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Furry of the Storm
Oct. 9th, 2009 04:25 pmLimited Internet access has just allowed me to discover terrible news from the mainland - I've just seen an article from an Australian girls' magazine (and have copied the four pages of it to my own space with very obvious filenames starting here) that seems to have the sole purpose of turning nauseating adolescent Twilight fans into nauseating adolescent furries. To be fair to it, it's actually very unusual to have the fandom portrayed in a remotely positive light and read something that concentrates on it as people just doing something objectively a bit weird and having a good time, so it's one of the most polarizing articles I've ever seen.
But I think the greatest problem with the presentation of it, as much as I never thought I'd be saying this, is that it isn't weird enough - it's presented as this very innocent and fluffy thing (that someone took her dad along to!), which to be fair it can be to many people, but as it's for an audience of sixteen year olds it completely ignores the very real atmosphere of mild to colossal deviance that inevitably goes along with it. I can guarantee that anyone who actually visits the wiki suggested in the article is going to run into some fairly horrifying stuff within the first three minutes, so it seems sort of... misleading in the other direction, somehow.
Incidentally, I should point out that the little glossary on the last page is not, as advertised, how the remotely tolerable people within the community actually talk - I think both insiders and outsiders would agree that they're instead a concise list of words that make it your moral duty to hit someone on the nose if you ever hear them say any of them. And what is this about "coming out"? It's about as necessary and admirable as "coming out" as a Magic: The Gathering fan - this kind of thing leads on to a misconception common to some of the more unstable members, where they feel the need to broadcast things that don't come up in everyday conversation to everyone around them (and I'm talking about far more disturbing things than just dressing up in ears a bit).
The boxout on the right of the first text page is quite interesting, actually, because that's pretty much how it infected me as well. However, there are several things that I (and it) are not, and one of those is an "OMG trend"! That's like saying it's somehow fashionable like... yoga or the Atkins Diet or something, rather than something that a large group of people over the world just happened to be interested in and a comfortable insanity that the Internet was ideal for channelling.
For that reason it reads like the best attempt yet at one of my greatest fears as expressed to somebody or other all the way back in 2002 or so, when I was first discovering all this, that the cycle of very arbitrary things suddenly becoming trendy would eventually sink its claws into the fandom with its full destructive force. I don't honestly think that that's going to happen due to one article, but I'm fairly certain the result would be morbidly hilarious if it did. "My character name is Skye and she's a winged wolf" in the last boxout is not the worst initial impression by far, but it's enough of a warning sign - I have the feeling that Angel Eye is going to keep on happening for a long, long time.
But I think the greatest problem with the presentation of it, as much as I never thought I'd be saying this, is that it isn't weird enough - it's presented as this very innocent and fluffy thing (that someone took her dad along to!), which to be fair it can be to many people, but as it's for an audience of sixteen year olds it completely ignores the very real atmosphere of mild to colossal deviance that inevitably goes along with it. I can guarantee that anyone who actually visits the wiki suggested in the article is going to run into some fairly horrifying stuff within the first three minutes, so it seems sort of... misleading in the other direction, somehow.
Incidentally, I should point out that the little glossary on the last page is not, as advertised, how the remotely tolerable people within the community actually talk - I think both insiders and outsiders would agree that they're instead a concise list of words that make it your moral duty to hit someone on the nose if you ever hear them say any of them. And what is this about "coming out"? It's about as necessary and admirable as "coming out" as a Magic: The Gathering fan - this kind of thing leads on to a misconception common to some of the more unstable members, where they feel the need to broadcast things that don't come up in everyday conversation to everyone around them (and I'm talking about far more disturbing things than just dressing up in ears a bit).
The boxout on the right of the first text page is quite interesting, actually, because that's pretty much how it infected me as well. However, there are several things that I (and it) are not, and one of those is an "OMG trend"! That's like saying it's somehow fashionable like... yoga or the Atkins Diet or something, rather than something that a large group of people over the world just happened to be interested in and a comfortable insanity that the Internet was ideal for channelling.
For that reason it reads like the best attempt yet at one of my greatest fears as expressed to somebody or other all the way back in 2002 or so, when I was first discovering all this, that the cycle of very arbitrary things suddenly becoming trendy would eventually sink its claws into the fandom with its full destructive force. I don't honestly think that that's going to happen due to one article, but I'm fairly certain the result would be morbidly hilarious if it did. "My character name is Skye and she's a winged wolf" in the last boxout is not the worst initial impression by far, but it's enough of a warning sign - I have the feeling that Angel Eye is going to keep on happening for a long, long time.
