AWFR

AWFR, the Anti-Were and Furry Resource movement (1998 to February 20, 2003. Founder: TiggyBot, also known as Bad Tiggy or Lanmaru) was considered by some on the Usenet furry groups of the period as the first movement hostile to "spiritual" or "lifestyle" were, furry, and dragon individuals within those fandoms, and the first organized group labeled as such to have an actual web presence on the net, just slightly ahead of the Burned Furs, another group tarred with the AWFR "Anti" label, though there is no formal link between the two.

According to its founder, the AWFR was:


 * "A centralized place to study and discuss negative opinions, facts, or whatever of these groups, preferably in a semi-decent, intelligent, and/or humorous way, created because there was no place to openly expose the flaws and dislikes of these genres, or otherwise have fun with them."

TiggyBot himself was well-known and liked were fan in the were community starting from 1995 onwards, and ended up working both as an administrator for the now long dead news.were.net and as an IRCOp on WereNet IRC. He still manages some of the now-largely-defunct WereNet's web resources. This changed when he started to publicly express his personal disenchantment with the whole "spiritual" movement that he felt some therianthropes (and later, furry lifestylers, and dragon spiritualists) were trying to "force" on the were community. To counter this, he created AWFR, initially to bring a counterpoint to the advent of spiritual therianthropy, later to propose an alternative to wereism itself, the "Creature Culture", and its much expanded follow up, "personal symbolic zoomorphism". The later idea went largely unnoticed, and eventually dropped.

At the beginning, TiggyBot's contributed works and thoughts concentrated specifically with the were community itself, but after a few other sympathetic, like-minded people started contributing their works to the site, articles regarding the furry and dragon communities would be later added to the site's resources. The "coverage" of alt.fan.dragons on the site, and the vocal opposition it caused within that group, would entice TiggyBot himself to write a sarcastic short piece on how dragon fans could defend their "beliefs" from external attack in a short piece called "The AFD way."

Other featured works include:


 * "Were Fairies" (By Lion Templin): A comedic piece about a new were fairy and his job, in a diary format. Secretly mocked some select members of the were community at the time.


 * "What's Wrong With Wereism?" (By TiggyBot): Came in two volumes, and generally articulated why TiggyBot thought wereism was a broken belief system.


 * "100% Pure Fur" (Author unknown): A proposed plan for "cleaning up the fandom", namely by cutting back on "adult" artwork and excising other elements of furry. Some of the people that considered themselves part of the AWFR ideal suggested changing the name of their endeavor to "The Pure Fur Movement" after the release of the piece, in the same vein as the "Creature Culture" idea. The proposed plan, and the small localized suggestion for a name change never got anywhere.


 * "How to be a True Part of alt.fan.dragons" (By Jazzaboo): An essay detailing her distaste with the direction this group had taken.

The site went from being the AWFR to the AWFR Deluxe circa late 1999/early 2000 after TiggyBot added support for news posting and a links database that better catalogued the site - an early attempt at a CMS or portal. However, by late 2000, the site was no longer being updated for a number of reasons, the primary one being that he felt there was really nothing more to write at the time. This wasn't quite enough to take it offline, but at the end, it would be his growing concern for the rising amount of vitriol leveled against some individuals, specially a rather graphically violent screed by artist Eric Blumrich, involving bodily harm against Zoophiles that did it, as he never wanted to be associated with this kind of behavior. With his decision of moving on, AWFR ceased to be.