#Dawntide fanart | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

joelhasaschoolalt · 9 months

Text

Fan Autoethnography, Final Draft

Many such tweets have been made seeking to get to the bottom of this whole “furry” thing. I happen to be partial to this one.

Fandom, as I understand it, is a lot like faith: a means of understanding my experience in the world. I first received salvation when I was thirteen years old.

Imagine this: It is 12/21/12, the night the world is supposed to end. Your friend showed you a movie a few weeks before, which has since been echoing through you like a song stuck in your head. Your family goes to a Christmas market in Dade City, and looking around at the string lights everywhere and the decorations and the old friends running into each other by chance—you think of the Christmas song which describes the holiday as “that time of year when the world falls in love”—you feel as though you’re in the world of the movie. It wasn’t that it echoes through you; you echo through it. The world isbeautiful, you realize, as beautiful as your favorite movie, and you feel lucky to have found a place in it.

Fanart of two characters from the visual novel “The Smoke Room.” Artist unknown.

So you get involved. You don’t just look up fanfiction on an iPad you stole from your mother and feel as if your heart were exploding with excitement and sudden purpose until early in the morning (and no, the world does not end that night, but something inside you blossoms and you think maybe a world began); you do your best to live that sudden purpose. You get involved. You get into writing because you want to make other people feel the way the fanfiction makes you feel; you stand up straighter, laugh more at jokes, and settle into a new persona that might make others see you with the same awe with which you see the characters you love so much. You get involved.

The word hyperfixation is thrown around a lot in anecdotes like these, these days; though probably accurate, the word feels limiting. It feels more like what Didion wrote: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. In the fandom experience, one doesn't simply tell a story, or consume it; the story becomes like a hot tub, golden bubbling water into which you lower your body and are yourself consumed. And then you’re at peace.

A meme made by a friend, featuring one of our favorite characters, Ranzo LeVant from the visual novel “Dawntide.” The image is now my Twitter banner.

As an adolescent, I remember being awestruck at how welcoming this new side of the Internet seemed. I’d only known nerd culture in stereotype: fedora-clad men with greasy ponytails arguing which of them were “real” fans and which weren’t. I know now that division still exists in fandom circles, which are far from utopian—the role of capital-d Discourse in furry fandom, I’ve found, is like the electrical charge inside a thundercloud that might at any time explode into occasional lightning—but it did, admittedly, seem like a utopia, then. Fandom to me was a genuinely thriving literary and art economy in which everyone was making work for everyone else with little boundaries, assumptions, or requirements; and a space in which, with no entry requirements, people could simply gather to celebrate.

These were years I spent in conversion therapy; years during which I watched the openly-gay senior at my homeschool co-op be barred from graduation; years which, as a pastor’s kid, I spent in the panopticon, surrounded by people who felt close to me though I didn’t feel close to them, keenly aware that there was some invisible difference in me. I dreamt all the time of kissing boys. Fandom was psychological compensation for a kid who just couldn’t come of age in a safe or “normal” way in his environment and was pushed into the worlds he enjoyed in his head. It meant more to me than I could have known, then, to read a fanfic in which two men kissed who I felt I knew, and to be surrounded by people similarly overjoyed. I lowered myself into the hot tub and let the narratives, fan content, and art that sustained me render me weightless. I was only an observer in adolescence, but fandom then taught me everything I’m passionate about today.

A drawover of a friend’s fursona on Discord.

These days, I’m no longer an observer. In fact, I’ve grown to participate as a hobbyist more intensely than I ever thought I would: for example, I thought in high school that fursonas (fursonae?) were for people who genuinely believed they were non-human on some metaphysical level—people I now know as “Therians.” But these days, mine are a great joy of my life. I’ve found the fursona is whatever you want it to be, nothing more than a character you create for yourself. According to Jung, the persona is a mask; furry or not, we all don masks online. What’s the harm in giving yours a tail?

In time, what you pay attention to, you eventually emulate. Having spent my thought-forming years online, inundated by images, I and other Gen Z-ers tend to think in categories of images rather than in images themselves; the phenomenology of the image is such that you, in your own diffuse and intangible way, become the image through emulation. This is self-actualization. (Egregious oversimplification, I know, but I’m no psych major.) As a furry—dwelling upon anthropomorphic images and aesthetics—I self-actualize in different ways, now. Which affects how I experience the world, what I want out of life, or how I want to be perceived. I find writing is more fun when in my head there’s a limber raccoon-guy doing it in my place; cooking food and joyfully tasting my creations is more fulfilling when, holding the spoon I am holding, is a badger.

Myself and a badge of one of my fursonas, which I commissioned to wear at conventions.

And then there is the convention. If the fandom experience is lowering oneself into a narrative as into a hot tub, the convention is the literal lowering oneself down. Word made Flesh. The etymology of “convene” is, simply, “to come together”; I’ve spent my whole life convening around kitchen tables, car rides, restaurants, and airport gates. So have you. But there’s something more beautiful in it that can’t quite be put into words when everyone who’s in the room shares the same tender, intimate secret. I mentioned before growing up feeling invisibly different; only on the convention floor, I’ve found, am I really myself.

People in general, I feel, are starved of spaces devoted to celebration. We seem to have deluded ourselves into thinking that joy has to be earned. I find a lot of value in faith communities of any stripe for this reason. Fandom, as previously mentioned, is to me a means of understanding my experience of the world, and a reason to celebrate it; faith, I’ve found, is no different.

Stickers on the stop sign outside the Rosemont Hyatt on the third day of Midwest Furfest 2022, the largest furry convention in history.

At Furry Weekend Atlanta 2022, the main hotel had a soaring atrium nearly 50 floors up. The dashingly cute-in-a-nerdy-way boy who would eventually become my beloved and I raced to the top, and as we looked down from heaven to earth, a group of fursuiters on the ground floor began to howl as if calling to us. Their joyful cries echoed about the building. I remember thinking if I’d stepped off the forty-seventh floor balcony then I’d float the whole way down.

Art on a window at a room party during Furry Weekend Atlanta. Our dancing would soon generate enough heat to fog up the windows again; new artists would draw new art, and new writers new words. The condensation dripped in long, slow lines from our handiwork. We do these things in order to live.

@officeofdocmalone

#com255

3 notes · View notes