a welcome part of our growing community.

Furry is like a family. And some families have that really racist gandpa or aunt or something. Right now, we’re kind of dealing with our version of that. I don’t want to call this “Drama”.

Calling it “drama” belittles these very important issues.

“Drama” is a label the community uses as a defense mechanism to avoid dealing with issues. These problems lie beyond the individuals that are involved and needs to be addressed by all of us.

I want to end on a lighter note and address one individual, The Boozy Barrister or The Boozy Badger. The fandom’s new badger lawyer came in while investigating all this. And after? He stuck around. He changed his twitter image to a Badger and is invited to just about every convention. I feel that this is a sign that overall, the furry fandom is handling these issues well. Better than it might appear on twitter. Better than the small group of bigoted jerks and kids who just don’t know any better want you to think.

Here is something for you guys to ponder in the comments, is this special to Furry? Is there any part of this conversation that is unique to our community or is this a small conversation in the larger discourse in the ‘human’ world? I expect all the comments will be thoughtful and respectful to the other users. I do not want to have to shut down the comments section but I will if I have to. I challenge all commenters not to use the words “Nazi” or “SJW” at all.

So to conclude, RMFC closed for a number of reasons including tax evasion and heightened security costs at the threat of violence. The Furry Raiders are not necessarily Nazis, but enough of their members have very questionable pasts. I believe the problem lies in the us-v-them mentality that has arisen in the recent political climate. We have to be careful with labeling people as it can be counter-productive and likewise we should all strive to be at least a little bit social-justice-warriors to help the fandom grow and foster a true community of acceptance.

This video only represents the opinions of the writer, and does not reflect the opinions of our Affiliates, Sponsors or Patreon Subscribers. Or even Dogpatch.press.

Culturally F’d is not a news outlet, and is subject to being incorrect or bias when regards to communicating the story. We do strive for accuracy and where possible providing links to sources. We encourage viewers and readers to conduct their own research and form their own opinions.

We would like to thank our contributing editors for their feedback: Aberguine, BlackLynk, Fletz, Kothorix, Queenie Deerhart, Nayo.

Comment Response Video and Closing Thoughts

Basically, I felt the overwhelming urge to do and say something. There’s so much happening and everyone is so confused to what to do. I felt a responsibility to use the platform that I’ve built to spread my message and hopefully spread some hope. I’ll admit that it was first drafted under a lot of stressed out anxiety, and a lot of that was scaled back after several revisions and good friends helping shape the script.

Some more of my own thoughts post-video. A few of the comments showed a complete denial that anything is wrong in the fandom. Many still think that racism is not a part of the issue, but personally I have seen way way WAY too many racist comments and tweets from furries about this. Some, understandably, want to ignore the issues outright and wait for it to go away.

There are still an alarming number who are defensive of Nazi’s. Since when were they aloud back as legitimate speakers? After WW2, basically every allied nation reshaped their entire society and government structures specifically to avoid ever giving those people any legitimacy or chance to power ever again. Free speech is super important to Americans, I know that. But it’s only really recently that these extreme views have been given the validation and equal footing that they really don’t deserve. Just because someone dresses nicer, gets a haircut and rebrands as “white identarian” (a real thing someone said in the comments), doesn’t make them any less of a neo-nazi.

Another thing that’s upsetting to me, is that people are still reeling over “nazi-punching”. Yes, sucker-punching people you don’t like is a shitty thing to do. You should check out the top link the research below on “The Ethics of Punching Nazis” which I got from Boozy Badgers twitter feed. What’s shittier is validating people who advocate for genocide, and encouraging them to conceal-carry firearms at furry parties just in case someone gets done putting up with their shitty views.

A fist fight at a school happens daily, it’s easy for the school to deal with, it’s easy to deal out repercussions and even make the offending parties make up after. A gun at a school makes international news and a lot of the time too many people are on the wrong end of it. So many furries don’t see the threat in the tweet about shooting Deo, just because of how it was carefully worded. I see it. And it scares the crap out of me. I would think that the country with the highest number of mass public shootings in the world would take a gun threat more seriously. The Denver Police sure did.

Research Links:
The ethics of “Punching Nazis”: https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/21/on-punching-nazis/
Boozy Barrister/Badget SovCit Breakdown http://www.lawyersandliquor.com/2017/04/free-furry-of-the-land-when-sovcits-and-furries-collide/
Vice Media: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pony-nationalism-and-the-furred-reich-inside-the-alt-furrys-online-zoo?asd%3Futm_source=mbtwitter
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/even-furries-are-fighting-fascists
RF2016 Post-Mortem http://orrery.prismaticmedia.com/2016/02/20/rainfurrest-2016-post-mortem/
http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Furry_Raiders

Additional links:

RMFC2016 Footage by The Halloweiners https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_k7y7W-VNs
Anthrocon – Arguing against Nazi furs by RNCoyote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C_zec9f8Gg
ArcticSkyWolf’s Furnal Equinox 2017 Con Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geKcsGK-bmo
Are We The Baddies? – The German Soldiers by Mitchel and Webb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JOpPNra4bw

 

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Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

The Wayward Astronomer, by Geoffrey Thomas. Illustrated, map by David Lillie.
Midland, TX, Corvus Publishing, May 2017, hardcover $24.99 ([ix +] 309 pages).

