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[Mictlantecuhtli]

My first thread is less than 24 hours old and it's already self-sustaining. i'm awesome

Rule of awesome: You lose it if you mention it.

[Tuck_Lion]

My first thread is less than 24 hours old and it's already self-sustaining. i'm awesome

Rule of awesome: You lose it if you mention it.

Did I ever say I wanted to be awesome?

[Glowcat]

Think we managed to found the uncanny vally. Thing goes deep down enough to reach the core.

Even after looking at a bunch of pictures of him I don't see anything that I'd describe as creepy about his appearance.

[Scoops Novel]

Well if you think I'll upset, or have upset the thread, please tell me. I'd appreciate having my questions answered by a level-headed genuine article, and Bay 12 provides that amply.

[nenjin]

My first thread is less than 24 hours old and it's already self-sustaining. i'm awesome

Rule of awesome: You lose it if you mention it.

Did I ever say I wanted to be awesome?

What you want isn't relevant. What you claim is.

[Cthulhu]

I think he illustrates why the very human furries freak me out more than the others.  That guy is the nadir of the uncanny valley; a form with too much of both sides and too little of either side.  He's hideously deformed.

[Sirus]

(Carefully touches thread with 10-ft pole)

Surprised http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Avner  hasn't been mentioned yet.

Okay, that uncanny valley someone mentioned a while back? I think this guy crosses it for me. It's a little odd, to put it simply.

[Tuck_Lion]

Rule of awesome: You lose it if you mention it.

Did I ever say I wanted to be awesome?

What you want isn't relevant. What you claim is.

oh shit I lose

[Telgin]

...I love the idea of non-humanoid intelligent creatures, the potential for animal traits to bring in a wide variety of preconceptions to bear, either to support a character design, or to mislead in preparation for a subversion. I'm fascinated by the idea of both human extremes as norms (which is what much of the spectrum classified as "furry" is, more or less, in disguise), and the narrative potential of role-playing beings that are intelligent but not-quite-human in some fundamental way...

So do I like a lot of furry stuff? Yes, I do. Do I consider myself a furry? No. As a label, that's constraining, confining, and inaccurate.

This is pretty much how I feel about it.  I don't consider myself a furry, but I do find those sorts of characters potentially fascinating.  It's definitely one of the reasons I'm a part of the fandom that shall not be named, and why I like to explore it more deeply than most fans (or even the creators).  For example, I love thinking about the way things like body language and average every day things would have to change if you were a quadruped.  Or had hooves instead of hands.  Or how life would be different if you were an herbivore instead of an omnivore.

It goes far beyond just MLP though.  A story I started writing before the MLP craze involved sapient deer like creatures as the protagonists.  There I had to consider how sexual dimorphism would affect things.  Males have antlers and enlarged eyeteeth (like a few species of modern deer, and many extinct species) whereas females don't.  Since the teeth can be erected during excitement, how does that affect body language?  Or what about a female that had small antlers?  She'd probably be treated strangely and picked at.  There's so much potential for this sort of stuff.

That's the sort of stuff I find very interesting, and I love to think about it.  I don't consider myself a furry though, but largely because of the general definition of what a furry is that's etched into my brain.  I don't have anything against people who are furries in any sense of the word though.

[Neonivek]

Even if I were to accept that the Furry Fandom is a bad and terrible thing. The Furry Hatedom is still and definitively 100 times worse and more annoying.

[alway]

Actually, having more than one gender has a signicant benefit for species that are more spread out. After all, if you have 14.000 different genders, and you finally meet someone else, chances are very small that they're the same gender as you. And the multigender only gets complicated depending on the genderdifferences. It might purely be a Dna thing, after all.


Sadly, those species are unlikely to develop a civilization.

_{Mainly because they are fungi}

Ah, you misunderstood my meaning there. By pair-mating, I simply meant 'requires 2 organisms' without any relation to gender; encompassing anything from hermaphroditic snails to 2-gender humans or 7-gendered whatever-that-recently-discovered-species-was. As opposed to a cloning based process like that of bacteria and plant budding or a process which requires 3 or more individuals.

The first reason being the advantage of pair-mating over cloning for large, long lived creatures in terms of evolution. Cloning is basically worse than incest in terms of evolution for such creatures, and is mostly done because it is cheaper, faster, more simple, and because rapid mutation becomes beneficial when you have 10000 children within half a day.

The second being the lack of advantage from any more than a 2 organism reproduction process, as sufficient genetic recombination is achieved with pair-mating. It also comes with big disadvantages, even assuming a best case scenario of a hermaphroditic species. Population establishment becomes much more difficult, the cellular mechanisms would be more complex, and so on. That is not to say it wouldn't exist, but if it did, would likely exist within a framework allowing for pair-mating as well, similar to how plants (and even many animals) can reproduce both sexually and asexually.

Gender itself is pretty irrelevant to all this, as it holds true regardless of whether gender exists or how many there are. In a way, gender is just an efficiency modifier which tells organisms to lop off part of their reproductive system which would otherwise require resources to sustain.

[Tuck_Lion]

Calling yourself a furry essentially means that your Internet persona(s) match(es) the criteria for one of these beings. If it's for a roleplay, this is generally a separate circumstance entirely.

As I've said before, it's to specialize the tone you are read in.

[Solifuge]

Sorry if those pictures were primarily female, and not a full spectrum of Squicky/Attempted-Sexy stuff; most artwork out there, furry or not, is female, and clean male anthropomorphic foxes that fit that spectrum were kinda hard to find. Also, I don't care to link explicit stuff here, nor Google "anthropomorphic fox boy" with Safe Search turned off. Also, sorry about doing spoilers instead of hyperlinks; if folks want, I can go back and change that to prevent anyone from getting grilled/fired for having foxes with hair and butts in your browser history.



When it comes to this stuff, I think I just don't like it when human traits get glued on to mostly-animal critters willy-nilly; I prefer them to be redesigned from the ground up. Even Sphinxes weird me out, but Bastet doesn't. I don't seem to have any problem with animal traits being glued onto mostly-people (tails, ears, wings, horns, whatever).

I think a lot of it stems from the same reason I dig Speculative Fiction that imagines a world where things are different; I like stories with non-existant critterfolks, like the Khajiit and Argonians from Elder Scrolls, so long as their differences are significant beyond aesthetics, or they make some kind of biological sense, etc. In the Elder Scrolls: Morrowind example, Animal-People have traits that separate them from the Human and Elven races (Digitigrade legs and oddly-shaped heads that can't wear boots and helms, night vision or enhanced swimming ability, etc.). And it's relevant to the plot; since Animal-People are kept by the Elves as slaves, and since Slavery is outlawed by occupying Human empire, you have instant dramatic tension. Awesome! Now I can liberate plantations of Lizard-Folk laborers, and rescue Cat-Folk being used to to sneak drugs in and out of Vvardenfell, and I can feel like a cool dude. Or play a literal cat-burgler character, who takes revenge on House Hlaluu for using his people that way.

Surprised http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Avner  hasn't been mentioned yet.

Cat Man weirded me out, but mostly because I have a kneejerk dislike of piercings and tattoos. Even though tattoos can be really beautiful, my brain lumps them and piercings with self-mutilation rituals, which make me sad. I know he did the body modification with his Amerind heritage in mind, and I can look at and appreciate the result from a removed perspective... but extensive body modification still strikes me as unsettling.

[Vector]

I think I'd feel better about insect-based ones.

[Solifuge]

I don't care if there's already a name for anthropomorphic insect characters.

From now on I am calling them Chitinies. (Cartoon bug-person nudity: probably NSFW)