Talk:TBOF

I'm wondering if this page and a couple of others are factual/relevant and could be worked into other already-existing pages. I've been in the fandom since the early 90s and I don't remember any organized group rallying themselves under a banner called TBOF or SOF or any consistant, well-defined use of the phrase Golden Age of Furry Fandom. There were certainly individuals and people who were friends with each other who shared attitudes about the fandom, and had individual ideas and maybe a personal ideology, but to call them ideological groups seems to be trying to label vague clusters of individual attitudes as something more sinister.

When I do online searches for these terms, all I find are Usenet newsgroup posts made years later, and it feels like an attempt at ideological historical revisionism. It's like picking out all the people who didn't like cats in the fandom and saying, "Then there was an ideological group called ACF (Anti-Cat Furries) who would frequently talk about how cats simply held no appeal to them." In the current fandom we've still got people who are don't like this or that aspect of the fandom - that's a given constant - but most of them don't organize themselves into anything coherent and the people who disagree with them don't create acronyms for something that isn't there.

Where the pages are factual is that there were people who took issue with various aspects of the fandom and sometimes aired their opinions in a derogatory way. But I don't see a point in having a Wikifur page devoted that kind of thing unless it was really something major. Like Richard Chandler's essay, that was major, that could have its own page, because it indeed caused a large disturbance in the pond.

Essentially I think we should remove the TBOF and SOF acronyms because the groups didn't exist, but some general attitudes did, and we should mention differences in attitude in pages where they're appropriate. The History page already sums it up succinctly: "A schism which had been developing in the fandom for some years ..." and "Backlash appeared from various other parties ..." etc. Maybe add a general description of growing disgruntlement over the 1990s to the Burned Furs page, citing individual complaints without making up groups to put them under.

As for "Golden Age of Furry Fandom", I don't mean to say the term was never used, but I think everyone who used it (or some other term like it) all had different conceptions of "the good old days" - maybe replace the Golden Age page with one called "Nostalgia in Furry Fandom", or eliminate it entirely. The zine and comics fans of the late 80s didn't like the new wave of FurryMuck people coming into "their" fandom; the "fandom is about art" people didn't like the wave of lifestylers, and so on and so on. I've heard pre-2000 fursuiters complain about people jumping on the fursuiting bandwagon for popularity and attention, that they don't respect the art of public performance, and so on and so on. It never ends. :-)

So yeah, TBOF, SOF, Golden Age of Furry Fandom, Furry Renaissance - all these pages seem to be largely pointing at each other and could just as easily be summed up on already-existing pages that differences of opinion existed through the history of the fandom. They largely seem to be made-up terms that have never seen widespread use. Why they're here, I don't know, but it feels more like individual, non-neutral opinion to attribute specific stuff into the fandom's history that were typical disagreements that you get in any fandom's internal politics. - The 12:12, 6 May 2011 (EDT)


 * "Essentially I think we should remove the TBOF and SOF acronyms because the groups didn't exist, but some general attitudes did" - Not quite. The group did exist, on AFF, ICQ, Usenet, Furrymuck,... All thought small footprint on that era, they were a discussed, and know as part of the past of the furry fandom. They did not have the large presence that the net could have promoted (Burned furs, CYD, etc,...)., but its small presence does not indicate the whitewashing from the lore of furry because they not "really something major". - Spirou 22:21, 6 May 2011 (EDT)


 * Tl;dr They existed, as I viewed them personally, including their creation (and for some) their demise - Spirou 22:26, 6 May 2011 (EDT)


 * Well, I take a bit of offense at having the term "whitewashing" used. I was on FurryMuck, AFF and Usenet since 1992 (but not ICQ) and I simply don't remember anyone using those terms.  If you say you encountered them, I'll trust your word, as other edits you've made around the wiki show you've been in the fandom for a long time as well. Either my memory's become selective over time or I skipped over wherever the terms appeared. - The 00:17, 7 May 2011 (EDT)


 * ARGH! my long winded response went "boom" =( try tomorrow. No malice intended with the term "whitewashing", truly - Spirou 02:43, 7 May 2011 (EDT)