[adjective][species]

I spent a night a while back cooking dinner for my fiancé , who was sick with the flu and a sinus infection. Though I was either cooking or working, we had a few moments of banality together, talking about work or taking NyQuil for the night. Eventually, I sent him to bed before he could start another TV show; I was feeling jealous that I was working so much and he had taken the day off. We said our goodnights and our I love yous, and he left to go lay down. As he did so, I was immediately struck by how weird the whole evening was to me, then fascinated that such would be the case. The whole night was totally banal, as are so many others, but it took place in person: something relatively unique to me and seemingly uncommon in the circles in which I hang out in the fandom. Even all of my relationships that weren’t strictly based online still had some interaction in that arena, and I think there are a few good reasons for this.

Furry is really important to me. Like, really, really important. I’ve thoroughly entrenched myself in the fandom, have lived it for more than a decade, and relish every moment of my interactions with it. That’s the whole reason I started this blog, really: the act of writing helps me understand what this is and why it’s important to me, and the act of sharing what I write is one way that I feel I can give back to the community that has meant so much to me. I’ve written about a lot, lately, and I feel that my topics have been fairly diverse, but not without their common threads. Of course, there’s the difference between how we feel and how we act, and the importance of a separate character from our selves, but what I think is the most important attribute of our fandom is the way we interact and the relationships we form with each other in the context of furry. There is a reason that the most-used tag on this site is the social interaction tag. Second to that is, of course, “Internet”, and the obvious combination of the two leads us to online relationships – that is, dating – which play an outsized role in our community.

I am no stranger to online relationships. Far from it, in fact: I think I can say that my online relationships outnumber my in-person relationships two or even three to one. One of the big draws to having a relationship online in a culture that is based in large part on the Internet is that you gain the advantage of the selection bias: by interacting in a primarily furry setting, you have at your disposal for potential partners primarily furries. A good part of a relationship lies in having a good deal in common with your partner, and that is almost built into the fandom. You likely have a group of people with similar levels of technological aptitude, a ready-made shared interest in anthropomorphics, and you don’t have to explain your activities to your partner. That you share this ahead of time makes a good case for dating within the fandom. It’s simply easier, perhaps healthier to be in a relationship with another furry.

I went through a relationship with a non-furry a few years ago, and while I cared for my partner deeply, there was always this thing we could never quite share. It’s not that we didn’t have other things in common, nor that we didn’t talk about furry. It was that there was this bond that I shared with other people that I could just never share with her, not without her becoming a part of the fandom,which is something I could never force her to do, and she did not seem interested in doing on her own. I still care for her and do miss some aspects of going out with a non-fur: particularly, I miss the fact that it often caused me to step back and take a look at the things that I was doing or saying or thinking as part of this subculture from and outside perspective. While I’ve always considered myself a fairly introspective person, I can honestly say that this was probably the first time that I had started to really look into what furry meant to me, particularly because either it or my relationship was on the line. The relationship didn’t last and was probably never meant to, with this another differences keeping us apart.

Another thing that that relationship lacked was not only the interaction between the two parties on a personal level, but interaction on a character level. Even though my fiancé and I rarely talk online (he’s a terrible speller – sorry, James!), we still have this multi-layered relationship that may be essential for a couple within the fandom. For furries, you have to interact well as a couple not only on a personal level, but as characters and vice versa, and this is one of the reasons several of my other relationships did not work out quite as well as either party had hoped. Although things may have been spectacular or mind blowing online, you’re just not really an eFox or iWolf in person (probably). Species aside, our characters are very much front-stage constructs, in the Erving Goffman sense. We build up these characters to emphasize or even take on attributes that may be lacking in us, and that’s what helps to make them a separate entity from our true self. It’s amazing to think back on all of the wonderful times I have had over the years in the relationships I’ve been a part of and realize that, when thought of that way, it’s like watching two completely separate people fall in love: my iFox to your eWhatever, and you and I are only the narrators, or the readers of a story.

More than just these separate aspects of our personas, however, is the barriers inherent in online interaction, particularly in a furry setting. The best, and also quite possibly the worst thing about online interaction is that, being primarily text based, you have the ability to construct your persona moreso than usual. You have the ability to reread what you’re about to say, and the ability to build a reply that is carefully designed with the other party in mind. It comes as a shock interacting with someone in real life after having only had the ability to interact with them online for so long. This is, of course, especially true when there are additional levels of fantasy involved in your interactions, the most salient example being gender play: not only are you constructing your front-stage avatar with this additional type of foresight, but you are changing a very basic fact about yourself in the process. Gender roles are complicated things that have their tie-ins even with role-play online as animal people, and when those roles are inverted or otherwise changed between the two settings of online and off, the interaction between the parties of the relationship is put at risk.  Even so, it’s important to have that interaction between both character and self within the relationship, offline and on. James is still my dog, and I’m still his…whatever species I am that day, even though we’re both grown men working our day jobs and taking care of each other when we get sick.

All of this relies on technology, though. It relies on the fact that we, as a group, tend to be some fairly tech-savvy people. I write these articles on an iPad, sync them to a remote site, then publish them on a copy of WordPress that I set up myself on a server I purchased space on myself, with a domain name I obtained myself. That may fly as impressive with, say, my folks, but I can already hear the jeers from my audience that I even mentioned an Apple product (hey, it was free, alright?). We are some pretty tech-literate folk, and that just adds to our relationships with each other. It takes a certain type of willingness to embed a portion of our lives in this thin layer of augmented reality that hovers over, beneath, and through everything else, and a certain type of person to find the thought of that enjoyable as compared to perhaps going out to a bar in an attempt to pick up a date.

This is not to say that we’re all nerds or anything. In fact, I’m pretty sure that much of the stigma that affects “nerds” outside the fandom translates to within it as well. Rather, we are a group of people that has embraced the technology around us and made it part of our lives, even if we don’t necessarily know, or even care how it works. We may not always be cutting edge, but we are contemporary with our generations, and maybe even a little ahead of the game, in general, and that may just serve as the basis for much of the social interaction within our subculture, and the relationships within that, taking at least second-seat to our interest in anthropomorphising animals.

I should wrap up by saying that I am not against online relationships in any way. That they didn’t work for me in the end is a fact I’ve come to accept, and that some of them led to pain on my partners’ end is something I deeply regret. But in the long run, I feel that I am who I am today in large part because of them – I’m one of those “even the bad times are beneficial” guys. I think that any chance we, as furs, get to share in the closeness of our bonds to each other and our characters’ relationships is worth taking, for sure. Online relationships have become almost an integral part of our fandom and it would be strange to see the culture without them in the fore. Love itself is too big a topic for a lay-fox like myself to even begin to comprehend; I’m simply glad that I had and have the chance to experience so much of it with such an awesome crowd, both on the ‘net and off.

Yeah, you probably haven’t seen it. It’s pretty underground.

I first began to suspect a furry:hipster overlap in the dealer’s den at Furry Weekend Atlanta, when I observed that the ratio of hat-wearing men was precipitously high. Not ballcaps, mind you — fedoras, flat caps, bowlers, and other examples of the sort of headwear that one would expect to find less in Atlanta than in, say, 1954.

If hats aren’t your thing (and how do you fit your ears through them, anyway?) you may defer instead to the Skinny Jean Quotient, which is also elevated. If anybody asks why you’re staring at their pants, just tell them it’s for research. Nobody wants to stand in the way of science.

As it happens, this helps explain a lingering geographic dilemma I’ve had. If you take a bunch of furries and group them by state, you can create a sort of density map: what percentage of furries live in any given state compared to what percentage of Americans in general reside there.

When you do this, you don’t find too many anomalies. Furries are underrepresented in New York, possibly because, let’s face it, most of us can’t afford to live there. And in general it’s what you’d expect: we’re slightly less common in the American South; more common on the west coast. Standing out as islands, as compared to their surrounding states: the Pacific Northwest, Michigan, and Colorado.

What’s the common thread?

By instinct, you want to look for furries in high tech density areas, because the basic idea that “furry=geek” is pretty well established. But only 8% of furries work in technology fields; a majority, 60%, are students of some stripe or another. This latter angle bids I point out that these islands are, for example, also where you can score high-quality pot. But I’m sure furries know nothing of that (certainly I don’t; I don’t like smoking, and I can’t eat brownies because chocolate is poisonous for dogs).

Anyway, when seen through a hipster lens, the inclusion of places like Portland, Seattle, Denver, and Ann Arbor suddenly fall into place. And this helps to explain the hat-wearing. It also helps to explain the results of a microsurvey I put together a few weeks back. I asked several hundred people 32 questions on their personal beliefs and behaviors, and I plugged this into a sinister machine of my own devising, the Behavioral and Attitudinal Tabulation, Mapping, and Analysis Navigator.

I asked BATMAN for “two-box” responses: when it tells me a general skew, it’s because a given respondent either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” (conversely: “disagreed” or “strongly disagreed”), leaving out the middle parts and focusing on the extremes. The computational engine whirred and thunked, and then it told me this:

• 80% of furries say that trying new things is fun and interesting
• 36% say they’re often the first person in their group of friends to try something new
• 29% say their friends look to them for advice on music, movies, games and so forth

BATMAN pointed out, in its surly fashion, that only 10% of furries say they’re ahead of the curve where pop culture is concerned. But that’s not surprising, actually: 44% describe mass media as being too “lowest common denominator” for them and 41% describe corporations and their products as “rather soulless.” That probably explains why 55% of furries agree or strongly agree that they’d rather patronise a small business.

