Furry Meets Furries
April 18, 2017 4:25 PM   Subscribe

 
The dog looks like he's having the best time EVER!! Love it.
posted by billiebee at 4:28 PM on April 18, 2017 [3 favorites]


This is so flipping cute omg
posted by Hermione Granger at 4:40 PM on April 18, 2017


Ohhhh, how much do I love it that Link the dog (the Canis lupus familiaris kind of dog) actually got to sniff butts? Lots. I love it lots.
Once she got past the initial shock, though, she wasn't fazed, and neither was Link.

"His eyes got bigger and bigger as we walked through the convention. He's not used to seeing people with tails so he was very intrigued,” she said. "He kept sniffing them under their tails and I kept apologizing but everyone was very nice about it."
What a good pupper.
posted by Lexica at 4:52 PM on April 18, 2017 [11 favorites]


hashtag blessed
posted by boo_radley at 4:54 PM on April 18, 2017 [2 favorites]


Needs #yaypril hashtag.
posted by Fizz at 4:56 PM on April 18, 2017 [3 favorites]


"I've seen a lot of humanity in my line of work, but nothing like this," she said.

oh cool, a new euphemism
posted by infinitewindow at 5:38 PM on April 18, 2017 [8 favorites]


"He kept sniffing them under their tails and I kept apologizing but everyone was very nice about it."

You have to say "hello" somehow.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:49 PM on April 18, 2017 [2 favorites]


They're good costumes.
posted by rhizome at 6:34 PM on April 18, 2017 [7 favorites]


So, this is an interesting variation on the first version of this I read, which didn't have the detail of her having been invited. It made it sound like she'd, I don't know, saw a flyer for it or something, and just decided to go and wacky hijinks ensued. Whereas she was actually there as a guest speaker because they'd chosen her charity as their target. That's a whole different scenario.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:36 PM on April 18, 2017 [22 favorites]


Bernese Mt Dog FTW!!
posted by chaoticgood at 7:20 PM on April 18, 2017


Jacquilynne, yeah, I'd read an article that made it sound like she'd thought it would be a pet convention and decided to check it out, which makes her sound like a slightly daffy older lady type. Where really she's a retired parole officer who was invited to speak as the representative of a nonprofit and is surprisingly open-minded!
posted by lunasol at 11:26 PM on April 18, 2017 [4 favorites]


A fetish community composed of people who enjoy dressing up in furry animal costumes, often involving a sexual component.

...
posted by Segundus at 12:12 AM on April 19, 2017


See also last year's Feel-Good-About-Unexpected-Exposure-to-Furry-Convention story, where Syrian refugees were booked into the same hotel as the VancouFur convention.
posted by radwolf76 at 12:15 AM on April 19, 2017 [7 favorites]


A fetish community composed of people who enjoy dressing up in furry animal costumes, often involving a sexual component.

There's about as much of a sexual component to the furry fandom and its related cosplay as there is in the Star Trek fandom or all those people you see in photos from Comic-Con.
posted by hippybear at 2:20 AM on April 19, 2017 [7 favorites]


Also, really not a fetish community. Unless you regard Trekkies/Trekkers or superhero cosplay as a fetish community too.
posted by hippybear at 2:20 AM on April 19, 2017 [8 favorites]


Yay for everything and everyone furry!
posted by Room 641-A at 3:48 AM on April 19, 2017


Not a fetish community? Really? Oh dear, I guess I'll have to set the young furry living upstairs straight on who his people are.
posted by Goofyy at 4:29 AM on April 19, 2017 [3 favorites]


It's as good a place to share this as any -

Some years back, the cast of the show Stargate was at a fan convention, and somehow furries got invoked during the cast panel. Cast member Christopher Judge apparently didn't know what furries were....
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:40 AM on April 19, 2017 [3 favorites]


There's about as much of a sexual component to the furry fandom and its related cosplay as there is in the Star Trek fandom or all those people you see in photos from Comic-Con.

So... not exactly everything, but still a hefty dose? Con cosplayers aren't generally known for austere and utterly unsexualised costuming...
posted by Dysk at 5:38 AM on April 19, 2017 [2 favorites]


Dysk, you are talking about two different "sexual"s. The reputation that the KCRA article is trading on is that furries just want to get together and yiff. There is no parallel reputation among, say, Dead or Alive 5 female cosplayers. To the contrary, a lot of the chatter I've seen from that community is about how they wish you'd get their consent to even photograph them, and how disgusting it is that a lot of con attendees think that cosplay is a tacit invitation to be touched.

