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'Rolling Stone' asks if Furries will go mainstream, but are they already?

Edited by GreenReaper as of 15:50
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I was browsing my Google news feed, as people who read non-fiction writing tend to, and low and behold, a news article from Rolling Stone came up entitled Will Furries Ever Go Mainstream? The reporter reviews his experiences while attending Midwest FurFest last December.

It’s a good piece that poses the question of whether our fan club, that has grown to the size it has in Rosemont, will garner mainstream attention - or acceptance. It's also long, and coming from me you know that’s saying something.

Like most coverage deemed “positive”, they do seem to marginalize the adult aspects of sexual expression in the fandom pretty quickly by saying that it was not the “main aspect of the fandom”. However, like most clever furs they snuck in a risqué quote about foxes:

dozens of six-foot alligators, snakes, lizards, and other assorted reptiles scramble to pose for a group photo.
[...]
On the floor, about three dozen foxes lie on top of each other in a “fur pile,” orange-and-white limbs and bellies knotted together on the ground.

I see what you did there Rolling Stone. You should be proudly ashamed.

But back to the concept of going mainstream. It isn’t a new question within the fandom which can bring excitement or concern depending on who you ask. We claimed it was happening when Disney used the word “anthropomorphic” to describe the world of Zootopia.

However, I would like to claim that, yes, we are entering the mainstream, whether we like it or not. I even have evidence that we may already be there.

Feeding the feeds – Google targets the furries

What is this evidence? One solid piece can be found by reading the first sentence of this article.

Over the course of the past year or so, articles about furries have been appearing in my news feeds. Sometimes they are even my own articles, thanks to GreenReaper’s efforts to have Flayrah articles seen as a news source a few years back.

But this alone wasn’t enough evidence. I had set ‘furry’ as a newsgroup in Google’s old more customizable feed, so I already had outed myself to them. Plus, I’m someone who specifically goes looking for non-fiction about the furry fandom, which is a niche within a niche. Therefore, I could not take my personal feed as evidence that Google results for me was content that was algorithmically targeted instead of my own fault.

However, a furry artist named ZilchFox responded to the Rolling Stone article showing up in their feed with a tweet showing they were seeing the same thing. This reveals that Google isn’t just targeting people who held up a sign asking for furries in their newsfeed.

So, if you are a furry, you’ve probably noted that you are getting articles that deal with the fandom. I would propose if we’re on the radar of the world’s largest search engine enough to have a keyword dedicated in the algorithm to target us, they have seen it as something worth targeting.

Of course, maybe that alone is not evidence. Perhaps if they someday are actually able to provide ads to us that fit our demographic rather than an ad for a new pair of shoes that just so happen to be the ones we just bought, we can talk turkey. I doubt any fur wants to corner the market on that specific shoe and buy them in excess - just saying, Google.

Fursuit Dance competitions will now be televised?

As I was writing this, it was pointed out that a new show is being proposed that took inspiration from the Masked Singer. From my understanding, in that show celebrities dress up in costumes and perform a song on stage. The judges have to guess who it is behind the mask. Usually these costumes are animal costumes. One infamous segment passed about the fandom was one performer in a rottweiler costume that had people in gimp pup-hoods for an accompaniment. Of course those “marginally thirsty” people in the fandom were quick to leash onto that one.

Anyway, this new show, which seems to involve Ellen Degeneres, takes that idea and makes the costumed participant dance instead. How this premise would make any sense I have no idea. I mean, dance is something anyone can do, and adapt. How are you going to guess as to who is under the mask simply by how they move their body? If they start moon-walking and pop-locking, are we going to guess that Michael Jackson rose from the grave? That would be quite a thriller I suppose.

Or perhaps I’m just too out of touch to be part of anything mainstream.

But the fact is that dancing in animal costumes and competitions around them are now a major staple of most furry conventions. After a humble start at Furry Weekend Atlanta, these contests have continued to grow in demand and draw in large crowds - so much that they, liked the Masked Singer, have already had spin-offs such as Floor Wars.

