| ...round and round and round and round and round and round...
No dream, no sleep, no suffering
... No pain, no now, no time, no here
... No knife, no mind, no hand, no fear
... Love, now, breathe, now
... Here, now, here now
Here, now, here now
Here, now, here, now
– Screen Shot
I HAVE written mostly from an ideal perspective up until this point. While I have discussed what the furry fandom is and/or should be ideally, and, while I have touched upon certain real examples, I have not gone as far as to discuss the difference between practice and reality meaningfully. For all I have flourished about the ideal furry fandom, and of the opportunity – and equal degeneration – it can theoretically offer for anyone, the truth of the reality is, as always, something below this. Even if one were to play their cards right in their best capacity, there are some unmistakable flaws of this community that one will have to eventually face. It’s an unfortunate reality, true of any ideal.
Parallel to this, I want to discuss a specific facet of Echo – pretension. One of the main layers of fantasy involves pretension. After all, fantasy, in simplest terms, is something that is not, and in order for the is-not to be, one must have a powerful, dismissive imagination for an equally absurd non-existent reality. Perhaps this is why the neurotic paint the fullest worlds. Regardless, pretension is a driving force in Echo, and the extraordinarily niche trope Echo parodies. I haven’t found a well-established name for this trope, so I will boringly call it The Incident. The Incident is a haunting moment in any horror story – usually a Bildungsroman – that sets into effect the plot and drives the antagonistic force, which the protagonists willingly try to ignore and forget but must face later on to survive. This was most famously used by Friday the 13th, where usage later spread to similar downstream movies.
The Incident in Echo is, of course, Sydney’s death. However, Echo’s Incident notably diverges from what is commonly found. Typical to the trope is aspects of guilt and remorse; The Incident is caused by a horrid moment of judgement, such as that by camp counselors, or some systemic failure in one’s given society. The necessity of this guilt is reasonable; after all, why else would someone choose not to speak on such a matter? Trauma, you may say – which is an entirely valid reason. You must understand, however – Friday the 13th was the prized stallion of the Slasher Film genre in the 80’s Reagan America. To them, this silent oath was more a matter of escaping consequence than it was traumatic paralysis. Isn’t it only fitting, then, that this trope blossomed in Reagan American – an administration who desperately tried to escape the blood of Vietnam and the HIV-positive?
The Incident in Echo’s solemnity is not fueled by escape from this consequence and guilt. What it is fueled by instead is pretension. The characters in Echo don’t willingly ignore the incident because of the consequences; They choose to because it destroys this sacred portrait of an already perfect world. To them, The Incident isn’t sad and awful because of the loss of a life, but is a horrid abominable thing because of the holy thing it defiled. The death of Sydney is the death of innocence, a forever dead anchor to the past. This is a large part of the tragedy of Echo; people who crave those past halcyon days, never-reachable, yet unable to deal with the reality and truth of it. The past to them is for pickings; those old days – choice hallmark scenes in a coming-to-age film. For a cast of characters who have such boring promise, it’s understandable why the gilded past would be so enthralling, yet Echo makes abundantly clear that this golden wreath encircling the past is but a decoration, and that the future is brighter than the false sheens of the past’s nostalgic wrapping. The pain of unrealized lives – indebted romances – innocence – all of these things are the architects of our persons, but they are but backwards-facing signposts on the road we travel, letting us know how far we come, yet never to be followed. Keep your eyes on the road, Echo says. You won’t get far traveling the roads you already know.
The furry fandom is marred with volatility and variability, as previously mentioned. There is not one universal ideal furry fandom, and every member going in will have a different plan. Some will see it as an innocent animal meet-up – like some Disney conference – and turn their nose at anything defiling their children’s stageplay. Others will see it as nothing; another hobby to mention in passing to coworkers. A few may see it as a fandom to explore that lavish sexual imbibement they have, delving deep into ecstasy and all other pleasures of the world. Regardless of which you subscribe to, you can easily make clear the interfandom friction this commonly causes. Neoconservative military Furs battling it out in vain with Liberal or Leftist Furs, the hypocrisy pointed out often by both sides in alternate condemnations. The vanilla ne’er-do-ill Adults shocked at the existence of those icky deviants, wondering how a public image could ever be made in such a face of adultery. You get the point. What underlies all of these conflicts, and the furry fandom as a whole, is utter and complete skepticism.
I say this in the sense that there are not many objective truths about the furry fandom and what people say or are. I mean, yes, there are the technical details of what we are; somewhere along the lines of “people that dress in animal costumes”. But there are not many, if any, moral truths to be found in the furry fandom. In the same fandom that promotes equality and the marginalized – you have exorbitant amounts of racism to be found in the cracks next to the well-wishes of white twinks. In the same fandom that promotes positive body images – you have fat-shaming right next to fetishization. In the same fandom that promotes positive mental health – you have those who shut down any conversation that dares intrude on fantasyland, yet others who sexualize the entire ordeal in a fashion beyond base. In the same fandom that promotes sincerity and the true-to-heart weird – you have endless materialistic vanity under the guise of expression, fashion fascists, and shunning away of icky peoples. Is this true of any grouping of people? Yes, maybe – but find me a fandom as self-annihilatory as the furry fandom. Not even Anime fans, nor the LGBTQIA+ community, nor anywhere else have I spotted such internal warring. The ship seems to have steered so far from the course I have promised that it seems it will never reach Neverland, yet the wind that set it off course, I believe, is the same one that carried it out of harbor.
