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The Rukus Movie
6 years ago
The Rukus movie…
This has been a topic that has been on my mind for some time, and has certainly been an intense, glorious fastball that the Universe threw at me nearly two years ago. Back then, at my previous job at a computer lab in a local community college, my friend and co-worker (also a furry), asked me a simple, innocuous question as I was returning from my smoke break. The interaction went something like this:
Friend: “Hey, have you heard about this new furry documentary that they’re making?”
Me: “Like the Fursonas one?”
Friend: “No, it’s about this furry named Rukus.”
Me, after a very long pause: “How is that spelled?” There’s a furry artist named Rukis, and I wasn’t sure if it was about them.
Friend: “R-U-K-U-S.”
Me: …
I just stared at him dead eyed for a minute.
Him, literally: “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Me: “Um, well…”
I then proceeded to tell him a very, very condensed version of how I and my partner knew Rukus, how he was a good friend of ours from back in the day on the long-defunct lolfurries.org forums that we used to hang out on. How we hung out at a few cons back east, and used to talk on AIM a lot, and how he fought really hard at the end against Scientology, who was tailing him with P.I.’s at FWA 2008 the last time I saw him. He informed me about the movie, and told me there was a trailer out. So, naturally, I went home and watched it after work.
This changed my life. Aside from talking about our shared enthusiasm of cannabis, furry drama, psychedelics, and our love of drawing unusual furry art, we talked extensively about our furry science fiction universes. We both had created, from childhood, these massive, intricate furry worlds and stories that we used to escape from whatever traumas we were experiencing. I’m sure many others in the fandom can relate, which is one of the reasons this movie is so good. More on that later.
Back then, we also thought that no one in the fandom would ever care about our weird art or worlds outside of our offbeat circle of friends. I certainly didn’t. I spent years living in mine, much to chagrin of my federal worker parents and the Fairfax County Public School system, who sent me to therapists, alternative schools, and fundamentalist Christian group homes to get me to focus on normal things like TV, the GOP, George W Bush, Jesus and Football. The post 9-11 Washington, DC area was not a fun place to be if you were an LGBT furry, or any other person who was an aberration from the norm. After years of that, I didn’t talk about it with much of anyone, except for a single friend of mine in Virginia, and Rukus.
Once I saw the trailer, I decided to actually begin to work on my world again. When I heard in one of the reviews that part of the world that he created was going to be in the movie, it got to me in an intense way. His death was something that I was not able to fully process at the time back in 2008, as my father had died a few months prior, and I was in the middle of managing that. What a feeling to be unexpectedly mourning a friend who tragically left us a decade ago. The only thing I could do was to keep my own universe going, and to start producing material for it as some odd way of keeping his memory alive though his support of my universe. If my work ever gets published, you will see his name at the front in every dedication, I promise.
But this essay isn’t about me, or my own creative works. In reality, it’s mostly a way for me to process a movie that, even if I hadn’t have been friends with the subject of the film, still would have had me thinking about the things in life that led me to being a furry. Plus all of the serious struggles I had growing up on the edge of the southeastern US as one in an era where furry is not as widespread as it is today. That, I think, is the power that this movie has. You don’t really know what to expect at first as the director sets everything up. Is this a movie about Rukus? Is this a movie about him? What’s going on here, exactly?
I feel that the movie is about us outsiders as a whole. Juxtaposing the two stories opens up a door that allows us to reflect on ourselves through what is happening to the people in both sides of the film. Coming of age is difficult no matter whom you are, and for some of us, it’s damn near impossible to get though without some scars, it we even do at all. A good friend of mine once said something to me at one of the cons back in the Rukus days that has always stuck with me about being a furry. “None of us get into this who haven’t had something bad happen while we were growing up that brought us here.” While certainly this is not the case for everyone, it definitely was for a lot of us. It was for me, and, as the movie touches upon, it was for Rukus too.
But back to the movie. As someone who also grew up at the edge of the south (I refer to Northern Virginia as the “Diet South”), watching the director and his friend smoking joints, drinking MD 40/40, getting 40’s of OE from the only convenience store in the neighborhood that doesn’t ID and going to punk house parties was very nostalgic for me, except replace the punk houses with death metal ones. Weaving that narrative into Rukus’ takes a little time to set up, but it does so in a way that I personally identified with on both fronts. Plus, the toes-in-the-nose scene is the perfect combo of adorable and gross, and I loved it! The extremely awkward dramas that we all go through while growing up managing our mental health in a world which doesn’t understand it, were played out very well here, painfully so in some cases.