These figures are all positively correlated with each other: the more likely you are to be asked for advice by your friends, the more likely you are to reject mainstream pop culture and the more likely you are to gravitate to small businesses. They’re also related to the creative spark: 58% of furries say creativity is one of their strongest assets, and 37% say they’d rather make something than buy it.

Beyond the numbers, this shouldn’t really be surprising to anyone who has spent much time around the fandom. We trade heavily in social currency — who you know and how well you know them. Listen in at the discussions at your next convention:

“Oh my god, who did that drawing?”
“Is that conbadge one of…?”
“Have you read…?”
“This is the new work by…”
“I’m getting a commission from…”

It’s all about the names. And since nobody is, let’s be honest here, really going to break out of the furry fandom, celebrity here has to be milked for what it’s worth. So there’s a fair degree of bandwagoning, as well, and you can get props for picking up a ‘famous’ person’s work at the auction just as easily as by discovering an up and coming artist on FA.

I don’t think it’s a particularly mysterious phenomenon. Hipsterism tends to arise in bohemian cultures where monetary capital is undervalued (either because everybody has money or nobody does). We’re certainly bohemian — on the fringes of social acceptability, wildly creative, anti-establishment, consuming mass media and pop culture only as far as it lets us repurpose it…

And, of course, money has no value in the fandom because we’re all digital here. Physical possessions and the means to acquire them are, more or less, completely irrelevant. As long as you have enough money to pay your ISP, you can plug into the fandom. So establishing your credibility has to rely on something else, and social capital steps in to fill that gap.

Some of this we can acquire by dint of our own creativity — those of us who are skilled at drawing, writing, music-making, fursuiting, roleplaying, or any other audience-focused activity can trade our abilities there for recognition and status. And if we can’t make things ourselves, we can know people who make things, and serve as a proxy to their own works: being the first person to share a new picture or story is the next best thing to having written it yourself.

Every meeting of furries I have ever been party to inevitably involves some modicum of gossip and discussion, frequently about those people whose talents we respect (or envy) and whose work we enjoy. And gossip, too, is essentially hipsterish: we prove how “in the know” we are by being the first to a scoop (or, if not the first, by having the most information!). It’s the common ground, for when novelty-seeking iconoclasts band together.

So we have attracted some of the trappings of what, ironically, I would have to call mainstream hipsterdom: the self-referential humor, the love of memes, the unorthodox fashion. To this we have added our own spin: I joke about having a mole for a furry avatar, but I’ve seen species propagate from a single point — somebody cool decided they were going to be something, and a bunch of people jumped right on. And artists acquire the same fetishistic attachment here as they do in any Seattle enclave.

But before you all try and close the circle by Rule 34ing Hipster Kitty, let me suggest that it’s not such a terrible thing. It’s who we are, and in a sense it’s what makes us unique: a shared sense of identity, a shared love of the new, the interesting, the exciting, the different, the crazy, the creative, the passionate. You could do worse than that, and if it helps you find a great new artist or two, your life’s all the richer.

Besides, at least PBR is cheap.

What is in a name, anyway? For us here in the fandom, a name can be several things: a pseudonym, a description, even a whole other being, however fictional.  It’s safe to say, then, that names are pretty important to furries, and so maybe that’s worth taking a look at.  You have to start somewhere, so lets begin with how to construct a name.  There are, of course, many other ways to construct a name, but we’ve listed just a few of the best here.

• [adjective][species] – This, of course, goes without saying. It’s the only method of choosing a furname that’s endorsed by an entire website. On the Internet! The pros? Well, obviously, the first impression will go much smoother, now that everyone knows your a SlutFox or an AngstWolf*.  There is simply no mistaking what you are, is there? It’s also food for subversion! Who knew, SlutFox is a virgin, and AngstWolf is really doing pretty alright in life!  As for the cons, well, if you can’t change the name, but you wind up changing your species, you could be SOL.
• The suedonym – Sometimes, you just can’t think of a name.  Or…well, you can, but they’re all taken.  Well, that’s no reason to stop you!  Why, I was once !Xabbu (from a book by Tad Williams), then Ranna (from a book by Garth Nix), who then became Astarael (same book).  The pros – don’t really need to think too hard; it might already be memorable! The cons – it might already be memorable as something else; it might already be memorable by many others (I wasn’t the only Ranna…). Subcategory: The they-can’t-suedonym - You know, if works even better if you don’t have to worry about the problems associated with a stolen name.  Like if the author or origin is long dead.  I knew a cat named Merlin, for instance.
• The appropriation - Why not just appropriate another word for yourself?  I very rarely go by Happenstance, which is also the name of a French film (pure happenstance, of course).  I have a good friend named Whiskey, too.  That’s good, I like whiskey and Whiskey!  Pros: pretty memorable. Cons: this one’s pretty safe, actually. Subcategory: l’appropriation - Bonus points if you appropriate from another language.  Just.. be careful of Japanese, okay?  There are a few Ookamis out there.
• The punny animal - Of course, these are totally memorable for reasons that make people want to hit you in the mouth.  My otter-sona is named Macchi.  As in Macchi-otter.  In fact, the back story is that he’s got light fur and his parents weren’t very inventive, so they named him Caramel.  Caramel “Macchi” Otter.  Sigh.  Pros: totally memorable.  Cons: people want to hit you in the mouth.  Subcategory: The recondite lingual obfuscation of humorous intent - If the pun of your name takes more than a few words to explain it…may actually be a pretty good name, because then people won’t hit you in the mouth so much.
• The real name - I…er…hmm.  I guess I may have met someone who used their real name once.  Maybe?  I mean…hmm.  Hey, was that guy Ty really named Ty?  Does Karlhockey count? This could be big, guys, I don’t know…maybe the new, unique trend in furry pseudonyms would be to just use your real name.  I mean, that’s pretty inventive, and it’s already © you… Pros: inventive.  Cons: now they know your name.

* See: http://rikoshi.gd-kun.net/furry.html

Hey!  You!  Are you a furry writer?  Or an avid reader of furry fiction?  Yeah?  Well, we want you!

We’ve been spending a good amount of time on visual art, recently, and as we peek through the drafts and ideas for the upcoming year’s articles, there’s still plenty more where that came from!  We’d like to start branching out, however.  In order to get a broader perspective on the furry writing scene, we’re trying something new: we’d like to feature three short pieces about tropes in furry fiction.  A trope is an idea, technique, or metaphor that carries through multiple, unconnected works; as TVTropes puts it: “Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations”.  We’re looking to explore a few of these which are either specific to furry writing, or weirdly out of proportion in our genre.  Keep reading for the rules!

The Rules

We’re looking to pick three entries from three different people in order to highlight some of the tropes common in furry writing.  You may point these tropes out in a humorous fashion, find a unique way to hang a lampshade on them, to subvert, avert, or invert them, or point out if they are particularly effective.  Three winners will be published here as an entry with proper credit, links back to galleries or websites, and a sentence about the author.

• Enter as many times as you want; if you provide more than one entry in a submission, please make sure they’re easily distinguished.
• Submissions should be 500-1000 words.
• Please include a short sentence about yourself and/or your character, as well as a link if you wish (website, FA or SoFurry gallery, etc).
• Cite any quotes you include.
• If your submission is fiction, please provide a description of the trope you are highlighting in order to make sorting easier (we’re aiming for three different tropes).

Please email your submissions to [email protected] by 12:00 AM, Mountain Time, Tuesday, January 31, 2012. Fine print

You will be notified in advance whether or not your entry is selected.  Only one entry will be selected per person.  By entering, you’re giving us the right to publish your entry here on http://adjectivespecies.com with proper attribution.  You may be contacted again if there are additional publishing opportunities for your entry (we will never spam, nor share your address, of course).  We may edit your entry for style, spelling, and grammar, and will notify you in advance if we do so.  If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to contact us at [email protected].

It was suggested by a few folks that it would be good to do a semi-regular feature on some of the wonderful art that gets lost in the torrent of furry porn (which certainly has its place in our fandom).  For this post, we’ll be taking a look at Chris Goodwin on FA, who has been posting small drawings and paintings to his “Overheard” series for a while now.

Overheard - No, it's fine...

Taking overheard snippets of conversations and turning them into short two- or three-panel cartoons, Goodwin has created several small slice-of-life images, humorous and touching both.  While they contain anthropomorphic animals, these images aren’t strictly Just Furry, but represent conversations anyone could imagine themselves having or hearing out in the world at large.

Overheard - I just don't think it's that cold

I’m really no art writer, but one of the most striking and beautiful things about these images is the way each of the panels are tied together, both stylistically with their thin, sketchy lines, and through the use of a dominant color scheme.

Overheard - I will speak with you when you are not

Each of these comics can be read on its own, there is no arc, of course, but taking them all in one right after another gives the impression of travelling through Boston on a cold-ish day, stopping by a coffee shop on the way to the station.

Overheard - Well, maybe it's just a phase

The composition and art is beautiful, the colors captivating, and the subject matter often touching or heart-breaking.  Please, check out this awesome set on FA.

