like seriously this is also my problem with furry communities; commissions are only of people’s individual characters, and most people suck at design
Furry conventions exist to show off your Unique Personal Character (IDEA MINE!!! DO NOT STEAL!!!) and people mostly buy things related to their Unique Personal Character
it just sucks for artists in the community if the artist ever wishes to escape furrydom; most furry customers are already cheap as hell, which makes it harder to move onto doing original works
i dont know where this little rant is going but im really glad i can draw fuzzy stuff of my own volition and of my own characters and make money. i guess i really get agitated over bad design, and you see A LOT of that at furry conventions where people arent interested in good design, only in design that has to do with their (often bad) ideas
in the end i would never bitch to anyone individually about this because its great that people come to furry cons to have fun, but it creates a really shitty environment for artists
which is also kind of why i left fa years ago but yeah. im more interested in artists advancing in cool ways, not putting together a portfolio that no one can take seriously
i dunno man ugh
i went to anthrocon like five times before i went to a real convention that was actually about a thing
the difference was staggering
i explained this before you guys left: furry conventions aren’t about anything. they have a bunch of parts with the same names as the things you see at conventions, but they’re all hollow weird distortions of what you’d expect, because there’s no real underlying subject to rally around. there’s no canon, no common interest, barely a theme.
at pycon i saw a keynote about an amazing step forward for networking programming in python, had some cool discussions with smart people i respect, and got to play with a raspberry pi because they gave everyone who attended a free one
meanwhile the further confusion schedule (which i had to fucking hunt to find at all) includes such wonders as:
- how to be a demon
- dragons (that is the entire name)
- furry and traveling (?!)
- hiv awareness for furs
- inflatables and balloons meet and greet
an entire track is just “species”. quite a few panels are “i share your fetish” or “______ but, inexplicably, for furries”.
there’s a decent spread of making stuff panels, which is cool, but the vast majority of attendees are not artists
you may notice that even the theme this year appears to be “popular comic book slash movie, but with furries”
“furry” is not a topic; it is an adjective, and the only thing anyone can think to do with it is apply it to other stuff, whether relevant or not
i guess there’s no point here and nothing to really be solved but it’s kind of disappointing in general
also, modulo some details: ideas are cheap. people who don’t have anything else still have ideas, and come to pride themselves on those. furry fandom is virtually designed around magnifying and celebrating this effect.