The traditional dance contest usually comprises of judges reviewing the dance after one fursona or dance group performs; the newer Floor Wars is also a contest but done in a more informal a free flowing manner and more head to head. This separates a practiced and rehearsed dance competition from the more free style and improvised style of dance that would be more common in clubs since you don't have control of the music you are dancing to. It's similar to the difference between being a stand-up comedian with rehearsed material and doing improv comedy.

Inked Magazine - Riding on the Coattails

So how does one determine whether they are leaving an impact enough in culture and people around them enough to be mainstream? One of the ways you can measure this is by emulation. Is there someone out there riding your coat-tails?

For Rolling Stone, for instance, as soon as they published this piece, other publishers felt they needed to get on a bus being generated by the interest this article was creating. Inked, a magazine dealing with tattoos, responded to the Rolling Stone feature by printing their own article. They didn’t hide the fact that they were inspired by their furry piece as they reference it quite quickly.

Now to be absolutely fair you could say this article is doing the same, but… just shut up!

There is a difference, while I believe this one has some relevant items to say (otherwise why would I write it?), their article was clearly trying desperately to find something to tie our fandom with their target audience. So they noted in this article, entitled The Hidden Art of Tattooing Fursuits, that tattooing of fursuits was a big question and conundrum among fursuit consumers.

Now most fursuit designers may be scratching their heads and note that you don’t actually ink the fursuit. It’s certainly not the biggest of problems that many people are talking about, or even in the top ten of issues. To emulate a tattoo you would either integrate different color fur for the markings, or use some kind of dye to recolor the fur in those spots. No needles required. To be fair to Inked they do note this, however their subtitle calling it a conundrum makes it seem a bigger deal than the body of the article presents.

I guess that's just written media for you, mainstream or no.

Their evidence that this is a 'conundrum' is perhaps the most amusing thing. Two links: one to a LiveJournal post from 2005 and another to a Fur Affinity Forums thread from 2008 where someone is talking about trying to add tattoos to their already designed fursuit and people offering advice on it. I mean, if you’re going to make a claim that something is a common inquiry, you should at least trace out a pattern of this rather than referencing two posts that are 12 years old or more. Especially if you’re going to suggest it may be a career opportunity for tattoo designers at the end your article.

You can’t really make a tattoo of any significance using two points as far as I’m aware, so you can’t do this with a news article either. Sure you could do it, but it’s going to not be seen as very intricately designed.

This is how you know that Rolling Stone is still quite mainstream and relevant. Would Inked have been inspired to make their article if not for the fear of missing out when they saw Rolling Stone's piece? That means Inked is after furry clicks, right? If that is the case, they missed an opportunity.

Instead of thinking about furries as being equal to fursuiters, an all-to-common issue in media, they could have discovered that many furs don’t have a costume upon further research. They could have taken advantage of the fact that this article was going to draw in furry readers by selling them on the idea of getting a tattoo of their fursona. You could even present that as cooler and cheaper than a fursuit, right?

Hey, we have skin too. That’s all I’m saying. Not all of us have costumes and not all articles about us have to revolve around those fuzzy outfits. We love art and we love to express ourselves through our fursonas; why not combine the two and put it on our body? Make your fursona a part of you— literally. The tattoo designer demographic would be far better-served trying to draw furries into their own market rather diving into costume design.

#DHGate-gate

And as a final note as to why fursuiting in particular has become quite mainstream, other than the fact that it’s all the press talks about when discussing the fandom even to their detriment, is the fact that there are knock off and counterfeit fursuit dealers. Relevant to Rolling Stone in particular, since they were a music magazine last I checked, was one such individual who found themselves amongst the swindled.

Insane Clown Posse’s lead man Violent J was just trying to buy a fluffy animal costume for their daughter, Ruby. He ended up getting crooked out of hundreds of dollars as he bought them from the website DHGate. In a video breakdown and rant, the duo go over the webpage’s promises compared to the final bobblehead-like product they actually received.

