Paywalling

Using sites like Patreon or Subscribestar to lock some or most or even all of your art behind a paywall is an increasingly widespread practice, and for me, an increasingly annoying one. It’s not the practice itself so much as how it’s approached by so many artists that rankles.

I mean, what’s the point of maintaining an account on FurAffinity, for example, an art-sharing site, if it’s mostly going to be used as promotion for your Patreon? If most or all of the things you post are teases for paid content, or your gallery is peppered with them to the point of feeling like adverts in a Youtube video? It comes across as kinda cynical, even a touch exploitative, and that only increases when you factor in the most common, and most aggravating, variation on the theme: paywalling nude versions of art.

An artist posts an image, usually of a female character, and it could be anything from clothed and tame, through minimally clothed and suggestive, to nude with certain bits obscured, and the description informs you the ‘saucy’ or ‘rude’ or ‘NSFW’ or ‘adult’ or ‘lewd’ version is available on their Patreon. It could be a lovely piece of art, but because they are pushing paid-for ‘naughty’ versions, the artist is cheapening it, reducing it to little more than a peep show; “Wanna see her tits? Pay me!”.

For someone like me, who doesn’t see nudity as inherently ‘rude’ or ‘lewd’ or ‘adult’, it’s doubly annoying, because it’s reinforcing problematic attitudes for self-interest. The obvious counter-argument here is they need to make money to survive, and this is the best or only way of doing it, but how many artists saying that would also insist the fandom isn’t fixated on ‘adult’ content? If it truly were mostly ‘clean’, then surely you wouldn’t need to be doing this in the first place, just like you wouldn’t need to offer ‘adult’ commission options no matter how much you dislike doing such work.

I have actually unfollowed artists who’ve started paywalling nude versions, because it annoys me so much, and because I don’t feel right supporting, even tactitly, such behaviour. On one occasion I made a rather unguarded and admittedly slightly thoughtless comment on an image posted by an artist I used to follow when they were advertising their new pay-for-nude-version approach. Their response was to delete the submission and send me a less than friendly note. I felt guilty, and apologised, and through several subsequent notes we smoothed things over and came to an understanding. However, one thing stands out to me, and I wish I’d noticed it at the time so I could have carefully brought it up to them: they contradicted themselves.

In either the journal announcing their new venture, or the submission – I don’t remember which – they stated they’d wanted to do pinups and light erotica for a while, and this was their way of getting into it. In sharp contrast, in the notes to me they stated they were really uncomfortable doing such work, and were only venturing into it because they really needed the money. So, either they lied in the original journal/submission, or lied to me. Either way, they were being deceitful, and deceit is at the heart of this.

True, some artists are open about what they’re doing, but many aren’t. These artists want you to believe the posted version is the main one, and the others are merely optional extras, but that’s a lie. The posted one is an advert, even if a subtle one sometimes, something in the pose or the framing or the composition drawing your eye to certain areas, the ones you only get to see if you pay them, the ones that are the real point. I reiterate: it’s exploitational, taking advantage, and I genuinely hate it for that.

Even if not intentional, doing this makes it seem like the posted art doesn’t actually matter, just the money made from the paywalled version(s), and that’s pretty depressing for a fandom that prides itself on its creativity. People worry about big corporations commercialising furry as it continues to grow, but frankly, through this and the increasing dominance of commission work among other things, the fandom’s already doing it to itself.

Furry Site Roundup

I’ve done this a few times, but now there’s a couple more additions to the roster I think it bears doing again.  In no particular order, here’s how I see the various furry art sites stacking up.

FurAffinity – The Daddy of all furry art sites, and still the most popular/active, but so beset with problems it’s a wonder it’s still running.  Yes, it’s (largely) simple and accessible, but so out of date as to almost be laughable, chronically lacking in features (social ones in particular are near-non-existent) and lumbered with inept management with an unrivalled (almost) talent for promising things they never deliver.  Reliability has always been poor, too, and particularly so now, the site frequently going through patches of spotty loading.  Its purchase by IMVU did nothing at all to improve things, only serving to ratchet the advertising up to near-intolerable levels.  Add in the security issues, the scandals – a known zoophile, an alleged sexual predator and rapist, and a career hacker are or have been employed by FA – and the skeleton staff largely failing to do their jobs (trouble tickets should not take a year to answer) and you have a disaster of a site surviving almost entirely on the lack of real competition and widespread user complacency.

