> I've been around the fandom a while now, but joined pretty
> much as the Burned Furs thing was cooling off. I have
> heard the term quite a few times and even encountered a few
> who considered themselves "Burned Furs", but they are often
> reluctant to talk about it.
>
> So as a 'significant' event in furry history, is anyone
> able to fill the rest of us in?
>
The short version: it was a group of (mostly) artists who felt they
had been "burned" by the highly sexualized side of the fandom.
(experienced negative attitudes for their work, their association with
omgpornographers, etc)
They longed for the cute, squeaky clean, non-sexual period of the
fandom that never existed. Beyond that, the group didn't have any
real central organization or goals. Some of them wanted to force out
the "dirty" artists from the fandom. Some wanted to isolate and
separate themselves. Some of them just wanted some high moral ground
while they conducted their attention whoring.
The biggest accomplishment they ever had was when somebody called up
the manager of the hotel where conFURence 10 was going to happen just
a week before the convention, and told them essentially, "this furry
con centers around pornography and animals and so it's bestiality and
illegal and omg you could be closed and sent to jail so there." The
result was lots of drama, some very fast phone calls, the adult art
show being cancelled (artists could not hang, display, or sell any
adult stuff in the art show at all) and the dealer's room being highly
paranoid about making sure bits were covered up in prints on display
for sale. That convention was really the death knell for ConFURence.
It was the only conFURence i ever attended, and only managed to have
fun through lots of effort. On the other hand, i got to meet Jim
there, so it certainly had a few up sides.
-SirFox
Received on Thu Oct 05 2006 - 04:21:18 CDT