Review of Fursonas (2016) by Corey S — 07 Feb 2017

What starts off as a very interesting and rather promising look at our very weird little hobby, and with much appreciated variety in perspectives and voices (including some of the outcasts), kinda goes off the rails more and more as it goes on, ending up being a bit of a mudslinging contest at the de facto leader and voice of furries after running afoul of him a bit.

Look, Uncle Kage is perhaps arguably a bit "tyrannical", and very definitely extremely hyperbolic (though clearly mostly for humor's sake), but I think the filmmakers missed a bit of the point of his role or his philosophy on the media: he wants to control the narrative towards the positive, in spite of ourselves, for all of our sakes - Rousseau's "forced freedom" that comes of the social contract of being one of us. Being forced to be free means that the collective good of all is the standard of behaviour, and any egoistic action that damages the greater good is punished to protect the collective. This existence of law and standards allows for freedom to be expressed, and saves us from the potentially violent forcing underground that would occur if the rednecks and skinheads got too much false information, as the media is wont to push almost every time they get involved.

Considering that there was a convention that was chlorine gassed during the making of the film (Midwest Furfest 2014), likely pretty much just because we have a bad reputation at times, it's rather surprising that they did miss this point. People have very nearly died as a result of the nature of the narrative, and, in other sociopolitical spheres, people have in fact died for centuries, and likely will for the next few years in particular, as well. But I suppose that's confirmation bias for you.

So, in short, half of a good documentary. It does show some things I think it shouldn't, like the inclusion of Boomer, who I think annoys almost all of us for the poor stereotypes he creates of us (there are better examples of therians, surely?), mixed with his compulsive attention-seeking behaviour towards the media, and some behaviours that create bad impressions of all of us (you know older people see some people of a group smoking pot and assume we all do it and that's why we're all "weird special snowflake losers who will never amount to anything" and then try to destroy us).

A great pity, because the half that is good is REALLY good, and REALLY interesting (if maybe not really aimed at general public consumption), such as Varka's thoughts on taboo, what happened to Chew Fox and Tom Cat, and the fact that they actually had a greymuzzle in Bandit.