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- Feb 3, 2013
Infected Ren Faires - nerd cringe but olde timey
- Thread starter CatParty
- Start date
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- Aug 30, 2014
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- Feb 3, 2013
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- Aug 25, 2013
the funny thing about those fairs are that the people who go to them would have died before the age of 12 if this was the actual renaissance.
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- Oct 1, 2015
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- Apr 6, 2015
I didn't know the Renaissance took place on middle earth
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- Oct 21, 2015
At what point did they start allowing furries and cosplayers into the Renaissance Fair?
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- Feb 3, 2013
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- Dec 28, 2014
It's funny when irl wizards dress up as fantasy wizards.
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They look like they would be a tag team in ROH
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- Feb 25, 2015
I have always thought that it was strange how they seem to lump in all the middle ages and the renaissance and high fantasy together and call it "the renaissance"
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- Jul 30, 2015
Renaissance fairs are pretty fun IMO. It's neat checking out the food, music, beers, and crafts that these actors devise. I've never seen a cosplayer or furry at one though.
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- Feb 3, 2013
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- Apr 6, 2015
what the christ is with the steam punk person?
wikipedia is a trustworthy source
furries make perfect sense. furries have been around for thousands of years
wikipedia is a trustworthy source
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- Feb 3, 2013
*raises hand* Not to powerlevel, but I've worked behind the scenes at a fairly large ren fair, and I've seen the reasons behind some of this stuff firsthand. And yes, we had a TON of cosplayers, fairies, furries, Wiccans of the weird too-intense variety, and creepy dudes with pentagrams.
It may be different at other fairs, but at the Fair That Shall Not Be Named where I worked, there was an ongoing struggle between various parts of management over theme, tone, and--most importantly--money. Truly accurate fairs, sticking to the actual Renaissance, wouldn't attract a very large customer base. Fairies make you more money than Chaucer, so if you want big crowds, you have to bend a little. Plus, some attendees are going to wear fairy wings no matter what, so you have to have at least a small tolerance policy for that kind of thing or risk getting a rep as draconian and unfun.
In fact, my fair was in the middle of that transition: it had begun much more accurate and historical, but they'd recently introduced fantasy elements, and there was a LOT of tension between the various factions who were for or against that. The type of people who will lose their shit over a (concealed) zipper on a gown do not play well with the type of people who think fairies and elves are the best thing evar, and neither of those play well with the people who can take it or leave it either way, and NOBODY wants to acknowledge the fact that if they don't make budget this whole thing is sinking one way or another. There were cliques among the different backstage performers: street performers, like jesters and wandering minstrels, were apart from "face" performers like the court, and the historical performers didn't really cross over with the performers that played the fantasy characters, and none of them socialized with outside vendors who were technically fair employees but not really, and then there was the SCA guys ...
(Massive simplification. I'm trying to avoid details which equal too much powerlevel.)
Historical accuracy does get you money at one level, though--state level. I've known of at least one fair where they go full derp hippie fantasy and then farm out some concessions to SCA folks, who'll do pottery and blacksmithing demonstrations that will allow the fair to bill itself as educational and thus get state tax breaks.
TL;DR: So you have the historians versus the fantasists versus the budget guys. It results in a mishmash of different agendas, different eras, different genres, and you really don't know what you're getting when you go from one fair to another.
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- Feb 3, 2013
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- Jun 9, 2014
No pictures to share, but I do have an amusing/relevant story from my childhood that some of you might appreciate.
When I was very young, maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, my class took a field trip to a very large ren faire. Every student in the class was given a disposable camera to fill up and return to the teacher so that she could make a big photo collage somewhere in the school. I'm pretty sure this message was conveyed to us to some degree, but my cronies and I paid it no attention. Out of the five or six of us there were in my hangout circle, we ended up filling the cameras entirely with pictures of us doing stupid shit on the bus &/or the big titty belly dancers that were at the faire, the ones the teacher specifically told us not to go near.
We thought it was the funniest shit ever until about a week later when the teacher got the film developed and pulled us all aside to ask us what the fuck was wrong with us. I think out of the 144 or so pictures we collectively took she was able to use like, maybe 15 of them tops. (I remember one of them was a picture we took of a classmate who was crying because he dropped his food and we thought it was fucking hilarious until the teacher actually realized what was in the photo and took it down.)
When I was very young, maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, my class took a field trip to a very large ren faire. Every student in the class was given a disposable camera to fill up and return to the teacher so that she could make a big photo collage somewhere in the school. I'm pretty sure this message was conveyed to us to some degree, but my cronies and I paid it no attention. Out of the five or six of us there were in my hangout circle, we ended up filling the cameras entirely with pictures of us doing stupid shit on the bus &/or the big titty belly dancers that were at the faire, the ones the teacher specifically told us not to go near.
We thought it was the funniest shit ever until about a week later when the teacher got the film developed and pulled us all aside to ask us what the fuck was wrong with us. I think out of the 144 or so pictures we collectively took she was able to use like, maybe 15 of them tops. (I remember one of them was a picture we took of a classmate who was crying because he dropped his food and we thought it was fucking hilarious until the teacher actually realized what was in the photo and took it down.)
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- Dec 28, 2014
At some point, though, don't you get completely overrun by spastics in fursuits and bronies and shit?
It seems there have to be some standards or it's just a generic con of some sort.
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- Feb 3, 2013
Quite possibly. I didn't stay with the fair long enough to see the process through to the end. From what I hear from others on the circuit, though, a lot of fairs have a "this far and no further" point (like fairy wings are okay, but no fursuits), while others end up splitting the fantasy and history stuff into different areas or even different events.
Spastics are inevitable, though, even if you lock all the wizards and furries out. Some of the worst, most annoying people at the fairs can be the ones who insist they're being completely accurate and freak out over zippers. Or, worse, insist they're being completely accurate and don't know what the fuck they're talking about. I recall one charming individual--highly-placed in the fair's administration, alas--who insisted that all fair performers, vendors, employees, etc., wear hats, because historical accuracy and modesty in accordance with medieval values and all that jazz. Never mind that it was 105F in the shade and there were no regs on what kind of hat you could wear, resulting in situations where peasants and beggars had on velvet caps or Landsknecht feathery messes. What mattered was that they were wearing hats, dammit!
And then there were the corset regulations. Oy vey.
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- Mar 29, 2014
They should just call it the "Fantasy Festival."
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