Well, have you heard of Twain's maxim? "What is good is not very original, and what is original is not very good." I mean, the original context was a critique of someone else's writing, but it kind of does hold true on a macro-level; i.e. if something was truly original, we'd have no context in which to judge if it was actually any good. I already blathered about that yesterday, it's folded an all, but
I think "originality" is overrated, but mostly because the other word you're using, "creativity", which is much more applicable to what furry does, does get used as synonym for "original" a lot.
Making a fursona is "creative", but it does not necessarily mean "quality." On the other hand, "ripping off Disney" is not necessarily bad. And, okay, this comment is pretty cogent, but, uh, Diamond Man is present, and he's the one who gets stuck on copyright when that is what matters at all here, so I'm not sure who I'm talking too? But, uh, fucking who cares about copyright? Copyright is just a legal term; we're talking about style (which, yeah, can't be copyrighted). Copyright's a legal term used to protect a single, solitary work, which is not a style, which generally contains multiple works. And to be further clear, "style" is a very vaguely defined term with no legal definition.
You can probably find like 20 YouTube video essays describing what "Disney style" is, but the point is, even if you took out the bumper saying "this is a fucking Disney movie" at the beginning, you could probably tell that what you're watching is a fucking Disney movie. To go back to furry, I'm sure you can recognize your favorite artist just by looking at a piece by them; you don't have to see who it is. You know, you're all like "that's Blotch. And that's PointedFox. And that's tailsrulz. And that's Dark Natasha." They literally have a whole cinematic critical theory called "auteur theory" which basically says a Stephen Spielberg movie is going to look like a Stephen Spielberg movie, and it doesn't matter if it's a science fiction horror movie about dinosaurs or a Holocaust drama, because he has a style. You can't even really rip off a style, because it is so unique to the individual entity (whether a person, collaboration or corporation) that has it.
You can rip off elements of it, however. That's what I'm accusing furries of doing, and it's not that big a deal, really. They watched Robin Hood and said to themselves "I'd like to make something like that." And then they copied elements of Robin Hood (and plenty of other stuff, not just Disney or even animation), and in the beginning it looked like an off-brand copy of Disney because that's what it was. As time went by, the whole thing accrued it's own style because that's how art works.
My point is not "be more creative, furries!" My point is, an anti-corporate message is not a good use of furry because you can still see the original bones stolen from corporations such as Disney (and Warner Bros. and Kelloggs' fucking Frosted Flakes and a thousand others) if you know how to look. The self-aggrandizing myth I'm trying to expel here is the myth that we're independent of corporate/capitalist society, when we're not.
Well, have you heard of Twain's maxim? "What is good is not very original, and what is original is not very good." I mean, the original context was a critique of someone else's writing, but it kind of does hold true on a macro-level; i.e. if something was truly original, we'd have no context in which to judge if it was actually any good. I already blathered about that yesterday, it's folded an all, but
I think "originality" is overrated, but mostly because the other word you're using, "creativity", which is much more applicable to what furry does, does get used as synonym for "original" a lot.
Making a fursona is "creative", but it does not necessarily mean "quality." On the other hand, "ripping off Disney" is not necessarily bad. And, okay, this comment is pretty cogent, but, uh, Diamond Man is present, and he's the one who gets stuck on copyright when that is what matters at all here, so I'm not sure who I'm talking too? But, uh, fucking who cares about copyright? Copyright is just a legal term; we're talking about style (which, yeah, can't be copyrighted). Copyright's a legal term used to protect a single, solitary work, which is not a style, which generally contains multiple works. And to be further clear, "style" is a very vaguely defined term with no legal definition.
You can probably find like 20 YouTube video essays describing what "Disney style" is, but the point is, even if you took out the bumper saying "this is a fucking Disney movie" at the beginning, you could probably tell that what you're watching is a fucking Disney movie. To go back to furry, I'm sure you can recognize your favorite artist just by looking at a piece by them; you don't have to see who it is. You know, you're all like "that's Blotch. And that's PointedFox. And that's tailsrulz. And that's Dark Natasha." They literally have a whole cinematic critical theory called "auteur theory" which basically says a Stephen Spielberg movie is going to look like a Stephen Spielberg movie, and it doesn't matter if it's a science fiction horror movie about dinosaurs or a Holocaust drama, because he has a style. You can't even really rip off a style, because it is so unique to the individual entity (whether a person, collaboration or corporation) that has it.
You can rip off elements of it, however. That's what I'm accusing furries of doing, and it's not that big a deal, really. They watched Robin Hood and said to themselves "I'd like to make something like that." And then they copied elements of Robin Hood (and plenty of other stuff, not just Disney or even animation), and in the beginning it looked like an off-brand copy of Disney because that's what it was. As time went by, the whole thing accrued it's own style because that's how art works.
My point is not "be more creative, furries!" My point is, an anti-corporate message is not a good use of furry because you can still see the original bones stolen from corporations such as Disney (and Warner Bros. and Kelloggs' fucking Frosted Flakes and a thousand others) if you know how to look. The self-aggrandizing myth I'm trying to expel here is the myth that we're independent of corporate/capitalist society, when we're not.