Fanboy Confessional reveals offbeat fantasies

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Fanboy Confessional reveals offbeat fantasies
July 27, 2011
By ALEX STRACHAN
The Gazette

Fanboy Confessional (Space, 10 p.m.), the six-part series that boldly goes where relatively few documentary filmmakers have gone before, presents a pair of offbeat episodes Wednesday.

First up is a gentle - read: non-judgmental - look at "furries," science-fiction and fantasy fans who don costumes based on animal characters with human personalities and attributes from popular fiction. According to Fanboy Confessional's Canadian producer, Michael McNamara, this group of fans was particularly hard to convince to participate in the program, thanks in part to an infamous 2003 episode of CSI, titled Fur and Loathing, that depicted furries to be, well, different. And dangerous.

McNamara worked hard to win over furry groups in London, Ont., and Toronto, and the result is a portrait that's both sensitive and objective.

Next up is an episode about LARPers, shorthand for Live Action Role Players. It's not enough to speak Klingon, in other words: The true LARPer has to be a Klingon.

LARPers aren't nearly as weird as they sound. Mc-Namara's aim, at least in part, was to show how a distinctive subculture can be surprisingly normal at times.