If you have or have found some interesting, out-of-the-ordinary art and would like to have it featured here, please let us know, and we’ll see about creating a small write-up here.  The only guidelines are that it should be unique in some way, different from the flood of porn that seems to take up most of the art sites out there; and that it should be either a set of images or a larger work, such as a graphic novel or comic.

I was too excited to sleep, the night before Anthrocon 2005.  It was the first convention I would be going to, I’d be meeting some truly awesome people for the first time basically the minute I stepped into the hotel, and sleep just wasn’t going to happen.  In order to make sure that I could make it down to the airport without crashing or anything, I planned on subsisting almost completely on black tea through the night, then stopping on Starbucks twice on the way down from Fort Collins to Denver.  Unfortunately, both my roommates were asleep, so I was listening to music on my headphones.  I had forgotten that I had put the kettle on for tea, so I was interrupted from my jittery reverie by my roommate knocking on my door to inform me that the kettle had been whistling for five minutes or so by that point.  I was lucky I hadn’t boiled it dry.

With the lack of sleep and my excitement, I was basically useless for the first day of the convention.  I got into Philadelphia at around 2:30 or so in the afternoon and to the hotel by 3PM.  I stumbled into the lobby and met, for the first time, my friends, some of whom I had known for five years, by that point.

Due to my age and some lingering doubts about meeting furries, I had never really planned on going to a convention, at least not until the beginning of 2005.  I had met furries in person before, of course; my partner and I had visited each other on several occasions for the years previous, and I had a small group of furry friends around me throughout high school and moving into college.  It wasn’t really until March or April of 2005 that I started really meeting more and more members of the fandom, and then only when I was dragged to a local furmeet by a friend of mine, where I had plenty of fun.

The problem with conventions for me until that point was two-fold: first of all, there was this negative stereotype floating around about who furries were and how they interacted with each other – the most succinct comment to this was the oft-quoted “by and large, furries are bi and large” – which I found vaguely disturbing; and secondly, I was so used to interacting with my friends online that I wasn’t quite sure how well interacting in person with them was going to work out.  I knew, for instance, that my friend was a five and a half foot tall red fox on the Internet, but I had been assured that he was a good bit taller and most likely not actually a fox in person.  How would I interact with him?  I knew for sure that I wasn’t also a fox, so there were probably certain things that we were used to doing that wouldn’t likely happen in person: no swishing, for instance, and there would probably a dearth of nuzzling, murring, and all the rest.

Having started to interact more with furs offline, however, much of my fears were allayed, and I warmed quickly to the concept of heading out to a convention.  The people I had been meeting were normal people, and we had a ready-made topic of conversation.  I figured things would be fine with a few more of them around.  I pulled my money together and flew out to the final Anthrocon in Philly.  Rather than finding a bunch of normal people milling around with a ready-made topic of conversation, though, I found that conventions were a little more complicated than just that.

For me, the first con was all about validation.  It wasn’t so much that I was around a bunch of people who could talk about the latest fursuit they’d seen or bit of gossip they heard.  It was more than just a group of people, period.  Furry wasn’t something we did, it was something we were.  I hadn’t understood the concept of a furry lifestyle until then, but that certainly cemented home the fact that we weren’t just partaking in a hobby, but interacting with others who also had this integral part of their lives, and expressing that with them.  I don’t really mean to wax rhapsodic about my first con, it wasn’t all sunshine and scritches, just that it was certainly more than I had hoped for: my friends and I got along just as wonderfully in person as we did online.

It also helped drive home the idea that conventions are more than just a bunch of people interacting in person rather than online.  I talked to several of my friends that I had met at the local furmeet online and interacting in either location was just a matter of either typing or talking, it didn’t matter which.  A convention, however, is more a unique medium.  It’s not just a big furmeet, and it’s not just furries interacting offline instead of on; everything works slightly differently in a con setting.  It’s as if, after a certain number of attendees (lets say twenty five), or in a certain location (almost always a hotel), we cease being interested parties and become a little society of our own, with our own mores and modes of interaction.

Since I was pretty effectively hooked after that first convention, I did my best to head to several more after that, making several more Anthrocons and man Further Confusions, as well.  While I enjoyed my first few conventions in a near ecstatic state, I settled down soon after to relax and enjoy my time in these new surroundings and  in this new society.  Conventions have a rhythm to them, a tempo, or a curve.  There’s the building excitement leading up to the trip, the hassle of packing and flying, and the first exciting few hours catching up with your friends and having a few drinks, then the sustained joy over the next few days until things start to wind down, with more people leaving the area, having to go to bed early to make their early flights, crying in the hallways, lobby, and airport.  It’s something you settle into like a comfortable sort of routine.  Every convention’s different, of course, but I think the general experience follows that same ramp up, sustained level, then tapering off, even if, in the case of Camp Feral, there’s that last trip back out of the woods tossed in.

There are a few other seeming universals tossed in along with the convention.  It does seem possible to break the attendees down into several fairly constant categories:

• The New Attendee - Bright eyed, in the throes of ecstasy, the new attendee is easy to pick out from all other groups (excepting perhaps The Nut) as the one who is mostly gung-ho about everything.  They want to go to all the events, the want to ogle all the suits, they want to hug all their friends.  These folks are really relatively harmless, and they help keep the conventions exciting for those who frequent them.
• The Nut - Similar to The New Attendee, this person is totally gung-ho about everything, except that it’s almost certainly not their first con.  They have the relentless, determined enthusiasm that drives many groups to go to events or check out new restaurants in the area, or, on the flipside, drives many people nuts.  While it’s nice to keep some of that joy from the first visit to a furry con, and it certainly is good to keep experiencing them, sometimes it’s best to just calm down, breathe…
  
•  The Lobby Lounger - Sitting in the lobby and ordering a ceaseless round of drinks (even if they’re just waters), drawing and kibitzing, texting all their friends to tell them to “just meet me in the lobby”, this attendee is a near permanent fixture in the lobby of the main hotel, preferring to soak the con up rather than necessarily go out and experience it in panels and the like.
  
• The Wanderer - Wandering from lobby to Dealer’s Den to Artist’s Alley to the panels to their room to restaurants to the lobby ad nauseum, this person is easy to find, but not so easy to pin down for plans – why stop? They might miss something!  Of course, having spent the whole convention wandering around, there’s a chance they actually saw less than the might have otherwise.  An important sub-category of this is The Fursuiter, who wanders around with good reason – it’s hard to do anything in one place for long without overheating or, heaven forbid, not get quite enough attention.
• The Worker - There’s always money to be made at conventions, or if not money, a little bit of power, however benign.  The Worker is the artist who will work their way through the con to hopefully come out of the affair net positive, or the volunteer who will check badges at the door to do their part for the convention.  Even if it might be difficult to to see them for more than a few minutes at a time, they’re still an integral part of the con atmosphere.

There’s another universal almost too obvious to mention: convention badges.  Most any convention has their own, obviously, but within our fandom, it’s customary to not only wear the membership badge, but also art badges created specifically for the wearer.  These small, commissioned bits of wearable art represent the owner’s character, another unique artifact of the difference between our selves and our characters.  So unique, in fact, that, concurrent with the upcoming Further Confusion, there will be a portion of a gallery exhibition in San Jose dedicated strictly to the art of the con badge.  They act as a way to help carry our characters into our real-life interactions and blur the line between the two somewhat.  We may not all be dressed up like our creations, nor can we all swish and bark and so on, but at least we have a sign of just who we are visible to those around us.

Of course, anyone who has been to a furry convention knows the basic duck-and-weave of the con greeting.  With the near-absolute saturation of con badges, it’s be come standard practice to approach someone looking at their chest, sleeves, or belt, wherever they’ve hung their badges.  Depending on how friendly you are and whether or not you know the other person, you might jump straight into a hug after that, or start chattering right away.  If you don’t know them, of course, you still know more about them after that brief glance than you might if you had just met on the street, and that’s something we’ve written about before.  It gives a whole new meaning to “my face is up here” (and, of course, if you put a QR code on your badge, now they’re pointing a camera at their chest…).

The mystique surrounding the convention and the medium of interaction that it represents is an integral part of the fandom.  For many, our conventions are the high point of the year, a time to both see friends we rarely get the chance to see and blur the line between our selves and our characters.  It’s the time when we get to let down our guard somewhat and show some of our back-stage selves, show some emotion with how we feel about our little subculture, and maybe even act a fool in a giant animal costume.  They’re the time for us to live out our culture in person.  It’s interesting that, with a group based so strongly on interaction on the Internet, some of our highest points are the times when we get off the ‘net and hang out in person – whether it be to relax, to have fun, or to make money.

I’ll see you guys at Further Confusion 2012!

After the most recent article about suiting, it has been brought to my attention by several folks that I spent most of my time talking about suiting at cons and interacting only with other furries.  Of course, that’s not the only context in which fursuiters don their garb!  In the spirit of providing a more inclusive look into the costuming side of the fandom, I’m going to be pulling together a few of these vignettes on different aspects of fursuiting.  If you have any suggestions* to make regarding some unique use of suiting outside of the con scene, please feel free to either leave comments on this post, or email them to [email protected].  You can also send them to our Twitter, Google+, or FA accounts!