In addition, the way that the actors were used to substitute Rukus’ characters in a meaningful and symbolic way was done very well. Those parts probably pulled at my heartstrings the most, for reasons that I won’t get into here. I had one qualm with the last scene toward the end, where they break the fourth wall and throw you out of the emotional buildup that the scene is producing. However, that qualm was quickly quashed when the rest of the final scenes of the movie played out, especially the animated sequence at the end.
For me, that made the movie. I was already having a ton of emotions spewing out of me after seeing and hearing Rukus’ voice again after a decade, as well as everyone else from those days that I remember, like Sable. But seeing both animations of his universe play out got me more than anything. When I got the news back in November of 2008 about Rukus, after the shock and numbness wore off, it hit me that he would never be able to finish his graphic novel, which added to my sadness. But instead, his universe, which was well informed with quite a bit of heavy esoteric and philosophical concepts (you see the Gnostic concept of the Pleroma come up in one of the drawings early in the film, for example), is now animated, and in a movie that will live on indefinitely in the public domain!
For that, I personally want to thank Brett Hanover, who was kind enough to reach out to me to inform me that the movie was out. You have ensured that our friend’s memory and work will continue to be a part of the furry fandom, and I am very grateful for that. I was also informed that there was video material on the cutting room floor of Rukus and I at a con, where either him or I was holding up one of my old weird psychedelic furry drawings with Rukus saying that it was the best art you’d see all day. I can’t put into words what hearing that meant to me. This whole thing has been an emotional rollercoaster for me, but in a good way.
As Rukus says in the movie, “Everyone misses me, but no one is with me.” Yeah, well, whether you know it or not buddy, we may miss you, and we aren’t there with you, but there’s a lot of you that’s still here with us, and thanks to this movie, it’s not going away anytime soon. I’m sure you’d also admonish me for being so damn sappy about the whole thing, but it can’t be helped!
A lot of furry documentaries seems to me to acknowledge but gloss over the harsher realities of why some of us are here, and that’s okay! We don’t need to be reminded of it all the time, hence the fantasy worlds we build. But sometimes we do, to help us remember and understand that furry is something more than just a fandom, and it’s something more than just an escape from a “normie” world that grows more abusive and toxic each day. What we are doing is nothing short of creating our own world for ourselves. If politicians, corporations and public figures can lie all day long and try to gaslight us into accepting their realities as real for their profit, why shouldn’t we create our own as an alternative?
This is why Rukus and Brett have inspired me to take my own childhood escape from the psychologically damaging aspects of my early life and teens, and turn it into something that everyone can enjoy, contribute to, and escape in. I hope that this movie and story is able to do the same for others. We all have dreams, we all have our stories to tell, and we as furries are in a unique place in that we are part of one of the few subcultures that creates itself as it goes along. Our own cons, events, art, music, books and shows. I feel that this thing is far more important that we realize, and sometimes it takes someone from outside of the fandom to create something that reminds us of this, as Brett Hanover has.
Rukus was one of those people who, looking back on it, was a force of nature. I have so many fond and crazy memories of him. Him dancing euphorically around in that red tail at my first con at AC 2006 (where I ended the con carrying his inebriated ass across the streets of Pittsburgh), venturing into hyperspace with him and Sable (who I always remember having just the best personality around) at FWA 2007, and ominously, him informing us of the Scientology P.I. that was tailing him inside FWA 2008, which was, sadly the last time I saw him. But I will always remember our talks, the fun times we had when I was venturing out into the fandom in person for the first times, and, most importantly, his stories.
At the end of the day, the level of weird synchronicities that have happened to me around this movie has been high, from hearing about it at work of all places, to my friend Khyber Kitsune informing me that he was in it, to Brett Hanover reaching out to me, to the fact that I would have been at the con in the movie if I had moved to Arizona a week later, and everything else, it makes me feel like Rukus is still around, looking out after us as he ventures through the Other World.
Considering the things we talked about back in the day, and what Sable mentions toward the end, he believed in a collective unconsciousness, and I do too. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed, it can only change form. The ones that we lose may be lost in body, but somehow, somewhere, the spirt still lives on.
Thank you again, Brett, for ensuring that our friend and his world continues to be remembered.
Watch the movie at http://www.rukusmovie.com
This has been a topic that has been on my mind for some time, and has certainly been an intense, glorious fastball that the Universe threw at me nearly two years ago. Back then, at my previous job at a computer lab in a local community college, my friend and co-worker (also a furry), asked me a simple, innocuous question as I was returning from my smoke break. The interaction went something like this:
Friend: “Hey, have you heard about this new furry documentary that they’re making?”
Me: “Like the Fursonas one?”
