How the Bonds Among Virtual-Reality Furries Saved a Life, in “The Reality of Hope”
Anyone who doubts the validity of relationships that take place only through a digital medium has never experienced one. But these days most of us have. It could be through text messages, Instagram posts, a real-time video-game chat, or plain Zoom calls. The emotions and connections that such channels elicit are as real as those which arise at gatherings around a dinner table or side by side on a walk. The physical manifestations of this intimacy might look cartoonish or superficial—just pixels on a screen, after all—but they are our lives, in the deepest sense. “The Reality of Hope,” which is shot mainly in virtual reality, provides proof, recounting the story of Hiyu and Photographotter, also known as Jack Parsons and Alex Davidson, two people who meet in V.R. and then go on to complete a viscerally physical exchange, as Davidson donates a kidney to Parsons.
Hiyu and Photographotter belong to the community of furries: people who develop alternate selves, “fursonas,” as anthropomorphized animals. In virtual reality, with motion-tracking devices, they can fully inhabit their fursonas—Hiyu as a sleek rabbit-fox and Photographotter as a bespectacled otter. They get to know each other via virtual furry events that Hiyu stage-sets in interactive landscapes such as a fantastical tree house and a volcano night club. The film’s director, Joe Hunting, interviews the pair’s avatars in seated shots as he might any other documentary subjects, and there’s a pathos to seeing their digital identities soberly spotlighted. This format also heightens the contrast of the pivotal moment when Parsons and Davidson first meet offline, as Davidson arrives in Sweden, where Parsons lives, to undergo the surgery that will transplant his healthy kidney. “We spent about four months periodically meeting in V.R. together,” Hunting told me, of the filming process. “Once we later met physically in Stockholm, there was already a lot of trust built into the production.”
The switch from virtual to physical—which are, after all, two aspects of the same reality–comes in a single frame rendering Hiyu’s avatar in a virtual hospital room. “It’s a poetic space that only exists within the cinematic truth of the documentary,” Hunting said. Then the V.R. cuts to a shot of an actual hospital room where Parsons receives dialysis, and Davidson walks in. The viewer experiences a moment of confusion as the identities are merged, the bodies matched with the now-familiar voices and personalities. But it’s quickly resolved as we come to understand that these are the same people—two virtual friends wholeheartedly committed to a bodily act. “It would’ve been easy to lean into surface-level novelty or the perceived weirdness that some associate with the furry community,” Max Willson, the producer of the film, who originally knew the subjects from his own involvement in the furry community, told me. Willson kept in contact with Hiyu and Photographotter’s wider furry circle to insure that they felt accurately represented. By the time of a final V.R. party, it makes no difference that the celebration is happening in a geodesic dome on a lunar landscape.
