The very real role that fantasy plays in our everyday lives
By Leah Sottilehttp://www.inlander.com/spokane/imaginary-friends/Content?oid=2339157
Furries at Spokane’s First Night
NOTE: this is a very long article about many different fandoms and subcultures, thus I'veonly included the part about the furry fandom, feel free to visit the OP link to read the full article
It doesn't matter who this man really is. In this world, no one cares that he's a 31-year-old business owner who lives in North Idaho. What matters is who he wants to be.
Who he wants to be is Quip — a mostly white York Chocolate cat with a striped tail.
Quip likes to hide underneath desks and sneak inside cabinets when they're open. Occasionally, he'll nap in the afternoon sun on the top of a late-model sedan parked in the driveway. He likes stuffed animals and jumping on the counter.
Sitting at a downtown Spokane coffeehouse, Quip explains that he's a lot more than just a man sitting here. That this animal side is him, too — a part of his personality he has nurtured for decades as a member of the "furry fandom," a worldwide subculture devoted to animal characters with human traits. For some, being furry means enjoying books, cartoons or films starring talking animals — say, Watership Down or The Muppets. For others, it means adopting an animal personality, or a "fursona," like Quip. And for others, it means spending thousands of dollars to create a custom "fursuit" to wear at conventions and furry meetups.
Quip, who spoke on the condition his real name wasn't printed, is this man's fursona. Being Quip is his escape.
"My fursona — it's like a person's counterpart — is a cat. Others identify themselves as a wolf," he says. "We even have people who identify themselves as dragons, lizards — we call them scalies. There's no fur, but we still love them too."
Escapism is nothing new to the human experience. Ask the guy who drops his paycheck on Zags season tickets, or the people waiting in line for a movie on a Friday night. Ask comic book fans, artists, musicians, gamers, woodworkers, distance runners, Civil War re-enactors, avid fans of Game of Thrones. Odds are they'll all tell you they're just looking for a vacation from the norm, a few minutes when they can forget the bills to pay, the obligations to meet, the 9-to-5, the problems they don't want to address.
"When we fantasize, we experience the same emotions we would feel if we were in reality. Think of the fear you feel with a nightmare. Happy fantasies make us feel good," says Norman Holland, author of Literature and the Brain and a researcher of psychoanalytic psychology. "All work and no fantasy makes Jack pretty gloomy. We all should have some space for fantasy in our lives. Fantasies — escapism — give our emotions a workout. That's why the imaginative arts are good for you."
But even today, when there are arguably more outlets for people to escape their everyday lives than ever before in our history, some fantasy cultures still raise eyebrows. Some people feel they are social pariahs because of how they choose to escape. Some say they have keep their fantasy lives secret.
Like Quip. He says to him, being a furry is just a casual hobby. But he knows that's hard to understand — so his family and friends, and especially his clients, have no idea that he's a part-time cat.
"You know, you're a professional," he says. "What would happen if tomorrow you dressed up like a half-nude panda bear and started playing fetch with all the vases in the office?"
People aren't that open-minded, he says.
"I do much the same thing [as anyone else]," he says. "I just go home, I make myself a nice little salad, I catch up on email, and then I put on a dog collar and go to sleep."
Ethan Gilsdorf, author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, has made a career out of studying escapism. He writes about geek culture for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post and has appeared as an expert on escapist cultures on PBS, the Discovery Channel and BBC. He points to what he sees as one of the modern-day origins of fantasy-escapist culture: Dungeons & Dragons, a game that remains wildly popular today.
"Dungeons & Dragons, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, was ... one of the few 'games in town' for immersive fantasy escapism when it first came on the market in 1974," he says. "Back then, a game like D&D was cutting edge. Today, its tools — dice, maps, rules books — seem rather rudimentary compared with the sophisticated toys and diversions we have today."
But as technology has evolved, Gilsdorf says fantasy has become a part of day-to-day life. It's in the CGI movie effects that make movie monsters larger than we could have ever imagined. It's in the immersive digital communities and social media that have become as integral to our lives as going to work and eating breakfast. Fantasy isn't just for geeks anymore.
In fact, fantasy escapism is a booming business. Last year the largest comic and pop culture convention, San Diego Comic-Con International, attracted more than 130,000 attendees. Tournaments of one of the world's most popular video games, Defense of the Ancients— better known as DotA— have become so massive, they're being broadcast on ESPN.
"People are attracted to fantasy lives for a variety of reasons: to escape from bad times, to get a break or respite from day-to-day life, to experience wonder and magic, to feel empowered, to be able to do something or be someone they can't be or do in real life, to feel camaraderie, fellowship and socialization," Gilsdorf says. "Ultimately, we want to feel part of something bigger than ourselves, something grander, something more epic than day-to-day life."
Even the smaller subcultures, like the furry fandom, play to that notion.
This year's Anthrocon in Pittsburgh attracted 5,861 furries from 26 countries. That's a far cry from the beginnings of the furry fandom, which sprouted out of 1970s fanzines, found an online home in 1990s chat rooms and took off with the advent of the World Wide Web.
Here in Spokane, the Inland Northwest Fur Folk group on Meetup.com boasts more than 130 members — that's everyone from actual "fursuiters" who wear animal costumes, to folks like Quip who simply have fursonas but don't dress up, to people who just like to nerd out on talking animal characters.
Ritzgaul Gryphs is another member of the group here. The 28-year-old man works at a Spokane Valley grocery store, but he won't divulge any other details about himself or use his real name — and it's not because he's ashamed. He says it's how the media has portrayed the furry fandom as an a animal-costuming-wearing sex group of sorts that keeps him anonymous. He says that's not what the the majority of the fandom is about.
And yeah, sure, he says some furries do like to have sex while dressed up as foxes and wolves. But not all of them. And it's certainly not exclusive to fursuiters.
"There's no denying things like that go on," he says. "There's no denying that at Trekkie conventions there's going to be Klingon sex."
Ritzgaul says he's been a furry since 1998, but he's never assumed a fursona. He's a human. "I never found a furry side of me," he says, "but when you really deeply think about it, humans are animals too."
But he's just as much a part of the fandom as people who wear costumes. When Ritzgaul thinks about his attraction to the furry fandom, he thinks about being an 8-year-old kid watching afternoon cartoons. His still remembers his first crush: a villainous wolf on the cartoon TaleSpin.
When he found the fandom as a teenager, he said it actually changed him as a person.
"It got me social. It got me out of the house more. It got me to discover myself as a person. It helped me," he says. "It pretty much saved me from boredom. It helped me become more active and discover things, learn things."
Quip, the man who identifies in the fandom as a cat, says with furries he found a group that was more accepting of who he was than anyone else he'd encountered.
"That's the interesting thing about the furry fandom, it's really an anything-goes sort of community," Quip says. "Nobody will lambaste you because you listen to this type of music as opposed to another type of music. No one will rib you because you like to watch cartoons."
So it isn't sexual for these men, but would they prefer to date someone who is a furry, too?
Quip answers that with a laugh. "If you know anyone, just..." — and he holds his hand up to his ear like a telephone.