The thing I most remember from Anthrocon 2025 is dicking around at Chakat Windshear’s booth, asking if there were any Brian O’Connell originals. An older guy next to me asked if I knew he died a few days before while flipping through Genus, and one of the unpaid laborers at Chakat Windshear’s booth responded, “They’re dropping like flies.” We’re at the point where we’re actively witnessing the deaths of many of the artists that shaped the visual language, and proclivities, of the furry fandom.
In a macabre way it ended up being funny that my other time-sink was attending Room Party at Bunker Projects, which played with the form of Confurence-esque room-parties-turned-art-galleries. The curatorial direction seemed to come from BFA-type frustration with received art education and its incongruity with apparent reality. This was covered more in an associated panel at the convention, where Lane Lincecum explained how the team’s curatorial direction felt divorced from their academic training and was more in line with the fandom “galleries” of the past. Going to the Room Party gallery, itself in an intimate, poorly-ventilated space, felt generational, with Gen-Z artists coming of age in the 2010s/2020s creating art reminiscent of their childhoods in the early 2000s but in the form of media, zines, imagined to dominate the 1980s/1990s. These zines were the highlight of the event, intentionally indulgent and self-referential, closer in content to contemporary punk zine-making than fandom zines/APAs like Rowrbrazzle or the Ever-Changing Palace. At the Anthrocon panel, many of the artists were able to speak about their pieces—gender and sexuality were the dominant themes, with a big emphasis on “keeping furry weird.” It definitely felt like a contemporary-art event, distinct from the “fandom-artness” of the fandom 30 years ago, where artists were either more “academic” in the often-used pejorative sense or entirely self-taught.
Room Party had zines, it had Mark Merlino (who passed away last year) art on the walls, but I don’t know what all of that means when furry as a subculture has moved beyond MUCKs and has now become everything to everyone. The furry fandom of the past has been ossified into a series of objects that are purchased as relics—con programs, prints, old photographs of weird suits—while the actual artists “drop like flies” and remain unhosted. Room Party felt indicative of the looking-glass furries seem to peer through when trying to understand the past, and this looking glass can create a lot of myopia about how the fandom is understood. One artist at Room Party offhandedly mentioned that being a furry means you have a fursona. I could have just been interpreting that uncharitably, but it felt like the biggest example of showing your disconnect from how people were actually engaging with the fandom back then. Of course Room Party can’t reconstruct the fandom of the 90s, nor was it trying to do that, but it felt in the air after all these deaths.
Other reflections: