It's dangerous to make assumptions. Not usually "somebody might put a slug in your gut" dangerous, more often it's like "trip and fall in a mud puddle" dangerous. Even so, we constantly make assumptions, and often find ourselves soaking wet and covered in muck.

I made an assumption when I set up this site, and I'm not sure if it's even a "mud puddle" assumption. But just in case, I'd like to clear it up. My assumption was this: People visiting the site would immediately understand what I meant by the title of the site: FurNoir.

I assumed that people coming here would know what the "fur" part meant, since I'm hosting the site on FurNation which specializes in furry websites, and since I'm only "marketing" the site to other folks with furry or semi-furry interests. I assumed visitors would also know what Noir meant because it's a term that's pretty common in American culture.

Of course, when you're surfing the web, why would you pay attention to what server a website is on? Why would you even care? And while "noir" may be a common cultural concept in America, it is not a universal one, can be ambiguously interpreted, and then there's always the rest of the world which might not be up on every tiny, obscure nuance of American culture. Trip. Splash.

So without belaboring the point too much, I want to give a quick summation of what is meant by the "Fur" and the "Noir" in FurNoir.

So to start with, the "fur" comes from the fact that this is a furry website. Furry is a term fraught with overtones, but basically it's this. You know those people who really like science fiction? They're so into it that they own tons of books, posters, toys, videos & DVDs, all devoted to various science fiction stories? They are known to even dress up in costumes and hold conventions just so they can meet with other people who are involved with science fiction. These people and their activities can be broadly referred to as the science fiction fandom.

Furry is the same thing, except that instead of science fiction, the furry fandom is concerned with talking animals. Substitute Bugs Bunny or The Lion King for Obi-Wan Kenobi or Mr. Spock, and you've got it.

So furry fans collect books and videos that feature talking animals. That would include Warner Brothers and Disney animation, but also a lot of more obscure stuff, a lot of it from Japan. Furry fans collect and trade artwork, much of it homegrown and featuring characters unknown outside of the fandom. Furry fans go to conventions to meet with other furry fans and trade drawings, stories, books, movies, videos and toys. Some furry fans dress up in costumes, but instead of Darth Vader or Jean-Luc Picard, they look like Wile E. Coyote or the Easter Bunny. Furry fans play computerized and non-computerized role-playing games, but instead of elves or wizards, their characters are wolves and panthers. Or sometimes wolf elves and panther wizards, or... um... well, you get the picture.

Just like with science fiction fandom, there are different sub-interests and different levels of involvement. Not everybody who goes to see a Star Wars movie has Boba Fett posters lining their bedroom wall and TIE fighter models dangling from the ceiling. And not everybody who likes furry stuff dresses up in costume or goes to conventions. Some folks are just happy to consume the vast amount of furry material available for free on line. Some people go a little farther, posting their own pictures, or writing stories. ;-)

Despite the fact that most people associate talking animals with children's stories, most of the people involved in furry fandom are adults. (Or at least adults in the making - the fandom seems particularly popular among people in their mid-teens.) And because it is mostly an adult endeavor, furry fandom also encompasses "adult themes". So you have the spectrum of human sexuality thrown into the mix. This makes some people uncomfortable, especially given the link between talking animals and children in most people's minds. Also, to the extent that furry fandom has appeared in the mainstream media at all, the more salacious elements seem to be the ones that attract all the attention. But furry stuff is about a lot more than cartoon animal porn, as sites like mine and plenty of others demonstrate.

(Quick update: For a really good essay on this topic, check out Proud To Be Furry at the Suburban Jungle comic strip website. It will give you an idea not only of what's going on, but how people in the fandom feel about it. Check out the comic strip too, while you're there!)

So that about covers furry. Now what about noir? Film Noir is a genre of films produced by Hollywood in the post-War years of the late nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties. The genre was marked by a particular visual style - very high-contrast black and white with dark shadows and odd camera angles. Films in the genre also made common use of certeain archetypical characters, such as the hard-boiled detective and the femme fatale. The plots tended to revolve around dark subjects such as crime, murder and betrayal. A more complete description of the genre can be found on Wikipedia.

While primarily a film genre, the term noir has come to extend to other types of media as well, particularly the novel. Many of the films noirs were drawn from existing detective novels by authors such as Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, and the genre has come to include the works that actually gave birth to it. These authors had countless imitators in the crime and exploitation magazines and dime-store novels produced after the Second World War, and these types of works can also be lumped under the "noir" heading without too much trouble.

As I said in my introduction to the site, FurNoir is a lot more about Fur than Noir. FilmSite.org characterizes film noir as primarily about "..melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt and paranoia." Most of the furry sotries I have read are a little more upbeat than that! So my furry story is too, or at least that's what I intended. Sometimes I find my idea of happy is someone else's idea of sad.