Furries, for their part, aggressively dispute the view that they are just another fetish community. Plenty of male gamers I know would say they have a "significant sexual interest" in females wearing FemShep costumes (as 33% of furries would say about their interest in the community), but that doesn't make it a "fetish" for them.

In light of all that, I'm inclined to take furries at their word.
posted by radicalawyer at 7:37 AM on April 19, 2017 [7 favorites]


Best of all was the fact that, in just two days, Furrycon raised a whopping $10,000 for Pets for Vets.

I think the article buried a lede there a bit.
posted by joycehealy at 7:43 AM on April 19, 2017 [2 favorites]


I'm not contesting that furry communities are a fetish community (I absolutely accept they're not) but the argument that there's no sexual component to a cosplay culture that revolves around overt and heavy sexualisation has effectively no sexual component is laughable to me (and I'm not talking about furries here, where there is orders of magnitude less of the aforementioned).
posted by Dysk at 7:53 AM on April 19, 2017


Link is a beautiful dog.

I was in the hospital for nine or ten days last August, and the therapy dog visits were the highlights of everybody's day. Everybody on the unit would show up in the lounge for it. It was great to get my hands on a sweet dog, but it also brought everybody together for a bit of social time. Everybody would talk about the dogs they'd left at home, dogs they used to have, dogs they dreamed of having. Pictures would be shown. I'd always thought therapy dogs were a cool thing, but I really got it in a new way after that.

I sometimes engage in a kinky behavior that is commonly evoked as being on the other side of a line people won't cross. "I'm kinky but I don't do X." It's a judgment-avoidance action: "I'm kinky but I'm not that kinky." So I have a lot of sympathy for furries, who are so often derided and made fun of, the bottom-of-the-totem pole fandom/community that the other nerds and weirdos can look down on and say, "Well, at least I'm not a furry." But they always seem like perfectly nice people. I'm neutral on fursuits themselves—they neither appeal to me nor repel me. But I'm pro the people inside, who have found their way to build a community and care for each other.

And I don't give a shit how sexual that community, and the individuals in it, are or aren't. So long as everyone is being kind to each other, asking for and giving consent, and creating a place where people can be cared for—sexually or otherwise—in the way they long to be cared for, a place where they can be honest about who they are and about their desires. In my heart, I am a friend to furries. Down with sexual shame! Up with love! Up with acceptance!
posted by Orlop at 8:51 AM on April 19, 2017 [11 favorites]


Honestly, one of my biggest reactions to reading this article was to get a warm fuzzy when I read that Link kept sniffing under the tails of people's costumes. Because if you consider that furries are (as I understand it) striving to be the otherkin beings they dress as, having an animal treat them that way may come across as, like, a sort of acknowledgement that they really are those beings, and for many that probably felt really good.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:26 AM on April 19, 2017 [3 favorites]


Story time, my Empress: the dog trainer we used for a while to try to make radicalpupper less leash-reactive to other dogs did a funny thing where she had him stand 30 feet away from her car, then pulled out her black dog. RP went ballistic per usual. Then she put her dog back in the car, and then pulled out a black stuffed dog like the kind pet stores use to model harnesses. RP went equally ballistic. We let him off leash, and he ran over to play with and smell the stuffed dog. It took him at least ten seconds of excitement to realize it wasn't a real dog.

I bet a pupper who ran over to investigate a giant doggish thing, only to discover it looked like a dog but smelled like a person said pupper has been trained to therapize and also is playing with said pupper, would be thrilled.
posted by radicalawyer at 9:33 AM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


Dysk, my point was that the "sexual component" described in the article obviously refers to yiffing, not sexualization. Yes, cosplay involves sexualized costumes, chiefly because major-league games with prominent female characters do, too.
posted by radicalawyer at 9:51 AM on April 19, 2017 [1 favorite]


There's a wide spectrum (in multiple dimensions) of furry including otherkin, creative role-play, sexual role-play, and media fans. Not everyone in a fursuit is going to be otherkin.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:23 AM on April 19, 2017 [2 favorites]


Hence my use of qualifiers.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:25 PM on April 19, 2017




"... but the argument that there's no sexual component to a cosplay culture ..."

I missed where this argument was made by anyone anywhere.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:01 AM on April 21, 2017


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