Our first example of suiting in a unique way comes from a submission, and included a neat little story:

When I first got my fursuit, I promised myself I’d use it for at least one charitable cause, which ended up becoming a pretty extensive fundraiser campaign. The premise is that myself and anyone I can get involved will keep making fun fursuit videos as long as people keep donating to our target charity

Furs For Life is a fundraiser for Red Cross, and helps in the charitable cause by advertising, primarily through the use of their YouTube channel where they’ve amassed several videos.   Of course, this includes the obligatory Thriller dance video.

They have their own Red Cross donation channel set up to use (use the link, or funds won’t be counted), and have pulled together about two and a half grand so far this year, which, hey, is pretty good!

* These aren’t going to be paid sponsorships or anything, and this is, perhaps, on the edge of what I’d consider posting, but it is for a charitable cause!

There’s all sorts of things that would have to be different about the world around us, were it a truly furry world.  These can be as simple as structuring chairs differently, or as complicated as equal rights for all species in a multi-species setting.  Lets collect a bunch of them here, just for funsies!  I’ve divided the list up into species-specific and non species-specific issues, with sub-categories in the species-specific category.  Inspired by this.

Species specific

• Snakes, Nagas, and the like
  • Stairs could pose quite an issue
• Giraffes
  • Doorways could prove to be awkward, and building every building to accommodate might be impractical
• Elephants
  • As with Giraffes, buildings would need to be specially designed
• Avians
  • Steps would get awkward
  • Possible entrances on multiple levels, and perches within a building
  • Air-traffic regulations are bad enough, but add in avians flying about…
• Bats
  • How do shirts work?

Not species-specific

• Motorcycles and convertibles could cause some…facial discomfort.
• Speaking of, motorcycles, bicycles and the like – would have to come up with a way to keep fur or entire tails from getting trapped in the chain!
• Eating gummi worms
• “Being a professional chef, my career would be over. Hair, on ALL OF THE THINGS! I’d have to shave my hands and arms to work.”
• “More food for thought (literally): eating. Most furries are canine; ripping/tearing eating, rather than mashing as human.”
• “Another big problem: I’d be expected to be dressed, probably to human standards, so I’d be too warm.”
• Bathing would be a pain – so anything that involves getting dirty
• Cups could be a real pain (see comment)
• Differences in senses could cause awkwardness or even strife (see comment)
• The tricky question of carnivores versus herbivores. (see comment)
• Workplace discrimination based on species attributes. (see comment)
• Cleaning the drain.  Monthly.

I’ve been within the fandom for about eleven years now, and only relatively recently (about a year ago as of this post) did I get into fursuiting.  Prior to that, I must admit that I didn’t understand the concept at all, and even found it vaguely creepy.  While I understood the desire to more physically look like your character, I didn’t understand how fursuiting would be the solution: it seemed like wearing a onesie of faux fur combined with slippers, gloves, and a ski-mask coated in fur-covered foam was rather more like some elaborate Halloween costume effect than getting nearer to one’s character.  However, having gone suiting and wound up with a fursuit of my own, I think I’m gaining a better understanding of it now.

Fursuiting is clinal, a gradient from one end of the spectrum to the other.  It can be very meaningful, where putting on the suit makes the wearer into their character, or as close as possible. Or it can be relatively meaningless, where suiting is closer to a job than anything, something you do rather than something you are.  Along the way, the amount of meaning passes through the still very meaningful desire to at least look like one’s character, to enjoying the act of costuming itself, to enjoying the varied social interaction that comes with wearing a full-body costume somewhere other than Halloween.

As I grew within the furry subculture, I started out thinking that everyone with a suit must be attempting to be their character in real life, rather than just online.  My opinion of how I would react to suiting, however, was closer to the other end of the spectrum – I could see how it might be fun to do that, but didn’t really see it going further, for myself.  As time went on, though, I started to experience how suiting was different for different people, and, at the same time, I felt myself climbing the scale in the opposite direction.  The concept started to make more sense to me, and I could understand how someone might enjoy looking rather more like an animal, specifically like their character, even if it was most definitely in the context of costuming.  Sometime in 2010, these two converging lines met when I was given the opportunity to try a friend’s suit for a day at Anthrocon.

One Gay Jackal

The friend is a bit of a sarcastic sort, and he had a black-backed jackal suit that I wanted to try on to see if I could (jokingly) sully his reputation by acting super furry and overtly homosexual.  It just so happened that we were the right size and he thought it was as good an idea as I did, so I went up to his room at ten or so in the morning and put on the suit.  I was immediately surprised by how warm it was, and I had a bit of a hard time getting used to it, at first, since Pittsburgh in the summer is already plenty warm.  It was a bit of a trial getting from the convention hotel to the convention center, though it’s a relatively short walk.  Once I got inside, however, I really started to get into the swing of things.

I had a lot of fun interacting with people around me.  A surprising amount of fun, really.  I was expecting that, wearing a full body costume that required a wicking layer, I’d be uncomfortable, but goof around and act flamingly gay for a little while, then head back to the room to strip it off.  However, the costume was comfortable and I felt comfortable acting like a fool in it.  Wearing paws and having a stuffed tail behind me made me walk different just to see how it felt, and those around me ate up the fact that I was a big dog-man acting like a nutjob.  I wore the suit longer than intended; I made a few stops by the “headless lounge”, ambled around the dealer’s den, followed people around and mimicked them, and spent more time than I usually would talking to, playing with, and otherwise just interacting with furries.  When I got home, I placed an order with the maker of the fursuit, Jill of jillcostumes for my own, settling on an otter after some discussion.

A member of the otter-man empire

That was about the time I started to realize the diversity apparent within a subculture of a subculture.  There was more, I figured, to wearing a fursuit than just getting closer to your character, being your avatar.  It was a whole different way of interacting with those around you, whether you’re one of those suiters that never talks or one that rambles on in suit (I am, of course, the latter).  Having asked, there are those who do feel like it brings out aspects of their personality that bring themselves closer to their character, but that’s not the only way of looking at it out there: there are those who find them sexually attractive, those that like them because of the social interaction with those who aren’t necessarily part of the fandom (interacting with kids is mentioned as being particularly awesome), and those for whom it is a living.  It’s a whole spectrum, just as are other aspects of furry, but it comes with its own culture: listen in on conversations in a headless lounge and they’re most certainly unique.

Things aren’t all sunshine and roses, of course.  One of the first things I found out once I got my suit was how to clean it, and how divisive such an act was.  There are currents and trends of thought within the suiting culture just as there are within furry as a whole, and something as simple as washing a portion of your suit can cause strife.  Having personally known the maker of my suit, I trusted her when she gave me instructions for washing not only the bodysuit but also the head in the washing machine.  However, even after she posted a video of how she cleans her own and her customer’s fursuit heads without harm, others within the fandom insisted that she was damaging the heads that she had made, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary.  Similar discussions rage around how best to transport your suit from place to place, particularly on a plane.  Any fursuit lounge is bound to be filled nearly to the brim with Rubbermaid Action Packers, while anyone (say, yours truly) who travels with his suit in a duffel is scoffed at openly.

And then there are the people.  Oh, the people.  Not every interaction is a positive one.  In fact, we can start to break down the other parties into rough categories:

• The Talker - The talker will hover close, and may or may not be affectionate, but will insist on talking to you “out of character”.  Rather than interacting with a fursuiter, they will insist on interacting with a person wearing a costume.  ”This is really well made!”, they will say.  ”I think this is a cute one, but the older version was cuter, in my mind,” you will be informed.  ”One doesn’t see black-backed jackals all that much, it’s nice to see that the colors are very accurate,” they’ll say, pointing out the patterning on the suit despite your lack of peripheral vision.  The talker is mostly harmless.  Mostly.  You can’t spell ‘stalker’ without it, though, and it’s only a few minutes too long of following you around that separates the two.
• The Toucher - This is the one we all kind of worry about.  You’ll be wandering around, and someone (99.44% chance that they’re male) will open their arms for a hug.  ”Sure!” you think/mime/say and approach them.  They’ll hug you and maybe coo at how cute your suit is.  And the hug will linger.  And go on a little too long.  And you’ll try to pull away, and the Toucher will laugh and ruffle his hands down over your back, sides, or front, and then it will come: the Touch.  Sometimes the touch is fumbling and quick, because you’re likely in public, but it’s even worse when it’s not, the Toucher grabbing rather firmly at some decidedly tender bits or giving your backside a squeeze.  The worst part about this, for me, is that all I feel I can do is just get away.  It’s surprisingly hard to tell someone to stop or to move their hand when you’re dressed as a giant otter.
• The Maker - The Maker is closely related to the Talker and the Toucher, though obviously more innocent than either.  They will spend a lot of time touching you while talking out of character.  The whole time, though, rather than grabbing at your crotch, they’re feeling along the seams of your suit or inspecting the eyes’ construction, all while talking about air-brushing or fur selection.  While not quite as offensive as the Talker or the Toucher, this is nonetheless still quite awkward for someone who most certainly did not make their own suit.
• The Fursuit Hater - I don’t know what to do about it.  Look, I’m sorry that I’m a grown-ass man dressed as a giant otter among a bunch of other grown-ass men.  I’m having fun, others are having fun, and those that aren’t are doing something else.  Why do you need to tell me that fursuits are creepy and probably gross and covered in semen and countless other things I really don’t care to hear about.  You pretend to be an animal-person, too.
• The Other Suiter - This one’s up in the air.  Normally, hanging around other fursuiters while in suit is pretty awesome.  You can commiserate about those around you, play around and get some laughs (and plenty of pictures), and just plain have fun.  Occasionally, though, you’ll run into a suiter that also happens to be a Toucher, or even more so.  I don’t deny that some suits are pretty attractive, of course; the problem lies more in the lack of respect for differing opinions, especially around how to act in a public place.  Fursuits serve to offer some of the same anonymity provided by the internet, and there has been more than once instance of someone grabbing or grinding on me in a scratchy, hot, faux-fur onesie in a hallway or dance that has led to quite a bit of discomfort.

