Some Notes on Contemporary Furry Affairs

Posted on September 3, 2014 by mouse

I’ve slept on my duties as HU’s resident perverted furry crank, so I’ll take up a little space here for some housekeeping.

Rocket drawing by (I think) Mike Mignola and Al Gordon // Bojack designed by Lisa Hanawalt

A One Night Stand with the Lion Queen

An article by HU contributor Isaac Butler which appeared in Slate has been on my mind since I read it some weeks ago. In anticipation of the The Lion King’s 20th anniversary, Isaac charmingly and convincingly compares Scar, the movie’s antagonist, to Shakespeare’s most lusty and magnetic villains. He also astutely takes into account how the film’s particular place in the timeline affects his character’s framing in the story.

“In the Renaissance, Scar would have been the lead of a tragedy that bore his name. In 2014, he’d be the star of a prestige-cable drama about a charming, thwarted sociopath who’s smarter than everyone around him.”

There are some key properties that bewitch young people. These early obsession can germinate into someone identifying as a furry. The Lion King is one of the big furry generators. Though I was never fixated on the Disney property (I’m a Bluth / Robin Hood / Redwall type) I have some affection for Lion King, and I like that someone’s writing enthusiastically about its best character.

One snippet though, has been hanging onto me like a grapefruit rind between my front teeth.

“While Scar’s clear effeminate coding feels problematic now,”

What does that mean? There is no unpacking of this coda to a tasty meditation on Scar’s sexiness, slinkiness, decadent indulgent amorality, with a positive comparison to David Bowie! Effeminate men are out there. I am effeminate (hi). What’s problematic about a character like Scar being like me? Andreas Deja, his gay supervising animator who escaped mention in Isaac’s article, might have had something to do with his effeminacy. There’s straight writers making nelly guys the butt of a joke, and then there’s Scar! Holding court and being fabulous and generally about to steal your man at all times.

I’m a little sensitive about this. I’m recovering from years of rounding myself down to “default” to appease my punk friends from high school who were cool with me being gay but had remarks for our mutual friends who spoke and acted “stereotypically.” I had no sassy(tm) retort for them in my vocabularic arsenal at the time. It has been a whetstone for my resentment for people being dissected in this way. A tangential coincidence: Just today I read someone called the Comics Crumudgeon’s assessment of the Cathy Guisewite’s final Cathy strip. It’s in line with the general miasma of contempt my (always male) colleagues projected onto the (on my own investigation) funny and well-drawn strip. Here’s the offending little jab:

“but Sally (Forth) was always a more or less fully functional human being, whereas Cathy is a nightmare bundle of neuroses. The fact that the character always seemed to take every negative stereotype about women and extend them to cringe-inducing extremes made it hard to celebrate it as a feminist achievement.”

I need. A drink. Excuse me, I’ll be right back.

I’m back. Thanks for waiting. Cathy, a strip starring a woman, written by a woman, about the concerns and experiences of the woman who wrote it, is bad because Cathy is the wrong kind of woman. How many male self-inserts in comics have put in their hours in the pathetic ennui mines? But this woman? *ACK*, how irritatingly neurotic! If only she were more “fully functional” (respectable, proper, correct). If only she didn’t fall under the lens of negative stereotypes that men invented to pressure and demean women no matter what they do!

ACK, INDEED, SIR.

The concern for Scar’s framing doesn’t steam me up like the line about Cathy so much as puzzle me. I’m puzzled because it seems to abruptly undermine everything that came before it. Scar’s effeminacy is the whole reason we like him. He’s CAMPY. Not rigidly and blandly masculine like his gilded-beige brother, Mufasa. If he were a human he’d wear a cloak and circular sunglasses and those pewter finger-claw things and a pointed goatee. Scar’s queeniness is the engine of our delight in him, and the essence that sets him up in opposition to the hypocrisy of Mufasa’s reign.

Mufasa worships the “circle of life” which is not a circle but a ladder with the Lions occupying the rung where they are not killed and eaten. Scar’s minions, the equally slinky hyenas, capable predators all, are set apart to pick over bones. Hyenas are led by women, this pack is headed by Whoopi Goldberg as the alluring butch Shenzi. Maybe that’s why the lions set them apart. Scar does not produce an heir (unless one surfaced in the Lion King 2, the search for Zazu’s Gold, which I did not see) and by the end of his rule, the Savannah is in ruin. If we accept the film’s framing, it is Scar’s fatal flaw of arrogance in upsetting the cosmic moral order that dooms him. But really it is drought and migration that doom him. His rule was in fact a brief and unlucky, though perhaps dictatorial rebuke of the divine right of straight kings.

Thanks, Isaac. Great piece. Let’s watch Kimba the White Lion next.

A One Night Stand with the Raccoon and his Husband the Tree

“We did it. We finally kissed the raccoon. He’s a good kisser.” I tweet as my wife and I leave the theater.

Guardians of the Galaxy is a big hit. A lot of furries went to see it and wanted to kiss Rocket. A lot of not furries went to see it and wanted to kiss Bradley Cooper as Rocket. Watching this happen has been kind of priceless. Though I’m less interested in how many kids watch this with their parents and become furries than the kids who watch this with their parents and end up thinking that guns are really cool. There was a good movie trapped somewhere in the machinery of a bad movie. An unexpected left turn from a seedy cantina scene remix to a drunken brawl let’s Rocket demonstrates that slurs are bad, and they wear you down. But later there are misogynistic slurs as a joke????? The Raccoon was as interesting character as you can fit into his macho packaging, and I liked watching his mercenary qualities dissolve in caring about other people. Like the Lion King, where Scar’s point of view is subsumed into Simba’s hero’s journey, a zany road movie/5-way buddy comedy was dying to escape the very boring shell of a brutally violent bauble. I list toward being a “Scenes from a Marriage” type of film enjoyer, and Rocket and Groot’s partnership is clearly a cranky kind of marriage. I’d rather have watched two hours of that.

Of the material I’ve seen so far, I give most of the furry porn featuring Rocket +/- Groot a D+

A One Night Stand with a Pun about Horses I Didn’t Feel Like Following Through With

Bojack Horseman is a Netflix Original animated series about Furries in Los Angeles. They’re uh. It’s about the television industry. Self-absorbed washup actor. Still materially OK so we can see him stress his excess as a measure of his delusion. Had the idea ever occurred to you that money and fame plus drugs can corrupt people? Hm. The best and most distinguishing feature is the designs of Lisa Hanawalt, who is a national treasure. Her animals are uncannily perfect. I almost lost it when two pigeons took flight from a tree overlooking Bojack’s bedroom window, flapping their blazer-encased humanoid arms. She’s so amazing. I saw Frank Santoro say they should have let her write the jokes. Yeah. Bojack Horseman is often sharp but hones its edge on joke after joke that would have been prescient in 2003. I was in high school in 2003. Don’t make me go back there. The show comes around and starts to get more interesting around episode seven.

