I just replayed this game the other day with some of my friends, so I thought now it’s a good moment to leave some feedback since it’s fresh in my head.
First of all, the positives. I think the premise of the story is really fun and interesting, I love the idea of a furry convention story where the characters are depicted as their fursonas (despite the idea that being a furry = having a fursona sometimes makes me feel a bit excluded, as a guy without a fursona myself). The art is top-notch, I love how expressive everyone is. In terms of presentation, my only real gripe is that I hated how everyone’s nametag except for Swift’s was on the far right of the textbox. I can’t tell how many times I missed it and thought I was reading a piece of narration at first.
In terms of writing, the quality varies wildly. Some of it is attributable to this being written by two different people (again, an idea that I want to commend, co-writing sounds very fun!). I believe Keith has a bit of a bad habit to write in long windy paragraphs that tend to go too often for distant and abstract imagery, without appropriate block breaks to give the narration a nice rhythm (something I had already noted in Since November).
My biggest problem, though, is that pretty much every single description relating to what goes on in a furry convention or its logics is consistently narrated in this way. Swift’s hookups, and even the one scene of him going to the Pulse shooting location, are actual scenes, while everything else going on in the actual furry convention is relegated to a laundry-list style of narration that feels cold and emotionally removed and ends feeling like window dressing between the actual beats of the story. For example (and I choose this example because I feel like both these parts were written by Keith, so I’m not trying to suggest Keith’s writing = bad!), compare the scene where Swift goes to browse furry art, which is a few 6-line dense paragraphs of him going “I enter a room, I see A, B, and C, these are my thoughts about A, B, and C” vs him going to the Pulse shooting location, where we see him actually interact with the site. Only the second really leaves an impression, which is fine if that was intention. But the fact everything relating to the furry cons gets described in this way means that what we really remember about this trip are the dates.
This was one of the two big reasons imho as to why this fails at celebrating furry conventions, if that was the intention: the con is always out of focus. The other big reason is that, whether it’s intentional or not, the message I get from this VN is that furry conventions are mainly a place for random hookups. I’m not trying to say casual sex encounters are bad, far from it, but if that’s the be-all and end-all of what a furry con is, I’m starting to share a lot of the anxiety Swift is feeling lol. Admittedly, this is not why Swift went to the furry con at first, but by the second day this feels like the driving force of the entire plot (e.g. every conversation with our “friends” is about hooking up, we follow Hammer specifically because we’re looking for a rebound, etc.). The biggest scene that reinforced this idea to me is the grindr/dream scene. As we leave the con early because of our traumatic experience (!), we reach for the phone, log into Grindr, and go (paraphrasing) “I can still salvage this”. The fact that this is what would salvage your furry con experience (a grindr hookup away from the con) is what really plants the idea in the back of my head that this story is (inadvertantly, I’m sure) trying to say that this is what a furry con is about.
On the other hand, I found the idea of going to a furry con and meeting up with a bunch of friends, only to immediately split up and barely interact with each other, except to touch base between hookups, kind of depressing! We start the story with the idea of Swift’s refuge being in his interaction with the furry community, but he barely even seem to know any of his friends by the time they meet up (he doesn’t even know Osgood’s age or sexual orientation!) or have any desire to spend his time with them.
I’m kind of getting sidetracked, because ultimately I feel like whether this does a good job of celebrating furry conventions or not is not that important. What I got out of this is more of a comedy about gay hookup culture, and in that sense, I had a good time with it. I appreciated the dialogue and the narration being quippy and the humor we got from all of Swift’s different encounters.
I will mention that pretty much all my American friends thought the inclusion of the Pulse shooting in the narrative was quite tasteless. Myself, as a non-America who didn’t know much about this event other than that it happened, I appreciated the inclusion. It’s nice to follow a gay person doing some gay activism and I did genuinely learn some things I didn’t know! But I guess it’s worth noting that people who have a closer emotional connection to the tragedy might have a different reaction to this.
The last thing I’ll mention is that, while the characters are colorful and fun, their characterization feels all over the place. Swift does not always come across as someone “at their first rodeo”, so to speak. And my American friends remarked that he looked like a character literally born yesterday, as he seems to have as much awareness of his American cultural context as me! Diesel not only participating at the con but even having a room there is very perplexing, and Osgood’s “reveal” sounds at odds with him being friends with Blake and being a group chat where porn gets regularly exchanged (spoilered or not). I don’t know, I don’t doubt these people can exist, but the impression is less that we’re learning about them as characters and more that the story is throwing at us whatever is needed for this particular scene to work.