Friend: “No, it’s about this furry named Rukus.”
Me, after a very long pause: “How is that spelled?” There’s a furry artist named Rukis, and I wasn’t sure if it was about them.
Friend: “R-U-K-U-S.”
Me: …
I just stared at him dead eyed for a minute.
Him, literally: “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Me: “Um, well…”
I then proceeded to tell him a very, very condensed version of how I and my partner knew Rukus, how he was a good friend of ours from back in the day on the long-defunct lolfurries.org forums that we used to hang out on. How we hung out at a few cons back east, and used to talk on AIM a lot, and how he fought really hard at the end against Scientology, who was tailing him with P.I.’s at FWA 2008 the last time I saw him. He informed me about the movie, and told me there was a trailer out. So, naturally, I went home and watched it after work.
This changed my life. Aside from talking about our shared enthusiasm of cannabis, furry drama, psychedelics, and our love of drawing unusual furry art, we talked extensively about our furry science fiction universes. We both had created, from childhood, these massive, intricate furry worlds and stories that we used to escape from whatever traumas we were experiencing. I’m sure many others in the fandom can relate, which is one of the reasons this movie is so good. More on that later.
Back then, we also thought that no one in the fandom would ever care about our weird art or worlds outside of our offbeat circle of friends. I certainly didn’t. I spent years living in mine, much to chagrin of my federal worker parents and the Fairfax County Public School system, who sent me to therapists, alternative schools, and fundamentalist Christian group homes to get me to focus on normal things like TV, the GOP, George W Bush, Jesus and Football. The post 9-11 Washington, DC area was not a fun place to be if you were an LGBT furry, or any other person who was an aberration from the norm. After years of that, I didn’t talk about it with much of anyone, except for a single friend of mine in Virginia, and Rukus.
Once I saw the trailer, I decided to actually begin to work on my world again. When I heard in one of the reviews that part of the world that he created was going to be in the movie, it got to me in an intense way. His death was something that I was not able to fully process at the time back in 2008, as my father had died a few months prior, and I was in the middle of managing that. What a feeling to be unexpectedly mourning a friend who tragically left us a decade ago. The only thing I could do was to keep my own universe going, and to start producing material for it as some odd way of keeping his memory alive though his support of my universe. If my work ever gets published, you will see his name at the front in every dedication, I promise.
But this essay isn’t about me, or my own creative works. In reality, it’s mostly a way for me to process a movie that, even if I hadn’t have been friends with the subject of the film, still would have had me thinking about the things in life that led me to being a furry. Plus all of the serious struggles I had growing up on the edge of the southeastern US as one in an era where furry is not as widespread as it is today. That, I think, is the power that this movie has. You don’t really know what to expect at first as the director sets everything up. Is this a movie about Rukus? Is this a movie about him? What’s going on here, exactly?
I feel that the movie is about us outsiders as a whole. Juxtaposing the two stories opens up a door that allows us to reflect on ourselves through what is happening to the people in both sides of the film. Coming of age is difficult no matter whom you are, and for some of us, it’s damn near impossible to get though without some scars, it we even do at all. A good friend of mine once said something to me at one of the cons back in the Rukus days that has always stuck with me about being a furry. “None of us get into this who haven’t had something bad happen while we were growing up that brought us here.” While certainly this is not the case for everyone, it definitely was for a lot of us. It was for me, and, as the movie touches upon, it was for Rukus too.
But back to the movie. As someone who also grew up at the edge of the south (I refer to Northern Virginia as the “Diet South”), watching the director and his friend smoking joints, drinking MD 40/40, getting 40’s of OE from the only convenience store in the neighborhood that doesn’t ID and going to punk house parties was very nostalgic for me, except replace the punk houses with death metal ones. Weaving that narrative into Rukus’ takes a little time to set up, but it does so in a way that I personally identified with on both fronts. Plus, the toes-in-the-nose scene is the perfect combo of adorable and gross, and I loved it! The extremely awkward dramas that we all go through while growing up managing our mental health in a world which doesn’t understand it, were played out very well here, painfully so in some cases.
In addition, the way that the actors were used to substitute Rukus’ characters in a meaningful and symbolic way was done very well. Those parts probably pulled at my heartstrings the most, for reasons that I won’t get into here. I had one qualm with the last scene toward the end, where they break the fourth wall and throw you out of the emotional buildup that the scene is producing. However, that qualm was quickly quashed when the rest of the final scenes of the movie played out, especially the animated sequence at the end.
