💭 If the characters used to represent and promote organized proto-furry meets were like, weird colorful psychic alien hybrid critters, does that mean postfurry has existed as long as furry has?
@indi both are extremely good and valid, and both can come from a variety of different wants, needs and backstories within the realm of the human mind. but there's always gonna be the summer camp people and the Burning Man people
@distressedegg @indi *NODS FIRMLY* YEAH this n.n
@distressedegg I mean I do also believe that the "I'm just here for the art" folks exist, phantomlike, at the fringes, even now. But yeah, agreed. :)
@distressedegg But yeah I think the germane point is, those spectator-type folks were literally never the majority.
@indi these days there's absolutely a large quantity of them out there, like a ring around the planet. i meet artists who are low-key into furry stuff all the time in comic circles. LOTS of people would be flat-out furries in a slightly different timeline, but i think the community is a little too intense and solidified in what it is and isn't for a lot of folks to feel comfortable in right now
@indi and i think that's due to a variety of factors and some of them aren't necessarily things that can be fixed overnight, to be fair
@distressedegg @indi I like that second category.
@indi yeah.
And the likes of you and me have been around for a big percentage too
@indi Chakats and citras and sergals, oh my!
@indi The way "furry" grew out of SF fandom is really complicated and weird. Like, any "serious" first-gen furry work pretty much *had* to have some kind of explanation of why all these animal-people are running around - maybe they're aliens who happen to look a lot like big cats or whatever, maybe they were made by humans to be some sort of slave class, maybe they were made by humans for noble and charitable reasons, whatever.
Now we just don't care. They're animal-people and there's a degree of metaphor to it and we pretty much all just roll with it and have fun.
@anthracite @indi I still generally justify my critters as being plausible within reality just because it's what I'm used to in terms of science fiction storytelling.
Like Unity is basically an Inherit The Earth scenario, with added "the humans also did harebrained genetic experimentation in their spare time" sauce.
But things just being furry is also totally valid. :)
@anthracite @indi Yeah, the Unity critters are more like, humans planted the seeds (accidentally) and then left, and there's a reverse-uplift situation going on too, and like most of the uplifting actually came from another one of the species that emerged within their arc.
It was ALMOST incidental to the story except I was telling a story about long-term thinking and what it means to have continuity of existence and whatever. Sort of a genealogical Ship of Theseus.
@indi I was nearly a skiltaire once! Until I realized how weirdly restrictive the species guidelines were.
Joke's on them, I'm still an electric otter. :-P
@indi i think that at any point on the timeline you can essentially sift furry into two different categories, the "what if i could tweak my own reality slightly" category and the "what if i could tweak my own reality TO A SUPER FUCKING WILD-ASS DEGREE" category