"you are claiming here your work predates the "Rowrbrazzle group.""
Rowrbrazzle started in '83. I started conceiving Furry stories in '75, a year before Vootie.
"Unfortunately, your own essay kind of shoots that one in the foot when you freely admit that this genre did have another term ("allegorical literature") that predates yours ("furry novel")."
Allegorical literature is the section of the library where talking animal literature tends to be found. But there's a lot more to allegorical literature than talking animals. I was putting a name to the subset of allegorical literature that's specific to talking animal stories.
And I did this at a time when I was highly influenced to think Furry literature was required to be allegorical, philosophical and spiritual. As a matter of fact, when I later started to add science fiction to my mix, I was actually critsized for cheapening my genre.
I would take those 3 major novels with me everywhere I went - Bambi, Watership Down and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I would insist that if somebody wanted to read my stuff they had to read these books first. Because everybody who read my stuff who wasn't familiar with those books thought I invented the whole concept of talking animals for adult readers.
But even when I got people familiar with those books so they'd understand I was working in an established genre, they'd still come back astonished at what I had written. They'd want to sit and talk for hours about how they interpreted what my characters had said. And how amazing it was that they were getting all this spiritual inspiration from a bunch of talking animals.
So when I started talking about adapting the work for science fiction, my readers were like, "How can you do that? How can you taint this classy genre of yours with that trash?" And I just shrugged it off and said "Don't worry about it. Whatever I draw into this genre will become just as allegorical, philosophical and spiritual. But I can't be content to just copy my predecessors. I have to have an eye, not only towards promoting my genre, but taking it to its next creative phase. And the genre can not progress unless other things are added to it."
The most prominent icon of the fandom I know of who started out around the same time I did was Reed Waller. He didn't come up with the term "Furry." But he had a very similar attitude. He didn't like people thinking that he invented what he did. He wanted people to know he was working in this long established genre called "Funny Animals," and he was just taking it to its next phase.
And these were the kind of people who came together to lay the ground work for The Furry Community. In general, they did not consider themselves inventing something new. They were promoting and furthering things they considered to be already firmly established. And the only time they wanted to hear words like limitations or boundaries was when they were trashing them and moving beyond them.
And it was because we were so proud of our established genres and the way we were progressing them that the outside world looked on us with an awe and respect that is unimaginable to the young Furry of today, because the community has lost it's true history and replaced it with a mythology that the outside world can not relate to.
This notion that we who were active during those pioneering years had some kind of limited vision of what Furry should be is a big part of that detrimental mythology, coupled with the notion that nothing that existed before 1980 is part of what the community’s about, or that we should only be concerned with things made by the community for the community.
It's because the community has done that to itself that the young Furry of today can't stand up in the face of reporters or family and state with unwavering pride, "I am part of something with a long and culturally renowned history." They can’t whip three best sellers out of their back pocket to show people that what they're doing is not only respectable, but potentially lucrative.
Now, it has never been my policy to ask the community to back up and start doing anything based on the way I used to do it. But if it is your intension to look back and try to recapture something of the spirit of the pioneers, don't do so in search of standards or limitations, because that is not what we were about.
As far as we were concerned, Furry was beautiful because every wall we knocked down opened up so much unexplored territory. And if today Furry has become stale or has stopped getting the respect it used to, it's only because Furries have stopped looking at the walls as something to be knocked down. Or because they lack power to knock down walls without the weight of their genre's history to back them up.
"A modern example would be the recent Furry Vengeance movie; I doubt the title was an attempt to appeal to Furries, or to label itself as any sort of genre."
Actually, "Furry Vengeance" is an awkward title that I don't think they would have chosen if the producers didn't anticipate some kind of pop culture relevance. It's likely that they had some kind of confused notion of what the word represents in pop culture. But it's also important to realize that "Furry" has been used to refer to animal societies since the early 20th century. So, in the absence of a realistic explanation of the object of Furry Fandom, some people might think we're a fandom for animals in general.
Some folks in England might hear the term Furry Fandom and think, "Ah, the little furry folk. That's part of our culture, you know." Some folks in America might think, "How interesting, a fandom for our furry friends." And, of course, anyone who grew up with Sesame Street has some idea of what Furry means.
That's one of the things I try to get across in the essay – that we didn't invent this word, we appropriated it. And anybody who hears about a Furry Fandom, or a Furry market (as we were described in The Financial Times) is likely to assume a connection to one of those older uses of the word.
Under the circumstances there's no reason to assume Furry Vengeance wasn't specifically being pitched to us as a test. Hollywood producers have heard the noise. They know we’re a market. They know we have money. They’re interested in exploiting us, but they don't know how.
What this fandom will come out in mass to spend money on is very hard to get a grip on. But I anticipate we will be seeing more odd things with Furry in the titles, as the media attempts to catch our attention. But I'm hopeful that they'll do their homework and eventually attach that word to something more obviously anthropomorphic.
"I'm again forced to point out that furry may not be a good term to label any genre"
Furry is an excellent word. Why do you think so many of us came up with it naturally, rather than through peer interaction?
If I knew of a word that was more perfect, I might be inclined to switch. But any new word that someone suggests tends to throw in a limiting factor and change the nature of what we are.
Actually, I remember back in the 90's watching the comic book companies wrestling with what to call the genre, once Funny Animals started to be seen as being in appropriate for a genre that was no longer overly concerned with being funny. They tried Anthro, Morphic, and maybe a couple of others. But there was no massive relating to any alternative terms except Furry.
If you look at the cover of the latest issue of Furrlough, you'll see Funny Animals and Furry are still duking it out. So, if we're going to drop Furry, there's nothing to go back to but Funny Animals. Which doesn't work because too much of what we do is not funny – it's just Furry.
