Dogpatch Press

Furry Family Ofrenda on VRchat

It seems appropriate to write about losing things and carrying on, after a doomful week in America…

Hydraheads, an artist in Canada, is a player of Flight Rising, “a social web-based activity site featuring dragon breeding, adventuring, combat, and collecting.” You get your own clan of dragons and work with other clans. It’s more than solo fun, it was also a family connection. Hydraheads joins Dogpatch Press with a story:

Recently, Flight Rising closed my own account and my deceased mum’s account. I adopted and inherited from her before she passed.

It happened when someone attempted to hack in, and I couldn’t reset my password, so I started a trouble ticket and they investigated. They closed my account and hers, because they considered it an unfair advantage in the game to have two accounts. I had been active on both, and it’s against their TOS.

I appealed anyways, because I didn’t really want to lose my mum’s account or dragons she gave me; but you can’t exactly merge accounts or transfer progen dragons. My appeal was denied and I permanently lost both. They issued half-hearted condolences to my mum and said I could start a new account. It stung, mainly because I used her account to set it up as a comforting memorial for myself. We used to play it together and it was our thing.

This made me recognize and reflect on how furries on a wide scale put importance on and have tendencies to memorialize our lost members, friends and family, in ways that I think are uniquely touching. It says so much about how we value each other and are connected. Community ties can be so widespread through a single furry, and make support for one another when facing mortality… The more I look, it’s everywhere. A lot of us live very digitally. For some furries that were more isolated, this was their life. Maybe it was their only way to participate in the fandom.

Be it shrines on Second Life, or VRchat, obituary posts, or the ∞ of Furaffinity (RIP Dragoneer), you can see the outpour of friends and strangers coming together for someone like Dogbomb when they pass, and the continued memory for furs like them kept alive by the rest of us. It’s a beautiful thing.

Furry Family Ofrenda on VRchat

Losing an important account like that says something about the difference between corporate owned spaces, and things we make and own. Having a choice of how to keep things private also brings to mind an experience for Patch O’Furr:

Go back 5 years, when my girlfriend then brought me into her favorite things, before I brought her into mine. She helped found a huge monthly Bike Party event years before I met her. It brings 1000 people to the street on festive lit-up bicycles, like a rave on wheels, with music speakers on trailers, and dance party stops in special places. We started going together, and I figured out how to mount a fursuit head on my bike handlebars and ride in partial suit or bring a full suit on a trailer for the stops. Then she joined me for street fursuiting events. She even volunteered to be a helper and dressed fabulously for our furry contingent at San Francisco Pride, and fit perfectly as a non-furry.

In 2021, she died, and hundreds of people rode bikes for her memorial. Only a few dozen private furry followers got to read about it and see our photos together, because I wanted to keep it personal.

Around then, there was a glitch with this news site. I’m not the admin and it’s purposely kept minimal, like an old-school paper zine put on the web. The glitch wasn’t immediately solveable and I was busy. Then an insistent stranger who claimed tech expertise got upset that I wasn’t personally fixing it immediately, talking down to me without knowing how the site was set up. They assumed I was admin and had the latest install of WordPress instead of a version with a legacy theme on purpose, which couldn’t accommodate what they expected. Since I wasn’t fixing things right away, this person called in friends and led an online harassment dogpile campaign while I was busy helping my girlfriend’s mom. As hate posts poured on, I wasn’t looking. I was saying goodbye with her family at the edge of the San Francisco Bay closest to where she grew up, and scattering her ashes on the water.

Her memorial was huge on the street, but it stayed purely for those involved because I wanted it to stay private. Now the bike party runs every month and everyone there is carrying on for her. I’ll keep photos to myself, except this one was us…

Hydraheads adds:

Sorry to hear about your girlfriend, goodness. It’s people like them that are still a part of our community by extension, even if they weren’t a furry, they were loved among and by furries. My mum thought furries were cool AF, even if she didn’t fully understand it, haha, but she was so supportive too.

That’s beautiful despite the circumstances occurring, I’m genuinely relieved that your IRL friends could do that for you to preserve her memory. And I like where this topic is going, about perseverance and strength, and trying to find and make those things in the shadow of uncertainty that comes after death. A friend shared this one with me and it has helped me cope: “When someone you love passes away, the things they leave behind or the qualities you remember them by are now gifted to you, and become your qualities. That’s how they live on through us.”

We continue to try and live and honor those things and carry forward through bad times. With your personal story about your girlfriend, it’s important that we ourselves as a community recognize the reach we have to one another. Good and bad. Whether our family and friends were furry or not. They were a support for you alongside and part of that network or our community too.

Considering the elections and what everyone is now facing going forward in America, more than ever we need the strength of each other, and the memories we hold of each other helps to propel us towards the vision and keep our focus. The importance of why and who we stay strong for. Ourselves, our family. For those ahead and after us, and in honor for those that have already departed.

One of the best keepers of memories is Changa, who is deeply involved on VRChat with the Furality event, and founded the Furry Family Ofrenda. Since 2020, it has collected memories of departed fandom members to view with a Dia de los Muertos theme.

Have you ever had a close call with death, and did it make you think about instructions for what to do when the time comes? If you have a very active life online and with a fursona, should your identities be remembered all together, or kept separate just for those in the know?

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