SoFurry – This site was created when two sites – Anthrostar and Yiffstar – were smashed together, and the latter definitely came out on top.  It’s into its second incarnation, with the third coming at some point, yet still has the same crippling issues it always has – an almost suffocating overabundance of porn, over-complicated interfaces and broken core functionality.  The search has never worked properly, stories only listing with keywords and no descriptions is daft, the ratings system is a relic of YS that is ill-suited, imbalanced and barely explained (is violence clean or adult?) and there’s always too much clutter.  To be fair, it does have by far the best story support, but even that’s missing something obvious – no way to resize the font.  It could and probably should be a great site, but it’s held back by it’s fundamental flaws, odd omissions of obvious, basic things, a distinct bias toward porn – even in staff attitudes, as noted in a prior blog – and, lately, a lack of progress.  Two years since 3.0 was announced, and still nothing but screenshots and promises.  FA would be proud.

Weasyl – In many ways one of the best-presented sites out there, its systems well-sorted, its interfaces largely intuitive and sensible, and yet, it’s not what it could be, and likely never will be.  As is a theme with furry sites, the fault lies in the management, who in this case seem to have little or no idea of what they want Weasyl to actually be, or where to go with it.  It’s been in Beta for longer than SoFurry’s been waiting for 3.0, with no hint of ever coming out, and it suffers from a strain of paranoia that results in the weird ratings system – also mentioned in the same prior blog – and rules apparently canted more to covering their behinds than providing users with a solid framework.  It’s playing things much too safe, while lacking any real direction, and that’s a shame.  Also, story support is oddly limited.

Inkbunny – Seriously slick, with the best ratings system, a solid keywords system used well by the members, a clean and clear yet flexible interface, but distinctly sterile and lifeless.  Being home base for the fandom’s cub porn artists certainly doesn’t help, either, lending a stigma it seems weirdly unconcerned about.  It’s a site that looks to be simply coasting, making no real efforts at evolving or engaging or expanding, or attempts to deal with the few problems it has, like the story uploader stripping all the formatting out.  Whether through complacency, laziness or disinterest, this site is a smart but largely soulless place that’ll never really be more than what it currently is, which isn’t much at all, really.

Furry Network – The first of the new arrivals, and one packing a serious amount of promise, but not without a concern or two.  It’s in invite-only beta right now, so beyond its well-sorted UI and abundance of features I know little of it.  My worries stem from it using a binary ratings system – clean and adult – that feels completely ill-judged, reducing the content to a stark either/or metric that does it a serious disservice and limits variety greatly, and the short interaction with a staff member that was pleasant, yet oddly insubstantial.  Definite echoes of Weasyl’s facile approach and SoFurry’s polarising content categories (as if the fandom needs to be more split) which, for me, are cause to doubt.

Furiffic – The other newbie, coming with much less fanfare and flash than FN, and a much simpler, more workmanlike UI, yet its mechanics are so well sorted it feels almost anticipatory and adaptive.  This is a genuinely refreshing site in the face of the wrecks, the slick-but-empty, the flashy-but-overbearing, as it’s been built with simple common sense, resulting in a place that genuinely feels intimate and personal.  The people and the art take the foreground, which isn’t really the case anywhere else.  True, it’s a little rough around the edges in places – submission descriptions and journals often don’t display properly – but it gets so much right that’s easy to forgive.  Maybe it’s because I’m so sick of sites that aren’t run properly, don’t work properly, are trying too hard or stay stuck in ruts, but I genuinely love this place.  The friendly, responsive staff don’t hurt, either.

Summary – So, six furry art sites, but only one really, truly works – Furiffic.  Furry Network came so very close, only to likely botch it through a basic, but severe blunder.  Weasyl should be something great, but is so rudderless and nerveless it’ll never get there.  Inkbunny just doesn’t care.  SoFurry is trying so hard to be everything to everyone, but is built on a chassis that just isn’t up to the job.  FurAffinity is a relic struggling to stay relevant, all the while slowly collapsing under the weight of its own incompetence.  The sad thing is, the best site here is the one most likely to be ignored in the face of the familiar, or the flashy, but that’s the Furry Fandom for you.

