Hello, fellow netrunners.

While we wait for the rest of Build 4’s asset development to wrap up, here’s another essay.

So there’s been a critique of “String Zero” I’ve seen floating around in a couple of different spaces more or less since the game’s first build that reads, essentially: “This game sure does love its lore.”

And that’s true. Worldbuilding is a major pillar of the game.

There’s an implied subtext here that reads “and this is bad,” but not pleasing everyone is simply the reality of art, and generally speaking, I’m fine with leaving the conversation there: It’s really none of my business what people think of my work unless I’m seeing a notable pattern of concern, and largely as a matter of taste with no clear solution, this critique is not that.

But that got me to thinking: “Well, what do readers of furry visual novels (FVN) actually expect from the medium?”

Is This Just a Science Fiction Thing?

See, there’s some merits to the argument that an author should limit the amount of information they try to pack into a work so that it remains accessible. There’s also counter-arguments that this is self-limiting and can harm the greater artistic value of the text. As I discussed in my essay on “Literary Reading” in visual novels, trying to walk the line between accessibility to the greatest possible demographic while also creating art without reasonable constraint is a very challenging exercise!

But interestingly, I think this is where I get into trouble, not because of some absolute failure to walk this line (I’m an average writer with the average writer issue of getting it right sometimes and not others), but because of a failure to understand why FVN readers come to the FVN space at all.

In an (already dated) essay on lore inclusion I wrote last year, I explain how expository worldbuilding is challenging, and how I found the use of databases/codices more polarizing than expected. While I still largely stand by what I said there, I think I failed to address this really essential question: “How does the inclusion of this information make this game more furry?”

Because to be honest, I was a thinking as a science fiction author, not as a furry one.

So as someone accustomed to science fiction genre writing/gaming, the level of worldbuilding in “String Zero” is pretty standard bread-and-butter, par-for-the-course stuff. Even when it’s complete, the LOOM database in “String Zero” is very unlikely to even remotely touch the codex/database word count of texts like “Mass Effect” or even of isometric fantasy games like anything out of D&D or Pathfinder. So I was initially a bit perplexed when I saw critiques to the effect of “too much lore.” This is a science fiction game after all, and while there’s certainly variation in the genre on the exact scope and breadth of lore, allowing for high concept worldbuilding is generally the accepted reader-author contract.

So I am sorry to say that if science fiction is not for you, then you’re probably not going to like my game. However, this hasn’t stopped readers from giving it a try anyways (and occasionally making their displeasure clear in public reviews, despite stating a clear animus against the genre).

I’m not really interested in exploring why readers who dislike a thing then try that thing, get annoyed they didn’t like the thing that they knew they wouldn’t like, and then make a long complaint about it. I actually think it’s good to make honest attempts to engage with media we think we won’t like to avoid confirmation bias. So for those of you who have made a fair attempt at my game but still can’t get into it–I do thank you for trying.

But that still begs the question of why these attempts happen at all. I don’t think these same readers are intentionally hopping into science fiction spaces and then getting surprised by something they know they don’t like. Rather, I think they come to the work because there’s something about its “furriness” they found appealing, and that inspired them to overlook their genre preconceptions and give the work a shot.

And honestly? I think that’s fantastic.

Media Is Furry In Spite of Genres, Not Because Of Them

Yet that doesn’t answer the original question of: “Why do people read or what are they trying to get out of FVNs (and furry media in general)?”

This is something I intend to discuss along with my editor Wyatt at our panel “We Are Cyberpunk: Themes and Furry” at Furry Weekend Atlanta in a few weeks time. (If you can go, check it out! If you’re reading this article after the fact, we’ll probably toss our slide deck on the patreon; I’ll update this line if we do.)

I could write a much larger essay about this, but I think furry youtube musician and video essayist Patricia Taxxon, first in “Art, Furries, God” and later in “On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People,” does a very good job taking a stab at trying to define what furry media is beyond “I think the big tiger man is cute” (which, entirely valid, he is–but why is the big tiger man cute??).

In summary, her criteria for what makes a piece of media furry are that it must be:

• “Symbolic” in that furry media employs animals not as a literal stand-in for some human experience (such as race), but as a way to symbolically abstract that experience by projecting the animal within.
• “Sensory” as means of dissolving the human/animal boundary (because that boundary is artificial and arbitrary; humans are animals) by allowing for animal expression, physicality, and the deconstruction of emotional barriers.
• “Autistic” as a way of explaining what it means to feel “other” or “alien” when presented with what a “normal,” socially-acceptable experience is supposed to look like. (I actually think this is a fairly narrow explanation, because not everyone will perceive their experience as “autistic,” but I do think Taxxon is essentially correct that furry media shares a desire for “transgression” against oppressive norms, be that experience related to autism, queerness, race, and so on.)

So why do people read furry media? Because it’s outsider media. It’s media that expresses humanity from an inhuman perspective, and in so doing, makes us more aware of and confident in our own experiences, not less. Furry media is about making its readers feel more human by making the subtextual textual. No longer does the animal need to hide in the dark, oppressed by a society that has no use for it. Furry media gives that animal permission to exist.

To quote Taxxon: “Political power is wielded in this world through the strict denotation of who is and is not human.”

Furry media, like punk media to a great degree, denies the idea that “humanity” can be so defined. Like the plurality of animals we see in furry media, there is a plurality of human experience. The animal simply allows us to symbolically project our fears or desires, explore those things through alternate modes of expression, and therefore transgress the boundaries society has placed on our own self-understanding.

Similarly, media genres exist to contain and categorize, whereas furry media transcends the very idea of genre. Even as an aesthetic, “furriness” continues to evade broadly agreed-upon definition because, like identity, the principles behind “furriness” are ambiguous, diffuse, and extremely personal.

And that’s why my game keeps getting this critique! I’m (mostly) not a (very) bad writer!! It’s because everyone wants something different from furry media!!!

Conclusion

But also to be entirely fair, “String Zero” does ask for some conceptual labor on the part of its readership. This “love of lore” isn’t just a matter of personal passion for worldbuilding: all of that detail exists to reflect the world we live in now, to serve the purpose of “a mirror darkly.”

If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it comes from a secular reading of 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” Or in short, our understanding of reality is imperfect and incomplete; looking in a mirror reminds us of the fact. To that end, science fiction isn’t just about writing some vision of the future, it wants to be that mirror.

So how does the inclusion of all this doggone lore make “String Zero” more furry?

Well, the benefit of furry science fiction beyond the symbolic use of furry characters interacting with all that worldbuilding, is that there also happens to be a fun animal in that mirror darkly.

And that animal is you.