Repayment for borrowing the suit

Even with the occasional bad apple, it’s definitely more fun than not to pretend to be an animal person, or at least interact as one, or to act a fool as one.  I picked up my suit at Further Confusion 2010 from Jill once I arrived at the hotel.  Just for giggles, I wore the suit as a partial for the rest of the night, roaming around to find people I knew so as to surprise them.  I stole sips of beer, batted at people with my paws, poked my enormous nose on them, and basically just had fun.  It’s another way to entwine yourself with this strange fandom of ours, and provides a unique mixture of in- and out-of-character interactions with those around you.  For some, it’s a way to become their avatar, and for others it’s a fun way to, in the jackal’s words, “get drunk and touch friends.”  And, whether you’re a fan of them or not, suiters are an integral part of our subculture, shaping not only our own interactions but the views of those looking in from outside.

I know, I know, two asides in a row; I’ve been trying to keep them to a minimum.  However, I’d just like to note that, if you’ve taken the 2011 Furry Survey (or even if you haven’t – and why not, huh!?), there is an additional microsurvey of psychographic information available that could provide some very useful insights for us, which we can pass on to you!  Head on over and fill it out!

Just a reminder to get in on the 2011 Furry Survey before the year’s end! A lot of the information gathered by the survey is really pretty interesting and drives much of the content on this site. It’s a pretty quick survey, and well worth it!

Speaking of character versus self, Latte on FA recently posted an excellent series of photos of fursuiters in their mundane surroundings.

From the artist:

I wanted to juxtapose the surrealism of fursuiters with the normality of daily life routines, playing with furries’ unique sense of two “selves”. Which one is our true self?

Here are a few of them:

Outer Animal - 1 - by Latte

Outer Animal - 5 - by Latte

Outer Animal - 6 - by Latte

Check out the whole set on FurAffinity!

I pulled together a few additional ideas on the concept of character versus self visited in a previous post.  A lot of these rely on little ideas dropped here and there by comments either on the blog itself or on Twitter.  They’re all kind of neat, but none of them really warrant a full post.  I pulled together these three smaller ramblings here into one larger post in the hopes that I can still get my thoughts out there on the subjects.  Enjoy!

Acting

I was turned on to Erving Goffman by a commenter recently and found out a little about his ideas on the presentation of one’s self (mostly through secondary sources, full disclosure).  Goffman describes our social interactions as “front stage” and “backstage”.  Each person in a social group is an actor utilizing their props and their role to present a positive image of themselves to their audience, who are, of course, actors in turn doing much the same.  This is the front stage aspect, whereas the backstage aspect is more the idea of who we really are outside of the social play, where we can “deconstruct our personas”.  This impression management is a sort of “artificial, willed credulity” (or, more glibly, consensual hallucination, a phrase used by William Gibson, who used it when he coined the term “cyberspace”).

In a lot of ways this concept fits in well with furries.  Of course, there is the surface aspect that our frontstage aspects are much stronger in that they differ greatly from our backstage personas – I don’t have any specifics on the numbers, but I’m pretty sure that very few of us are anthropomorphic canids sitting in front of a computer.  Beyond that, however, the idea still holds: speaking from personal experience, we interact with other furries very differently than how we interact with others, and that persona that we present to our cohorts is a strong one, often considered freer and more true to ourselves than our other roles, but still something different from our true selves due to the whole thing being only a portion of our personalities.  It’s not the whole of our self that we present to our furry companions.

Whether or not the concept is strictly applicable is up for debate in my mind, however.  In terms of the first impressions mentioned earlier, there seems to be this additional layer of role-playing, as if our front stage personas were acting about being actors in a play, and the line is blurred further when bits of information about ourselves, as well as aspects of our other personas, are injected into our avatars via these other layers of our channel of communication.  I suppose that it’s for this reason that the Internet would be considered largely a backstage environment, or at least has the potential to be such.  The reality, though, is that we construct our characters just as thoroughly online as we do in real life, if not more so, with it being a conscious effort.  They are our avatars, yes, but they are also constructed personas used for interacting with our environment in the context of a social structure.  Goffman’s idea of stage and backstage is more useful in considering that, as we interact with each other within our subculture, we’re presenting ourselves in a certain way, acting a part for our audience, yet also giving them a glimpse into our backstage lives due not only to our interactions spanning the online and offline arenas, but also due to the fact that our constructed personas are blatantly not ourselves.

Attention

The Internet hasn’t been all roses and sunshine.  Since its inception and rapid growth, several problems or perceived problems have been associated, fairly or unfairly, with the liberal interconnecting of people by technology.  As the web increased in importance, so these problems increased in visibility.  One of the more interesting of these problems is the interestingly named Münchausen by Internet.  This is when someone will feign a severe illness or disability for themselves on the Internet in order to garner attention for themselves.  It’s not quite hypochondria, which is a separate disorder, and it differs from regular Münchausen syndrome in my mind in that, while there’s some discussion as to whether the latter is a conscious drawing of attention to one’s self, the former requires much more forethought in order to keep up – it is either a gross exaggeration of reality or an outright lie.

Along the same time as the Internet was coming into its own as a serious technological innovation, my own generation was reaching middle- and high-school age, and the age of the over-diagnosed psychological disorder was gaining steam.  Friend after friend of mine was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, manic depression, bipolar syndrome, or some other item from the mild side of the DSM-IV (I’m speaking glibly, of course).  I knew of a score of classmates on Prozac, as many on Ritalin, and a few on more extreme drugs such as Lithium.

I went through my own period of depression and restlessness, but my solution was to hide it from my parents and escape the best way I knew how: get online.  I know I wasn’t the only one, too.  When I was first getting into the Internet, I associated with many of the same age as myself on a previously mentioned forum, and when I got into furry, I wound up on FluffMUCK, again in the company of several other high-school kids around the same age as myself.  I battled my depression with electronic affection and fought my restlessness with… or, well, I enabled any ADD tendencies I had with either wasting time online or thinking about wasting time online.  A rough childhood, I assure you, growing up in upper-middle class Colorado with two engineers for parents.

By the time I got to college, however, these three things – the ability to garner attention through lying or embellishing illness online, the over-diagnosis of youth, and the dipping mean age of the furry fandom – had coalesced into the strange amalgam that is The Furry Disorder.  The Furry Disorder seems to shift as time goes on – originally, it was bipolar syndrome or manic depression, then it shifted to ADD, and now it seems to be Aspergers syndrome – but the distinguishing aspects seem to be that it is often a loosely diagnosed disorder among furs in their teens and twenties and is easily used to gain attention online.  It’s as if a segment of the fandom agreed that the best way to gain reinforcing attention from others was to latch onto this one disorder and capitalize on it as much as possible. Synchronized Münchausen by Internet.

It should be noted, however, that all this pales in comparison to how amusing the term ‘cybermunch’ is, in referring to someone partaking in or suffering from Münchausen by Internet.

Self-Importance

I’ve mentioned the Dunning-Kruger Effect before.  Briefly, it’s the idea that those who are less competent are more likely to overrate their competence, while the opposite is true for those who are more competent – they are more likely to underrate themselves.  And boy howdy, am I prime example of this.

It seems as though every fur goes through some creative phases, due in part to how much the fandom itself is centered around creativity.  Which phase is most popular seems to change with time.  When I first really got into it way back in high school, everyone was drawing – to be a furry, you had to draw (while that’s still popular now, it seems that the thing to do now is make your own fursuit, and a few years ago, it was making your own website).  I was…not good.  I was very bad, actually.  It wasn’t so much that I lacked a sense of proportion – though I definitely did – or that I had very little sense of light and shadow – though I had none at all – rather that I thought I was pretty awesome.  This was back when Yerf! reigned supreme in the furry art world, and it was a struggle to even get on VCL.  I was most definitely convinced that I could get onto Yerf! with ease.  I mean, look!  I could draw foxes!  Foxes and foxes and foxes!

Of course, I was rejected.

When I say I was bad, I’m sure some of that is a bit of the old Dunning-Kruger effect, because, while I was really actually bad, I was getting better.  Here’s a bit of a progression from what I could find (having destroyed most of what I could find years ago): mid-2009 – late 2009 – 2002.  I did draw quite a bit, and with experience, I was learning more and improving.  As my skill at creating improved, so did my skill at appraising my own work, and I started to see more and more problems with what I was doing.  This is a theme that’s been repeated a few times in my life; nothing was more detrimental to my compositional output than my composition degree: the more skill I gained as a composer, the less competent I felt.

