Grissom from CSI likes to think that they are the modern version of animal-totem worshippers.
Heh. Wow. I originally opened this thread because I’ve got some friends who are furries… the creators of that game. I’m renting my house to one of 'em.
To be fair, I don’t know that they’re furries. I’ve always been kind of afraid to ask- 'cause they might tell me. :eek:
I said I didn’t want to know.
Oh, yeah. I’m still churning through Usenet, at a rate of about 50-100 groups per day (I throw away any group that’s pure spam for over 250 posts). I just started rec.*.
I have much love for Smeghead’s Nerd Chart.
I also know the people who run Furcadia, though I don’t talk to them as much as I used to. Great people, overall. Small world, huh?
Inflation porn is… well, basically treating people like balloons. I have no idea.
Furries did indeed exist before the Internet (at least before the Internet was common), mostly in APAs (Amateur Press Associations - like fanzines but with limited circulation) and fanzines. Some of the longer-running fanzines have been going since the mid-to-early 80s, and the term first came up (as a subgenre of fantasy art) sometime in the 70s. I know a few people who have been fans longer than I’ve been alive.
I explained the Usenet thing earlier. I can’t really explain why I found the idea attractive, though there’s definitely something to be said for feral charm and patterned skin. The patterns really accent anatomy well. I think there might be the tactile idea of thick, soft fur, but I think about spitting hairs all over the place and it just disturbs me now. Ultimately most furry art is a human body with slightly fuzzy edges, a tail, and a pronouncedly animal-influenced face.
I don’t think there’s anything unhealthy about furry, per se, though furry fandom is a slightly different case. It’s healthy under certain circumstances, but profoundly and subtly bad for you in others. I left because I decided I needed to keep growing as a person, and I felt it was getting in the way. Basically, I grew up, threw away the training wheels, and started playing with the big kids.
I will elaborate more later. It’s going to be a long-winded post.
I still get up early some Saturdays to watch Looney Tunes reruns. That’s as close as I get, really. If anything I’m consuming deeply negative amounts of furry material; I’m actually in the process of liquidating large chunks of my collection (and turning a tidy profit, incidentally).
I have a job fair I need to get to; back later.
Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Pink Panther, Furs all.
In antiquity, Aesop had his Fables starring animals with human attributes.
Hell yes. The term was coined in the 80s (way before my time, so I can’t really give an exactish time-frame), and the fandom existed in various forms well before that. This chronology puts the first truly organised furry/funny animal fan group forming (rather organically, the way it’s described here) group in 1983. It doesn’t mention just when the term ‘furry’ was coined, but the way it uses the term, it’s pre-1986.
And, even before there was anything resembling an organized fandom, there were plenty of people who had a particular fascination with anthros - particularly the ‘funny animals’ that most strongly influence and inform modern furridom.
(FTR, I don’t suit, I enjoy any anthro art that registers as ‘good’ to my particular aesthetic sense, be it yiffy, serious, cute, or whatever, and I have a handful of fur characters I RP - an Anime-style catgirl, a Funny Animal style cat (male), and a couple lycanthropes and other shapechangers (of both sexes). None of them tend to be used in sexual RP.)
Also…ignore that CSI episode…it’s truly ridiculous.
I seem to remember reading native American Legends about animals that act much like humans. Coyote was always a big one.
And surely the minotaur counts for something.
Especially when you consider that the minotaur was born when Poseidon caused a king’s wife to fall in love with a steer…
snerk
Agreed. The CSI episode is silly. I return, by the way, though I’m not sure I’m quite up to trying for “How Fandom can be Bad For You”.
Does ODOR free really work?
No clue. I shower daily and never owned pets except for some tropical fish. The con I went to has a requirement in the registration agreement that you bathe; if someone complains, staff reserves the right to herd the offender into a shower. It’s pretty funk-free.
