Someday I hope to be as pretty as how Rabid Cowolf draws me.

The above picture is from *Wicked City*, an anime from 1987, directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri.  This iconic image has been in dozens of adverts, trailers, and teasers in the last third of a century. Many of you have seen it but have had no idea what movie it's from.
  I first watched it on an undubbed, unsubbed VHS tape, with a fan translation on print-out👵  When I was asked about what "old anime" might be good to watch, I suggested this movie with some reservations. While I couldn't exactly remember what was bad about it, I did remember "80s anime" and thus I was sure it had content that would make me and others uncomfortable.
   IMDB's Parents Guide rates *Wicked City* as having "Sex: Severe", "Violence: Severe", and "Frightening: Severe".  To IMDB's credit, their reviewers list the elements of the movie that their guides put into these categories. But, my audience didn't want spoilers, so they just told me that "Sex: Severe" and "Violence: Severe" was okay.
   Ahem.
   By putting "sex" and "violence" into separate categories, the ratings system does not quite prepare the audience for how much sexual assault is in *Wicked City*.  Though "a woman is gang-raped twice" is listed as one element. Also listed is the unhelpful "There is a sexual theme throughout".
   The reviewers also file the assaults under "sex" and *not* violence. This system puts the consensual sex in the same category as non-con sex, which is a terrible way to put it. Somehow, "sex" can have elements of both consent and non-consent... but "violence" only has non-con.
   I will not defend the movie as being "of its time". I'm sure the director was excited to put new and unseen images on the screen. This anime contains some of the best, many of these scenes would be imitated or even stolen. But the constant "fridging" of women wasn't even okay back then and it's not okay now.
   To their credit, the guides did express that the sexual violence was portrayed as "titillating" and thus more, um, "severe". Such portrayals were common in 70s and 80s exploitation cinema. Like many anime, *Wicked City* is imitating that quality; and because they're hand-drawn cartoons that don't require actors, posing, lighting, etc, they can include more of these scenes, more frequently, with very specific portrayals. It's not great.
   I wanted to get my thoughts down in a journal about it. I am left wondering how we can move beyond the puerile & puritan Eighties and find ways to discriminate between sex and assault in our media, and how to talk about it.

Once upon a time, a social media account asked for submissions for what would be the *worst* user name would be. One that would get past obvious censors, of course, but still be reprehensible.
   I must have won because after I posted my entry, they banned me. 🙃

Putting this here so I can find it later.

---

Company	Logo	Description
Altamont		From their humble beginnings selling DIY computer kits by mail, Altamont eventually became a leader in personal computing. While their attempts to make a home console never materialized, they had much greater success with mobile devices.
Bidapak		Primarly a music label, with some of the best-selling acts across multiple decades, Bidapak published several games in the second- and third-generation eras. Today, most of their titles are mobile games licensed to outside parties.
Forbin		One of the pioneers of home computing, Forbin shifted from hardware to software as low-cost clones eroded their share. The company pivoted to acquisition, and now controls a large library of movies, television, music, and video-game entertainment.
Foreco		Originally an arcade-machine manufacturer, Foreco also commissioned their own games, always as conversion kits for existing machines. Many of these titles were converted for the home market, where they have a small but devoted fan base who praise their idiosyncratic style. While still incorporated, Foreco hasn't published any titles in years and appears to be a holding company.
Lagniappe Video		Primarily a distributor for home video, Lagniappe also published several titles for early-generation machines. Their games are almost all licensed shovelware and kusoge, of interest only to die-hard collectors.
Liu		One of many companies to publish dedicated "Pong" consoles, Liu were quick to enter the home-computing market. Their advertisements were often seen in magazines and shopping-trailers, especially their plea for unpublished designers to send their own games for consideration.
Mediagra		Originally incorporated as "Guru Mountain", this company was formed by disaffected developers who had worked for other corporations. Their games were famous for their "rock-star" packaging where they prominently featured their designers. After sales floundered in the fourth-era, they were rebranded as "Mediagra", where they aggressively pursued sports and entertainment licenses, which proved to be a good fit in the "attitude era" of gaming. Today Mediagra is notorious for their aggressive monetizations and their abuse of employees, a tragic turn of their bright legacy.
MPC		Formed by ex-Guru Mountain employees, MPC both made their own games and maintained a set of "MPC standards" under license. Their theory was that if there were a unified set of home-computer standards, many companies could make their own consoles while other developers could make games, creating a thriving ecosystem. MPC-compatible computers and consoles enjoyed success during the fourth-generation, largely due to their comprehensive and affordable standards for CD-ROM media. While MPC has never officially dissolved, they remain largely irrelevant in the mobile-games era.
Nagaco		Originially an energy concern, by mid-century they had begun making cable-ready televisions and their own cable network to help sell them. With the home video-game explosion, they became a publisher of several titles. Today, the company is primarily involved in energy and manufacturing; their legacy titles are subcontracted to other publishers.
Nimbal		Nimbal Products were a successful toy and boxed-game manufacturer. With the rise of the home market, they exploited their library of IPs and licenses to subcontract several studios so they could publish dozens of video-games a year. Their titles are infamous for their poor coding, their baffling game-play, and their unforgiving difficulty. Nevertheless, Nimbal's games proved incredibly profitable. Their filing for bankruptcy at the start of the sixth-generation was due to poor sales in other departments; their portfolio was acquired by Forbin, where it is occasionally dumped onto "mini-consoles" and other retro-themed merchandise.
Nullarbor		Catering primarily to English-speaking audiences, Nullarbor House first became famous for innovations to the interactive-fiction market: complex parsers, colorful graphics, and limited artificial intelligence. Their catalog includes a variety of titles, original and licensed. During the fourth generation, their company was bought by Mediagra, mostly for its publishing and distribution network. Their in-house studio was renamed "Mediagra Pacific" and now exists to port or remaster other titles.
Springheel		Operating out of a computer store in Europe, this studio enjoyed early success on third-generation micros with their Billy Sloper and Runewind series of games. Later renamed "Springheel Interactive", they had more success with their simulation series of "Czar" games before the inter-company tensions resulted in several lawsuits. The assets were sold off to numerous companies.
Worldwide Amusements		Originally incorporated as Kampong Ltd., this company was a manufacturer of Pachinko, gacha, and slot machines. They were one of the first distributor of arcade machines, eventually subcontracting other companies to produce more titles. The rarity of some of their games, coupled with their unorthodox styles of play, gave their titles a sinister reputation. (One game in particular, "Necrolution", appears in contemporary catalogs for sale, but it appears to have never been produced; it has now become fodder for urban legends and parody.) Today, the company makes point-of-purchase gambling machines and owns many casinos.
Zevo		A family-owned operation, Zevo Toys were popular with the boomer set for being cheap, durable, and fun. The company was more famous for their various after-market peripherals to games (joysticks, trackballs, etc.) and a line of action-figures that would respond to signals embedded in direct-to-video cartoons. After the fifth generation, Zevo no longer makes home amusements; today, they exist only as patent-holders for micro-processors and other computer hardware.

