You don't get what I'm saying. Having the current top-ranked professional gamer in the world happen to be a furry, okay, that's pretty neat. It's a feather in the fandom's cap, sure. But it's a pretty small one. It's not as significant as, say, having one of the most publicly visible astrophysicists in the world happen to be black. And if Neil Degrass Tyson's achievements are one day eclipsed by someone who happens to be furry, awesome. But that person being a furry will be a distant second to their actual accomplishments, if it even ranks. We might never even know they're a furry.
And I'm not saying it's inevitable that furry will become mainstream. Really what I'm saying is, the way furry came about largely by co-opting things that were both mainstream and niche and turning it into a subculture, the mainstream can just as easily co-opt those same things we think are intrinsic to the fandom. But the way it does with everything else, it'll do it very selectively in a kind of "melting pot" fashion.
A lot of movements and subcultures really only last a generation or two before this happens, or before they kinda wither away or transform into something else. The therians, for example. I first took an interest in them around 1997, 1998, probably spent a good few years with the various message boards, chat rooms, and homepages trying (and mostly failing) to define Therianthropy as a legitimate spirituality before ever even hearing the word "Otherkin". And then those two concepts kinda merged and Otherkin largely absorbed and replaced Therianthropy. I don't even recognize what's left of "the community" anymore.
What I do recognize though, is the internet, and that communities who heavily depend on it for their existence and identity are inherently subject (by which I mostly mean victim) to its whims, its tweaks, its sweeping, wholesale changes. I feel like at this point I've probably written too much about all this shit to go into more detail except to say that, like with therians and otherkin, the furry fandom has already changed a lot since I first delved into it and these changes seemed to coincide with how the internet as a medium changed more than because furries as a whole (or even as individuals) decided to change. And in the interests of giving the original subject a nod and a glance, I think I should also point out that a furry identity is something you choose more than something that's thrust onto you because of your birth.
TL;DR put the fandom, and your own life, into perspective FFS.
You don't get what I'm saying. Having the current top-ranked professional gamer in the world happen to be a furry, okay, that's pretty neat. It's a feather in the fandom's cap, sure. But it's a pretty small one. It's not as significant as, say, having one of the most publicly visible astrophysicists in the world happen to be black. And if Neil Degrass Tyson's achievements are one day eclipsed by someone who happens to be furry, awesome. But that person being a furry will be a distant second to their actual accomplishments, if it even ranks. We might never even know they're a furry.
And I'm not saying it's inevitable that furry will become mainstream. Really what I'm saying is, the way furry came about largely by co-opting things that were both mainstream and niche and turning it into a subculture, the mainstream can just as easily co-opt those same things we think are intrinsic to the fandom. But the way it does with everything else, it'll do it very selectively in a kind of "melting pot" fashion.
A lot of movements and subcultures really only last a generation or two before this happens, or before they kinda wither away or transform into something else. The therians, for example. I first took an interest in them around 1997, 1998, probably spent a good few years with the various message boards, chat rooms, and homepages trying (and mostly failing) to define Therianthropy as a legitimate spirituality before ever even hearing the word "Otherkin". And then those two concepts kinda merged and Otherkin largely absorbed and replaced Therianthropy. I don't even recognize what's left of "the community" anymore.
What I do recognize though, is the internet, and that communities who heavily depend on it for their existence and identity are inherently subject (by which I mostly mean victim) to its whims, its tweaks, its sweeping, wholesale changes. I feel like at this point I've probably written too much about all this shit to go into more detail except to say that, like with therians and otherkin, the furry fandom has already changed a lot since I first delved into it and these changes seemed to coincide with how the internet as a medium changed more than because furries as a whole (or even as individuals) decided to change. And in the interests of giving the original subject a nod and a glance, I think I should also point out that a furry identity is something you choose more than something that's thrust onto you because of your birth.
TL;DR put the fandom, and your own life, into perspective FFS.