Harbour City Furcon, based out of Sydney, Australia is a healthy yet small furry gathering of 300 people. However, despite the smaller size, over the weekend of its operation it created quite a media stir. One article by the Daily Mail’s Holly Hales shows a quite embarrassing blunder in its haste to attract an audience utilizing a hyper-sexualized headline. In the midst of orgy allegations, they destroyed any credibility of expertise on the matter being discussed by stating that the Sydney furry convention was the largest gathering of the fandom down under.

Innocent cosplayers who love dressing up as animals or deviant sex cult? 'Furries' in colourful costumes defend their pastime while gathering at Harbour City Fur Con

• Furry fanatics have descended on Sydney as part of the fan culture's largest annual gathering down under
• The Harbour City Fur Con convention sees people splash thousands on cartoon-inspired animal suits
• However, the fandom has often drawn criticism for its sexual component which includes allegations of orgies

[Warning, link goes to source for documentation/evidence purposes, do not click if you do not wish to support this behavior via viewership.]

The furry fandom’s favorite fighting fox has proven once against that when it comes to the competitive fighting game scene, he cannot be denied. SonicFox found himself victorious in the EVO eSport World Championship, to taking home the first-place victory in Dragon Ball FighterZ. He also kept his form as a top contestant in the Injustice 2 scene, able to take home third place despite having waned his practice to focus on the anime based game.

Many in the furry fandom typically care so little about sports that the University of Waterloo that researches furries literally uses sports fandoms as a control group when trying to compare those in furry with those of the outside world. However, it seems that when it comes to the fighting game eSports scene, many have found themselves giving into the fan fever of competition as one of their own dominates its world.

Those who watched the final match against Goichi (using the tag Go1) were not disappointed as the two faced off in their final sets to claim the title. It is a match that will go down in fighting game history scene for the intensity, and little bit of controversy.

Late last year, Nightf0x, an individual who I have done furry panels about journalism and non-fiction writing, had his first furry piece published by DogPatchPress. Prior to his publication he had spoken with me about doing a review and offering advice on it. In this piece he discussed his feelings of a furry’s class and how that weighed more at a larger convention like Anthrocon where he didn’t feel such a thing at his more local gathering of Anthro Weekend Utah which has an attendance around 10% the size of the Pittsburgh gathering.

My main critique with this piece was that I had noted while he was speaking from his experience between the environments of smaller conventions against larger ones, it did not highlight, nor go into depth, why he felt that the larger one had more classism in it. There weren’t any major examples on classist behavior observed which would have sold the concept better, but instead all the article did in the end is note that it existed.

Little could have anyone suspected that in the last weekend of July, a convention from Syndey, Australia would provide us with a new neologism that would elicit more groans and eyerolls than even the infamous words of “yiff” or “popufur”. This word would become known as the highlighting of elitism, particularly that of fiscal abundance. More ironic is that the convention that coined this phrase was even smaller than the Utah convention at an attendance cap of 300.

This word is “fursuite”. A word put forth to the press by the chair of Harbour City Fur Con. It was defined as meaning “a fursuit that is cheaply made”; giving the example of a costume that is being worth less than $5,000. What followed in its wake was a stark look at classist behaviors at the small Syndey gathering, and the fandom at large.