The State of Furry

I don’t recall exactly when I discovered there was such a thing as the furry fandom, but it was either in 1999 or 2001, when trawling around this wonderful thing I’d ventured into called the Internet, via a painfully slow dial-up connection.  In searching for anthropomorphic stuff, I found artists’ websites dedicated to it, all linked by a WebRing (remember those?).  At first I was jubilant – I’m not alone in loving walking, talking animals!  Then I noticed that many of these sites had sections for much more ‘adult’ work, and the excitement waned.  Thankfully, it was always ring-fenced, properly warned-about, and rarely that explicit, so I was able to come to terms with it as a part, albeit a fairly sizeable one, of Furry.

I, in time, made a very rudimentary site of my own, and even made a couple of connections, who soon became friends.  One still is, the other…well, let’s just say things didn’t end well at all.  I spent time browsing the VCL, a simple art site, again aware that ‘adult’ work was present, but able to ignore it.  There also existed the ‘clean’ archive Yerf, which was very active.  True, there were signs of where things would end up going, but nothing to make it seem inevitable.  It’s worth noting that I had already begun exploring my particular area of nudism-heavy work in my writing, and that I hadn’t yet begun rendering; the tools weren’t available.

Come late 2005, something new, and big, emerged – a social, art-focused furry site called FurAffinity opened.  Enticed by the possibilities I was among the first to join, though as a lurker, not having anything beyond writing to share, which wasn’t supported well at all (no change there).  It wasn’t until July of 2007, and the release of Little_Dragon and CharlieFox’s Krystal model, that I could start to be a more active, contributing member.  3D work agreed with me, and I gathered a modest collection of followers in an atmosphere that felt largely open, friendly and warm; accepting, in a word.

Then I posted my first intimate work, a series of Krystal and Fox making love by firelight, which was very tame even then…and my popularity jumped quite dramatically.  I was now fractionally less of a nobody, and that cheered me, as well as set me on a path of steadily more explicit work.  At the same time, I was embarking on making my own textures, and characters, and little worlds…but the sexual work was what gained the interest, so I did more.

I got pretty close, I recall, to the point of no return, but a number of things stopped me before I could cross it.  One of my watchers, a rare beacon of honesty then and now, pulled me up, asking what I was doing, telling me this wasn’t what he’d liked about my work.  At the same time, the friend who things went sour with had gotten into more explicit drawing, and it was bringing out aspects of their personality I must have wilfully blocked out up ’til that point, distant, exploitative, cheap sides I really didn’t like.  Cue epiphany.

It suddenly became plain to me that ‘adult’ work really wasn’t for me – I didn’t like what I was doing to characters I claimed to be a fan of and care about, I didn’t like the people the work was attracting – not interested in me, just in what they could get from me – and I really didn’t like where it might lead me, as so vividly demonstrated by my ex-friend.  Thus, I stopped.  I explained in a journal that I was doing so, and why, and my follower count dropped by nearly half.

That was when it dawned on me what the Furry Fandom had become in the mere few years I’d been on its fringes – ‘adult’ work had gone from just being a part of things, albeit a fairly large one, to the dominant aspect.  That was where the popularity and the money lay, so that’s where people increasingly turned, and it had gotten a whole lot more graphic since my initial, tentative dial-up forays.  I will admit, I got rather vocal and dramatic about it for a while, and on occasion still do, my ex-friend taking a lot of the brunt of it after a failed attempt to reconnect, and a discovery that he’d gotten even worse (I dread to think where he is now, if he hasn’t simply dropped Furry entirely, as he’s dropped many other things he has no further need of before).  I saw so much potential in anthropomorphism, and it sickened me most people just treated it as a means to an end.

Since then, it’s gotten steadily worse and worse.  Yerf died, since the demand for ‘clean’ art was dwindling, as well as it being out-of-date as a site in the face of FA, and DevArt, and more.  Conversely, ‘adult’ furry sites like Sexyfur and Jabarchives appeared and are still thriving.  Come the present day, and the fandom is positively polarised, the 33% of ‘clean’ artists on one side, the 60% of porn and/or fetish artists on the other, with only a scattered handful in between, lost in no-fur’s land.

FurAffinity actually demonstrates this nicely – last time I was able to check the numbers, there were around 62,000 Clean submissions, 24,000 Mature, and 62,000 Adult.  In other words, just shy of 42% of the art on FA is adult, which is hefty enough.  Factor in that being a few years ago, as well as the huge amount of fetish and sexualised work under the Mature label, and the real figure is likely north of 60%.  I don’t doubt these figures, as I’ve watched the shift happen – in 2007, if I searched clean and mature submissions for ‘nude’ on FA, I’d be presented with ample tasteful, pinup pieces; search nude now, in 2015, under the same conditions, and they’re rare as skylarks, dotted sparsely in a sea of exaggerated proportions and objectifying poses.