Wow! Geoffrey Thomas wrote this as fan fiction in David & Liz Lillie’s Dreamkeepers universe, set about a year before the Lillies’ Dreamkeepers serial, and got Lillie’s permission to publish it as a novel. Lillie even agreed to illustrate it. Thomas wanted to make it a particularly handsome book, so he started a Kickstarter campaign to raise $18,000 for its publication. He got 484 backers and $32,309. The Wayward Astronomer is a Beautiful Book, with each of 25 chapters getting a full-page illustration and a chapter heading picture by Lillie.

The Dreamworld is inhabited by funny animals. Each character also has a special psionic power. The largest city in the Dreamworld is Anduruna, but its repressive government has made use of special powers illegal.

(This is somewhat different from rules of the Lillies’ Dreamkeepers visual series. In that, the Dreamworld is inhabited by an equal number of people as our world, which currently is estimated at seven billion people; and each character looks different. He or she also has a special power. With over seven billion inhabitants, that’s a tremendous number of physical and psionic differences. David Lillie can show the variety in his art, but in this text novel, it would keep stopping the action to describe in words how each character looks different from everybody else. So the cast of The Wayward Astronomer is mostly just funny animals; an anthropomorphic raccoon here, a wolf there, or an owl or rhinoceros or jackal or another well-known animal. As for the restriction against using special powers, that has a plot purpose but it’s also to keep from having to write dozens of special powers into the story.)

(Something that is unexplained in either this novel or the regular series is what other cities besides Anduruna are in the Dreamworld; and how far beyond the Anduruna city limits its laws extend. The Wayward Astronomer begins at a small observatory in the Starfall Mountains, shown on the map as far outside of Anduruna; but apparently still subject to Anduruna’s laws.)

The protagonist is Halcyon (Hal) Adhil, who is not a standard funny animal:

“Hal was a feathered reptile; a raptor. Neither dinosaur nor bird, he found himself on the terminus between two eras of evolution. His scaly skin was colored a dark jet black, save for patches of green around his eyes and along his limbs.   A crown of gray feathers atop his predator-shaped head buffeted and billowed in the blustery air.” (p. 1)

Hal also has a long tail with an unintelligent four-eyed head on the end. (You can see why Thomas doesn’t want to describe each character in such detail.)

Hal Adhil – Artwork by David Lillie

Hal has taken such an isolated position (the observatory belongs to Calypsa District University in Anduruna) so that he can use his special power in secrecy. He can see in all ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. When he uses it, a shimmery halo appears over his head that anyone can see.

Miriel (Miri) Rodgers, a purple-&-gray fox from the University who knows his power, is visiting him when they see a meteorite fall nearby. They trek to it, and are examining it when armed strangers attack them. Miri is kidnapped, and Hal is shot and left for dead. A farmer family nurses him back to health, and he returns to Anduruna two months later to find Miri and learn what’s going on.

Miri Rodgers – Artwork by David Lillie

To describe the plot in any more detail would give away too many spoilers. It’s basically a noirish detective story, with Hal despondent and depressed, and with everybody against him; but never giving up. Hal’s gunshot drove splinters of the meteorite into him that, when he uses his power, give him enhanced but crazy senses that may be killing him:

“‘Why is his breath so foggy?’ asked Vanir’s gravity. He tasted her eager curiosity. Miri’s heartbeat moved closer to him.

‘Is he extracting energy from the air around him?’ Miri smelled like uncertainty. ‘That doesn’t seem physically possible.’

‘This is more than I remember last time.’ Hal’s tail looked up at the ceiling, tasting the air. He continued to pace around the punching bag that served as the center of his accelerating orbit. ‘I need new words.’

‘Hal, slow down.’ Miri paced alongside him, alarm sharpening her sound. Heat shaped like a hand grabbed his wrist, pressing firmly against a throbbing vein. ‘Spirits! Hal, you need to stop. Your heart rate is insane.’

Marcus from Deviantart

The words fell on the floor, unacknowledged. He kicked them aside to clear a path. The sound of static filled his brain, like sand pouring from a broken hourglass. The weight of the flow came from somewhere up above. He turned towards the white noise, the volume increasing as he homed in on the source. Somewhere, out beyond the invisible walls of stone and life, there it was.” (pgs. 138-139)

In a sense, The Wayward Astronomer’s being a text novel does it a disservice. I’ve called the characters funny animals rather than anthropomorphic animals because, despite being called talking zebras and panthers and bears, without constant illustrations it’s hard to envision them as anything but people. They’re all human sized. They all eat human foods, ride in human vehicles, and so on.

But if you don’t mind this, this is an exciting novel, especially for fans of the Dreamkeepers graphic novel. There is additional information here about the city of Anduruna, too. Don’t miss it.

– Fred Patten

• Buy The Wayward Astronomer on Amazon
• Press release
• The Wayward Astronomer Kickstarter 
• Dreamkeepers.wikia.com: The Wayward Astronomer
• Dreamkeepers.com
• DreamKeepers Vol. 4, Descent to the Archives, by David & Liz Lille – review by Fred Patten
• ‘DreamKeepers, volume 3, Intentions Entwined’, by Dave & Liz Lillie – review by Fred Patten
• Flight to Starfall (DreamKeepers vol. 2) – review by Fred Patten
• DreamKeepers. Vol. 1, Awakenings – review by Fred Patten

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