Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Category: Performance

Renegade fursuiting is BEST fursuiting: chat with Sakura Fox – Part 3

by Patch O'Furr

sakura2
Continued from Part 1 and Part 2: Sakura fox tells more about “renegade fursuiting” in public. I’ve previously written about “Street fursuiting”. Sakura’s convention panels and journals about it are recommended reading (see bottom.)

Patch:
I think public suiting is way better for candid photos than conventions, because it’s outside of predictable space. I love seeing surprised bystanders, or people drawn into furriness for the first time! Do you end up with a lot of photos afterward? Do you get photos taken by people you bring, or find them from searching randomly on the web? Do you have a favorite photo moment?

Has media ever picked you as an attraction to highlight? (It seems to happen to our meets a lot when San Francisco furries do street fairs. Even just to add incidental color to a story.)

Sakura:
Agreed! Photos from public events are always very dynamic and full of surprise.
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Renegade fursuiting is BEST fursuiting: chat with Sakura Fox – Part 2

by Patch O'Furr

sakura3

Continued from Part 1: Sakura fox tells more about “renegade fursuiting” in public. I’ve previously written about those unique experiences of “Street fursuiting”. Sakura’s convention panels and journals about it are recommended reading (see bottom.)

Patch:
Your suiting tips practically scream “go do this”, to anyone who has a fursuit and is tempted to try public suiting but hasn’t yet dared. You give an impressive list of your local Texas-based places to try it, from shows to festivals to random neighborhood exploring. You even rate them from best to worst. It shows a lot of dedication! How often do you go? Can you say more about starting- was it just doing cons with others, making plans, or did the character naturally lead you out on your own?

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Renegade fursuiting is BEST fursuiting: chat with Sakura Fox – Part 1

by Patch O'Furr

Interview series:  Artists, animation directors, DJ’s and event organizers, superfans, and more…

Left: Mercury - Right: Sakura

Left: Mercury – Right: Sakura

Sakura fox and Mercury are huge inspirations. They’re great fursuit performers, cool people, and way cute. They’re the kind of furries who make this subculture awesome. They’re Texas-based but well known around cons.

I’ve seen them present con panels about “Renegade Fursuiting.” Sakura has a series of FA journals about it that are recommended reading. Without comparing notes, we have come to similar conclusions that taking it to the street makes a unique experience beyond the usual. (I’ve called it “Street fursuiting” and the “theatrical soul of furryness”.) Whatever you call it… let’s find out how fabulous foxy friends bring the magic.

Sakura’s journals:

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How furries helped Jei Cheetah reach an impossible goal

by Patch O'Furr

Amazing… I saw Jei share that 3 years ago, he was 300 lbs and could only watch others dance. If you can’t dance, you can still watch and learn from videos. Now this cheetah is a dancer. Because of you furries! What a story. This is why I love furries so much. <3 After I saw his video, I asked him to tell his story.


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Opinion: Street fursuiting is the most fun furry experience

by Patch O'Furr

Repost from Flayrah, 5/3/2013:

San Francisco hosted the 14th annual How Weird Street Faire last weekend, with the theme “WEIRDI GRAS: Carnival of Peace.” An informal fursuiter outing was organized through Meetup.com and its active Bay Area Furries group (independent from the mailing list), which runs many local events each month. I offered changing space at a nearby apartment, and scored a pair of “Disco Pants” for costuming, direct from the office of local web-based fashion startup company Betabrand. Afterwards, Betabrand was cool enough to post photos of modeling the pants on their “Model Citizen” section. (There’s more photos on Reddit.)

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Left to right: Kitten, Meerk, Patch. Background: Ty Cougar.

Any news media story that covers furries is likely to focus heavily on fursuiters, and their striking visual appeal and fuzzy glamor. Fursuiters can’t represent the whole of furry fandom, when “furry” is a vague and broadly defined umbrella over anything related to anthropomorphic animals- but I think it’s OK to consider fursuiters the expressive, theatrical soul of furrydom. There is an element of “ambassador” role to their hobby. Without the 15-20% of furries who wear fursuits and costumes for role-playing, you’d just have regular unglamorous nerds saying “meow! I’m a cat”. That’s what crazy people do.

Of course, I’m kidding: Call me the most crazy of all, but I prefer the term fabulous. I like to put on silver disco pants and a Husky partial, and get on the subway to go dance and hug random people, under the influence of blasting techno music and magical substances in the air. They get so entranced by a giant sparkly talking dog, that they hand over their babies for photos. That actually happened several times this weekend at the How Weird Street Faire. I didn’t know where those babies had been, but I let them touch my paws anyways, even more carefully than when I pick up my chihuahua (who gets super confused and never knows whether to trust me when I dress up.) As far as I can tell, everyone loved the experience, even the astonished babies. Those photos might provoke some interesting questions when they grow up.

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Opinion: Why the furry experience hits home so deeply

by Patch O'Furr

Flayrah news: 10/23/12

Originally posted to BAF and reposted with permission, here is a nice short piece by Spottacus.

The furry experience addresses a nearly universal desire to be seen as you feel you are

Whether you are a fur (who feels a species identity different than your human skin shows), a transgender (who feels a gender different than your birth body shows), or just differently colored, shaped, or pigmented than those around you, probably all furries and their kin were likely acutely aware at an age as young age as 4-8 years old that how people saw and treated them was very different than what they felt they were like inside.

This is true for all humans, in fact, who are instantly judged at some level based on impressions: blonde, female, Mexican, Asian, African, and so on, which also have nothing to do with who you are inside. Where furs step off this path of false impressions is that we, nearly uniquely, create a fursona that we own (we feel it, we made it, it was not set a birth), and then we project and interact based upon that character.
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