Clearly the swindlers and crooks out there see a market that is large enough to be worth exploiting, and if that doesn’t make something mainstream, I don’t know what does. Like Inked, DHGate are riding on the fur coated tails of the furries. But unlike Inked, whose article isn’t going to take money from your pocket, DHGate is far more exploitative. Not even trying to do anything original, instead they're pretending to be more creative than they actually are, deceiving their audience into buying cheaply-made costumes with designs lifted from existing fursonas and costumes.

When fame results in things like this, I’m starting to see why some have proposed that being mainstream is overrated. But perhaps, I can just tell myself, this really means that it’s just fursuiting that is mainstream, and not necessarily the entirety of the furry fandom.

Comments

Your rating: None Average: 2 (2 votes)

It already went mainstream over 30 years ago.

Your rating: None Average: 4.8 (4 votes)

That is a curiosity, what event or item do you think made it "Mainstream"?

That's sort of where this grey area about the concept comes from, people have different ideas that make it that way.

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People in furry fandom have argued about The Mainstream for years, and I think part of the problem is that there's no clear definition what that means, or how we measure that something has changed. What does seem clear is that "the mainstream" (or parts of it) represents different things to different people.

I think it's important to note that "mainstream" doesn't necessarily imply "popularly liked by most people", nor "something that everyone knows about", nor "cleaned up / dumbed down / has sold out for mass approval". Taking a look at anime, for example, its fandom in North America started at the same time as furry (and with some of the same people). Anime is massively more popular than furry. It's got huge conventions, the better films get shown in North American movie theaters, English television and streaming networks are broadcasting series, there's a thriving fanbase, lots of indie artwork sales (regardless of being a franchise-based fandom), and of course porn. But huge numbers of people really don't know much about it. It's successful - and yet it's still niche. It... feels more mainstream (whatever that means)? Like it's as "mainstream" as it's been able to achieve, at least up to this point in time?

I think one thing that's been a huge help, is that after the year 2000-ish, thanks to both the Internet and marketing, that being a geek or a nerd about a niche interest is being seen as increasingly ok. High school teenagers can still be nasty, sure, but once you're out of that environment, it's become so much easier to connect with and celebrate your fandom.

Personal bias, I think that furry fandom has limited mainstream potential, because if more people were interested in it, we would have already gotten bigger, a lot earlier. We're still growing from year to year, but it's rarely felt like there was a sudden influx of growth. I remember people at ConFurence complaining about people from FurryMuck coming in. Otherwise our growth has felt pretty slow and steady.
Even the wave of MLP art turned out not to be a lot of new people, just a lot of people already in furry fandom figuring out that they also liked MLP.

There's also a distinct worry that furry fandom will lose control of its underground, indie feel if external interests were to establish enough of a foothold, or would try to create a short-lived trend for personal financial gain, to the detriment of the grassroots fan origins. Or that suddenly, huge numbers of "normal" people will show up in the fandom and try to marginalize people. The phrase "Keep Furry Weird" is a reflection if this, though depending who's saying it, can carry a number of additional undertones. (Personally I don't care if someone is "weird" or "non-weird", if someone likes anthropomorphic stuff and wants to hang out in the fandom, and they don't act like a selfish jerk, they're in.)

I think some of the things that Sonious points out in this article are a factor of growth - we're still a small fandom, but we're getting big enough for people to think it's worth customizing a newsfeed, or trying to sell a crappy knock-off fursuit, or to write an article about something weird and geeky because society has been getting acclimatized to niche-interest news. I think the "mainstream" will have finally "gotten" furry fandom once they stop assuming it's mostly fursuits, or keep harping about individual comfort (or discomfort) over content. Perhaps someday!

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I draw a parallel with the growth of science fiction and fantasy literature, media and fandom. SF/F started in the early 20th century as very niche, and over the decades grew in respectability with a notable serious work that caught mainstream attention every few years. Furry's about 40-50 years behind SF/F; right now it's about where SF/F was in the 1970s. Stanley Kubrick adapted Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey"; Wes Anderson has adapted Roald Dahl's "The Fantastic Mr. Fox". "The Lion King" was our "Forbidden Planet", "Bojack Horseman" was our "Star Trek", "Zootopia" was our "Star Wars".

