OHHH YEAH let’s start the year with providing possibly TMI to Internet folks, here’s a meme about furry fandom swiped from online friends!
2) at the time I was really nuts about fox anything and searched for fox pictures which got a fair amount of furry stuff. But I was also real prudish at the time, and nearly all clean art of anthro foxes was by my buddy Robin - and that mentioned FurryMUCK so I explored that!
3) the best things about the fandom are; it’s not tied to any one show or movie, it’s a space for a lot of small artists/artisans and really committed hobbyists, and it’s always changing! This is as true now as back in the 90s.
4) my first fursona was a wolf (I’d been told foxes had a rep of putting out, remember i was a total prude) with one differently colored paw (reflecting my nearly missing hand).
5) I uh don’t have one fursona but several, and none of them are actually a coyote or an otter. Current roster is a heraldic unicorn of sorts of sorts who is sometimes also a fennec or a dolphin, and a very naive wolf.
6) okay the unicorn is a shapechanger, but I thought it’d be nice to have a way more forest/somewhat fey creature with the heraldic traits and I empathize with horses (strong competent smart creature suddenly irrationally panicked). I like the eat-anything nap-anywhere water loving nature of hyenas, and I chose wolf intentionally to make that character somewhat generic.
7) all fursonas are something like who I am or want to be. F’rex I wanted to join Frank’s hyena study group in grad school, the wolf character is very much who I was in high school without the “practically under house arrest” part, and the unicorn is very much “I am an untamed creature of the forest also tell me I’m pretty and pet my hair.”
8) Let me dig through my stuff when I get home for art by Kaiven. She was REALLY good. If you’re out there somewhere, I love you, I miss you, and fuck cancer.
Images, furries, nudity, adult situation
Okay here are two drawings of fursonas rather than “stuff I thought looked pretty”; a borzoi by Diana Harlan Stein, and a Percheron with hyenas by Kaiven. The second is NSFW though I’ve covered up horse bits.
9) I will probably change fursona species at some point. I've thought about fennec fox, manul, black-footed cat, fisher, river otter, but I might go right back to being a border collie, idk.
10) my opinion of fursuits have changed over time. Initially because ears and tails were static I didn't want a suit, but thought they were technically neat (very much the "magic of special effects!" nerves). Now though I'm a lot more interested in performing as a character, and how fursuits are their own thing, part of furry's festival atmosphere and potentially a nice augment to weed (I of course would never want a fursuit for the purpose of stoned lying on the floor listening to Kyuss).
I *do* think it's a little too easy to use a great looking suit as substitute for being an okay person and I definitely think they're an overemphasized part of fandom simply because they're that visible - a little like assuming all SCAdians are fighters with their own elaborate armors.
12) I don't think I'm the big reason anyone's gotten interested in furry!
13) Paws I guess - I like handjobs and footjobs but I'm not OH WOW PAWS like some fans I know. And definitely not maws, I think because I'm a little too old to have had all of the Bluth movies with mouths be a looming influence in my childhood.
14) favorite furry character from pop culture - this is going to date me, Mrs. Elizabeth Brisby. The movie version drifted from Watership Down styled adventures right into D&D (come on, that owl?) and Mrs. Brisby's superpower in a world full of necromancer rat geniuses and huge cats is basically being kind and caring.
I'd managed to miss 11 so;
11) I absolutely love conventions despite their *built in* down sides. There's not much of a line between exciting and intense/overwhelming and exhausting; being in this big exciting space which you sunk tons of energy just *getting* to makes it entirely too easy to screw yourself up on self-acceptance, body image, alcohol, food, sleep, hygiene, etc.
long addendum
But if I can go all Barbara Ehrenreich for a moment, conventions are what humanity's all about; a big festival atmosphere, planning elaborate stuff for ages, personal involvement in ecstatic experience. That's where furry comes in; there are a lot of places where cons and music festivals can lose their way and furry, being kinda big tent and rooted in smaller scale creations, can't so much. I'm sure there's other conventions that capture that same energy though and honestly we need all of them as a counter to the sort of mass produced, conveniently sorted, profitable joy we're *supposed* to be having in this society.
@Leucrotta Hmm. There is a risk I might post that too. =:D
@porsupah do it do it gabba gabba one of us
@Leucrotta You are pretty and I want to pet your unicorn hair. And your unicorn horse cock.
@Kusimanse *flicks leonine tail, immensely pleased*
@Leucrotta pallas cat?
@eredien yeah. They are fuzzy stocky kitties and kinda evolutionarily interesting!
long addendum
i’m amazed at how many modern experiences have such strong parallels with classical mystery cults
not a furry but as a hacker c’mon i know full well how much overlap there is in those two communities
would love to know more about the experiences of participants tbh
long addendum
@Aphrodite okay so I will gladly stan Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich if you haven’t already read it. She thinks there’s this core festival/audience involvement focus that runs through anything from Greek mystery cults to 60s music festivals to football games (to Nazi rallies on the dark side of things). She posits this cycle where eventually a grassroots thing gets to be an elite thing, and then something else becomes the big audience involvement event.
1) I’ve been in furry since 1995. (promptly ages centuries in seconds screaming “what have you done to me” like at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The kids love that movie right?)