Interesting drama is manifesting over at Western Pennsylvania Furry Weekend, which is scheduled to happen in a few weeks (early October). For the sake of context: WPAFW is less of a convention and more of a weekend-long outdoor furmeet. It has a hard cap of 500 attendees, and most people spend the day at the outdoor lodge that the con staff rents for the weekend. Regardless, it's been pretty long-running.
One notable thing about their annual traditions is that every year, they pick a featured artist and guest of honor, and if you pay for supersponsor registration, one of the perks is a custom badge drawn by that artist. This year, someone in their infinite wisdom decided it was a good idea to ask
HearthFox of all fucking people to be both the 2025 artist and guest of honor.
link archive
Why is this a problem? Hearth has been mentioned
many,
many,
many,
many times on the Farms before, and has a reputation for being a massive shit-stirrer, constantly picking fights with random people over minor disagreements. If you've ever browsed furry social media and seen one of those headshot icons of people's fursonas wearing Antifa bandanas, you can thank Hearth for drawing them.
This specific example belongs to Lumin City, who already has a thread here. Hearth has drawn dozens, if not hundreds, of these icons.
Reception to featuring Hearth was mixed among attendees, which was not at all helped by the fact that registration prices increased, and supersponsors no longer got the bonus badge commission (without paying an extra fee). This wouldn't be an issue if not for the fact that it went from $250 to $275 (though in WPAFW's defense, the high reg prices are mostly attributed to food costs; this event includes lunch and dinner all three days).
Yesterday, Hearth saw the news about Charlie Kirk's assassination. Like many Bluesky users, Hearth decided that not only was it a good idea to celebrate this event with a bunch of really regrettable posts, but to ramp it up a step further by trying to profit off of his death by shilling more antifa icon commissions.
https://archive.is/x7yDm https://archive.is/Px4KN
When people complained that Hearth was trying to profit off a man being assassinated, Hearth proceeded to double down and
blatantly admit they were using Charlie's death to make money, all while keeping "GOH @ WPAFW" front and center on their account.
Many furries were rightfully disgusted at Hearth's behavior and wanted WPAFW to remove them from the event immediately, resulting in people contacting WPAFW to complain. The next day, Hearth deleted most of their posts celebrating Charlie's death (but not the posts shilling more Antifa icons) and made a groveling "apology".
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WPAFW finally responded a couple of hours later with this. It basically boils down to "Hearth totally apologized, and their views don't represent ours." There's nothing mentioned about removing Hearth, so you can probably tell by the ratio alone that most furries don't seem to be buying this.
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They're getting their ass beat in the Quote RTs and replies:
EDIT: I just noticed that WPAFW has three "main" social media presences (Twitter, Telegram, and Bluesky), but WPAFW's response is mentioned only on their Twitter, while Hearth is only active on Bluesky. Very odd that they addressed this on only one account (especially given that Hearth's incident happened on Bluesky and not Twitter).
EDIT 2: Hearth posted this earlier today. This is the kind of person WPAFW is endorsing. At least this quote is a perfect candidate for random.txt
he makes bloody bank off being a fake traumatized furfag who draws stuff for virtue signaling paedos and dogfuckers 
