How to love the freedom of leaderless fandom, and fight the flipside of organized abuse
by Patch O'Furr
Do you know the story where several blind people try to describe an elephant by only touching small parts of it? Nobody can say what the whole animal is.
That happens when furry subculture talks about itself, and protests outside stereotypes by falling into its own… The Geek Social Fallacies.
Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power. If you don’t like the media, Be The Media. That’s the mission at Dogpatch Press, but the subculture keeps stubborn blind spots. Many stories are too inside for professionals to investigate, but hobbyists lack the resources, especially when they need action that people don’t want to take. Then they stay overlooked, underreported, and suppressed. Nobody is immune to the psychology of denying uncomfortable knowledge. This is how you get too much shallow drama between individuals, but too little intensive research. You may say the solution is showing more of the positive; but that’s not seeing the whole elephant.
The more we know, the more it empowers people to do better.
Rukis’s HeartTheft is two books: Covenant and Apocrypha, however when I heard about an 800 page hard cover of both books combined I felt an overwhelming urge to pick it up for myself. I am not terribly versed in Rukis’s work, besides having read one of the Red Lantern comics and having ogled their art for as long as I’ve considered myself “in the fandom”. However, this stands out to me as a very strong novel in its own right. My desire to grab up the book was solely because I knew that if it fell from a high shelf it might break a toe or two. I would like to see more of these long form books, unashamed to be dense and worthy of analysis as HeartTheft is. Did the story of HeartTheft require 806 pages to be effectively told? I am not confident in that. Am I endlessly grateful, however, that we get to spend so much time in this world and with these well constructed and lived in characters.
