I feel a duty to pop in and plug this documentary a bit more, especially since watching it was what inspired me to
pop back into Furtopia in the first place! It's so well considered from start to finish, neatly avoiding three potential traps:
1) It treats controversial topics within fandom history in a way that disarms the sensationalists by just giving frank explanations of how things came to be the way they were: even when the fandom was at its most messy and ill-considered and off-putting to outsiders, the film shows how all these things arose from inexperience, but with good intentions at heart.
2) It doesn't try to fight sensationalism by going too far in the opposite direction and turning itself into a mushy love letter wherein the fandom has no negative qualities, which is common among fan-led fandom projects.
3) It doesn't try to sanitize the fandom in an effort to place itself as A Film You Can Show Your Grandmother. We're just presented as we really are: as a group of ordinary humans who are maybe a bit nerdier and lonelier than average, who are not particularly diverse (aside from being generally super queer
), but who have nonetheless found their way to furry down a thousand different roads and discovered happiness here in a million different ways.
Its focus on the early personalities of the fandom genuinely did a lot to teach me about the significance of early cons and media and people that I had only read about on a screen before. My only wish is that they'd had time to provide perspectives on the last two decades of the fandom's history, i.e. the stuff I was actually around to experience.
It got me thinking a bit too. I first discovered the furry fandom back in 2002-2003ish, which in macro terms was... not a great time in the fandom, was it? Back then, Furtopia was almost the only place where I felt able to admit an interest in anthropomorphic animals. My first years coincided with a lot of pretty awful media coverage, which was so traumatic to the fandom and its reputation that for years afterward we could refer to it only in epithets ("that MTV piece," "that Vanity Fair article," "that CSI episode" and the like). Many voices in the fandom seemed to feel that the whole world was against us, and it seemed like few of us really felt comfortable in our own skin. Here on Furtopia, I remember thread after anguished thread in Life Problems and Help from people scared to "come out as furry"; on one hand, their utter lack of chill, and their use of a phrase almost offensive in retrospect, pointed to the fact that so many Furtopians were so young that they hadn't yet needed to grapple with "coming out" as anything more fundamental... but on the other hand, it pretty well captured the mortified unease that many new furries felt about the fact that they were furries at all. Yet in a way, I think that contributed to making Furtopia itself such a vibrant and fun place to be. For many of us, this was one of the few places in our lives where we could hang out with other people who got us, crack weird inside jokes, let loose a bit, role-play parts of ourselves we were scared to show anywhere else, and, having lifted off some of our shackles, discover some things about who we truly were when we could express ourselves and feel accepted for it.
Having not been actively involved in furry for years, there's a part of me that can't even process how far the fandom has come since then. Like, Pittsburgh! How on earth did furries work our way up to the point where an entire small city rolls out the red carpet for us once a year? Still, somehow, this doesn't seem real in my head.
