How I Went From Ridiculing Furries to Cheering them On in Five Panels or Less
Guest post by Isaac. Isaac is that guy who is still pretty much a human, but definitely not Mundane. He likes red pandas, chocolate, and improv. You may have seen his apology post on Reddit, found him putzing around the FurNet IRC, or attempting to become America’s Next Top Popufur on Twitter as @isaacapologist. He will be at Midwest Furfest, probably. Say hi. Be gentle.
In many ways, I like to think that I ended up at a furry convention in the way that many furries end up at a furry convention: alcohol, combined with an unhealthy sense of curiosity. But the reality, I think, is even a bit more interesting than that, so I’d be happy to expand on the perfect storm of circumstances that led to my attendance at FurCon 2015, and subsequent headlong fall into the rabbit hole that is the Furry Fandom.
It’s December. I’ve just recently moved to the Bay Area, to help out a friend with a new job working in the Silicon Valley. He’s much the introverted type, I’m much more of the outgoing type, and he invites me to live out in CA for a few months to help him get acclimated and make some new friends. As I’ve since discovered, neither of us is really good at ‘going out’ to make friends, we rather prefer to just organically meet people. In practice, this works out about as well as you might imagine.
So, we are spending one of our many weekends in our living room, drinking wine, he playing video games on his computer, me watching Netflix, and I stumble upon the documentary about Bronies. I, being mildly intoxicated and fascinated with countercultures, decide to indulge in the Brony documentary. I then decide to indulge in a second Brony documentary. By this point, I am both fabulously drunk, and fabulously fascinated. I have an inception-style we’ve-got-to-go-deeper moment: If there are two documentaries about Bronies, there’s got to be one about furries.
Continue reading This One Time at FurCon…