"you are claiming here your work predates the "Rowrbrazzle group.""
Rowrbrazzle started in '83. I started conceiving Furry stories in '75, a year before Vootie.
"Unfortunately, your own essay kind of shoots that one in the foot when you freely admit that this genre did have another term ("allegorical literature") that predates yours ("furry novel")."
Allegorical literature is the section of the library where talking animal literature tends to be found. But there's a lot more to allegorical literature than talking animals. I was putting a name to the subset of allegorical literature that's specific to talking animal stories.
And I did this at a time when I was highly influenced to think Furry literature was required to be allegorical, philosophical and spiritual. As a matter of fact, when I later started to add science fiction to my mix, I was actually critsized for cheapening my genre.
I would take those 3 major novels with me everywhere I went - Bambi, Watership Down and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And I would insist that if somebody wanted to read my stuff they had to read these books first. Because everybody who read my stuff who wasn't familiar with those books thought I invented the whole concept of talking animals for adult readers.
But even when I got people familiar with those books so they'd understand I was working in an established genre, they'd still come back astonished at what I had written. They'd want to sit and talk for hours about how they interpreted what my characters had said. And how amazing it was that they were getting all this spiritual inspiration from a bunch of talking animals.
So when I started talking about adapting the work for science fiction, my readers were like, "How can you do that? How can you taint this classy genre of yours with that trash?" And I just shrugged it off and said "Don't worry about it. Whatever I draw into this genre will become just as allegorical, philosophical and spiritual. But I can't be content to just copy my predecessors. I have to have an eye, not only towards promoting my genre, but taking it to its next creative phase. And the genre can not progress unless other things are added to it."
The most prominent icon of the fandom I know of who started out around the same time I did was Reed Waller. He didn't come up with the term "Furry." But he had a very similar attitude. He didn't like people thinking that he invented what he did. He wanted people to know he was working in this long established genre called "Funny Animals," and he was just taking it to its next phase.
And these were the kind of people who came together to lay the ground work for The Furry Community. In general, they did not consider themselves inventing something new. They were promoting and furthering things they considered to be already firmly established. And the only time they wanted to hear words like limitations or boundaries was when they were trashing them and moving beyond them.
And it was because we were so proud of our established genres and the way we were progressing them that the outside world looked on us with an awe and respect that is unimaginable to the young Furry of today, because the community has lost it's true history and replaced it with a mythology that the outside world can not relate to.
This notion that we who were active during those pioneering years had some kind of limited vision of what Furry should be is a big part of that detrimental mythology, coupled with the notion that nothing that existed before 1980 is part of what the community’s about, or that we should only be concerned with things made by the community for the community.
It's because the community has done that to itself that the young Furry of today can't stand up in the face of reporters or family and state with unwavering pride, "I am part of something with a long and culturally renowned history." They can’t whip three best sellers out of their back pocket to show people that what they're doing is not only respectable, but potentially lucrative.
Now, it has never been my policy to ask the community to back up and start doing anything based on the way I used to do it. But if it is your intension to look back and try to recapture something of the spirit of the pioneers, don't do so in search of standards or limitations, because that is not what we were about.
As far as we were concerned, Furry was beautiful because every wall we knocked down opened up so much unexplored territory. And if today Furry has become stale or has stopped getting the respect it used to, it's only because Furries have stopped looking at the walls as something to be knocked down. Or because they lack power to knock down walls without the weight of their genre's history to back them up.
"A modern example would be the recent Furry Vengeance movie; I doubt the title was an attempt to appeal to Furries, or to label itself as any sort of genre."
Actually, "Furry Vengeance" is an awkward title that I don't think they would have chosen if the producers didn't anticipate some kind of pop culture relevance. It's likely that they had some kind of confused notion of what the word represents in pop culture. But it's also important to realize that "Furry" has been used to refer to animal societies since the early 20th century. So, in the absence of a realistic explanation of the object of Furry Fandom, some people might think we're a fandom for animals in general.
Some folks in England might hear the term Furry Fandom and think, "Ah, the little furry folk. That's part of our culture, you know." Some folks in America might think, "How interesting, a fandom for our furry friends." And, of course, anyone who grew up with Sesame Street has some idea of what Furry means.
That's one of the things I try to get across in the essay – that we didn't invent this word, we appropriated it. And anybody who hears about a Furry Fandom, or a Furry market (as we were described in The Financial Times) is likely to assume a connection to one of those older uses of the word.
Under the circumstances there's no reason to assume Furry Vengeance wasn't specifically being pitched to us as a test. Hollywood producers have heard the noise. They know we’re a market. They know we have money. They’re interested in exploiting us, but they don't know how.
What this fandom will come out in mass to spend money on is very hard to get a grip on. But I anticipate we will be seeing more odd things with Furry in the titles, as the media attempts to catch our attention. But I'm hopeful that they'll do their homework and eventually attach that word to something more obviously anthropomorphic.
"I'm again forced to point out that furry may not be a good term to label any genre"
Furry is an excellent word. Why do you think so many of us came up with it naturally, rather than through peer interaction?
If I knew of a word that was more perfect, I might be inclined to switch. But any new word that someone suggests tends to throw in a limiting factor and change the nature of what we are.
Actually, I remember back in the 90's watching the comic book companies wrestling with what to call the genre, once Funny Animals started to be seen as being in appropriate for a genre that was no longer overly concerned with being funny. They tried Anthro, Morphic, and maybe a couple of others. But there was no massive relating to any alternative terms except Furry.
If you look at the cover of the latest issue of Furrlough, you'll see Funny Animals and Furry are still duking it out. So, if we're going to drop Furry, there's nothing to go back to but Funny Animals. Which doesn't work because too much of what we do is not funny – it's just Furry.