It's only in the past decade or so that SF/F has become "normalized" to the point where a late night host can geek out with "Lord of the Rings" references on a regular basis and not catch flak from the network. Give it about 20-30 years and Kyell Gold's books will become a motion picture or HBO series.

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Yeah,i wonder if furry will ever become normalized, at least in nerd fandom. I remember when i was growing up that to be seen carrying a book with a dragon/wizard on the cover or painting miniatures and you would get laughed out of existence. I remember when i was growing up i was beat up and bullied for reading Dragonlance and painting minatures, but the very people who used to make fun of me/beat me up for it are now calling themselves nerds. So who is laughing now? I think furry might go the same way.

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Furries ask if Rolling Stone will go mainstream.

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Well, I think the news here is that there was a big article in a big magazine about furry, and the reaction from furries seems to be, "Oh, that's nice." instead of "OHGODJESUSCHRISTOHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCKWE'RESCREWEDOHGODSOMEBODYSAVEMEOHMYEYESAHHHHHHH!" which was the older furry fandom's more usual response to this sort of thing.

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And actually getting on topic, I mean, if we're really all worried about going mainstream, maybe we should picked something besides, you know, cartoon animals to form a subculture around. Oh, and to the guys in the back planning revolt with the strategy, "Well, then, we'll just have to make it sexier!", yeah, that's not helping.

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You may as well say "Pepper Coyote" here...

His tweet saying that very thing is what led me to find Rivalo's Ellen Degeneres tweet.

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The whole point was to cover things that cartoon animals weren't addressing - at least, not then - and perhaps make a little money on the side.

Commercial adoption won't change that; it'll just push fans further to the margins, doing Disney's dirty work on the cheap.

Don't worry; I'm sure you'll get some of what you want. But so will the guys (and girls) in back - their audience is growing too, or I wouldn't always be on the lookout for the next server deal.

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Okay, first of all, your sexual plan ... that should work keeping it non-mainstream.

But, also, I mean, you've got the "we've been mainstream since Egypt" guys, who are wrong, but if there's a grain of truth in their pearl of ignorance, it's that we're not exactly re-inventing the wheel, here. Complain about Disney ripping us off all you want, but you can't tell me furry hasn't ripped off Disney. It's pretty hard to be the "anti-corporate" fandom when your entire shtick is cribbed from a corporation. We've always been doing Disney's dirty work on the cheap.

There's a furry self-aggrandizing myth that we're a very creative fandom, and we like to compare ourselves to Star Wars fandom or bronies or Trekkies or whatever as long as it's a fandom based around one single corporate owned property. But when some furries jerking themselves off about how inventive furries are, do they ever compare themselves to another genre, like, say, I don't know, the science fiction or fantasy fandoms? No, of course not, because they are creatively kicking our ass, and have been since we started. We like to brag about our literary achievements, when its usually just ganking a pretty rote plot from another genre and spray-painting a few animals over the characters.

Okay, I'll grant you "fursuiting>cosplay" as creative, on one hand, as most of the characters are technically "originals", but, but on the other hand, how "original" we talking, here? It's still basically just the same old corporate mascot costume, and the main improvements to that are mechanical, rather than creative. Our art is basically the same, just mechanical improvements to what is essentially the same cartoon animals that you can find pretty much everywhere. How creative, really, is throwing a bunch of random colors, wings, horns onto nature-be-damned hybridizations without any thought to justification? Oh, and maybe we added boobs, but they've made sexy cartoon insurance commercials and moved on from them at this point, so how "creative" is that really?

Obviously, this does gloss over plenty of furry artists who do work creatively, and totally undersells the creativity involved in pure mechanical improvement of pre-existing skillsets. But that's the problem; it's not that I disagree that corporations are bad and can have a net negative affect on furry if we were to "sell out". My argument is that we've developed a skillset perfectly suited to selling out to a corporation.