It’s not like FA’s alone in this, either.  SoFurry’s even worse, largely due to being grown, badly, from a porn site (it may have the best story support by a mile, but trying to find writing not peppered with badly-written sex is almost impossible) and embedding the polarised clean-adult divide into its very setup.  InkBunny suffers from being the home of all the cub-porn artists after FA banned them, thus has a stigma that keeps many away.  Weasyl is the only one I don’t really know about, if only because it’s a directionless waste whose staff seem far more interested in covering their collective backsides than actually making a useable, sensible site – witness their four content ratings actually being more like two (1.2…….3.4 instead of 1..2..3..4) so keen are they on keeping the harmless stuff and anything even remotely ‘adult’ as far apart as possible.

True, some blame has to be laid at the door of the country furry is mainly based in, the USA, a land of knee-jerk reactions, binary thinking, and polarised factions, but when only six or seven of the fifty most popular furs (see Popufur.com for the lists) aren’t porn factories, and many – like Zaush, Fisk and Wolfy-Nail – have unpleasant, disturbing reputations it’s hard not to think there’s something seriously awry in the fandom.  The way so many people insist otherwise, often with the aid of industrial-strength blinkers and shallow euphemisms – sex-positive seems to be the current favourite – really doesn’t help, either.

To further clarify the attitudes, you’ll sometimes hear an artist complaining about over-zealous clean-freaks badgering or even verbally abusing them because they do porn, which is ruining the fandom.  While it’s certainly true this happens, and these people are ironically doing just as much to damage furry as those who take the cheap, easy porn option, through encouraging that damaging divide, these things work both ways.  If you want to make money out of your furry art, you have in essence two choices – be so extraordinarily good you stand out, ala Kacey Miyagami, or draw porn.  Most people choose the porn option, and you can, to a degree, understand that.  The thing is, money’s not the only catalyst; there’s pressure from porn-hungry furries, too.

I’ve seen this in action, seen artists being cajoled, and manipulated, and even bullied, into doing ever more explicit work.  There are people, and more than a few, who will genuinely dismiss and slander you as not a furry if you don’t draw porn.  The most egregious example I can think of happened on SoFurry – an artist I followed, with a lovely style and an interesting comic, posted a journal noting they were thinking of doing adult work.  Of all the people who responded, I was the only one who noted the potential pitfalls, and expressed concern it wasn’t a suitable avenue for them, and I got pounded on for it.  Everyone else, even one of SoFurry’s own staff, was eager for them to take the plunge and railed at anyone even hinting otherwise, yet I was the closed-minded, selfish one showing no respect for the artist.  Hypocrisy is, sadly, pretty rampant in furry.

Now, to be fair, there are things that likely colour my view to some degree – I can very easily separate sex and nudity, seeing the latter as normal, inoffensive and enjoyable on an aesthetic level (the human form is pleasing in many more ways than the sexual); I, as will be detailed in another piece, see so much potential and freedom in anthropomorphism, and hate how cheaply so many others treat it; I tend to be oversensitive, and get too easily attached to people and characters, to the degree I refuse to follow an artist that does even a little porn, on the off-chance that character I like gets put in a virginity auction (yes, that’s a real furry thing, and popular, too).

I must also note the fandom has given me a handful of wonderful friends, people who encourage, reassure, care, provoke in the best possible way, challenge and help me, so it hasn’t entirely lost what made it great when I first found it, but they’re rare diamonds in an ocean of rough.

I don’t like porn, but rather than rail at every artist that does it, or post bitter sarcasm on a cynical, two-faced forum (looking at you, Vivisector) I try to avoid it.  That, no matter how hard I try, I can’t, is testament to how overbearing a presence it is in the fandom.  That people can complain about the adult ads IMVU put on FurAffinity, yet ignore the fandom-sourced ones for adult comics, websites, and even lubes, that are so abundant, speaks to how inured the furry populace has largely become, as long as it has fur and a tail.

At heart, my concern is that furry is, in the long run, killing itself with porn, with the ever more vicious divide it creates and perpetuates.  Yes, it has a place, but not anywhere near as big a one.  It needs to be scaled down, dramatically, if furry is to have a future beyond being a dirty joke.  Moreover, room needs to be made for a proper, rich middle ground, for a truly open landscape, not just two entrenched encampments with a wasteland in-between.

Then again, how many other things can you say that about?