Zk | dramagogues-part-1

I’ve been tiptoeing around this subject for a while now. It’s one of those topics that is both a pretty big deal and should be talked about, as well as one that is pretty divisive and some people could be tetchy about. My big worry in bringing it up I not that I’ll open a discussion on the topic, because that’s what I want to do. Rather, I worry that any discussion that does happen would be more inflammatory than anything. It’s one of those topics that a lot of people seem to agree on, but not agree on why, and it’s difficult to describe in words in any event. So I’m going to do the band-aid thing here and just say it all at once: either furries are more dramatic people than other groups, or they think they are, and either concept is fraught with implications and certainly worth exploring, given how much time and energy the fandom seems to put into its drama.

There is no metric of drama. It’s a hard thing to gaugeand an even harder thing to gauge objectively. To say that furry is more dramatic than other groups, or more dramatic than life in general or simply the non-furry portion is a hard statement to back up. Is the drama more intense or less? Does it happen more frequently or less frequently? Is it more or less legitimate? Or important? Rooted in reality? That there are even so many questions in the second paragraph of a write-up on the subject bodes ill for saying, definitively, whether or not furry is more dramatic. Instead of trying to determine one way or another on the issue, I think it would be best to explore why this either may be the case or at least why many of us believe it is. I asked this as a quick poll on twitter a while back, so I’m going to structure the first two parts of this article around the responses I received to the two parts of the question that I posted, starting with one of my own views, while the third portion will be more about the duration of dramatic events in the fandom, with potential future exploration down the line.

Let me begin with some of the thoughts that have been going through my own mind as I work through these articles. I think that one of the biggest issues I’ve seen behind the drama, at least that which I’ve been party to or part of, is that furry is larger and more diverse than we expect it to be. We, as a community, share a strong common bond in our shared interests. We have our unique ways of interacting with each other, our unique modes of expression, and our unique concept of character. We have gotten so good at dealing with what we have and how that works within our subculture, that I think we believe our group is more self-similar than it really is. With our strong connection, it’s easy for us to expect that those around us will share more than just our interests and some of our mannerisms, that they will also share our opinions and our eccentricities.

Part of why I started to see this was due to the fact tht many conciliatory efforts that I saw being made publicly were posited as diplomatic ways of informing one on how to interact with others. However, many of these efforts come off more as ways to successfully interact with whichever party posited them. That is, the one who attempted to solve the problem did so by assuming the embroiled parties (even if they were one themselves) saw things the same way that they did. While it may seem like we’re a collection of mostly canids and there is a lot of self-similarity in character creation and our shared interests, we’re just not that much alike.

In other instances, however, it appears that furry is smaller than we want to think. We want the fandom to be large enough to accommodate every aspect of ourselves, and we want that to include a group of friends who share the same experiences. Furry just isn’t big enough for that, though. There are going to be clashes here and there in everything from names to interests. I ran into the name problem, myself, years go. When I started into the fandom, I went by Ranna, which was a name I had stolen from a book (and that’s why I rarely go by that name anymore). Of course, the minute I tried to sign up for SPR using that name, I was rejected due to there already being one there. Same for Tapestries - a different Ranna, in fact.

In the long run, I really shouldn’t have been surprised that I ran into other “Ranna”s out there. We all wanted to be sure in our own little parts of the fandom, though, and so actually running into someone with the same name was a bit of a shock. The fandom just wasn’t big enough to hold that, though, and so we run into all these instances of people knowing friends we thought they would never know, and we find out that those friends maybe know much mores about us and our relationships than we had previously thought - this was something that happened to be twice within the past few weeks, actually: a friend I had known for a while under a different name didn’t know that I wrote for [adjective][species].

The drama, here, comes perhaps from the fact that it’s easier to speak about other groups of friends within our groups of friends. It’s easy for me to talk about drama at work when I get home and, with a filter in place of course, vice versa. Similarly, it’s easy for me to ramble on about some of the goings on in my offline life to my online friends, but things get difficult when it turns out that someone I talk to online knows more about the relationships than I had thought. This is another downside of our heavy interaction on the Internet: it’s so easy to say something to one group of friends and a different, perhaps contradictory thing to another group that could spark some strife when the information is shared between the groups. Enough from me, though, on to what others have to say.

Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics. In-feuds carry the implicit baggage of membership.