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hey furries jerking themselves off about how inventive furries are

let me tell you about how Cats is great and check out my list of top 10 big budget soulless corporate hamburger movies

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do you like my avatar I drew, its from this little movie you might have never heard of

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You're giving me way too much credit here, buddy; that's totally ripped off from a Disney animator.

But "basic fox fursona", boom, got it, helping me make my point. See, a basic fox fursona doesn't stand out, so what do you do? You add all those gewgaws and jimjams I like to complain about. You show up in a fursuit at Confurence 0, you're one of two guys. You stand out! It's great, it's fun! You're the center of attention! Fast forward 10 years, you show up at any furry convention with your basic fox fursuit, there's 10, maybe 20, basic fox fursuits, and, let's face it, yours isn't even that good! Nobody cares about you, nobody wants their picture taken with you, you might as well just went in your street clothes.

So what do you do? You go home and spraypaint that shit hot pink! Boom, next year, you're the bright hot pink fox! Lot's of fox fursuits, but only one hot pink one! You're back in business, boys! Until, boom, someone else does something, and they're the cool one, now. So you just keep adding polka dots and antlers and sabre teeth and tiger stripes and flashing lights and just all this shit, but what you never do is actually just fucking improve the suit.

Or, god, I don't know, just like your basic fucking fox suit.

It's the exact same process with art; yeah, there are good artists who do good work just drawing basic foxes really fucking well, and then there are people who don't, so they, once again, just throw attention grabbing shit at their artwork until it's just garbage.

Nothing wrong with a good, fucking basic fox. As the great poet Baren Akedladies once wrote, "I like vanilla, it's the finest of the flavors".

And, you know what, what I really want to talk about now is insurance companies, because fuck a Geico, man. Fuck a Geico. You kids today, with your Flos from Progressive and "Dadadada-We-Are-Farmers" and that Mayhem guy (I don't even remember which one he's selling!), but back in the old days, our insurance commercials were boring, and we liked it like that. Do you even realize what insurance is? It's actually really depressing! Money you pay now for a disaster you know is coming later! And now we have a fucking cartoon gecko selling it to us! Are you fucking shitting me!

Seriously, it's obvious in hindsight, because insurance is something you have to have (it's literally required by law). You don't have to sell it; you have to make people remember your company when it's time to buy it! It's advertising 101; you don't actually sell the product with your commercial, you have to make it STAND OUT! (So actually that Mayhem guy kind of sucks.) So Geico started making these funny commercials with cavemens and geckos and raccoons and fucking Speed Racer at one point and now all of them do it because it worked. It's the most serious, depressing thing you can spend money on, and they are literally using cartoons to advertise it!

And that's where Erin Insurance comes in; in order to sell insurance, they made a sexy cartoon character. Bright colors, simple lines and shapes. Designed to stand out. And it was sexy. Yes, the commercials themselves were, at worst, a hard G, but they using tropes from genres where the conventions meant, characters in those situations, they were gonna fuck after the commercial was over. It wasn't explicit, but it was implicit. Bright, poppy cartoons and implicit sex; do I need to make it clearer. And it turned out the problem wasn't people weren't ready for it; the problem was people were a little too ready for it and you couldn't get to the actual fucking insurance for all the fucking fan porn.

I mean, it's not like what furry is doing is that weird or unusual; we don't even have to sell out for Disney to use us for their own purposes because we're doing the same thing they are, we just are doing it finer. By that I mean is that we have literally spent the last half century drawing the same goddamn basic fox over and over and over and over until, my god, we couldn't help but get better at it. That may seem to contradict my first couple of paragraphs, but not everyone is a talentless hack who is trying to stand out and be popular. Some people may just like basic foxes, and other times you get talented hacks who could care less about basic foxes, but they're professionals, goddammit, and if what people want is a goddamn basic fox, they are going to draw a goddamn basic fox, goddammit.

All Disney has to do is type fox in to e621, see what furries have learned in those decades, see what works and what doesn't, and blammo! You can't even get mad at them since a. we're already ripping them off, and b. the process I just described is furries ripping each other off. A corporation is not your friend, but neither is a fandom.

