@Leucrotta But yeah, anthro forms seem VERY correlated with people-who-are-actually-human-just-pretending-to-be-"animal"-while-not-actually-being-animal.

@Leucrotta Also I'd say, beyond just "not an idealization", for therians being feral doesn't have anything to do with "being human" at ALL! 🐺

@Leucrotta ...I do not get human furries, and don't think I ever will. The concept of "oh yeah I'm an animal haha what do you mean ACTUALLY an animal of course not, I'm human and just pretending (what do you mean you're actually a wolf and actually you not a character, ew WTF)" is so alien to us.

(Stacked with the whole "pretending to be a literal different person" thing (and getting weird if you treat them as a person in their own right!), which I don't think I'll ever get either and is even /more/ alien.)

@Leucrotta ..so yeah, I feel pretty dang unwelcome in furry a lot of the time. >,,<

@Leucrotta huh, yunno

this whole "human as animal" thing is a /perfect/ example of Humans Humaning.

Even when they're presenting as animals, they still gotta go "but look see we're still HUMAN of course because HUMANITY is so IMPORTANT and fundamental to what it means to be a person".

@Leucrotta Can't have people seeing them as actual nonhumans, that'd be Weird Bad and/or make no sense because Nonhumans Aren't People dontchaknow!

It seems a lot of humans are just fundamentally /unable to get the concept/ that "human" and "person" are not equivalent. It's just baffling.

@Leucrotta anyway I'm up to like, 8 posts now of rambles and you're not interacting right now so hopefully this isn't unwanted and I should probably stop.

@frost I fell asleep pretty much immediately after posting (was falling asleep *while* posting)!

reading back some

@Leucrotta 🧡 yeah, I figured you'd just fallen asleep probably!

@frost I feel like festivals, costumes and art are part of the innate nature of humans. Part of what defines humans as *animals*, so it makes sense that theater and fiction would wind up gravitating to animal imagery.

So the role-playing as animals makes sense to me. If you're going to talk about stuff as a spectrum, where one end is a Victorian completely humanocentric view of the universe and the other end are say therians, furry's definitely somewhere on that spectrum.

@Leucrotta Huhhh. Didn't think of it as a spectrum.

@Leucrotta (...I feel like I should note that once you get to the therian end, I'm not human in any way >,,>)
(I know you didn't mean to imply that, 'specially since you're therian yourself! It just felt like "Types Of Human: xyz" so yeah, one end of that spectrum is Very Not Human.)
(and edit: it's probably just "human—nonhuman", haha oop. *cough*)

...I wonder if furries are less human [in a good way] than full human-presenting humans.

@Leucrotta There's actually probably TWO spectrums here, human—animal presentation, and human—animal identity.

There's feral human furries, and then there's feral therians like us, and we look identical from the outside but one's human and the other isn't.

@Leucrotta ...but back to your general humanity-vs.-not spectrum and pretendness...

...huh yeah, that's another weird thing about mainstream furry to me. How pretend it all is. Everyone's faking and assumes everyone ELSE is faking too. "We're all just humans faking here, everyone knows that!"

It makes some sort of weird sense when considered in isolation, like how plays are a thing... but it all breaks down when you add us to the mix.

(and it also stops making sense when people get really weird about "this is me but also not", but that's a big tangent.)

@Kusimanse And Spirit, then if you go further the Americanized Godzilla/cartoon and Jurassic Park's dinosaurs. The 90s really had a lot of animal characters beyond just obvious cartoons.

Why this is I'm not sure, but I think someone smarter than me could probably relate imagery *within* furry fandom to mainstream animal imagery to the larger sense of what's going on (in the 90s "our planet is dying" is a big revelation, in 2024, "our planet is dying" is pretty accepted "common sense").

@Leucrotta Oh yeah, there's certainly studies to be made about how and why Ferals, anthros, OCs become popular. Media influence does happen (MLP:FIM, Sonic, TLk) but also social/cultureal trends.

@Kusimanse Now what I really wonder is whether there's a gestalt of "stuff that makes potential furries and just people in media think about producing quasi-furry content, such that the potential fan is thinking about this stuff ANYWAY and then gets hit by quasi-furry media and goes, oh hey yeah I like this.

@Leucrotta It could be a trend, could be marketing hype (Kung Fu Panda made money, let's do Karate Penguin!).. there are trends for sure.