1. How long have you been in the furry fandom?
🧓 Over 30 years.

2. How did you first discover the fandom?
👫 The FurryMUCK online multiplayer game. Though I was collecting furry comics before that.

3. What are your favorite aspects of the community?
🌈 The common chord that links all aspects of furry together is the question of what it means to be a person. Body dysmorphia, genderqueer, neurodivergence, and all sorts of exploratory themes can be found there.

4. What was your first fursona?
🦎 A chameleon.

5. Describe your current fursona.
🐲 A dragon.

6. Why did you choose your fursona's species?
☯ I have 81 yang scales and 36 yin scales. If you brush against the wrong one, I will turn and bite you. Also I’m #majestic.

 7. How much of your sona is based on yourself?
💃 I have purposely styled my sona to be very much into opera, a form of art that has lots of nuance and details, but that most people are wholly unfamiliar with. This choice was so that I could write stories that were about obsession without leaning on cultural signifiers familiar to the audience. (The humor must work on its own merits.)

8. Post some of your favorite art of your fursona
🖼 All art that depicts my fursona is my favorite.

9. If you had to change sona species, what'd you pick?
🐐 A bonnacon.

10. How do you feel about fursuits?
🧥 They’re expensive and difficult and I suspect that when I do get one, I’ll tire of it very quickly.

11. How do you feel about furry conventions?
🏨 I enjoy them when I’m working. Otherwise, I run out of things to do.

12. Have you brought anyone into the fandom?
🍞 Yes.

13. Paws or maws?
⮆ First one, then the other.

14. Favorite anthro character from pop culture?
🐉 The Space Dragon from the Iron Man.

15. What is your biggest furry pet peeve?
🤔 Until recently, it was the conceit that “something is not furry if it’s commercially successful.”  This peeve might change to the conceit that "Something is not furry unless it’s endorsed by a corporate entity”.

16. What is the origin of your online nickname?
🌟💛💭 It’s a reference to two songs.

17. How has your view of the fandom changed over time?
⌛ It hasn’t. My belief is that fans are, at their heart, just people, and that’s both good and bad. Furry fandom has the same problems and progress as almost all other fandoms.

18. What can we do better as a community?
⭩⭩⭩ Nazi punks: fuck off.

19. Happiest memory from your time in the fandom?
💿 My furry boyfriend and I were on our way to the furmeet, and we stopped in a music store, and I was looking at CDs when I realized at this moment that we had stopped in a music store because I asked him if he would stop there for me, and I felt it was the first time that someone else was doing something that I wanted to do, just because it had meant something to me. It was such a quotidian moment, but just then I felt a wave of specialness and importance wash over me, that I felt giddy and romantic and understood.