A Marriage

I left my beloved Minneapolis when I vacated the ex-boyf’s apartment. Then I met someone. She’s a furry too, but our growing up furries was different and our being furries together is another thing. Getting older is asserting its leverage on our way of being. But we’re keeping it weird.

Introducing Miss Mouse

Posted on April 15, 2014 by mouse

Last week, all my twitterers were a’fluttering with the good news. Rocket News 24 translated into English and passed along some tweets from Rumiko Tezuka, who had uncovered some treats from her father’s long-under-lock-and-key desk drawer. The extant bits the tittering author found especially amusing were a small stack of erotic drawings of an anthropomorphic mouse with an accompanying image of a woman transforming into a serpent-like creature. The drawings themselves are lovely. Miss mouse is depicted playfully sort of rolling around an impression of a bed or soft surface. Her downcast eyelashes don’t acknowledge the presence of a viewer. She smiles with an unselfconscious sensual comfort that seems to affect the article’s author with no small amount of unease.

Miss Mouse

There’s some gibberish about “base urges” and a hypothetical about sensations in Walt Disney’s backside; musings on the “social propriety” that restricts how Uncle Walt was supposed to react to such sensations. What says such social propriety of how closely we are supposed to think about the sensations of the backsides of long-dead men? Reading further, such a propriety calls for projecting this effluviate notion in the direction of a grown woman:

“We realize these things are more accepted as just another form of expressing your talents in families of great artists, but should our kids ever stumble across one of our old skin rags, we hope they handle the discovery with a little more discretion than Rumiko.”

A propriety that demands, in the wiggle-room between an erotic subject and a clear and present exploitative gaze, that one be inserted.

“Don’t worry, though, it’s not like all the pictures are focused on her voluminous mouse breasts. / (in a following caption) See? A few call attention to her shapely rodent derriere, instead!”

It’s noted that Osama Tezuka is Manga no Kami-sama, the God of Manga, comparable to the Greek patriarch Zeus. Acknowledged is the fact that a butt doesn’t care under which circumstances it would like to be scratched, but not that gods of the Greek variety have similar concern for the manners of mortal men. Astro Boy, by some metrics Osama Tezuka’s most popular work, is held up a iconic in exclusion of damned near everything else he created. The reverence of a god through the lens of this one property diminishes the big-heartedness and open-mindedness of Tezuka’s material, some of which is not for kids at all no not one little bit, yet is still the reason creators and fans carry admiration and respect for Tezuka and his work decades after his death.

“Tezuka is a furry!” Furries are tittering, too. It’s not necessarily a discovery to furries who have read Ode to Kirihito, Tezuka’s epic medical thriller about a disease that twists human bodies into dog-like forms and their mistreatment at the hands of those who see them as no longer human, or Kimba, the White Lion, his clairvoyant Lion King fan-fiction. Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature, featuring the sensual genetically altered half-woman-half-cat is clearer still. There’s little doubting the “furry-ness” of this magnificently lurid series of transformation sequences (transformation is a well-established furry fascination/fetish today). While he lived, Tezuka-sama was a human man, and the concerns of human men (sex sex sex) coursed beneath a great deal of his achievements.

To briefly detour, allow me to bring up Rob Clough wondering about the recently completed final volume of Omaha the Cat Dancer.

“The depiction of the characters’ bodies is so close to human that I’m not sure why this was done as a furry series in the first place, other than being a popular style of the time.”

That’s because furry sensibility goes back way before the furry fandom. Omaha is one of the first widely-read capital “F” Furry comics, rather than a comic featuring furry characters. The sensibility, that anthropomorphism for its own sake, is primary. The other elements of Omaha (explicit sexuality, inclusive diversity, soap-opera pyrotechnics) are special because they are revolutionary in a funny animal comic. Bringing us back home, Chris Randle in a delicious response to the unveiling of Tezuka’s Miss Mouse, provides a lucid answer to Clough’s query.

“If the funny-animals trope has been used throughout cartooning history to simplify, interpolate and transfigure, then lust defines the medium too, even when it was necessarily sublimated beyond the sleaziest outlets.” (“sleaziest outlets” referring to Tijuana Bibles).

Excellently put! Though I must submit that for work with a furry sensibility (animal stories that have an astral resonance to weird little kids who will grow up to be capital “F” Furries), the element of lust is maybe only barely sublimated. We see this in the 1001 Arabian Nights clip, in Disney’s Robin Hood, in this truly obscene Tom and Jerry cartoon from 1943. “Old cartoons are weirdly sexy” maybe isn’t the most prestigious hill of cultural criticism for me to choose to die on, but I’m confident I won’t be alone up there. It’s a subject that apparently must be compartmentalized in this sub-genre for children in a medium for children.

If little prestige comes to Furries from the revelation that the god of manga sometimes worked in the continuum of the furry sensibility, it isn’t my concern. Miss mouse is happy with her own self as she was in that drawer all these years, a set of nice drawings regardless of all our tittering and twittering. Furry to most people is something that gets you, rather than something you get, and Osama Tezuka is continuous in his inspiration to all of us, furry or not, who wish to die slumped over our desks. Various sensations course through the butts of the living, and all the while old Uncle Walt lies naked in his grave, signifying nothing.

The Furry Doc: An Interview with Tommy Bruce

Posted on February 17, 2014 by mouse

Tommy Bruce / Fursuiter Group Photo, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

Tommy Bruce is a senior at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, intending to graduate with a BFA in Photography and a Minor in Creative Writing in the Spring of 2014. He was born in Boalsburg, PA and grew up in State College, PA, running around the backyards of Penn State. I met Tommy Bruce at Furry Weekend Atlanta 2011. I was struck immediately with his exuberance and enthusiasm for his project to document the Furry Fandom, and we became friends. I’d like to share a conversation about his work and experience with Furry so far.

Tommy Bruce / Jasper, Midwest Furfest, Chicago IL, 2012

Michael Arthur: Can you remember the first time you heard about furries? Was it from the internet or other media?

Tommy Bruce: There are a couple memories from around my sophomore year in high school, which is I guess about seven years ago now, that are kind of simultaneous. At that time, I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft, surfing 4Chan, and listening to videogame podcasts. Those weren’t the only things I was doing with my life… I had friends… But those are the places I heard furries being mentioned. I remember lots of jokes about Sonic the Hedgehog fans just being crazy furries, and remember lots of “fursecution” jokes on (4Chan Subforum) /b/. I have a distinct memory of looking through some image collection of memes and then smack in the middle was a drawing of a rabbit character with giant boobs and a huge package. That is for some reason a clear memory??? I knew furries were the butt of jokes and it was weird to be one. I guess those are my first memories.

MA: Can you recall a media profile so far that portrays the furry fandom with satisfactory accuracy? Or one that has resonated with you personally?

TB: Does the episode of Check it Out with Steve Brule Count?

MA: Yes, that counts.

