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ronboakes_87114As folks who have been following me (and allowed to follow me) on Facebook are aware, recent events have sent me into a bit of a dive into furry fandom. This has included watching a number of videos talking about various furry conventions.
I have, at this point, attended an early Midwest Fur Fest for a few hours on Saturday evening. This would have been in the early 2000s when they were still at the Arlington Park Hilton or Sheraton (same hotel, it changed franchises). But I can sort of say I'm the unacknowledged half-step-grand-uncle of MFF. I chaired DucKon the first year (actually the first two years) that it did not have a significant Furry Track. At DucKon 9, in that first year, many of the initial MFF staff members shadowed members of DucKon's staff to help them learn how to do their jobs.
At some later DucKons, Dr. Sam Conway, a.k.a. Uncle Kage, who is the perpetual chair of Anthrocon, was a frequent guest, including years where he was the Furry Guest of Honor and the Mad Scientist Guest of Honor. I recall one year when he ended up stepping in during the feedback session following closing ceremonies to talk down a member who was honestly upset about the fact that DucKon hadtoo much good programming . I cannot consider Kage a friend of mine, but he is someone who I have met several times and found to be a good and forthright person.
But the thing that has me the most weirded out is less good than either of these. In 2011, there was a bid to bring the 2013 Westercon, the West Coast Science Fantasy Conference, to (IIRC) Portland. The main people behind this were also the people who, at the time, ran RainFurrest, and they used that as their experience for running a reasonable-sized convention. However, they totally miffed the process of promoting their bid, so a couple of acquaintances of mine (at the time, now I would definitely consider them friends) decided to show them up by running a well-run hoax bid. Since I had thought that the idea of a Westercon on Route 66 would be a fun hoax bid, I threw together a second hoax bid and created a very lopsided three-way race.
Long story short, the Portland bid managed to dig themselves deeper with their appearance at Westercon 64 in 2011 and lost the vote, officially to "None of the Above," because neither of the hoax bids were filed. This resulted in a long business meeting that, in the end, awarded the 2013 Westercon, Westercon 66, to the couple who had run the hoax bid.
Another friend from Seattle was upset about this, in part because she felt that her friends had been unfairly taken advantage of.
This brings me to the recent discovery that in Furry Fandom, RainFurest is legendary for being a disastrous convention. My Google search led me to conclude that it was poorly managed. The final year had one or more incidents that burned their reputation with every hotel in the Seattle metropolitan area, which was the nail that killed the convention. But the descriptions of what happened from near the time and on more recent sources sound like there was no crowd control and disgusting (not sexually disgusting, but disgusting and unsanitary) things happened in public.
This sounds like if the people who ran that event had tried to run a more general SF convention, the results would have been an unmitigated disaster. As the person who ended up chairing the Westercon that was selected at Westercon 66, this would have been a serious personal problem. I would have been one of the two subsequent Westercon chairs forced to pick up the pieces from such an event—one that would have probably killed the event a decade earlier than its COVID-19-driven near-demise.
I have, at this point, attended an early Midwest Fur Fest for a few hours on Saturday evening. This would have been in the early 2000s when they were still at the Arlington Park Hilton or Sheraton (same hotel, it changed franchises). But I can sort of say I'm the unacknowledged half-step-grand-uncle of MFF. I chaired DucKon the first year (actually the first two years) that it did not have a significant Furry Track. At DucKon 9, in that first year, many of the initial MFF staff members shadowed members of DucKon's staff to help them learn how to do their jobs.
At some later DucKons, Dr. Sam Conway, a.k.a. Uncle Kage, who is the perpetual chair of Anthrocon, was a frequent guest, including years where he was the Furry Guest of Honor and the Mad Scientist Guest of Honor. I recall one year when he ended up stepping in during the feedback session following closing ceremonies to talk down a member who was honestly upset about the fact that DucKon had
But the thing that has me the most weirded out is less good than either of these. In 2011, there was a bid to bring the 2013 Westercon, the West Coast Science Fantasy Conference, to (IIRC) Portland. The main people behind this were also the people who, at the time, ran RainFurrest, and they used that as their experience for running a reasonable-sized convention. However, they totally miffed the process of promoting their bid, so a couple of acquaintances of mine (at the time, now I would definitely consider them friends) decided to show them up by running a well-run hoax bid. Since I had thought that the idea of a Westercon on Route 66 would be a fun hoax bid, I threw together a second hoax bid and created a very lopsided three-way race.
Long story short, the Portland bid managed to dig themselves deeper with their appearance at Westercon 64 in 2011 and lost the vote, officially to "None of the Above," because neither of the hoax bids were filed. This resulted in a long business meeting that, in the end, awarded the 2013 Westercon, Westercon 66, to the couple who had run the hoax bid.
Another friend from Seattle was upset about this, in part because she felt that her friends had been unfairly taken advantage of.
This brings me to the recent discovery that in Furry Fandom, RainFurest is legendary for being a disastrous convention. My Google search led me to conclude that it was poorly managed. The final year had one or more incidents that burned their reputation with every hotel in the Seattle metropolitan area, which was the nail that killed the convention. But the descriptions of what happened from near the time and on more recent sources sound like there was no crowd control and disgusting (not sexually disgusting, but disgusting and unsanitary) things happened in public.
This sounds like if the people who ran that event had tried to run a more general SF convention, the results would have been an unmitigated disaster. As the person who ended up chairing the Westercon that was selected at Westercon 66, this would have been a serious personal problem. I would have been one of the two subsequent Westercon chairs forced to pick up the pieces from such an event—one that would have probably killed the event a decade earlier than its COVID-19-driven near-demise.