20. What does the furry fandom mean to you?
🦟 Paradise is exactly like where I am right now, only much, much better.

   This text might be very dry. I've been told that I often speak very clinically and that such a manner of speaking doesn't feel very personable. Well, fuck that, this is very personal to me. So, ahem, I begin:
   I don't self-identify as 'gay' because I've had other people tell me that I'm not gay, that I don't give off the proper signifiers.  If 'presenting as gay' is a way to solicit partners or like-minded individuals, then I'm not very good at that, and thus I'd be doing a disservice to people who are much better at presenting to be gay.
  I don't self-identify as 'asexual' because I am a sexual being. I have met other people who collect porn, who masturbate regularly, who have life-partners with whom they regularly copulate... all of whom have self-identified as 'asexual'. I'm even less sexual than they are! So while I suppose it wouldn't be unfair to call myself an 'ace', in all candor, I'm really unhappy with that sort of linguistic gymnastics. There are people who genuinely lack for or have fear of sexual impulse; I am not one of them, and 'asexual' should describe their quality, not mine.   
   I'm excited for the recent developments of 'nonbinary' and 'queer' things in media, that challenge the ideas of 'one, the other, or neither.'  Furry culture frequently has dysmorphia as a theme, which overlaps with queer theory a lot.
   I do worry that I don't signify very well. I've been making queer art and stories for years, but I've had other people tell me that it's not queer.
   But then, I have noticed that people are fond of "A is A" dichotomies, like how a video game can be "not a game" because it doesn't have *enough* of the game quality, not that it has *none* of them.  Maybe I'm "not queer" because I'm not queer enough?
   I started and continue to write stories about non-binary characters, where the non-binary quality isn't the theme. Sometimes it's not even mentioned. Am I not being queer enough? Am I doing myself and my audience a disservice? 
   I don't like the mantra, "Make the art you want to see in this world", because if the internet has taught us anything, some people want to see art of a pony joining the Brotherhood of Steel to crush the social-justice warriors. I want my art to reach people, to say something about the human condition, to say something. If I'm not being heard, am I really saying something?
   What is my responsibility?
   These are words that I wanted to write, because these questions matter to me. There are more pressing matters, but these are still on my mind. Thank you for listening.

📚 The past three days, I have been going through my collection of physical sketchbooks. There were over 72 books, with the earliest book dated June 1989. I have digitized many of the pictures, but not all of them.
🧠 For almost all the pictures, I could remember the head-space that I was in, my purpose for drawing them, and my emotional state at the time.
But there were far more pictures when I couldn't remember the date, time, or place.
💡 I was hoping to find some great idea that I'd forgotten, or some fantastic energy that I'd lost. I did not. I remembered far too much of this stuff, and I've been repurposing it for years.
◐ The first 50% of the collection (1989-1994) makes up 65% of the scanned material. Much of the later stuff were simple iterations on previous pictures, working designs. But also, much of the later stuff has been aggressively scanned and posted to the Internet, already. It's not until June 2018 that I started working 100% digitally.
🚮 Because I was planning to trash the sketchbooks after use, it was easier to destroy them to get them scanned, tearing or cutting out pages. It took eight trips to carry the books out to the dumpster, which is next to the daycare center. I am left with the thoughts that the pages needed to be covered up so my neighbors don't find out that I collect cartoon porn. 😅
🙂 There's something oddly cathartic about throwing out the autographs of cancelled people.
🗍 It's one thing to find a skipped page or two. That happens. It was more surprising to find a half-dozen books that had a dozen or more pages that were blank. Two books were completely blank!
🤔 A fair amount of this art was better than I remembered.
🎓 I don't have any mentors. I have a few idols, but I've never had a mentor. When I make my art, no one has worked close with me in a supervisory capacity with the intent to help my skills grow. I've had teachers, but that's about it — advice from skilled people to push me along. There's been too many times where I made unsatisfactory output and received no guidance whatsoever; I would either be paid or not. Looking through some of these pictures makes me angry that no one was helping me, but I will take peace that the universe doesn't owe me anything.
✨ I had been worried that my art was becoming too stylized. I have been becoming more of a newspaper-style cartoonist, deliberately flattening scenes for talking-heads conversations, and I've been doing far less perspective or spatial work. Now I wonder if I should be playing to my strengths.
👊 There was very little superhero artwork in here, and today I can't even imagine wanting to draw a superhero comic.
🎲 There was a fair amount of art inspired by role-playing games. I had gravitated more towards story-agnostic games like Rolemaster, GURPS, Hero, Amazing Engine and the like. Story-heavy games like Vampire or Star Wars felt very stifling; that other people had made up a lot of the story without you, and that you were specifically discouraged from doing anything that might be considered off-script. Also there was very little gaming set in realistic or historical worlds. (There's something very symptomatic of nerd culture when the defining cyberpunk tabletop is "Shadowrun".) There were quite a few characters in here, both my art and others', that were far more unique and special than I might have appreciated, at the time.
🤨 I draw the same pictures over and over again, a lot.
🧓 I am soooooooooo glad I didn't grow up on the Internet. I worry that my feelings would have been weaponized. Or that I might have fallen into drawing more fan art than original art.
📅 I need to date-stamp more often.
💙 Sometimes I found messages to my future self, that said, "You can do this", "You are made of stars", or "I believe in you." Thank you, past me. 🙂