TB: There is a podcast called “irregular podcast” that did a decent job, I remember. There are a few podcasts that have done a good job though, I’m recalling your spot on Drawn this Way. On TV though, or in video documentary online, there isn’t much I can think of that does a very good job. Most have been too far one-way. They either completely ridicule furries as a bunch of childish adults or perverts or really, as failures. Or the piece takes on a super apologetic and defensive stance that tries to tell all about “what furries aren’t”. Those ones are nearly always written by furries and don’t get seen by many people.

Tommy Bruce / Ataraxia and Spiral-Staircase, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2012

Why I liked the episode of Check It Out is that John C. Reiley’s character is strange enough that the two fursuiters were allowed to be normal. The humor wasn’t relying on making furries a laughing stock, so much as it was making a joke out of bad television, which is the premise of that show in general. So in that move, furry culture was put as just another part of society, if that makes sense. What’s tough about TV media is that there isn’t much good education on anymore, it’s only really good for written work, like 30 Rock or Portlandia, or Breaking Bad. Most people don’t get news from TV, and most documentary style shows have gone the route of “reality TV” which is distinctly different from reality, and really doesn’t follow any of the basic rules of documentary work.

MA: I’m intersted in your role as simultaneous documenter and participant, since I feel like I share a nearly equivalent degree of distance and immersion in my own experience of furry.

TB: mmhmm :)

MA: what is the role of your education and training in your interaction? More specifically, from your fine art’s perspective, does Furry’s status as a “low culture” affect your perception of it, or your participation in it?

Tommy Bruce / Fursuit Football Gear Photoshoot, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

TB: It definitely has affected my perception of what is important for me to see, and what is interesting to me when I’m interacting with the fandom. There are a lot of sectors in furry culture that probably wouldn’t interest me on a personal level. Similarly, I meet a lot of furries who I don’t have much in common with, but I still enjoy getting to know them because I like seeing different facets of the community. It does get somewhat confusing when reflecting on my own desire to participate though. I have spent countless hours in my mind trying to justify learning a dance routine to perform in fursuit. Like “well maybe I can make this into some performance piece for the gallery.” I still haven’t given up on that one. That line is definitely in my mind though, because as an artist I want to make something that is contributing to a conversation. With my work about furry culture, I want to try to test the limits of documentary work.

I’m a participant, and struggling with my own insecurities and needs as one. But I’m trying to be as transparent about that as possible. At the same time, I’m trying to explain this cultural phenomenon as it happens. I think asserting a clearly subjective, but informed POV can be interesting. I’m not the first to do this. David Foster-Wallace’s “A supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” or James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” are big forerunners for what I want to do; Nan Goldin and Larry Clark too, in terms of photographers. But there is still some room in that conversation to be explored, so that’s where I’m trying to pick up.

MA: Being a participant in good faith affords you access that I don’t think any journalist can ever get. You have your subject’s trust when furries at large are very cynical toward media attention.

Tommy Bruce / Tails Neck Tattoo, Furbowl 44, Wilmington, DE, 2013

TB: Most definitely, I’m finding that more and more as the years go.

MA: You’ve had access as a documentarian to corners of furry that I, as a furry journalist haven’t, like babyfur room parties.

TB: And more ;)

MA: AND MORE!

TB: Because of some subjects current desire to stay anonymous, I can’t exactly specify with whom and when, but yes, more. I’ve photographed a few modified fursuits, had a couple people pose sexy for me, slapped a friends balls on his request at a wild furry new years party… Whether any of those photos will see the light of day anytime soon is yet to be determined. But if I can’t use any of those photos, I’m determined to find subjects who are comfortable talking about this aspect of the furry community. I’m trying to build an environment to view my work where the viewer is beyond shock value. I want to help viewers to empathize with my subjects. The work, to me, is about how people go to great lengths to connect with others and to feel satisfied with their life, and in doing so create a beautiful and intricate and interesting culture. It’s more about how that is a beautiful and overarching quality of mankind, not about how some group of people took a wrong turn in their lives and ended up here.

MA: Reporters still seem to have a hard time getting past that.

TB: the shock value?

Tommy Bruce / Barkley and Flip kissing at Midnight, New Years Furry Ball, 2014

MA: Yes. There’s been a sea change of empathetic reportage, but there’s still this urge to prepare the reader; to set up parameters for the presumable mainstream to understand what they’re about to experience.

TB: Yeah, I mean, I have no objections to people calling it “weird”. I just think that weird shouldn’t be taken as a negative. That is coming from someone who has spent four years in a private art school being taught that “you are unique and valid and people want to hear what you think!” though. It’s hard to see the water when I’m in it.

MA: I’m wondering if your goal has changed since you began, or if your focus has shifted as you explore more and more niches within furry. I imagine it’s become difficult to broadly summarize.

TB: Hmm. When I began the project, first semester of my freshman year in college, it was definitely not such a grand ordeal! It was just supposed to be a three-week assignment for a class. I went to a few furry meet-ups and took a couple REALLY BAD pictures. I then nervously talked to my classmates about them and tried my best to steer the conversation away from sex and how these people were all nerds, I’m sure I seemed SUPER defensive and secretive and in denial. Of course I’m not saying that it’s all about that now, but when you act defensive it draws a lot of attention. For a while I thought “Oh maybe I’ll do documentary work on all sorts of different fandom cultures”, but I’ve let that go. I know a lot more about Furries than I do Bronies or Trekkies or Anime kids.
MA: The ways furry is distinct from fan culture are more proliferate than the similarities I think.

TB: I agree. There is a much larger focus on social interaction than media consumption, especially with actual “fandom” behavior. Artists and creators of furry media are much more integrated into the social community than any other fandom. There isn’t one source point or gold standard for aesthetic or content or anything other than the rough guide of “animal people,” which is SO broad. I feel like furry is distinct in the sense that it’s a perfect storm of attributes that no other culture currently holds. Furry is a community that lives on the internet, but isn’t necessarily ABOUT the internet. In the same way, its a community full of transgressive sexualities and gender queering and such, but it isn’t about that either. It’s also a community that is by-and-large, self sustaining. Furries create their own messageboards, set up their own conventions, build their own costumes, etc. For the most part, furry is completely outside of capitalism; well, big capitalist culture, except for hotels and food. We pour a lot into that by way of conventions.

MA: Fursuits are of course the most publicly visible aspect of the fandom, and they’re a major focus of your documentary. Is it challenging directing subjects with masks with a static expression for photo shoots?