This may be my most personal and scathing condemnation, but I believe fully that fantasy is responsible for a sick, selfish skepticism in the furry community, where truth and morality is only warranted at one’s discretion. In a strange sense, I would say that many’s beliefs only exist since they are a furry, instead of vice versa. What do I mean by this? Many of the aforementioned contradictions I have listed seem to be laughable in the face of what being furry entails. Does racism make any sense remotely in a furry context? No, not at all, yet this sickening visage of fantasy enables this self-centered skepticism where any invaders of Neverland must be shunned and repelled immediately. It is the devil on one’s shoulder; a retreat into yourself, farthest from the truth and the world. This, I believe, is how we get things as absurd as furry racism; these previously existent biases return uncorrected, reverberated through the tunnels of these underground fantasy worlds where horrid people lurk to echo off of each other. Socializing, to them, becomes less a matter of genuine heart-to-heart and more reaffirmations of this shared delusion. Phrases become fiat, to be shared and purchased by others; art becomes decorum, in the same way you would find a 1800’s Victorian landowner gloat to visitors; and the body becomes a temple, not undisturbed, but sacred, with certain stone pillars and marble framing expected. The greatest sin of this transaction is the erasure of the person into actors on a theater stage. Sociological pressures exist in other fandoms, yes, but the furry fandom is one interwoven deeply into identity for some of its members. Any expectation, then, in the furry fandom – any pressure, any role – is then less of an obligatory-throwaway as it is an expectation of a person's being. Less then is the question of what people are specifically and more of what people represent.
This is how we get proofless goosehunts in the fandom, where words become nothing but spasmodic moralizing of actors fulfilling their roles. Incest – why, that is disgusting, yet the next week after is jokes of the same. Everything is distilled to such a vapid post-modern irony that the true substance of a matter is able to switch on a whim, condemnations being nothing but pointed words in lieu of true action. The villain of the week chosen by the aggregate personal disdain of a given subcommunity rather than any real wrongdoing. Every intermarital affair becomes a public spectacle, where the local internet-village must cast banishment on the guilty. Who did what? Who said what? Who is what? What is who? Who? What? When? Under the twisting-descending rabbithole of google documents and screenshots and voice recordings and photographs and testimonials you have a never-ending dispatch of, what I want to call, play. Yes, in the same way that furries may roleplay their fursona, so do they seemingly make play the process of condemnation, morality, and, most frighteningly, being. As much promise for identity the fursuit has given, it has seemed to strip away in equal parts as people fall victim to tropic being, the beautiful soul hidden under social vanity. Perhaps I have a bleeding-heart, but whenever I see people in this fandom speak in seemingly pre-recorded phrases to one another, never reading real conversation but rather a facsimile of what conversation should be, it drains me, as if watching an alzheimer-patient still-young. It seems then that the closer we reach for that ideal state – the closer we grasp onto fantasy, the star ideal – the greater the fall seems to be. Those that see the fandom as but another hobby in their lives are those we see as the most normal, and they are perhaps the best off. Yet those who do partake in it as a measure of identity? Their fall may be measured in how much they accept this fantasy and deny the world, or, equally, the truth.
In Echo truth is abhorred. Those that witness the true world – the dark, brooding depths of Echo’s mines and the horrors entailed – face summary judgement and execution. Flynn’s route is an obvious scenario, as previously explained, as is Carl’s and Leo’s, all of whom suffer under their fantasies. The real kicker, though, is that the entirety of Echo only occurs because of this chase for truth. Chase is only ever at Echo to catalogue the dying town; to attempt to immortalize it forever in some throwaway college project. Every event in Echo can be seen as downstream of this decision. The story of Echo has long since finished, yet here is Chase reopening the scab, with the same old wicked blood pouring out. Echo, both game and town, seem to scream at you – “Let it die, damnit, let it die! Move on with the world!” , yet here is Chase and us, returning. Why? Why do we so desperately cling to the past – to the certainty in the untrue? Why do we flagellate ourselves on the tails of barren nostalgia? There is but one summary question Echo begs the most out of any other – Why do we always seem to go in circles? Why do we return to our ancestral hallowed grounds, to be rend – burned – flayed – eaten – devoured – stoned – and cast into oblivion by cycles of guilt and torment and trauma and revanchism that we had no part in but were cast players nonetheless? Why do we return to those pinpoint moments of judgement, where all the world was to stand but for nothing more than what seems to be now grains of sand in an ever-sparse yet ever-infinite hourglass? Why do we return to those burnt bridges, knowing that every breath and every utterance and every advance feels as if fiberglass encased every edge of the lung and burning ice-cold prongs had seized the heart, waveringly, forwarded only by debt?
We’re scared of the world. As Flynn was – we’re scared that the fantasy will die. That those familiar bygones will be eroded by the endless radiation of time until all that is left is but a grayed photograph of crooked smiles and crystal tears. Fantasy exists because truth doesn’t. Tell me, where in the laylines of my palm can I read the broadcast for tomorrow? The day after that? The month? I can’t. No-one can. There is no certainty in the callouses of my hand. This is part of the innate human condition. Yet nowhere does it strike seemingly stronger than the furry fandom, who, at their worst, hide away in their artifices of fantasy. With such aforementioned promise, who couldn’t? To hide away in your world – a known world? This reveals the simple tragedy of the matter – the world is the truth. By doing we are, and by being we are experiencing. Fantasy dissipates in the wake of practice, as does reality in dreaming. Knowing all of this – what I have stammered out – it seems evident that Echo has one true message, hidden underneath all of its cyclic trauma and remorse – fantasy will kill you. The people you love and see will become but dusky outlines under its cancerous starlight, nothing more than vague ideas and motions. You will see the waking-bustling world with its verdant hills and cerulean skies twist and warp and break under the cinders and crackles of fantasia being burnt, barrenized into desert, lungs and eyes filled with smoke. You will forever wander those empty desert-valleys, yelling out your name, calling to others, alone, timeless, stuck as an echo bouncing off the walls of this world you yourself have built. Isn’t this what you wanted?
