Fursuiters bring inflatable horses to ANE 2026 for its theme of ‘Westerns’. (Flayrah/Eberra Wolf)

Boston saw thousands of furs congregate earlier this month, some donning cowboy hats, others putting on cowboy boots and throwing on ponchos. Anthro New England 2026: It’s a Western! brought a massive 7,284 attendees to the convention this year, pushing the square footage to its limit and outside the range of comfortable.

Masking requirements were relaxed this year. Only the dealer’s den, art show room, and gaming rooms were masks mandatory. In past years, the policy was that all convention spaces required a mask to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other airborne diseases. Like last year, though, face masks were given out at the safety office, and Covid Safe Furs distributed N95 masks and tests on Thursday for those needing them.

ANE was once again bookended by the Hanover Insurance Group’s annual ‘Ignite’ conference and Mathworks’ Sales Kickoff. On Thursday, I spoke to a Hanover employee named Nancy, who noted that more furries were arriving on Wednesday evening as compared to last year, an indication that the convention was growing massively.

We are now in the fourth year of reviewing the dramatic shorts category based on the recommendations submitted to the Ursa Majors along with random ones I may have seen during the year, or items that maybe the algorithms caught that only get recommended at this time of year for some reason. The choices here are, once again, polished and only one or two in the whole list had missing elements. Without you all curating your choices these lists would not happen so thank you for your efforts this year.

New to the format this year is that I’ll lean toward sectionalizing so that the text before the video doesn’t go too much into spoiler territory and any text afterwards will go more into elements I liked that address the content itself as to not spoil any desire to view without being painted by those thoughts.

(Prior Years: 2024, 2023, 2022)

When I used to live in Wichita, Kansas, I loved watching movies at the Warren Theatre West, and I have a specific memory of one movie I saw there, less because of movie itself, but because of an interaction with the ticket seller.

The movie was Wes Craven's My Soul to Take, and she helpfully informed me that if I walked out in the first thirty minutes, I would be refunded. Not exactly reassuring me about my ticket choice that evening, but I had to wonder what people, exactly, were expecting from a "Dead Teenager Movie" from Wes "Nightmare on Elm Street" Craven.

I did not refund my ticket, and though I can't actually recall much from the movie (other than a bizarre scene involving a pooping papier mache condor), I still remember it fondly. It was fun, but what else did I expect from a Wes "Scream" Craven slasher picture?

Anyway, he's dead now.

But we're not here to review Wes "Music of the Heart" Craven's My Soul to Take, but instead director Emma Tammi's Five Nights at Freddy's 2, which currently has a paltry 16% "Rotten" rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, which is somehow almost, but not quite, half the score of the first Five Night's at Freddy's, despite being a marked improvement. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.

On January 10th SoFurry released a post indicating that they are back online for the first time since early July of 2025. During this downtime they had moved servers and finalized updating so that the new Beta version will now fully replace the original style of the site. The beta will remain in place until bugs are fleshed out with the public transition.