TB: (Laughter) I go back and forth on how I feel about the dominance that fursuits hold in my photographs of the community. On the one hand, I know that furry culture isn’t all about fursuits. On the other, I know that fursuits are probably the most visually unique and perplexing element of the community, as compared to what the rest of the world may offer. The fact that fursuits are (by and large) static in their expression, is very important, I think. It ties directly into their appeal. Imagine if your hair looked exactly how you wanted it to all the time, multiply that feeling towards your entire outward appearance. Fursuits are made to look exactly how you want, and they stay that way. They don’t age. The nature of the costumes is also to simplify expressions, and those simplified features are more powerful in their ability to please. They just look nicer. Because they’re in costume, and because their costumes don’t have as good of vision as a normal person, it’s actually a lot easier to photograph fursuiters, I think. They are less self conscious of the camera, because they are confident in their appearance, and simply put, it’s easier to sneak up on them. Also no one ever blinks.

Tommy Bruce / Fraulein in her home with partially constructed fursuit head, Baltimore, MD, 2012

MA: People have no small amount of difficulty beholding fursuits as sexual expressions, but I think you communicate that quite well. I’ve just been present for one of your more intimate shoots, but it was fascinating. Do you think that it’s something that you have to intrinsically “get” or can it touch on some more universal aspect.

TB: As in, the attractiveness of fursuits?

MA: Yeah! I can certainly remember my epiphany moment when I finally saw a suiter as really hot.

AboveTommy Bruce / Ari, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

Below: Tommy Bruce / Shea, Anthrocon, Pittsburgh, PA 2013

TB: Me, too. I think if people could just get over the idea of sexual transgressive acts as bad, there would be a LOT of people more interested in fursuits. I’ve had so many friends tell me about wearing their fursuits to non-furry social events and being secretly propositioned.

MA: WOW.

TB: I know, right! Some people are just turned off by the idea of a person in a costume; the idea of a stranger. I can understand that, and I recognize that it is not everyone’s cup of tea. But sort of like I mentioned in photographing them, fursuits are like cartoons in that they are simplified representations. More simplified means clear, more relatable, easier to understand, and sometimes out of that more pleasing. I remember having a conversation with a furry friend about where the attraction to furry characters came from. Being young and gay, he told me he felt intimidated and uncomfortable with most gay porn.

MA: Me, too.

TB: It was all mechanical pumping and gruff dudes and so on. Furry characters permeate our world, on cereal boxes, on TV and in books from childhood. So they were more familiar, and seemed less shameful. I know that isn’t everyone’s experience, but it’s one that makes sense I think.

MA: What has been your experience with resistance? Furries who didn’t want to be completely open at the time.

TB: Hmm, I’d have to say that at almost 4 years in, I don’t experience much outright anymore. I have found select members over the years who have grown used to me having a camera around all the time. I try to be conscious of when are good times and bad times to be photographing. I generally don’t use my camera very much when I’m entering into a room party of a person I don’t know well. I try to be as covert as possible in my setup, small lens, no flash and so on. I have a feeling that problems will creep up more as I come closer to publishing work. People fear that, somewhat falsely I think, but the resistance has certainly lessened over the years. At this point, a lot of people seem to know of my blog, and those that don’t don’t pay me much mind. Where there are fursuits, there are cameras. I’m trying to get closer to photographing individuals in their lives away from conventions, and that does bring some hesitation, but I have not received much outright denial so far (knock on wood).

Tommy Bruce / Shiacoft (head off), New Years Furry Ball, Wilmington, DE 2012

MA: Do you think furry can survive in a fractured state, considering recent events? Because I’ve discovered many furries are proving resistant to the idea of furaffinity’s centrality being challenged.

((AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am referring to a controversy involving Furaffinity, the largest online Furry social network. FA admins recently placed in a position of authority on the site a popular furry artist who has been accused of multiple instances of sexual harassment, coercion and assault. Many furrs have left the site as a result, citing among many grievances a lack of a culture of accountability among furry “leadership.”))

TB: In terms of what I’ve felt, we’re already somewhere in the transition to a different era of interaction in the furry community. Most of what I see, and a few friends have expressed similar feelings, comes from places like tumblr and twitter now. FurAffinity kind of feels like bad Facebook to me at this point. I go on to see if anyone said anything to me, I absent-mindedly add people when I meet them. I occasionally browse artworks. I think it’s possible that a new site will come to take it’s place, but I also think that it might be a while before that transition fully happens. There is definitely something to lament about, in the scattering of the community away from a single hub, but that is kind of the way things go.

Tommy Bruce / Mouse, Midwest Furfest, Chicago, IL 2013

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a picture of me that I commissioned from Tommy.

MA: I know plenty of furrs who are eager for a clean break, with the desire to coalesce the community around an explicitly progressive ideology.

TB: I definitely think this won’t spell the end for the furry community. If anything, furry has been on a steady rise in the last few years. I suppose this is where my documentarian instincts come in. Personally, I would really rather only be around other progressive and open minded individuals, but the observer side of me is a little weary of trying to create some utopia kind of environment, for fear of exclusion and stagnation. I may be unsure of my feelings (!!!)

MA: it’s hard to parse, it’s that unlimited aspect that allows furry to thrive, but so many people see it as a safe place from the world, which allows itself unlimited access to oppress them.

TB: Yeah. To be clear, I think what is going on with the higher ups at the current site is awful. Everyone fleeing is only what they deserve, and I hope at the very least the conversations that come out of this uproar can lead the community to be more aware and averse to rape culture and rape apology.

Tommy Bruce / Frisky in his room, Brooklyn, NY, 2013

MA: What are you plans for the future?

TB: I’ve got to get started on my grant proposals. There are a lot of travel grants that go out around this time of year. I’m hoping I can land one to take the next few months to travel across the country and spend extended time living with and photographing a few furries. I know one plan is to make it out to see Brian and Alison of Wild–Life Fursuiting Company fame, and stay with them while they make fursuits, and wax philosophical on the community. That and a few other west-coasters and perhaps a few cons, are hopefully in the works for the rest of 2014. During that time, I’m also planning on putting together a draft for what would be the REAL Furry Doc book. Collected writings, interviews and photographs from all of my travels, to go out as the first real extensive art documentary book on the fandom. That’s all pretty optimistic, but I think doable, if the stars align. I’ll continue photographing after/if the book comes out, but I’ll probably be trying harder at getting work in galleries, both from my documentary and with my other photo work I’m making.

Tommy Bruce / Self Portrait in hotel mirror with Hyena Sharpie tattoo, FurTheMore, Baltimore,MD 2013

Occurences Among the Fern Fanciers, Winter 2013

Posted on December 13, 2013 by mouse

A Google Image Search for “Terrie Smith” open on an iPhone

A Wolf waiting for the Elevator on the fourth floor of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont Illinois / Midwest Furfest 2013

We’ve landed at O’Hare. At carousel 5, my bag does not have the “selected for inspection” sticker I expect, but they didn’t bat an eye at the x-ray machine, did they? At certain times of the year, airport security in every major city sees hundreds of what I’m carrying. The novelty peels off. I know the feeling. I’m about to take a shuttle to the office-park prison yard of Rosemont, Illinois for my dozenth or so furry convention, my coyote mascot costume tucked between extra sweaters in my rolling carry-on.