And there's pressure in the fandom to change an artist in ways they might not want to change; our currency may be more about popularity than, well, currency (but it can be currency, too). I mean, the obvious one you'd expect from me is an artist with qualms about porn may feel pressure to produce it, but it could be something as simple as an artist drawing a fox when they really just want to draw an ocelot, you know?

My point is not that we should all sell out to Disney or Geico or whoever the fuck, because they will totally knock off a lot of our weirder edges and lovable quirks in an effort to sanitize furry or whatever. But the problem is our art is already so bound up with the corporate, pro-capitalist "mainstream" that taking a stance against it is laughable and probably impossible.

Unless we go with Green Reaper's plan and make furry about turning cub porn into an acceptable business endeavor, and I'm going to vote no on that one.

Your rating: None Average: 2.3 (3 votes)

The joke was you didn't draw or do anything at all

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I've read your posts; they're not that clever.

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Fade away

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You must be riding my dick because it's so big, then.

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You could have made you point by going:

Average Furry: "Behold my creativity! I put a penis on a Pikachu."

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"Okay, first of all, your sexual plan ... that should work keeping it non-mainstream."
OF FUCK NO. I ain't keeping my sexual fantasy a non-stream. If a bunch of normies get to sprout theirs almost everywhere, then a bunch of furries get to as well as long as it's not breaking any laws. It's not really healthy to force many of such furries to hide themselves, and it's degenerating to force that as it doesn't respect basic "human" rights.

"There's a furry self-aggrandizing myth that we're a very creative fandom"
I have a bit of thought here on the whole original thing.
Is it based off existing property? Maybe. But is that any different than how most of culture gets created? No. Public Domain for example is what creates most of culture, and "Intellectual Property" doesn't change that creativity is based off existing things.

There is a myth that claims that originality is about making ideas and things out of thin-air, as if that can be a separate thing than how culture really works most of the time. In reality though, it doesn't exist. Making a cartoon character with your own designs is 100% no different than making 'weird' modern art, or making a character made out of plastic straws. Frankly, I just don't agree that 'trying' to be weird and unknown as possible in order to be "most" creative really equals to being better or "more invention" since after all, invention comes from past inventions anyway.

So is making a typical fursona a "rip-off" of Disney characters? If so, then so is every good art out there. By the way, I DON'T THINK YOU CAN COPYRIGHT AN ART STYLE.
I don't want to make a character stand out if I were to make a commercial. That's like saying I can't make anime to do that.

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This is about as good as a Diamond Man post gets; I can see some kind of thought process behind the arguments being made (if, ironically, not exactly original thought processes).

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You might be replying to the wrong comment.

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Don't you know anything? "My dick is huge" is the correct response to everything!

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Flashbacks to four years ago. :p

I think all this should leave us with a greater sense of self-awareness. We should recognize that furries are not uniquely creative or original. The ideas behind our fandom have been around since human culture began and, although we are smaller than more mainstream interests like rock music or science fiction, we have the same internal groups. We should recognize that content creators and content consumers are not distinct entities but overlap, both in and outside of the furry fandom. And, we should try to understand our own motivations to raise the standing of the furry fandom and recognize when our biases may be leading us to make distinctions that exist to make us feel better and not to reflect the truth.

https://www.flayrah.com/6514/opinion-furry-fandom-especially-creative-or-original

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

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I have no problem copping to unoriginality myself!

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I'm gonna have to disagree. If the furry "fandom" isn't creative or original, then creativity and originality doesn't exist, considering every creation comes from somewhere.

There just isn't a difference between the creation of the western dragon, and a fursona with large emotional eyes with a mix of colors. I mean their both based off existing past. Terms "fandom" and "copyright" doesn't change anything.

Of course, if creativity does exist, then it's about combining existing ideas thus applying to a lot of fursonas today. Even if the art style was just like Disney (even though it's hard to tell if an art style can be copyrighted).

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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.

