Tag Archives: Non-Furries

This One Time at FurCon…

May 12, 2015ArticlesConventions, furry culture, Non-FurriesGuestPost
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How I Went From Ridiculing Furries to Cheering them On in Five Panels or Less

Guest post by Isaac. Isaac is that guy who is still pretty much a human, but definitely not Mundane. He likes red pandas, chocolate, and improv. You may have seen his apology post on Reddit, found him putzing around the FurNet IRC, or attempting to become America’s Next Top Popufur on Twitter as @isaacapologist. He will be at Midwest Furfest, probably. Say hi. Be gentle.

In many ways, I like to think that I ended up at a furry convention in the way that many furries end up at a furry convention: alcohol, combined with an unhealthy sense of curiosity. But the reality, I think, is even a bit more interesting than that, so I’d be happy to expand on the perfect storm of circumstances that led to my attendance at FurCon 2015, and subsequent headlong fall into the rabbit hole that is the Furry Fandom.

It’s December. I’ve just recently moved to the Bay Area, to help out a friend with a new job working in the Silicon Valley. He’s much the introverted type, I’m much more of the outgoing type, and he invites me to live out in CA for a few months to help him get acclimated and make some new friends. As I’ve since discovered, neither of us is really good at ‘going out’ to make friends, we rather prefer to just organically meet people. In practice, this works out about as well as you might imagine.

So, we are spending one of our many weekends in our living room, drinking wine, he playing video games on his computer, me watching Netflix, and I stumble upon the documentary about Bronies. I, being mildly intoxicated and fascinated with countercultures, decide to indulge in the Brony documentary. I then decide to indulge in a second Brony documentary. By this point, I am both fabulously drunk, and fabulously fascinated. I have an inception-style we’ve-got-to-go-deeper moment: If there are two documentaries about Bronies, there’s got to be one about furries.

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Evidence that Furry is Following the Rest of the World

July 11, 2013Articlesidentity, Non-Furries, SexualityGuestPost
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Guest post by Amethyst Basilisk, written as a counterpoint to JM’s article, Evidence that Furry Is Leading the Rest of the World.

One of the best benefits from participating in a creatively chaotic community such as furry is the ability to be whoever you’d like to be. It’s an important outlet for many of us – our expressions tend to come out in terms of being who we feel we’re not necessarily allowed to be from a greater cultural perspective. Most of us didn’t fit in, wherever we came from. Most of us were too geeky – too awkward, even. Too loud and boisterous, too strange or too tweaked. As a result, we’ve fled to and cultivated ourselves a safe haven from emotional treachery. The only explicit laws against fantasy in most cultures are typically put in place to prevent fraud and violence. However, there also exists a social hierarchy which takes every opportunity to reinforce one’s alleged place in its expansive machinery. A plethora of societal and financial pressures as well as generalized threats on survival are applied in order to enforce this order whenever possible. A lack of order, as the host species appears to feel, is a formula for destruction.

Furries balk at this thought. Furries pretend to be whoever the heck they want to be, regardless of what others may think of them – at least non-furries, anyway. The community attempts to shed the societal pressures; intellectual disdain; and hatred toward experimentation; to craft crafts of provocative proportions. As a result, furries are outcasts for the things they enjoy doing, allegedly hated by the rest of the world for what’s perceived as anywhere from fun to enlightenment.

One of the sad ironies of cleverly crafted utopias are their abilities to mimic and even amplify the societal sundries they’re attempting to flee. Furry is Schrödinger’s Island.

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I Am A Furry

June 23, 2012ArticlesComing Out, identity, Non-FurriesKyell
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[edited from the original version posted at Kyell’s blog]

I wrote a blog post recently about how we shouldn’t be afraid to tell our friends that we’re furries, and I got a thoughtful question on FA. Namely, why bother? It’s just a hobby, right? Do we “come out” as a stamp collector, or a Man United fan, or a Jane Austen fan?

I said in the original post that I didn’t necessarily want to compare coming out as gay with coming out as furry. The first is a preference coded into us at birth which dictates many aspects of how we live if we choose to live with a partner. The second is a not-fully-understood aesthetic appreciation for animal-people that can range in degree from a guy who likes to talk about Looney Tunes cartoons with his friends to a woman who makes a living designing fursuits and wears her own every chance she gets. But it’s telling that when people talk about telling their friends and family that they’re furries, that the phrase coming out is more and more commonly used.

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Animal Farm

March 12, 2012ArticlesNon-Furries, WritingJM
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Animal Farm is George Orwell’s 1945 classic novel.

Orwell is considered to be one of the great authors and Animal Farm, along with Nineteen Eighty-Four, is considered to be one of his masterpieces. It is about talking anthropomorphic animals that overthrow their human farmer master and run the farm on their own terms.

I recently re-read Animal Farm with the idea that I would review it for [adjective][species]. I was planning to conclude that it’s a great book, and a great furry book, and that all furries should read it.

I have re-read Animal Farm, but I’m not recommending it: don’t read Animal Farm. Read something else.

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