I already drank two of my packed lunch of behind-the-counter tiny bottles of Irish Whiskey (under 4oz!) and I’m cranky and cold, but my roommates for the weekend, fellow Colorado furs, have our room ready -nice and cozy- strewn with animal costumes, various leather restraining devices, a chainmail flail, rubber jumpsuits and a dozen boxes of nitrous oxide canisters. Mostly for your sake, I wish I could draw up this con report with the psychedelic horny fantasmagoria of my first furry con. But the night is dark and my muzzle is grey (I am 26!) and I honestly want to hit the hay already. I can’t give you, I won’t give you, the account of my furry convention deflowering. Since then, I have changed, and fur cons have changed rather rapidly around me (without me?). This most recent Midwest Furfest (my third attendance of this particular event) was the con where I took care of myself: ate right, slept more, drank less and still got the nastiest con crud I’ve ever gotten. I’m older and frailer now. Furry is different now.

The morning I left Longmont, my ex-boyfriend sent me a text message, wondering if I would be in town for the convention. He’s moved back to Chicago and would like to get back in touch. I am attending the con with my partner. Er…. my girlfriend. He wasn’t/isn’t a furry and she is. So anyway….

The people from the car show trying to clandestinely take your picture in the hotel lobby

A weffy hands out doughnuts in the lobby at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL // A hot cheetah with leek prop at Rocky Mountain Fur Con 2013, Denver, CO //
Max Goof and Goofy fursuit cosplayers at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL

The shuttle driver is rigid, pulling us into the traffic circle. Fursuiters, insulated from the wind and cold by their costumes, spill out through the revolving door to the lower lobby of the hotel. This kinetic thrill courses through my guts out toward my fingertips gripping the handle of my rolling carry-on bag. We’re anxious to be out of our coats and into our itchy pelts. Something like a quarter or more of furries who attend conventions are fursuiters. The most visible public element of furry, costuming is increasing in its status within the fandom as a vital, though maybe not quite foundational element of participation. At my very first con (Furry Weekend Atlanta in 08), I may or may not have relied on some illicit herbal supplements to help acclimate myself to the culture shock of being around so many bipedal pink bunny rabbits. Years went by and I burned with envy to be one of them.

THE EXPERIENCE OF FURSUITING: It’s disorienting and uncomfortable. Your field of vision blinkered and diminished, the middle ground a puddle of murky shadows. Walking down stairs takes homework, comparable to descending in high heels. If you don’t quickly establish proper air circulation, you can overheat in seconds just wearing a mask. Furries with full-body costumes wear balaclavas and special sport undergarments from nosetip-to-toe, mostly as a barrier for sweat.

You learn to walk again, and to grasp door handles and room keycards and beer bottles with clumsy paws (I upgraded this year to a five-fingered set and have never been happier). People wave to you and squeal and take hasty cell phone photos in every snug spot and corridor and you learn to let the attention melt into your vanished peripheral. Squares furtively snap your picture, thinking you can’t see them. Some people ask, all blushing polite modesty. Some think you’re the cutest thing they’ve seen in the last ten minutes. Others want to fuck you. There are other suiters, suiters cuter than you, to hug and flirt and play with and share the same mesmerizing layer of over-the-top common reality.

In an idle moment, a friend will ask to try on your coyote head and you will feel jealous of the precious seconds they are wearing it.

The Alley, the Den, and behind the black curtain

Ad for vintage furry writing //
Inflatable Digimon Pool Toy, Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL

The furry economy is fluid and adaptable to the niche-est of niches, where cottage industries can spring up around much desired subjects, proclivities and fetishes. I have friends whose sole income comes from operating a furry porn pay site or building fursuits or serving as the art director for an erotic furry trading card game. It’s the most fabulous geeky entrepreneurial hustle in the world.

Furry conventions have space set aside for the various commercial endeavors. Anyone can sign up for a lottery for a spot to sell their own artwork, often on-the-spot cheap commissions or highly-collectible personalized con badges. There is also the option of renting booth space in the Dealers’ Den, where there is more freedom and variety of things available for purchase. It’s a mixed bag with apparel ranging from dismal meme-inspired tee shirts to brightly colored fur-lined leather bondage gear. Synthetic fur tails of various species are ubiquitous, and Japanese kigurumi, full-body hooded pajamas resembling dozens of animals are recently very popular.

Elsewhere you can find comics and furry literature publishers and catalogers of vintage fanzines and other such furry ephemera. There’s even a company that builds custom gigantic inflatable pool floaties.

Bad Dragon, the subject of a tittering Vice profile, is a much beloved maker of high-quality sex toys in the imaginative likenesses of the genitals of various fantasy creatures. Pornography in various formats is available everywhere, although strictly censored and separate from milder material.

Unlicensed merchandise relating to the children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has risen to striking prominence in the Den since the show began airing. Many writers including myself have taken pains to distinguish furry from a fan culture surrounding any particular product, so it gives me pause to see how naturally Brony fandom (adult men who self-identify as fans of the show) has adapted and integrated with furry on such a scale. There is a strong element within furry of engaging with animal-related pop phenomenon, either personalizing a relationship with a mass product, queering, smearing and breaking it down, or simply pornographying it for its own blessed sake. But this is often in a context of liberation. My envisioning of the fandom is a space for open-minded but ethical perverts of all persuasions. How then, does this intersect with a fan culture that can be seen as plundering its ownership of the show from the girls it’s specifically made for – Girls who represent the demographic whose own engagement with media in a personal way is so often dismissed and denigrated as fake or un-serious or deranged?

I always love the art show, which has a separate section for matted and framed cartoon porn. This Terrie Smith pin-up really ties the room together!

The DIY furry comics culture has been vibrant since the days of Albedo Anthropomorphics through RRUFFURR, but has been largely sublimated by the internet. Printed comics and zines are background radiation at cons, and the zine culture is passionate but limited in its depth and breadth. No fur con can mimic the experience of a Small Press Expo, and oughtn’t to do so, but I ache for more of a cultural crossover between my two beloved non-overlapping magesteria of the Furry and Indie* or whatever comics scenes. I should either be passing out zines in fursuit or wearing my fursuit at small press shows.

For real I would love an original Terrie Smith pin-up for our home office.

:AIRHORN: :GUNSHOT SFX: :DROP TO THE FLOOR:

The line for the dance competition finals snakes around the corridor outside the ballroom. Regular finalists are furry celebrities, attracting fans who remove their clothing as they step to the dance floor. Fan favorites like Phor, Zeke, and OMGSparky are musically literate in current hip hop and EDM. Individual personalities vary, but a house style of dancing has emerged that utilizes locking and highly-gestural arm movements that seek to transcend the communicative limitations of hot, bulky, highly ungainly costumes. Just existing in a fursuit is a test of endurance. Performers like the flourescent coatamundi Step are exhalted for the raw aggressive physicality they bring to the dance floor.