For me, that made the movie. I was already having a ton of emotions spewing out of me after seeing and hearing Rukus’ voice again after a decade, as well as everyone else from those days that I remember, like Sable. But seeing both animations of his universe play out got me more than anything. When I got the news back in November of 2008 about Rukus, after the shock and numbness wore off, it hit me that he would never be able to finish his graphic novel, which added to my sadness. But instead, his universe, which was well informed with quite a bit of heavy esoteric and philosophical concepts (you see the Gnostic concept of the Pleroma come up in one of the drawings early in the film, for example), is now animated, and in a movie that will live on indefinitely in the public domain!
For that, I personally want to thank Brett Hanover, who was kind enough to reach out to me to inform me that the movie was out. You have ensured that our friend’s memory and work will continue to be a part of the furry fandom, and I am very grateful for that. I was also informed that there was video material on the cutting room floor of Rukus and I at a con, where either him or I was holding up one of my old weird psychedelic furry drawings with Rukus saying that it was the best art you’d see all day. I can’t put into words what hearing that meant to me. This whole thing has been an emotional rollercoaster for me, but in a good way.
As Rukus says in the movie, “Everyone misses me, but no one is with me.” Yeah, well, whether you know it or not buddy, we may miss you, and we aren’t there with you, but there’s a lot of you that’s still here with us, and thanks to this movie, it’s not going away anytime soon. I’m sure you’d also admonish me for being so damn sappy about the whole thing, but it can’t be helped!
A lot of furry documentaries seems to me to acknowledge but gloss over the harsher realities of why some of us are here, and that’s okay! We don’t need to be reminded of it all the time, hence the fantasy worlds we build. But sometimes we do, to help us remember and understand that furry is something more than just a fandom, and it’s something more than just an escape from a “normie” world that grows more abusive and toxic each day. What we are doing is nothing short of creating our own world for ourselves. If politicians, corporations and public figures can lie all day long and try to gaslight us into accepting their realities as real for their profit, why shouldn’t we create our own as an alternative?
This is why Rukus and Brett have inspired me to take my own childhood escape from the psychologically damaging aspects of my early life and teens, and turn it into something that everyone can enjoy, contribute to, and escape in. I hope that this movie and story is able to do the same for others. We all have dreams, we all have our stories to tell, and we as furries are in a unique place in that we are part of one of the few subcultures that creates itself as it goes along. Our own cons, events, art, music, books and shows. I feel that this thing is far more important that we realize, and sometimes it takes someone from outside of the fandom to create something that reminds us of this, as Brett Hanover has.
Rukus was one of those people who, looking back on it, was a force of nature. I have so many fond and crazy memories of him. Him dancing euphorically around in that red tail at my first con at AC 2006 (where I ended the con carrying his inebriated ass across the streets of Pittsburgh), venturing into hyperspace with him and Sable (who I always remember having just the best personality around) at FWA 2007, and ominously, him informing us of the Scientology P.I. that was tailing him inside FWA 2008, which was, sadly the last time I saw him. But I will always remember our talks, the fun times we had when I was venturing out into the fandom in person for the first times, and, most importantly, his stories.
At the end of the day, the level of weird synchronicities that have happened to me around this movie has been high, from hearing about it at work of all places, to my friend Khyber Kitsune informing me that he was in it, to Brett Hanover reaching out to me, to the fact that I would have been at the con in the movie if I had moved to Arizona a week later, and everything else, it makes me feel like Rukus is still around, looking out after us as he ventures through the Other World.
Considering the things we talked about back in the day, and what Sable mentions toward the end, he believed in a collective unconsciousness, and I do too. Matter and energy cannot be destroyed, it can only change form. The ones that we lose may be lost in body, but somehow, somewhere, the spirt still lives on.
Thank you again, Brett, for ensuring that our friend and his world continues to be remembered.
Watch the movie at http://www.rukusmovie.com
>Football
I'm sorry this happened to you
But seriously, will watch this. Thanks for taking the time to share, and make it so sincere. This is why I remember you guys. You invoked the wrath of some unjust deity just by being born (human). You get revenge by being real while substituting reality. It's nice to see that still happening. Hope things are/get/getting easier.
I couldn't do the star justice anywhere you. He had vision, and made it personal both at a level I could not have understood. "Trapped in those memories." Then his boyfriend out of nowhere confronts my worst fears and then some.
Seriously both the stuff Rukus put on paper and how he expressed himself and the film are super touching. It's worth every minute.
It was so long ago but I remember so much like I was living it. I can't forget him.
Sorry, I'm having a hard time forming a coherent thought. I'm just overwhelmed by memories; I just found out about this project. Seeing, hearing, and thinking so much after so long is doing a number on me.