An interesting side effect of this is how protective I felt of my work early on as I was working on it, and this is something I’ve noted in others, not just myself.  Every one of my drawings on those early VCL accounts was marked “(c) me”, which sounds pretty silly to me now.  Silliness aside, though, I know that in the early stages of creative growth, whether in music or art, I was so confident in it that I was eager to copyright everything, whereas once I started to gain more skill, I was more and more willing, even eager to use less restrictive licenses such as Creative Commons licenses.  I know I’m not the only one to work this way, too; I’ve watched several artists within the fandom change similarly over time – the better they got, the more professional their attitudes, the harsher their critiques of their own work, and the more varied (though, of course, not necessarily more liberal) their attitudes toward the licensing of their creations became.  In fact, there seems to be a point in most artist’s career in the fandom – lets call it the Pre-Popufur Point – some loosely defined point in time that is penultimate to their going in one of two general directions.  As their skill progresses and they get better and better, the chances that they’ll approach this point increase, and here they will either become a popular (to whatever extent) furry artist or head the direction I did, feeling less and less comfortable with their work until they stop, or at least slow drastically.

Of course, everyone’s different, and not everyone reaches this point at the same time or perhaps even at all.  There are plenty who never start drawing because they’re preemptively hard on themselves, and there are those who draw and increase and keep a positive outlook on things.  There are those who invert their views on intellectual property, or those that maintain a firm grip on their art throughout their career.  And, lest we forget there are those who are so relentlessly polarized in their opinions as to warrant the creation of the LiveJournal community Artists Beware.  Even so, the general trend of the Dunning-Kruger effect is deeply ingrained in the fandom’s art culture, and, with our unique focus on the visual representations of our characters, seemingly more visible than in society at large.

Welcome to the first Open Post, where comments here, on FurAffinity, on Twitter, and Google+ help to shape the content of the post.  For this first one, let’s collect all the obligatory “furry” media – all that stuff you’re supposed to have seen or read in order to be a good man-animal.  Lets restrict entries to things that are furry without necessarily being made by furries.  To add something, either comment here or reply to us on FA, twitter, or Google+ with your addition.  If something belongs in two categories, I’ll likely  just add it to one, unless it’s an adaptation or has a different name.  Go!

• Books
  • The Redwall series – Brian Jacques
  • Watership Down - Richard Adams
  • The Animorphs series – K. A. Applegate
  • The Animals of Farthing Wood - Colin Dann
  • The Dr. Doolittle series – Hugh Lofting
  • The Ringworld series – Larry Niven
  • City - Clifford Simak
  • Little Fuzzy - H. Beam Piper
  • “The Ambassadors” — Anthony Boucher
  • “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell” — Cordwainer Smith (also “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “The Game of Rat and Dragon”)
  • “Space-Time for Springers” — Fritz Leiber
  • The Heavenly Horse from the Outermost West and Piper at the Gate - Mary Stanton
  • Acorna: The Unicorn Girl - Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball
  • The Witches - Roald Dahl
  • The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
  • The Spellsinger series – Alan Dean Foster
  • The Architect of Sleep - Steven R. Boyett
• Movies
  • Disney’s Robin Hood
  • The Lion King
  • Madagascar (and sequel)
  • The Wild
  • All Dogs Go To Heaven
  • Cats Don’t Dance
  • Balto
  • Over the Hedge
  • Fantastic Mr. Fox
  • Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
  • The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under
  • The Great Mouse Detective
  • The Secret of NIMH (book: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH)
• Television shows
  • Beast Wars
  • Arthur
  • Felix the Cat
  • Tom & Jerry
  • Loony Toons
  • Road Rovers
  • SWAT Kats
  • Thundercats
  • Rescue Rangers
  • TaleSpin
  • That one episode of…
    • CSI
    • ER
    • MTV’s Sex 2k
• Graphic Novels/Comics
  • Maus
  • Fritz the Cat
  • The Saga of Rex
  • Inspecteur Canardo
  • Blacksad
  • Usagi Yojimbo
  • “Omaha” the Cat Dancer
  • Pride of Baghdad
• Dubious
  • Pocahontas

The world is headed in some pretty interesting directions when it comes to things like Augmented Reality.  From little things, like QR codes next to items to allow further investigation of them, Google Goggles, which overlays locations of restaurants or other map markers on a real-time video of your surroundings as taken by your phone’s camera to all of the concept videos coming out from various places around the ‘net.  One of the more important, if not the most important, uses of AR is the addition of a data layer over what we perceive around us.  Need to know more about someone from their business card?  Snap the QR code on it and find out all you need.  It’s that simple, and let me tell you, furries are totally prepared for this additional layer of information: we’re already pros.

We’re used to multi-layered channels of communication, in this fandom.  With the majority of our interaction taking place online, we talk, role play, and chat plenty, but we’re usually not doing only that.  There is still the base layer of our communication online, the words and ideas going from one person to another, or among several people, but there are several things that change the way we interact, and especially change first impressions.  When we meet someone for the first time online, we have plenty of subtle ways of extracting information from or about them, and several of them without the other person’s knowledge that we’re doing so.

When you’re interacting with others on a MUCK, such as FurryMUCK or Tapestries, you have several tools at your disposal to tell you more about the person than you could ever find out in real life without knowing them for years.  MUCKs are text-only, so one of the first commands you learn is ‘look’, which will provide you with a short description of how someone looks; an obvious addition for the primarily visually-oriented furry.  Beyond that, however, there are commands such as ‘wi’ or ‘wixxx’, WhatIsz, which will show you what a person is interested in (or not interested in) in areas both clean and dirty.  Some of these are specific enough that they would likely not even crop up between a couple with no online interaction for years.  Another tool that’s available is, depending on the muck ‘cinfo’ or ‘pinfo’ – character information or player information.  Even more free form than WhatIsz, these commands will let you know not only about the character, but about the person behind eFox or iWolf you’re chatting up, as much as they’ll let on.

It’s not just on MUCKs that we have these additional layers of subliminal conversation going on.  Even on IRC where such commands are much more limited, we still have the rest of the internet available to us, and by far, FurAffinity has changed and helped this the most.  As soon as you see someone’s name online, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to just look them up on FA and find out a good deal about them, from where they live to the types of things they’re into judging by the art they favorite there.  FA isn’t the only site out there, of course, and you can also find out much more explicit detail on sites like F-List and The Rabbit Hole, not to mention other art sites like VCL, SoFurry, and e621.

These are so entrenched in the furry fandom that, writing this, I keep feeling like it’s not even worth mentioning.  Every time I think that, though I remember that it’s one of the things that helps to set us apart from other subcultures out there.  The fact that we can and will find out more about the people we’re interested in based on a few short commands or a quick search online sounds pretty sinister – it’s just not something people in general do, at least not to the same extent.  If you apply for a new job, you can expect to be Googled, Facebooked, and LinkedIn by your potential new employer, but that’s about as close as you’ll get to someone looking up personal information about you.  It’s so totally normal for us that we haven’t realized that it’s changed the way we make our first impressions of each other.  In an AR sense, this is roughly equivalent to walking down the street and seeing someone rather attractive, only to find out via a little thought-bubble above their head that they secretly really enjoy being spanked, bitten, and tied up when they have sex.

If you meet someone within the fandom now, it’s easy to find out more information on them than you would ever find out otherwise.  Friendships are formed more quickly than outside the subculture and are based on much more in-depth knowledge of each other.  Add in the benefit of sex without physical consequences through playing around online and you’ve got a strange basis for a culture that relies almost entirely on a multi-layered channel of communication.  The more I think about how different these first and lasting impressions are within the fandom, the more I think it stems from the previously mentioned difference between character and self that is inherent within furry: we are so eager to use any tools available to us to more completely represent our characters online that we’re willing to change the basics of personal interaction in order to accomplish it.  Add in the anonymity provided by the internet and you have a whole subculture that is far more willing to share personal details with those that they haven’t even met yet than most any group out there, online or offline.

Interacting in person with other furries, particularly at conventions, is a strange mix of “normal interactions” as well as some amount of this multi-layered communication. I’m sure that much of this has to do with how generally tech-literate furries, or at least the con-going crowd are.  If you meet someone at a convention, you’ll likely to do it by scanning their con-badges for images of their character or a recognizable name, rather than, say, looking at a face (the “con-greeting”).  With the information contained on a standard con-badge, one still has as much to go on as on IRC – namely, the ability to look someone up on FA and figure out more about them.  Maybe I’ll try an experiment with FC 2012 and make a QR code badge and see just who all interacts with it.

Beyond that, however, I wonder just how much of our in-depth first impressions translate outside of the fandom, but into other, tightly knit groups.  If, say, an academic winds up at SIGGRAPH or a designer winds up at TED, meets someone in the halls, and notices a convention badge with a name on it, chances are good that they’ll be able to go check on their work somewhere on the internet.  However, these examples are academic and professional, not social, and I haven’t had the opportunity to go to, say, an anime or comic convention to see if lasting personal or even sexual relationships are formed in quite the same way as they are within our own subculture.  Would I be able to go to Nan Desu Kan, a local anime convention, and expect to meet two or three people there whom I would be able to instantly look up on my intelligent telephone, know intimate details about, form lasting friendships with?

With this confused blur from total immersion in our characters to the unobstructed view of self that we provide glimpses of, our mixed-up concept of first impressions within the furry fandom is understandable.  These first impressions are based not only on the actions of a persona as we perceive them, but also the more static metadata left behind on the other layers of communication within the fandom, whether it’s information left on FA, attributes on f-list or within a command such as ‘wi’, or art, visual or otherwise, of a character doing whatever that character does, providing a glimpse of how that avatar moves within the larger arena of the whole subculture, or even reacts to the world at large.  Perhaps it really is no big surprise that the furry community is both incredibly tight knit and also renowned for the drama that it puts itself through.