The dance competition is a juried event, a clumsy approximation of televised dance troupe competitions, with the previous year’s winner invited as the guest judge in suit. There exists a yawning naked charisma gap between the panel and the performers.

There are raves every night. I used to love to grind nastily with suiters at these things. Now I’m old and square and any kind of dancing involving the ass in any capacity is called twerking and I can’t do that any more.

Unlike the dance competition, the music at the raves is usually dreadful, but you dance anyway.

Furry after dark

Artwork by Ataraxia on display during Furry Weekend Atlanta 2013 in Atlanta, GA

Do you remember the first time you saw a fursuiter and thought “oh my god, he’s really hot?” I do.

Furries are free to deny that weird sex is not a central element of this great weird social thing, but this thinking is backed by their own deliberate and reactionary cognitive dissonance. In the real world, furries exchange pornography to solidify bonds of friendship, integrate their fetishes into the forefront of their furry identities and meet at cons for casual sex. If you know the right friend of a friend, you get an invitation to each con’s sheath party, gear and pup-play get-together, babyfur meetup, XXX dead dog and transformation drawing circle.

Schrodinger’s digimon pool floatie in the lobby is at once a family toy and coveted fetish object.

I’m a champion of furry as a space for enlightened, ethical sexual liberation, but real-life sneaks in. There are many malignant spores of patriarchal rape culture that bloom in any free love environment. At this con I found myself having to almost immediately telegraph though my expressionless cartoon coyote eyes “Stay away from me. I know. What. You. Did.”

Exchanging erotic drawings is fun. My roommate drew my mouse fursona sheepishly beholding an ostentatiously athletic horse dude (!). I drew a lithe nude dog man striking a broadway pose, underscored by “HAIL CUM” in all capital letters.

During Midwest Furfest 2011 I attended an invitation-only party where I had to strip down to my underwear as a condition of entrance. I tried on a leather pup play mask and allowed myself to be reluctantly goaded into slapping a stranger’s ass. Arf Arf.

At that same con I smoked pot out of an apple in the backseat of my car.

Everyone really does love those dragon dildos.

This is my mate…

Fursuit photos event, Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL // My partner with her friend Ness at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL, both costumes by Jillcostumes // Spiral’s head in the hotel room at Midwest Furfest 2013, Rosemont, IL.

I met my partner for the first time at a furry con, but we fell in love on twitter, each keeping it secret from the other for almost a year. I used to think that I didn’t want to date a furry. A great number of furries only date within the fandom, and I thought that loving a non-fur would provide depth and perspective that an insider could never give me. And my ex was a peach of a non-furry partner; non-judgmental, mostly bored by my accounts of my debauched weekends in Pittsburgh and Atlanta without him.

I had discounted how foundational this furry thing is: the animal stories I was raised on, the lull of David Attenborough’s gentle baritone, the centrality cartoon animal people have to my personality and profession and sexual wellbeing. How right it feels to be with someone who “gets” Tom and Jerry cartoons like you get Tom and Jerry cartoons.

A quandary with furry is that furries like to date furries, but by its nature as an internet centered culture, you’re likely to fall in love with someone far away. I bit the bullet, feeling like I would be just as poor and aimless in Colorado’s front range as I was in Savannah, Georgia and packed up stakes to move across the country and live with my lover. Not everyone can do this. One friend hasn’t seen his Australian boyfriend in two years.

With our deep and abiding weird love comes the tension. I can’t recapture the experience of my first cons, the exploratory euphoric sexual abandon when I identified as exclusively gay and single. She doesn’t get invited in after dark parties I might get invited to because she’s the wrong type of person. My friend Kilcodo put it aptly, “Furry is a boy’s club; really it’s a gay boy’s club.”

Furry has changed, or I’ve changed without furry. I feel left behind by a more and more technically sophisticated, irony conscious furry, a sexy and cool furry. But my lover and I show up, and we try and get up for the Chakat breakfast on Saturday morning. We hold paw in furry paw, as deer and coyote, and we are cute. People tell us that.

Carnet D’Racisme entre les Animaux

Posted on September 23, 2013 by mouse

Are comic books really not for kids anymore if their pretenses at intellectualism are taking shape as the miasma of rhetoric excusing the straightforward use of crude racist stereotypes by white male cartoonists as satirical and over the heads of the rest of (x) unsophisticated rubes. And hey, is the racist iconography in question even really a known quantity, or something the cartoonist deliberately inserted to provoke reader (x)’s assumption that it is exactly what it looks like, dummy (x).

I’ve used sarcasm to draw your inference that I meant the opposite of the words I just typed (I am very sophisticated). Ugly, stereotyped, demeaning images of non-white people are racist. As Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr has pointed out specifically, sambo art’s past prevalence (or onmi-presence) in society was a deliberate social tool to shape dominant white attitudes about black people with the specific goal of dehumanizing and politically repressing them, which is exactly what happened (continues to happen). The lines on paper, the blots of ink, when arranged in this way traces a current of malice from history to the artist’s hand today. Even though it’s fashionable in some circles to affect a veneer of cash-and-carry general repulsiveness as a shield against any specific allegation of consciously doing ill with ink on paper, degrading racist cartoons do hurt people.

This is supposed to be funny under the assumption that this is scenario is alien to white Westerners. It is not because it is not.

How we cartoon people is important, even if we’re cartooning people as animals. I’ve written previously (before I was officially HU’s correspondent on Furries) about the furry detective comic Blacksad and transposing human racial attributes onto a setting with anthropomorphic animals. Blacksad is not an example of a lucid and well-measured application of this trope. In fact, it’s a disaster. In contrast to Blacksad’s racialized concept of speciation, I remember reading the cartoonist Dana Simpson mentioning in a response to a reader question that using funny animals was a way to avoid racial prejudice in a reader as a barrier to empathizing with each character. Cute animals are just cute animals. The pitfall here is that without context, characters in this setting can sometimes be read as white by default. Still, some funny animal cartoonists elect to take the route of no thought or consideration and draw the same offensive stereotypes, but now it’s a cat. This is an old idea. Look at Mickey, here.

The Mouse’s features mirror those of his companion, though it’s clear that Mickey is supposed to read as white, in blackface, and his purpose in this cartoon is to humiliate his black counterparts. Of course these cartoons have been buried as an embarrassing fart of less-enlightened history. I can’t help compare the racist Mickey Mouse pictures to their contemporaries from the old Fleischer Studios, where black music and performance were showcased; rotoscoping technology turning the magnificent Cab Calloway into a spooky ghost in Snow White. Bimbo the dog shares Mickey’s white/black distribution of shade, but less of the minstrel attribution.