What do most furries think of Other Kin? Are there any sane, normal furries? Is the furry community pretty open to these other kinks within furrydom (like pedophilia, scat, etc). Based on the websites I’ve seen, furries tend to be more into gender-bending and bisexuality than the average population. Have you noticed this as well?
I first encountered them at science ficion conventions in the 1980s. I’m sure it’s older than that.
A lot of things we think of as Internet Stuff actually existed in the form of 'zines and privately circulated stuff. Have a look at the book High Weirdness by Mail, or old issues of a 'zine alled Factsheet Five, or others like it. For the price f a stamped, self-addressed envelope you could be admitted to the worlds of someone else’s obsesion, hobby, fantasy, or fetish. When the Internet came along, this stuff grew wings. Instead of waiting for the return of that envelope, you can now hav it instantly. A lot of the stuff from HWbM is now on the 'Net.
I don’t know for a fact that furry stuff was i this mix, but I don’t doubt it. I’ve seen furry comics an stuff that go back that far.
Depending on degree, they range from OK up through really bizarre. If you have a totem animal you strongly identify with, that’s OK. If you think you were a <whatever> in past lives, some people will think you’re a bit batty, some people will think it’s OK. I notice that people identify with “powerful” animals a lot - tigers and wolves are very popular, as are ravens, horses, and the like. You don’t see many dust mites or tapeworms. The guy who thinks he really is a dragon… pretty much everyone thinks he’s a kook.
Yeah! Well, as sane as any other fan in any other fandom, I guess. They just have a very high whackjob population, and they don’t have the sense to shut up.
Mmm… this is a good question. It’s very political, to a degree I haven’t seen anywhere else. The tempers are high because the stakes are small, I suppose. There is a large-ish contingent of the furry community that thinks that the sex-furries are all unacceptably crazy. The more deviant fetishes go through varying degrees: Infantilism, for example, raised some eyebrows but isn’t condemned, while there are intermittent bouts of outrage over the CubCentral crew (pedophile-furry art).
For the most part, the attitude seems to be “Well… it’s not my kink, but… whatever.” There’s a very strong fortress mentality going; it’s better to be unified than to break down through infighting, because the outside world is Hostile. Most artists will have general rules about what they won’t do, usually “No blood, no cubs, no bathroom play, no hyperdevelopment”, but the ones who outright condemn things earn a little controversy for it. The ones who accept really out-there work often get known for it, since the people into those will mob their commission queues. One artist I know was pretty good, but made probably twice what he would have otherwise, because he was perfectly willing to deal with the shreddies. Fetishes need to be fed, I guess.
Interestingly, copyright infringement is a much bigger sin than controversial art. Seriously. I don’t know anyone who takes their copyright infringements harder than furry. I got offered a $300 bounty for finding an infringer once (it was easy, but I never got paid). The sheer amount of Drama that can be spilled over one half-assed artist ripping off another has to be seen to be belived; the amount over a large-scale infringer is the stuff of legends.
Oh, definitely. As I mentioned in the other thread, for the first few years in there, I knew more MTF-trans people than bio-females. Most RPers seem to play across genders at least once (I knew one man playing a lesbian skunk who had a note in his RP-prefs that he didn’t want to deal with cross-gender RPers, which blew the irony meter at the time). The bisexual thing is complicated, though I think the short answer is yes. It depends on how you define it. A lot of the RPers I know have gone both ways at various times (it might even be a majority), and a lot of people collect art in different gender-pairings. I’m not sure how it goes in real life.
I keep instinctively wanting to turn to the glossary at the end of the book.
What can I help you with?
“inflation porn”
“shreddies”
Inflation porn revolves around the idea that a body (yours or your partners) can be pumped up like a balloon, either with air or with a fluid of some sort. Extreme inflation people like to fantasize about pumping to the point of bursting.
Shreddies are vore people (people who get off on the idea of eating or being eaten by their partners) who are into the rip-tear-bleed idea, as opposed to swallowing or being swallowed whole.
What’s a furry? I thought I knew, but now I’m not so sure. What’s an anthrofan?