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Probably never heard of the term "Twain's maxim", but I was reading Nina Paley's blog and her spiritual thoughts about how Copyright laws has been destroying culture. She went on and exposed the 'cult of originality'. I don't remember what it said exactly as it was a long time ago but I remember enjoying it a lot.
If you're generally trying to argue along with me by saying that "creativity doesn't exist" against my claim about creativity and fursonas, well then what's the point of the argument?
If creativity doesn't exist, then why are some people on here arguing it so specifically toward the Furry fandom in general? As if it does, but the fandom doesn't count for that?

I don't think anyone I know here is really stuck on Copyright, I think there was an assumption of the Disney comparison involving Copyright due to how people act like it really is 'owned' by Disney. After all, if art style isn't copyrighted then Disney can't be "ripped off" by art style alone. Since nobody would legally own it. Speaking of ripping off, I think we need to be careful about that label. I don't think adaption of art style equal to ripping off even if it's not considered bad.

-Skipping third paragraph in terms of replying.-

Even if you consider that ripping off elements is not on itself bad, I think the argument of that seems a bit off. I mean, it just goes back to the "everything rips of elements all the time" thing. So some furries "ripped off" some elements from Disney, but so did Disney; they copied elements from cartoons around the same time, including anthropomorphism from older animation and around same time animation, and it goes on.
If you're like "Yeah, that is true." then what is the point of your argument then?

Your last paragraph exposes the problem. While I don't think you're trying to tell furries to be "more" creative, you seem to indicate that furries adapting culture for commercials is just "stolen" elements (as if it's a property, even though you even said yourself that you can't copyright an art style) from several companies and therefor they "can't" be like some of those companies, but in reality, the companies (for example, Kelloggs) has acted no different. Even if they were different, that doesn't mean the general group of furry cannot adapt a corporate/capitalist society. The idea that "Hey, furries cannot ever adapt a cororate for commerical gain because their art must be different." is only an opinion, unless you're pointing out that there really is a law forbidding this and it's true.

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This is Diamond Man, right? This is Diamond Man.

The bolding thing, that's the Diamond Man ... well, there it is, that's the Diamond Man style. I mean, I randomly italicize everything, so I can't say shit. Much improved grammar and usage, just remarkable improvement, actually. Good job. Don't let this praise go to your head, keep improving, and if you genuinely aren't Diamond Man, uh, whoops, sorry!

Back to the bold, as it were, uh the point of the argument is talking is fun! We're having a conversation, isn't that fun!

But, you know, you kinda are stuck on the copyright thing. I'm trying to talk about art, not legality. You're taking it too literally when I say "rip-off". It's part of the process of learning; "imitation", there, that's a better word. A personal style begins as an imitation of other styles. I'm merely pointing out this pretty obvious thing, that one of the things early furries "imitated" was Disney. And if I'm coming off combative it's because there is a troll up there, and, you know, they tend to make you come off combative. That's what they do. Also, I always sound combative (I like sarcasm).

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What?

I apologize if I assumed wrong here: You seem to act like the many elements from the furry fandom is just Disney property, or other commercial property by claiming that some things are "stolen" from them in the fandom while somewhat ignorant of the likely fact that Disney and specific mascot commercials do the same (have you seen those "That's not right." commercials, or that really sexy cow commercial that aired around 3 years ago?). So I bring out Copyright law because it's like the only thing people use to treat some creative information like property.
Intellectual Property was a rotten idea that inspired people to think that information can on itself be property when it's unrealistic to think so. The whole "stealing" thing, and the myth of companies being different than the furry fandom has likely some influenced effect from Intellectual Property (usually in a lot of cases, Copyright) idea and it's laws.

I already assume that you don't have any problem with the rip-off thing, but you were still acting as if companies and Disney were magically different and as if there was some hidden law suggesting that typical furry cannot make their own capitalism thing, even though it already kinda happened.

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to be fair, the "guy in the back" ? he's going to your site, inkbunny, to find cub porn since it's the only place that's welcomes it. The "guy in the back" isn't the normal, sane people who happen to like Zootopia and wonder if there's a fandom behind it.