Lets say you wind up with some spare time on the weekend or after work (or, hell, at work) and you’re a little pent up.  If you want to have some fun on the Internet, there’s a few simple guide-lines you can follow to find some… er… release.  It all depends on where you’re looking.

FurryMUCK

Hang out around a bunch of people and single one person out.  After a while, the sexual tension will reach the breaking point and things will just happen in a whisper, right there in the WCotP or the Purple Nurple.  Who knows if it will happen again, and it may be awkward next time you inevitably run into them at FC, but hey, it was fun!

SPR (SocioPolitical Ramifications MUCK)

Don’t. Instead, hang around for a while, and chances are good that what will happen is you’ll run into someone, meet someone through them, chat for a while only semi in-character, then boom!  It’ll happen!  It may take months to get to this point, but by then, you’ll have a super friend and, potentially, a relationship.

Tapestries

Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.  Simply follow this flow chart:

Finding a partner on Taps

IRC

Just start going, if everything’s okay, the other person will go along with you.  Depending on the room, you can even do it in-channel.

Have any more suggestions?  Leave them in the comments.

Stay classy, and have a great holiday :o)

Makyo and JD get ready to vore some turkey. Sure, 'vore's a verb.

When I first got into furry, I was probably fourteen or fifteen.  I know that it was the fall semester of my freshman year of high school, and that I started getting into it in my downtime in my first computer class at school (well, during class, too), as well as at home.  I wound up finding Yerf and FluffMUCK back in their prime, and played around with IRC on YiffNet, as well.  I found the whole thing from a website I was on called Puberty101 - which now sounds like a pedophile’s paradise; the name was later changed to GovTeen – a forum site for (supposed) kids to ask questions of other (supposed) kids about things like sex and sexuality, emotions, and all that jazz.  Just so happened that I stumbled over a few posts regarding this thing called furry, one of which had this abstruse collection of letters, numbers and punctuation at the end, which was described as a ‘fur code’.

I had already been all about the good old furry favorites like Disney’s Robin Hood, The Rescuers, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the Redwall books, and so on.  Finding the fur code and what it meant at that time in my life led to a perfect, terrible storm of destruction for any hopes of normalcy I had planned for my life.  I latched right onto it and, after spending three dumb days as a dragon, settled on a red fox with two tails as my character and dubbed myself Ranna.  This was the subtle point that would take me the better part of ten years to disentangle: character creation.

I sometimes wonder if people involved in LARP communities, those in the SCA, or even pencil and paper RPG players get quite as involved in their characters as furries do.  I honestly don’t know, as most of my knowledge is gained from an outside, media-tainted perspective, but I suspect that it might be a little different for furries for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost is that our characters are intended to be a representation of ourselves.  The thing that drew me in about FurCodes was the ‘T’ segment: If you had the chance, would you want to become a real furry.  This wasn’t just something fun we did or some historical accuracy we strive for – people actually really, truly desired to become their characters.  I’m sure there are folk in the SCA or in LARP groups that really do desire to be in the role they’re playing, but that leads us to the second point.

Furries don’t necessarily role play outside themselves.  Someone who gets so into renaissance festivals that they wind up working there and living the characters on weekends is casting themselves into a totally different time, where the modern conveniences of life are gone and everything is fundamentally different.  Furries – and, though I’m speaking from experience here, I know it doesn’t apply to everyone – are perfectly content to act out their day to day, mundane, boring-ass lives as anthropomorphic canines (statistically speaking).  As I was growing up through high school, I hung out with a crowd made up of furry gamers, programmers, and computer nerds; not just the players, but the characters as well.  As I grew and moved to college, I decamped from FluffMUCK and moved over to FurryMUCK to spend most of my time in The Purple Nurple, an online, text only gay bar where predominately gay furry yuppies aired their college and post-college woes.  We weren’t just pretending to be cat- and dog-people, and we weren’t just chatting about work, we were cat- and dog-people chatting about work.

Of course, I wasn’t totally secluded in my world of young professional furry gay men, I hung out elsewhere online and experienced everything from multi-session, all-hours of the night role playing (usually dirty) to entire relationships enacted strictly in-character.  However, while there were always ‘OOC’, or out-of-character moments, everyone was joined together in the fact that they were their character.  Even when I was in college, the music department, a decidedly close-knit group, contained several people who were just in it because they happened to be good at playing, say, the oboe, and could give a shit less about music, being an instrumentalist, or even making money off their skill.  In my experience, people like that in furry are rare: there’s the occasional person who has no real attachment to the fandom other than they simply happen to be good at some aspect of it, but they seem to be far from the norm.

All of this adds up to something that I feel is fairly unique to the fandom.  It is a strange line that divides character from self, in a fur.  The line is semipermeable as some would gladly view themselves as their character as a sort of whole-body dysphoria, but there’s still the separation between that aspect of personality and the person as a whole.  Our characters are intangible, non-spatiotemporal; they aren’t something that can be touched or felt, and are closer to an idea than anything real.  However, they form an integral part of our concept of self, whether or not we would actually like to be our anthropomorphic fox character in real life.  They inform our view of the world around us, as well, and not just in some vaguely foxish or wolfish way.

There is no denying that a good portion of the community revolves around art – visual and otherwise.  As with any group of people, though, skill in one particular field is not evenly distributed, and while there are definitely a lot of amazing artists within the fandom, they are still a minority.  We rely on the skills of a relatively small sub-set of our community to provide us with the more tangible representations of our characters, and here is where this blurred line between character and self can cause issues.  However, the way in which furries interact with creators in the community differs greatly from the way in which a professional artist would interact with a client in a few very important ways.  A client may commission an artist for a piece of artwork to appreciate or for others to appreciate – that is, something to hang in their house or something to hang in public.  With  music, you can branch out and say that a client may commission the artist for a piece of music to perform.  In all of these cases, though, nothing works quite like it does in the fandom: with furry commission, you’re not simply commissioning a piece of art to hang around the house and show others, you’re commissioning a representation of your self.

Several seemingly unique issues in the way that artists and clients (or ‘commissioners’, as they’re called, leading one artist to create a “feral Commissioner Gordon”) stem from this strange difference.  Some of the onus of creation is moved from the artist to the client in that much of the picture is designed by the client instead, because, after all, it is the client’s character and the artist’s talent.  This seems to work closer to standard work-for-hire relationships, except that it has strange inflections on licensing: FA notably specifies that uploads fall under a policy of ‘by you/for you’, where a user may upload a picture that they created or that was created for them.  Rather than falling under a standard work-for-hire relationship where it is the artist’s talent and the client’s art, there exists a continuing tension between the two parties, the artist maintaining near full rights over their creation while the client’s rights remain in shady limbo – they maintain rights over the intellectual property of their character, and have some vague sense of ownership over the picture they’ve received, with a shadowy idea of where they’re allowed to show it.

As a personal example, I was commissioned for a three-movement work for French horn and string base to be performed on my senior recital.  As I had been used to the standard furry way of doing things, I insisted that the instrumentalists specify rather more than less of the work, a fact that led to much strife and pain in getting the piece actually performed.  I was unable to live up to their expectations (they wanted me to write like Hindemith, and I’m not Hindemith), they were unmotivated to rehearse a piece that they felt they had a hand in creating, and my composition professor was baffled by the whole scenario.  My senior recital turned out to be one of the most disappointing experiences in my life, largely in part due to the fact that I had failed to properly execute the commission that was expected of me.

From the other side, an artist on FA recently wrote a journal about possibly offering prints of works that were commissioned from him, mentioning that since it was work-for-hire, he would split profit with the client who had commissioned the piece in the first place.  The result was rather out of proportion with the original post and helped to illuminate several of the differences between the professional art world and the art world contained within the furry fandom.  ”My talent, not my art [is for sale]. A commissioner buys my talent to make their art,” the artist writes, leading to a slew of comments ranging from decently positive to stunned and angry.  This standard practice is in direct opposition to the way the furry art world works – limited rights to the artist’s art is for sale, rather than simple access to their talent.

No small amount of drama has originated from this scheme.  While the artist above relinquishes their rights to the piece they’ve created to the client as part of standard business practice, this is not the usual within the fandom, and a client doing something such as uploading their art to be seen by a wider audience on other furry art sites such as fchan, e621, or pawsru.org can certainly lead to plenty of strife.  There is the occasional artist who will upload their art to these sites on their own, but the fandom has largely set them up as their villains, several of the sites or members of the sites buying readily into that label and stirring things up on their own.  This concern over use of art is doubly strange for a community so focused on appropriating heavily licensed characters such as those from Sonic the Hedgehog or anything from Disney for themselves.

The concepts of character and self are rooted deep in the furry community.  Making a negative comment about someone’s fursuit or images of their character can lead to trouble, as the words can be seen as a slight against that person.  After all, the fursuit or image is a representation of the character’s owner – even if you agree that a thing is ugly, a careless phrase can cause offense if that thing is dear to you.  The result is something akin to an offshoot of the Dunning-Kruger effect – unskilled people holding illusory superiority while skilled people hold illusory inferiority – in that the one who receives a representation of their character is likely to hold it to some illusory ideal higher than just any similar piece.  Meaning in art is a tough subject, and it’s only made more complicated within the fandom when it comes to character art.

