Seeing Spots
Andres Cyanni Halden
FurPlanet

When Associated Student Bodies hit it big in 1998 and 1999, it opened the floodgates for what’s become a dominant form of furry storytelling, especially in comics: the collegiate slice-of-life tale. People never get tired of taking a crack at journeys of self-discovery, of the process and aftermath of coming out. And that’s completely reasonable: it’s a ready-made source of high drama, and fairly relatable to all of us who are of the hobby. If we haven’t lived it, chances are we know someone who has.

Of course, not every slice-of-life tale is created equal. There are a lot of authors who can’t walk the fine line between mundanity and drama, tipping into soapy melodrama or the boring recount of someone’s experience with no connective thread to pull you along. The best slice-of-life is supposed to take the ordinary and present it in a way that makes it fantastic. After leaving the quietly wonderful world of the story, you look around to find yours is that world. A good author leads you to find the extraordinary in your own existence.

Unfortunately, Seeing Spots by Andres “Cyanni” Halden doesn’t manage that. In fact, more often than not I found myself having finished a chapter asking what on Earth he was meaning to do with it. Is the novel meant to be entertainment only? Is it supposed to convey a message? If so, what? What’s the emotional arc of the characters? How have they changed from the beginning of the novel to the end? What are we left with after we’ve read the final page?

College freshman Theo Gottleib receives an ominous message in his fortune cookie during dinner: “You will be seeing spots.” Shortly thereafter he meets up with fraternity president Khan Carter, a snow leopard who’s handsome, confident, well-connected and openly gay. They hook up, then navigate the somewhat tricky emotional waters of an actual relationship. Fleshing things out is a large cast of characters who really don’t stand out too much beyond their stereotype: the Straight (But Hot!) Friend, The Flaming Queen With a Surprise of Gold, the Jackass President of the Rival Frat, and so on. It’s not the fact that they’re stereotypes that’s so bad (though it certainly doesn’t help); it’s that he doesn’t even do anything new or even interesting with them. Any potential conflicts fizzle before they’re even fully formed.

At least half of the scenes focus on inconsequential details that become more of a distraction than anything. The story is littered with references to people playing video games, or kissing, or chatting when you can’t hear what they’re saying. The scenes could really be half as long as they are, and an awful lot of chapters could be summarized this way: Theo and Khan meet up in a noisy location, bs with some secondary characters for a bit, and then go somewhere private to cuddle and/or have sex.

There is a twist that appears halfway in the book that makes it even more disappointing. Just about everything that happens afterwards is simply unbelievable, and it’s clear that Halden doesn’t have a good grasp of how the situations that come up ought to go. I’m not an expert in the field myself, but the actions of everyone involved immediately struck me as nonsensical. The reasons that Khan’s father gives for his actions when Theo comes to visit — especially considering what they’ve been doing *and* what Theo does afterwards — are simply mind-boggling. It comes across as a clear excuse to keep Khan and Theo apart, even though the author doesn’t really do anything with the situation he created.

I could be being too rough on the story. After all, it might not be meant to ‘say’ anything at all. Couldn’t it be just a bit of light, entertaining reading? It certainly could. The problem there is that it doesn’t work on that level either. Neither Theo nor Khan are particularly interesting, because they’re not well-rounded characters. You don’t really know who they are or why they’re together, so it’s difficult to muster even a casual interest in their relationship. Considering that nothing threatens it, anyway, there’s really no reason to worry about it.

By and large the book could have really used a strong hand to give the story (and its author) focus. There’s no sense of movement in the novel, no connective thread to hold the chapters together, no meat at all on any of the characters. And because of that, it’s hard to care when they do things that are so obviously against the stereotype they’ve set. Remember the end of ASB, when Ricky took off his graduation gown to reveal some frilly underwear and everyone cheered? Or when Daniel’s father — a rabidly devout fundamentalist — paid for Marcus’ grad school because ‘he makes Daniel happy’? Seeing Spots is the legacy of those moments. It exists in a world so far unlike our own experiences — and without any recognizable logic — that it just can’t grab us the way it wants to, the way it needs to in order to be effective.