｜霜の狼｜人面獣心」
hi
NOT ALL FURRIES ARE ANTHRO
or "anthropomorphic" either
thank you
I really fucking hate seeing an implied "furries are anthro and/or anthropomorphic" with no indication that ferals and such exist, at LEAST once a week.
And yes. This is important.
When you go "furries are anthropomorphic animals" you are erasing people like me. We exist. We're not fucking going anywhere.
"but MOST people are anthro!"
I literally do not fucking care.
anyway yeah
this happens all the damn time and I'm sick of it
This also ties into the split between Nonhuman Furry where people are literally animals (transspecies gang!) and Human Furry where somehow everyone's just pretending while still being human.
Feels like the Human Furries took over everything – it sounds like it wasn't always like this and you could just be yourself without having a "fursona", long before we found furry?? damn I wish... – and act like the Nonhuman Furries don't exist. Sometimes I feel incredibly unwelcome in furry in general.
longish
@frost Furry started with some fairly imaginative people - afaik they were pretty sure they were humans, but they're coming out of a lot of 60s counter cultural holdovers in the 70s and 80s, much like the first Otherkin. Sometime in the 90s you get both "furry lifestylers" - basically therians - and Otherkin, who tended to be on alt.fan.dragons or the werewolf equivalent. Neither group liked each other; the weres were sure furries just saw it as a costume, a joke, and the furries saw the lifestylers/weres as taking it too seriously (and they took it REALLY SERIOUSLY - there was a lot of "prove you're a REAL were" equivalent to making women go through all sorts of mental gymnastics to prove they're trans).
Over the last 20 years things have shifted such that if you're a therian, you've probably been around furries and are okay with that (and most furries are cool with therians).
Fursonas get a little more complex because they're an early fandom thing that came about by accident and persisted; one of the earliest furries, Ken Sample, consistently portrayed himself as a cougar, and everyone around him thought this was a great idea. And of course, where fursonas are basically roleplaying people can and do swap out (my first fursona was a wolf, would you believe it?). Nobody's ever required a fursona - and I can think of one therian who's literally never *had* a separate fursona - but it wound up accepted as a shorthand.
longish
@Leucrotta Also wow. We had no idea of the mutual hatred there.
Sounds like that would have been... awkward all around, if we'd been around then.
re: longish
@frost "anthro" as terminology gets complex, since the really technical meaning of "having human traits" like talking is pretty consistent - there are still plenty of online and art characters who are quads/ferals/etc, f'rex the characters in The Fox and the Hound are definitely anthros by the standards of early fandom! - but it tends to get shortcut into "bipedal with obvious hands." I'd argue you *can* be "anthro" and be/self-represent as a quad or feral, *but* as a caveat, I honestly don't think there's all *that* much difference between humans and other animals anyway.
re: longish
@Leucrotta huh, neat. and yeah!
I'm not "anthro" in /either/ sense, personally. People sometimes say I have to be anthro and/or anthropomorphic by definition, because I talk and shit, and like, no. (Calling me humanlike like that makes me bristle.)
like, I can be totally nonhuman and talk! :3 Right there with you on not much difference.
longish
@Leucrotta huh!!
*raises paw* Count me in as one of the people who's literally never had a separate fursona. (Same for all my headmates too.) I'm just me, have always been.