The two intertwined entities of character and self comprise a large part of furry.  The fandom as it is is hard enough to pin down to any one definition, and I think that’s due in large part to the myriad ways in which one interacts with one’s character or characters.  For some, their character is inextricably a part of themselves, closer to an anima or animus in the Jungian sense.  For others, myself included, a character may carry smaller aspects of personality, and not, as a result, be as all-encompassing.  Speaking for myself, I have three or four of what I would consider characters that I often interact with, and each acts differently, each more focused on a different aspect of my personality.  This didn’t use to be the case, though, as I previously had a single character that was more all-encompassing and close to my self.

Along with the shift in character interaction came a shift in friend circles, and it left me wondering how much this internal interaction define how we build up and maintain our lives within furry.  I asked around on twitter and got a few answers: the way in which we relate to our characters does seem to have some relation to the types of people we find ourselves friends with.  Whether that’s cause, effect, or some sort of subconscious correlation, I can’t say.  All of this pondering around the psychological aspects of pretending to be an animal person with a lot of other people pretending to be animal people may just be another symptom of being a firmly-entrenched member of the very same fandom.  A commenter on a previous entry used the word ‘avatar’ instead of character, and I feel that this was an appropriate choice of words, moreso than character.  A character is an entity not necessarily connected to some person in reality, but an avatar has connotations of incarnation and appearance of something outside the world in which it interacts.  This is the idea behind our characters: they aren’t just some sort of disjoint idea that relates back to us, even if we create more than one.  They are aspects of us, and as such, are integral to us.  No wonder we can get so touchy in regards to our interactions with them.

Hay guys, check out the new banner by Floe!  It’s our very own RandomWolf!

For many, perhaps most, it’s easy to envision furry as being made up in large part of gay males.  Some evidence bears this out, even; results from the Furry Survey suggests that a majority of furry is indeed male, though the sexual orientation side of things suggests a different story, which is still, of course, far and above what’s considered standard in western society.  The point of interest comes in the way gender and sexuality are explored strictly within the context of furry, whether through art or through text, particularly on the Internet.

I, admittedly, grew into the fandom with a similar mindset, expecting that it would be a warm and welcoming place for a young gay (as I identified at the time; things have since shifted) man, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.  There was a very welcoming, bordering on celebratory, attitude towards non-heterosexual orientations, and there was certainly no shortage of guys around to fit into that niche.  I came from a pretty standard family as far as gay kids from upper-middle class liberal America go, and even I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of acceptance and testosterone flowing around within the fandom.  It definitely fit in well with my burgeoning sexuality, in that I had a lot of supportive people surrounding me and, to put it bluntly, a lot of choices for the targets of my affection.  Even today, I’m surprised at how large a part sexual orientation plays in those that I meet, to an embarrassing point, in some.

More surprising than the gay men, however, was the women I met.  Specifically, the discrepancies in gender ratios online versus that which I heard about and encountered at conventions, meets, and in person in general.  This wasn’t some sort of taboo phenomenon, either.  Some openly joked about how males on MUCKs were males, and females on MUCKs were probably males too.  Others who were a different gender online from in person treated it as an open secret and joked about it often.  Even those who didn’t joke about it weren’t coy about differentiating between player and character when talking online.

I’m sure that there as many, if not more, reasons for someone to have a character of a different gender from their player online as their are people who actually do that.  In fact, there almost certainly are a good deal more reasons for someone to do that than there are people who do that, just due to the fact that people change over time.

Here now, I’ve been playing coy, and that’s probably not a good thing for writers to do.  I know that this is the case because, in eleven years of being around within the fandom now, I’ve done my own fair share of playing around with gender and talking with those who do similar online, and I think I definitively state that there are several reasons for doing so.  They can be divided into needs and wants: those things that are biological or psychological imperatives and those things that are more desires than must haves.

Topping the list of wants is likely the desire for heterosexual interaction – not necessarily just in the realm of sex, either.  In a predominately male social group where sexual orientation is divided up fairly evenly, people have found a way to increase the amount of females available for this interaction through role play and art.  When it comes to sex on the Internet, it’s then easier for people to find partners even if they’re playing the female role in the act. This has surely led to more than a few instances of relationships that have started based on this interaction and then failed due to that not actually being the case in real life.

Along with this is the same concept of exploration that is almost stereotypical in society at large, where gender and sexual orientation are balanced differently.  Some players who identify as primarily homosexual may spend sometime playing with or as female characters as a means of experimenting more with a new experience.  For some, it’s simply testing the waters, for others more of a kink type thing, something to indulge in that’s not quite the norm.  In line with that, the Internet has certainly engendered increased sexual liberation, and some may find themselves exploring broader and broader areas of interest as time goes on, and playing as a female character may just be another way to branch out and have fun.

This ties a little into the separation between character and self.  In these instances, the female character’s player likely retains a fairly solid sense of male gender, as opposed to the instance where the difference between player and character sex is driven more by a need. The net has definitely brought around several benefits, and the layer of anonymity inherent in interactions provides a unique outlet for gender dysphoria; that is, some will undoubtedly play characters of a different gender from themselves because that gender will more closely match the gender that they feel.

As a bit of an aside, it should be noted that there’s a difference between gender and sex, in this context.  Sex is fairly easily defined as the biological make-up of the body, whether male, female, or intersex.  Gender is a little tougher to pin down.  It can be seen as a psychological thing, as in whether or not one feels comfortable or not (dysphoric) with one’s given sex.  It can also be taken in a sociological context, as several feelings in regard to gender have to do with how one is perceived by others and what societal roles they fit into.  While western society is heteronormative, gender can, like sexual orientation, be interpreted as a continuous scale from one extreme (totally masculine) to the other (totally feminine), meaning that these perceptions and roles can apply to portions of a person’s life rather than simply the entirety.

Gender identity is always a sticky issue to get around, as it doesn’t have quite the recognition that sexual orientation has, and thus has less support behind it, both from medicine and psychology, as well as society at large.  Many don’t understand the issues surrounding gender, and it’s difficult to comprehend what exactly is involved when gender and sex don’t match up.  Despite my own experiences with being in a relationship with a transgender person, I didn’t quite understand things until only rather recently.

The reason I’m writing about this at all, and still having a hard time not being coy or dancing around the issue is that it’s difficult for me to speak about openly.  That I have any problems at all with my own gender identity was very difficult for me to admit to myself and is harder still to admit to anyone else.  This is the first time I’ve mentioned it to anyone besides my partner and one or two close friends, actually, and it worries me that I’m doing so in so public a fashion, but it is pertinent.  As with sexual orientation and coming out, it’s the type of thing one fears losing friends and family over, and with myself, it led to a period of depression earlier this year lasting several weeks.

The reason I even bring it up, though, is simply to make the point even more clear on the importance of gender within furry, the fandom which is so welcoming of those within it that the answers pertaining to sexual orientation in the furry survey suggest a truly equal distribution of the sexual orientation spectrum (this in comparison to the oft-quoted 10% thrown around in reference to homosexuality in western civilization at large).  The fact that one can create a character with which they strongly identify in terms of gender and sex online can be an important psychological outlet.  I can say first-hand that the discomfort felt during sex when one’s gender and sex don’t line up is intense and, when your sexual partner is your significant other, deeply upsetting.

Interactions online blur the line between the two socially accepted genders even further, as it introduces the possibility of playing out roles that even more closely match one’s gender than society – or biology, for that matter – will allow.  To pull some examples from recent art that’s been floating around, if one identifies as mostly masculine with some female attributes, one’s character could be a mostly male hermaphrodite, or, if even less masculinity feels right, a (and I feel the need to prefix this with my personal dislike of the term) ‘cunt-boy’.  The whole spectrum of gender can be expressed in your character with that layer of anonymity the Internet provides, including even lack of gender or inherently hermaphroditic species such as chakats.

The whole idea of mixed genders within the fandom wasn’t something that I ran into until I had been exploring furry for a few years.  I didn’t really understand them or people’s reaction to them for quite a while.  The whole concept seems to be fairly divisive, with people taking either a firm stance against or for the whole concept.  On one hand, I’ve heard mixed genders of different sorts described positively as “more fun, since you can stack them so many ways” and negatively as “guys just wanting to play with boobs and dick at the same time”.  I certainly can’t speak for everyone involved and don’t care to try and change anyone’s mind, but my own opinion is decidedly positive: if the character fits the gender, excellent!  If it really is just about sex and playing Tetris with warm bodies, well, sex is good too.

Furry is very much a sexual subculture, when taken as a whole (though not perhaps as much as people think).  It’s not surprising, then, that gender plays so large a role within the fandom, both online and off.  It is an integral part of sexuality.  If the fandom is so sexually liberal as compared to the world it inhabits, yet is a subset of that world, it really makes me wonder how much of this is going on within humanity as a whole.  Are we all so evenly distributed in terms of sexual orientation, and the bipolarity of western society just prevents that from being expressed?  Are issues of gender versus sex more prevalent than it appears?  And, with a few exceptions, are we really as on our own as it seems when it comes to mixing biological sex in one body?  Hardly questions for a dumb blog on furries to answer, but interesting all the same.