Sonious's stories

On June 9th, 2023 the furry world was baffled by a newsletter from Washington state’s convention Anthro Northwest that has since been removed from the internet. On their social media page this letter was headered with the statement “Something had to be said”. The letter opened as if it is about to take an action that would cause controversy to protect their gathering, but then moved forward with meandering prose about the dangers of ostracizing others based on accusation, which they later refer to be related to a phenomenon that has been deemed as “cancel culture”. However, in its statement it also didn’t really announce any action that the organization would take to combat these issues it deemed important to state are occurring.

This meandering and winding prose about “seeing through the glass darkly” certainly caught a lot of attention. Because of the vagueness and the context of being an official statement it led many to speculate what could have prompted the post that read more like a defensive personal blog. Soon other furry conventions and organizations would capitalize on the public relations blunder by making parodies of their own.

But perhaps at the end of the day, the glass that ANW’s chair, Gabriel Felix, was seeing through dimly was that of the house he resided in. The shattered pieces reflected upon him for a past where he ignored his own currently presented ideals. Because while the chair asks the fandom to be slower to judge and to be more judicious with our actions to outcast others among us, on May 8th, 2019 his convention had banned the Furlandia soon-to-be-chair at the time, Richard “Saphy” Thomas, from being able to attend ANW.

Note for clarity: Saphy was the promoted to chair from vice-chair of Furlandia following their 2019 gathering just after he was banned from ANW, the current chair in 2023 (Rex) is not banned from ANW. To make the story more clear the headline working verbiage around the titles have been updated in the article.

On May 19th Fur Affinity had announced that it will expand the rules toward banning portrayals of youthful appearing characters, even if the character is addressed as being older in universe, engaging in sexual situations to include digimon and pokemon characters. While situations that portrayed actual young anthro characters in sex (known colloquially as cub porn) had been banned 13 years ago, there were elements of gray area on characters that are determined as mature in age, but younger in appearance that were later expanded upon. This update is a furthering of that expansion.

In the announcement Fur Affinity had noted that there is a method for artists who have posted works that may be in this gray area to discover how they would be handled by submitting trouble tickets against it.

If you have questions as to whether this may apply to your content, please feel free to open a ticket under “NSFW Underage Content” with links to the content in question, and we can verify if the content is in violation or not.

Artists have been informed that the amendment will start to be enforced on July 1st.

A brief press release made by IndyFurCon on April 27th announced that Cassidy Civet would no longer be their Guest of Honor at their 2023 gathering slated to happen at the end of August this year. No reasoning was given by the board for the decision in their press release.

Cassidy, in response, took to social media to express her shock at the announcement:

I feel completely blindsided. Being asked was such a rush, I canceled my Furrydelphia 22 to attend and be announced at closing ceremonies at IFC 2022. Then complete silence from the con for months, I reached out, then today the rug got pulled out from under me.

I’m in shock.
-Cassidy Civet - April 27, 2023 7:03 PM

March has been quite a maddening time for the hard working staff at furry conventions. Two of the gatherings, Vancouver’s Vancoufur and Detroit’s Motor City Fur Con, both came under attack during their respective activities when a false report of threat, known as swatting, was committed and caused the need to temporarily evacuate the facilities. Toronto’s Furnal Equinox, meanwhile, had a scare in the region of the convention during the early morning hours that caused witnessing staff to recommend sheltering in place.

We will start with what occurred during Furnal Equinox as it was a different situation than the other two. Then we will go over what occurred at Vancoufur and Motor City.