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It's a bad problem

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>The only place

Clearly you don't know about Pixiv. Or Baraag. Or any of the hundreds of websites that allow cub porn.

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I can do you one better, a furry went on Comedy Central to talk about the sexual aspects of furry fandom a few months back, and the internet didn't ask for his head on a platter. Or realized it happened at all.

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We know.
TV show
agenda

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That's not a bad point. Articles and videos about the furry fandom just aren't that rare anymore. John Oliver has referenced the fandom on several occasions and he's not exactly aiming for a niche audience.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

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Oh, and Inked; it's called a frost brand.

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About copying things/riding coattails (The Inked magazine piece riding the Rolling Stone one, and bootleg fursuits spawning the juggalo vid.) Rivalo's tweet about the furry on the dance show missed something. It's not an original fan-made fursuit. It's a Hollywood prop-maker's version of a fursuit made for the show Lucifer. They used to use crappy halloween costumes, now they have an original that looks good enough to fool people and it's on multiple shows now.

https://twitter.com/DogpatchPress/status/1214773332001746944?s=20

Side story: Lucifer cast some furry extras like Quietfire, who now owns the head of Sexykitty from CSI and was trying to get it on the show. Didn't work out but I have a long video interview with him on file (and pics of getting to wear it.)

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At least they're being somewhat environmentally conscious by reusing costumes.

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Furry is certainly more mainstream than it used to be but I'm not sure you've necessarily picked the best arguments for it. Google's whole business model relies on personalised advertising. That they are showing furry stuff to furs is not surprising in the least, nor would it suggest any sort of scale. Similarly, the presence of scammers is less about how mainstream something is versus how likely they feel they are to get something out. It could be a sign that the fandom is big enough to attract their attention but it could also be that its so small that the supply of some merchandise (such as fursuits) is so limited that people are willing to take risks to get them and, given the prices of suit, the payoff for exploiting that is high.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

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If a more lesser bad sub-group tries to be accepted (or becomes accepted) in a large society that is bad, then don't be surprised that the sub-group becomes bad, or becomes more bad itself.

In other words, in order for 'furry' to be accepted by mainstream media, they must start out casting several other furries, becomes just as judgemental, and be filled with more puritans.
And since mainstream media still cares about what certain furries do in the privacy of their homes involving harmless and non-threatening activity (e.g. gasping against consensual and victimless fursuit sex), treats their cringy romance as "superior", whines about someone being honestly sexual with their fursona, discriminates people as people, and is filled with many other bad things, I would probably just prey that this fandom just stays separate. At least until society is good.

Is there evidence that it's becoming somewhat mainstream in terms of "acceptance" with alignment of mainstream popularity rules? Sadly yes. Don't get me started on some of the furries over at Twitter. Anyway, it's pretty much so far seems to be what I predicted. There are furries who tries to get accepted while outcasting others ("So for example, "We are not sexual!" (Lies, many people are.)), many acts very childish, and completely stupid. I've even heard a story where someone open themselves on furaffinity and got harassed and with death threats by many furries on furaffinity.

I've heard on here that 'mainstream' doesn't have to mean being liked by most people, but judging by my experience, it kinda feels like the case (along with the evidence).
I wish the "community" could just be left alone, and be all about being open and loving on the physiological side, but atlas, a great amount of faith is gone. Now I just can't stop thinking about the end times involving the sun.

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The 1-star ratings attack is also further proof that this fandom in general is heading (or is already) into a degenerating wave.

For now, I rated the comment higher to fight against censorship.

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Weird, I meant to reply to the DiamondMan comment.

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If furries go ACTUALLY mainstream, AND fursuiters remain the default public image of what a furry is, I will........ "not stop" a furry civil war. COUNT ON IT.

Well, I'll be...

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This entire thread needs a Tsar Bomba dropped on it. If there's another one to spare it can annihilate wherever the original digital files for 'Alpha & Omega' are stored.

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Grow up.

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Oh, this article was from this year?

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