I agree with everything in this article, except that there is pressure on anyone to create a Furry avatar or fursona. There isn't. A lot of people on Fur Affinity have no avatar at all, or list their animal type as human. It's not a big deal to anyone.
Anyone who approaches the question of what is Furry Fandom with a minimum of logic will see that JM is wrong in his perception of the community. And he's by no means the first to try to paint the entire community with this same broad illogical paintbrush.
I do not understand why people insist on doing this time after time. If you just leave the community alone it has no trouble at all understanding what it is and what its about. And we are all very happy.
If you take from that that we are happiest as a community when nobody is telling us what we are and what we have to accept, one would logically conclude that such rules of definition are foreign to what we are.
Obviously, beyond the shared interest in anthropomorphic animals that brought us together, we are not any one thing. Beyond that one common thing, diversity rules The Furry Community. And the only thing that brings peace to The Furry Community is the acceptance of that diversity.
No one would deny that fans tend to make a lifestyle out of their shared interest. Being a fan and altering one's lifestyle are really inseparable aspects of the same thing. This is particularly true of Furry, because Furry is an allegorical concept, and allegorical concepts have mind expanding properties.
Becoming a Furry involves a change of thinking, or at least an opening of the mind. So our lifestyles are all changed to greater or lesser degrees by it. But this is such a natural part of the fandom that few of us actually notice it happening. We think we're just having fun, but actually we're learning a lot of stuff along the way, expanding our horizons, becoming better people who can tolerate things that aren't so easily tolerated in other circles of human society.
Unfortunately, because we don't notice this aspect directly, it doesn't get talked about too much, and we become easily confused when someone comes along insisting that fans and lifestylers are different things, and that one should be considered more important than the other. But this is really as illogical as a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup insisting its chocolate is more important than its peanut butter. Peanut Butter + Chocolate = Reece's. Furry fans + lifestyle = Furry Fandom. Just like Anime fans + lifestyle = Anime Fandom.
And, believe it or not, that is nothing even remotely new. Say you were in World War 2 and you looked up to see a bomb falling towards you with a Furry character painted on it. You probably wouldn't have had time to contemplate the fact that somewhere in the sky above you was a man who was liking that character far into his adult years, enough to spend considerable time painting that character on anything he could find to paint it on, and thereby living a slightly different lifestyle from the people around him, possibly even using Furry as a device for adjusting to life in war.
The mere adoration of Furry characters into one's adult years is a deviation from societal norms. It is a lifestyle choice. You just can not separate the two things. When you try, as JM is doing, you end up with Furries trying to take up sides against themselves. And the only way they can do that is to redefine lifestyler to its most radical extreme, while redefining fan to mean someone who can like Furry characters without deviating from societal norms, which is not possible.
And once you get everyone taking up sides from these ridiculous perspectives, all hope of a logical resolve is lost. Everyone will be doing flips and twists to try to somehow justify their illogical perspectives until all reason will be out the window, along with all the special benefits this fandom provides us with.
So when you encounter people like JM who try to tell you this stuff, remember that you wouldn't be here if you weren't a fan of something Furry, and that just being a fan of that one thing caused an alteration in your lifestyle, got you doing things you wouldn't otherwise be doing, with people you wouldn't otherwise be knowing, at places you wouldn't otherwise be going. So if there's a conflict between fans and lifestylers, you're on both sides, and the JM's of this community are trying to put you at war with yourself.
I agree with everything in this article, except that there is pressure on anyone to create a Furry avatar or fursona. There isn't. A lot of people on Fur Affinity have no avatar at all, or list their animal type as human. It's not a big deal to anyone.
Anyone who approaches the question of what is Furry Fandom with a minimum of logic will see that JM is wrong in his perception of the community. And he's by no means the first to try to paint the entire community with this same broad illogical paintbrush.
I do not understand why people insist on doing this time after time. If you just leave the community alone it has no trouble at all understanding what it is and what its about. And we are all very happy.
If you take from that that we are happiest as a community when nobody is telling us what we are and what we have to accept, one would logically conclude that such rules of definition are foreign to what we are.
Obviously, beyond the shared interest in anthropomorphic animals that brought us together, we are not any one thing. Beyond that one common thing, diversity rules The Furry Community. And the only thing that brings peace to The Furry Community is the acceptance of that diversity.
No one would deny that fans tend to make a lifestyle out of their shared interest. Being a fan and altering one's lifestyle are really inseparable aspects of the same thing. This is particularly true of Furry, because Furry is an allegorical concept, and allegorical concepts have mind expanding properties.
Becoming a Furry involves a change of thinking, or at least an opening of the mind. So our lifestyles are all changed to greater or lesser degrees by it. But this is such a natural part of the fandom that few of us actually notice it happening. We think we're just having fun, but actually we're learning a lot of stuff along the way, expanding our horizons, becoming better people who can tolerate things that aren't so easily tolerated in other circles of human society.
Unfortunately, because we don't notice this aspect directly, it doesn't get talked about too much, and we become easily confused when someone comes along insisting that fans and lifestylers are different things, and that one should be considered more important than the other. But this is really as illogical as a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup insisting its chocolate is more important than its peanut butter. Peanut Butter + Chocolate = Reece's. Furry fans + lifestyle = Furry Fandom. Just like Anime fans + lifestyle = Anime Fandom.
And, believe it or not, that is nothing even remotely new. Say you were in World War 2 and you looked up to see a bomb falling towards you with a Furry character painted on it. You probably wouldn't have had time to contemplate the fact that somewhere in the sky above you was a man who was liking that character far into his adult years, enough to spend considerable time painting that character on anything he could find to paint it on, and thereby living a slightly different lifestyle from the people around him, possibly even using Furry as a device for adjusting to life in war.
The mere adoration of Furry characters into one's adult years is a deviation from societal norms. It is a lifestyle choice. You just can not separate the two things. When you try, as JM is doing, you end up with Furries trying to take up sides against themselves. And the only way they can do that is to redefine lifestyler to its most radical extreme, while redefining fan to mean someone who can like Furry characters without deviating from societal norms, which is not possible.
And once you get everyone taking up sides from these ridiculous perspectives, all hope of a logical resolve is lost. Everyone will be doing flips and twists to try to somehow justify their illogical perspectives until all reason will be out the window, along with all the special benefits this fandom provides us with.
So when you encounter people like JM who try to tell you this stuff, remember that you wouldn't be here if you weren't a fan of something Furry, and that just being a fan of that one thing caused an alteration in your lifestyle, got you doing things you wouldn't otherwise be doing, with people you wouldn't otherwise be knowing, at places you wouldn't otherwise be going. So if there's a conflict between fans and lifestylers, you're on both sides, and the JM's of this community are trying to put you at war with yourself.