When I was studying comics at the SCAD campus in Lacoste, France, and later goofing around in Spain, I discovered that cartoonists were still drawing funny animals this way. In Madrid, a sambo holding a saxophone at a jaunty angle spray-painted on the wall with the text “jazz club,” etc etc etc. I was shocked and puzzled at the ubiquitous caricature of non-white people I saw in the comics shops in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre and Angouleme that only the boldest and self-consciously controversial American artists would think of rendering. In my extreme naivete, I just didn’t… mention…. how weird it was, at the time. In Apt, I even picked up second-hand copies of two of Jean Leguay (aka Jano’s) travelogues, Carnet D’Afrique and his collaboration with fellow cartoonists Dodo and Ben Radis, Bonjour les Indes. Inside, Jano’s uproarious, chaotic, sensational, grotesque drawings show an exaggerated portrait of the places the French cartoonists is fond of visiting.

From Bonjour les Indes.

While often poking fun at clueless white tourists, the book generally portrays Indian people as dirty, simple, venal, self-interested and exotically dangerous, mostly for comedic effect.

His characters are ducks, dog-things, sometimes vaguely bovine creatures with generally blank features, skin like pitch and painted red lips, their individual qualities, background, social status differentiated primarily by costume. It’s a jarring tableau, the post-imperial plundering of faux-quotidian details for broad, sometimes brutal comedy intertwined with mundane, naturalistic, documented daily life that we Americans omit from our envisioning of the world when we reflexively chide ourselves for our “first world problems.” Jano’s travelogues sometimes humanize overlooked experiences while simultaneously reveling in images, exoticism and racist stereotypes meant to dehumanize them. We see people in markets, at the cinema, on a train, buying a guitar, and on the last plate of Carnet D’Afrique, a comic beheading with a sword. Jano has an eye for detail, but too often he misuses it. Instead of highlighting the richness and variety of the lives of his subjects, he instead focuses on sordidness, a cheap thrill here, an ugly little chuckle there, which diminishes them. Gallows humor is a wonderful thing, but artists should keep in mind who erects the gallows and who swings from them.

Reading these books, I can’t really find a reason why Jano draws the people in his travelogues as anthropomorphic animals instead of humans. What thought went into the creation of these images other than “this will look cool?” My great fear, especially writing my own funny animal comic, is that there really is no right way to translate human culture into a world of differentiated animal species that isn’t glib, clumsy and married to racist narratives. Are animal people inherently cruder and cheaper and less dignified than people-people? Was that the whole purpose of the funny animals’ creation? Does drawing a racist image as a dog deflect from the awfulness of the image, or does it enhance what is already a purposeful dehumanization? If furry art is, as I think it is, or ought to be, an imaginative space, furry artists have to consider the historical backdrop in which funny animals have been used and misused to represent people, and do better. Much, much better than’s been done before.

For god’s sake at least better than this. Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.

Yiff1999: Furry Future Past

Posted on July 9, 2013 by mouse

A drawing I made of some furries

My friend could have been on MTV. Please hold my hand, reader, and feel the current of my palpable relief when I heard that they had graciously declined their offer to follow my friend around with cameras and broadcast selected footage under the banner of (x) reality program. For we are furries. We get cozy with the media at our imminent peril. Whether we approach the wild journalist in the spirit of being either coy or candid, it’s always something like “FURRING: Furring involves wearing animal costumes to have sex. The most popular is Sylvester the Cat,” that ends up getting circulated. That particular example came to me from tumblr by way of Channel 4. Passing it along to me, my furry acquaintance Van Weasel editorializes “That’s news to me. I think they just pulled this out of their ass.” They definitely did!

The straight media can’t help themselves. On a slow news day, they relish popping off the head of a plush sexy purple feline mascot costume to reveal not-conventionally-attractive character actor Willie Garson vaguely perv-ing and sweating beneath the sultry cartoon veneer. And don’t we furrs wish it were even Willie Garson half of the time. HE WAS ON SEX AND THE CITY. I get it. Let me just say this though, straight media. Cut it out with the “yiff” already. Anyone saying “yiff” unironically in 2013 will be outed as a fucking NARC and dis-invited to all future secret furpiles, never to be skritched again. Don’t let it happen to you!

I’m thinking about hack media coverage of furries because I am old. I am not old, I am 26. In the world of human beings, a 26-year old moaning about being old is grotesquely gauche and annoying, but a 26-year-old furry is four years away from being a greymuzzle. Quick! Add that one to your “furry glossary.” This distinction is a technicality. I’m already feeling irrelevant and alienated by the furry teens who are supplanting me just as I was allowing myself to feel cutting edge. I’m thinking about hack media coverage of furries because I’m feeling nostalgic and sorry for myself, and it’s hack media coverage of furries that got me into this pickle into the first place.

Imagine me, a misshapen weird teen (you are very good at imagining), reading “Pleasures of the Fur” in my mom’s copy of Vanity Fair. The subtitle to George Gurley’s article from March of 2001 reads “It’s sex; it’s religion; it’s a whole new way of life.” The brief anthro(pomorphic)pological trip to Midwest Furfest just outside Chicago that followed rang with that kind of grandiosity to me at weird lonely14. “TELL ME MORE ABOUT THESE PEOPLE” I implored my dial-up connection, afterword. “You are one of them, no duh,” replied the internet, clacking its mechanical pincers rhythmically.

I revisited Pleasures of the Fur in preparation for this article and no duh it is really bad. Like the lion’s share of ostensibly sympathetic explorations, it reeks of condescension, like isn’t it nice how these grown people have found their own never never land we can spend the duration of the piece pathologizing. Kathy Gerbasi, an “anthrozoologist,” in a BBC News UK article from 2009, describes the old chestnut, “being in a fur suit(sic) allows you to do things you might not otherwise do, like dance in public, clown around, give people a hug.” It’s shy nerd therapy! No mention of also getting to have sex in them. A not-zero number of people like to do this. You don’t have to get it! I haven’t done this thing, but one time I flirted with a coyote person and didn’t really know or care who was underneath the costume. Even if it were Willie Garson!

This is me, using this opportunity to be extraordinarily exuberant.

I just don’t think you can navigate ethically participating in one of the most sexually adventurous and open-minded subcultures on the planet by pretending it isn’t just that. Though I understand the urge to downplay this aspect. It comes from not wanting to be treated like a zoo animal. But one of the enduring pleasures of being a furry is that I know that I’m not the only person on earth whose brain is specially attuned to the secretly perverted frequencies emitted by the Tom and Jerry cartoons Fred Quimby directed. If you want a show, some furrs will give you one (I’m labeling that link NSFW unless you have an inventive explanation or a cool and fun boss).

The people skritching in public in paragraph 2 of like every article about furries ever are most likely close friends. Furry has not transcended basic boundaries and not every fur is Down To Skritch with every other fur. On the litany of things journos get way wrong, put this near the top.

