I know this is an old thread (is a month and a half “old” on the internet?), but this book is the first thing I found back when I started trying to figure out what the furry culture was about – and if it could have helped me to get better at writing non-human characters – so I thought my opinion might be useful. I read through it from cover to cover, this is what I thought about it.
Take this both as my first impression of the book and of the fandom as a whole, since I was looking for something approachable to explain it to me.
This book is offensive.
I’d never suggest it to anyone else who wanted to get to know the fandom. First, formatting’s a mess. At first I thought that someone just lazily copy-pasted a series of interviews, but even then, some of the choices they made don’t make any sense. Some sentences are bolded completely at random… as in, completely. Not in a way that would make sense if it came from another source, but just randomly. There are footnotes in the middle of the page, and sometimes a few lines at the beginning of a paragraph would have the same formatting as the footnote, just to continue as normal in the following pages. Images are casually thrown in the middle of a paragraph, and I’m fairly sure that some lines were just missing completely. Add to that that English is my second language, and you can imagine how painful it was to have to sit through that.
It’s just a mess. As a first introduction to the fandom, my impression was “should I even bother? It’s clear that these guys aren’t even trying.”
And that’s not even talking about the content. I enjoyed some of the passages in the book – especially the ones about the author’s personal experience – and I thought that one or two chapters were actually fairly interesting, but overall this book just made me want to run away screaming in the opposite direction. Seriously.
Roughly 3/4 of the book is about fetishes. That’s it. This is not a book about furry culture, it’s a book about furry fetishes. Now, I know that sexuality plays a certain role in the fandom, I believe that people are free to enjoy whatever they want, and I read through some pretty graphic stuff and was really amazed by how well it was written. But this is not what you want your first impact with the community to be. The first image in the book, while not pornographic per se, is sexually suggestive, and it goes downhill from there. This is not a book I’d suggest to a friend to introduce him to this community.
That’s the problem. It wouldn’t be that much of an issue, if it wasn’t presented as an introduction to the fandom. You want to write a book on furry fetishes? That’s fine by me, it’s a more than valid subject. But the introduction talks about myths, spiritualism and Aesop, so I thought it would have been on the same mindset I was – to talk about themes and storytelling, and the meaning of anthropomorphism in the human experience, what I thought I’d get by looking into the fandom. And then the first interview’s all about pansexuality.
Let me just read you some of the chapters’ titles:
Furry Fetish Fun.
Fat Furs.
Inflation.
Pregnancy.
Diaper.
Bondage.
S&M.
Lactation.
Can you see how this might turn some people away?
This is fetish pornography. As in, not pornography with fetishes, but pornography about fetishes. The only thing I could think about why someone outside the fandom would write something like this (because remember, the author’s not a furry himself) was for the shock value, for people who enjoy reading about other people’s “perversions” and love feeling normal, or even better than them. Yes, it’s presented as a series of interviews, and yes, it gives each person some space to explain why it’s something they enjoy, and no, it never judges them. But that’s why it’s terrible – it honestly represents furries as almost exclusively about kinky sex stuff. And I have a strong feeling it’s intentional: the only other book in the series available on Amazon, as Kokai said, is about BDSM.
And it’s the only book on furries I found.
In a sense, this book is why I came looking for this forum: I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There was no way that it was only about sex, some of the stuff I read was just too good to be only coming from erotica writers. And the fandom’s just too large for not having at least one or two people who were trying to elevate it. But someone coming from the outside who’s not willing to give it a chance will just find in it a confirmation of what the rest of the internet thinks about furries.
I’ve seen erotica in furry stories used in an extremely intelligent manner, and touching works about homosexuality that were clearly drawing from the author’s personal experience. But it’s not what this book’s about.
“It almost seems like people want to be able to create situations where they can love and have sex like the animals they believe themselves to be.”
It’s a quote. And it’s not disproven as a false stereotype. It’s justified.
This book makes me angry.