Other things are just different now. Anthrocon has moved from Philidelphia to appropriately weird Pittsburgh. Attendance at the largest conventions in Chicago, San Jose, Atlanta, etc. is measured in the thousands. The subset of “plushies,” furries especially fixated on stuffed animals, that so charmed the gawking public has notably faded. It might just be me, but I don’t see as many centaur fetishists as I used to, either (A SHAME). As the general demographic has shifted younger and younger and America’s cultural concepts and expectations of nerdery have warped beyond recognition from just even a decade ago, Furry is less of a hive-mind built around the individual fascination and nostalgia for funny animal animation. Furry is fragmented, with subsets absorbing and reflecting back influence from DIY zine culture, hip hop and EDM, “weird twitter” surrealism, seapunk, anime, queer consciousness, feminism and general internet. Furry-targeted art and social websites like the briefly-monolithic furaffinity are losing their power as roots of the community. Many furrs best connect and express themselves on twitter and tumblr, where their furriness can casually intersect with whatever else they’re into.

I am of a piece with all of these things, but privately I can feel my cache turning to ash in my mouth as I remember the raw HUNGER of wanting to read Associated Student Bodies but not being old enough to go to a convention and buy any of the copies. When I refer to copies, I mean serialized editions of a comic book printed on paper, which is made from trees. Sometimes I compose melancholic treatises in my head about femininity in naturalistic vs supernatural settings in Studio Ghibli films. Not congruently, last night my partner and I watched An Extremely Goofy Movie and I wondered if someone felt privately tickled to get to animate Max Goof’s armpits (I remove my sexy cat face to reveal that I AM WILLIE GARSON).

Better journos like Amy Letter at the Rumpus and Katie Notopoulos at Buzzfeed are hip to the concept that furry is less about “we are” than “we can.” The best way to summarize furry is to ask a furry and the only way to “get it” is to actually participate, like when the latter actually commissioned a sexy raccoon fursona for herself from a furry artist (to the glossary!). I’m glad I can see straight media growing up, just moments before I am summarily rolled into an open grave by a mushing team of teen sparkle-dogs. Before I expire, I am heard to cryptically mutter “elfwoooooooooooood.”

Princess of Despair

Posted on May 22, 2013 by mouse

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I wrote this piece fresh after finishing the show, and there were a lot of things I was oblivious to at the time that deserve a mention now. I read a feminist message in Madoka and I still like to hold onto how the show made me feel. But a more substantial and well-rounded analysis should take into consideration these factors: that tons of my friends who are women who know a lot more about Magical Girl anime than I do hate it! I later learned that the show’s creator intended a specifically sexist message, and that the darkness was supposed to be some sort of corrective to the “flaws” he saw in Magical Girl Anime, and that male fans of the show are encouraged to be as gross as they like re: objectifying the characters. So take my reading with a grain of salt!

“Chucking her under the chin, he said, “What are you doing here, honey? Your not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” /// “Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a 13 year old girl.”
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

Madoka and Homura by Magical Quartet

That’s a rough lead-in to writing about a Magical Girl anime, but if the shoe fits…

Reading Noah’s article in the Atlantic this morning got me thinking about different shades “princess” roll models for girls and boys. Since I have no day job, an indulgent partner and a crunchyroll subscription, I had already found a great example when I marathoned the entire twelve-episode run of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica (or Puella Magi Madoka Magica as released in the US) in one day. It’s an extraordinary show; a queer love story and maybe not exactly a deconstruction, but a purposeful re-envisioning of the Magical Girl concept and the way it is at this point rotely marketed to young girls.It’s been a big hit, and possibly (hopefully) will have a similar cultural impact as defining Mahou Shoujo properties like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura in time. NOTE: It will be difficult to discuss the major themes of this show without revealing how they are woven into pivotal plot points. Some things must be spoiled, but I will do my best to remain discreet.

Contrary to many Mahou Shoujo predecessors, the tone of Madoka is generally BLEAK, and our titular hero, Madoka Kaname, isn’t actually a magical girl. We begin with her as an “ordinary” eighth grade magical girl protagonist. She’s good natured, sweet and comfortable, with close friends and a successful businesswoman mom and loving dad to look up to. It’s her ordinariness contrasting with her descending deeper into the secret world of Magical Girls and the unseen Witches they fight that defines the narrative tension of the show. Witches spread unseen despair and psychological torment on unsuspecting humans, and it is suggested that they are generally responsible for humankind’s chaotic woes. Magical girls are ordinary teens who make a contract with kyubei, an elegant, sinister white cat-like familiar who grants them one miraculous wish as well as unique frilly costumes (of course!) special weapons and a soul gem, the source of their power.

It’s revealed quickly that Magical Girls must give up contact with their past life as they must continuously defeat witches, not just in the pursuit of justice and love, but for their “grief seeds” which purify the Magical Girls’ soul gems and replenish their power. Giving up their initial idealism for a kind of mercenary nihilism turns out to be the first and most vital tactic for survival. It’s the first of many revelations that kyubei omits from the initial contract negotiations, and a key to why Homura Akemi, a cold-blooded and mysterious Magical Girl will stop at nothing to prevent Madoka from accepting Kyubei’s bargain.

The setting of Madoka is a Magical Girl show where a teen girl’s volatile emotions, constantly demeaned by society, are the source of her power and her struggle for self-determination is locked in the greater karmic push and pull of hope and despair. It’s a world in which the hidden struggle of extraordinary young women against a byzantine structure of hopelessness and cruelty is the engine of all human civilization. The imposed price is living within a predatory system of oppression, where their bodies are not their own, their sacrifice is unacknowledged and their consent is trivialized.

Madoka is also a love story, one that grounds some of its most emotionally powerful scenes in nude intimate embrace between young girls without sexualizing them. This is remarkable itself, in a landscape of anime that is pathologically unable to NOT sexualize young girls. Just in my CR queue, Ano Hana is a somber meditation on friendship and grief where the main male protagonist perves over the ghost of his dead childhood friend, Hanasaku Iroha is a sensitive coming-of-age story about a girls and their mothers with wildly deranged notions about appropriate ways to deal with a sexual predator, Bakemonogatari is like, male gaze the anime, the most consciously and purposefully misogynistic cartoon I have ever seen that isn’t Heavy Traffic… What point is there in going on like this? Madoka is better than all this, and focuses instead on the deepening friendship, intimacy, tenderness, and trust that keeps the girls in sight of why they began fighting in the first place when the decks are stacked impossibly against them, and agony and hopelessness are a total certainty. Of course love saves the day, it is a Magical Girl Show, but a bittersweet, impersonal, abiding love that runs deeper than even the karmic balance of hope and despair.

I assume many parents would cringe at this Madoka show as a new “princess” model, what with the violent dismemberment and depersonalization and unsentimental atmosphere of hopelessness that’s bleaker than a diamond made from the compressed essence of a thousand Watership Downs, but kids know better. How many girls are sold a frilly dress and magic wand and are treated terribly, whether they take it or not? Madoka is an ordinary girl whose ordinariness, her naivety in the face of danger are her ultimate strengths, and her love of her friends the ultimate defiance of the system that exploits them. Also her pink outfit and rose-stem inspired magical bow and arrow are super cool.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: mouse