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malyminOriginally posted February 25th, 2024 on my Cohost account. Copied from this archived page.
Note: In retrospect, I think there are nuances to be had about the distinction between the "main bloodline" furry fandom, and the "animal xenofiction" bloodline.
The "main bloodline" originates from 1970's "funny animal fandom" associated with humanoid animal cartoon characters. (hence why skunks were popular in early furry culture - Pepe Le Pew, and in the 90's Fifi La Fume, were characters from popular funny animal cartoons!) This strain of furry fandom had a prominent NSFW scene from the beginning, and has been widely gawked at since the early internet for its association with particularly idiosyncratic kinks and fetishes, relative to other online subcultures. I can't imagine that many NSFW writers on Ao3 are into their whumpees turning into pooltoy versions of themselves and getting inflated big and round, you know? At some point, airplane, robot, and other inorganic characters became accepted parts of the scene, as long as they invoked animal shapes like snouts and paws; I'm pretty sure airplanes are so popular because they already kind of look like they have snouts.
The animal xenofiction bloodline is largely focused on sapient but non-humanoid animal characters; its associated "formative media" features casts of non-humanoid animals who talk (although that speech is not understandable to humans, in settings where humans exist), and who may (especially in literary examples) display elaborate cultural traditions despite their lack of hands. Characters anthropomorphizing objects or made of artificial materials are relatively rare, compared to the funny animal bloodline. Animal Xenofiction fans, and media fandoms within the Animal Xenofiction, are generally less interested in NSFW than either "mainline" furry fandom or human-centered media fandom, and when kink appears it's in relatively mainstream forms like Dom/Sub and sadomasochism.
It is more stereotypically associated with children and teenagers, especially teenage girls, than "mainline" furry fandom, and this reflects the difference in bullying the two strains have received. Main bloodlines, from what I remember of the aughts, have largely been lolcow'd for being weird and offputting autistic adults (and ugly and fat - didn't matter if this wasn't true, it was assumed) with childish interests. This is a type of harassment that, in media fandom spaces, targets both male and female fans (and both transformative and curative fans) who are in their adult years. Xenofiction strains - such as "wolfaboos" - were often bullied for being emo kids who made edgy and overpowered OCs with unnatural colors and tragic backstories, being too into alt fashion and anime-esque narrative melodrama; sometimes this bullying even came from other xenofiction furries, who felt they were superior to their peers for sticking to biological accuracy in character design. I'm sure many Dreamwidth users can see the parallel to how teenage girls in fandom have been historically treated - by people outside fandom, by men in curative fandom, even by other women in transformative/shipping-culture fandom, who sneered at "Mary Sues" as affronts to canon and literature.
These strains of "furry" have melded into each other over time, but I believe treating them as synonymous is a category error on par with treating anime fandom "yaoi" fans like they're just a weird mutant subspecies of K/S-descended "slash" fans - they have convergently evolved similarities, and they have overlapped hybridized over the decades, but they are different animals, with their own evolutionary histories and quirks stemming from that history.
With that out of the way, let the original post stand unaltered. In addition, under the cut, tresfoyle gave me permission to add her commentary from when we were both on Cohost; her commentary is in the readmore under mine.
The Lion King Fan Art Archive.
There's something about the areas where the line between "media fandom" and "furry fandom" has historically been blurry that appeals to me. I feel like making OCs has largely become something media-fandom culture is shamed out of, for being... "cringe," because "nobody wants to see that."
(If nobody's allowed to make "bad" but earnest art, good art - weird and experimental, sincere and personal, niche and unmarketable - is less likely to be made in that space, too.)
But the absolute second most popular post on this archive, is a flash video from 2005, of a bunch of sparklelions, sparklewolves, and other fursonae of people in the community, singing "Witch Doctor" together. I can't imagine most media fandoms making something like this today. Other fans, at best, are "mutuals" - not members of a community. And it's cringe to make a video of people in the fandom singing together as their idealized selves. Everyone looks back at this kind of thing with shame and disgust now. Either because they think that fandom is better than this now, or because they (jaded by it having the same petty conflicts and serious problems as any other interest-based community, jaded by its recuperation by corporations into glorified advertisement) think fandom is so irredeemably terrible that it was stupid to ever be so joyful about it.
Maybe Warriors fans would do something like this, but they're kind of one of the biggest surviving examples of a place where the veil between furry fandom and media fandom remains kind of thin. Few, if any, media fandoms are as dedicated to making original animation projects, including ones about radically divergent alternate universes or completely original characters, en masse as they are.
I think you have the right of it, that we're seeing this weird sort of cultural drift where participatory, creative, collective modes of fan interaction with media are kind of siloed off from fandoms that are really mostly a formalized mode of water cooler talk about Our Shows and a vehicle for advanced forms of marketing. That said, I think the boundaries of that division are weird and fuzzy
because like, okay, so furry culture is very much of the former class. Furries still do stuff like you're talking about in the archive. And part of that is that if you subtract out all the participatory, creative, collective parts of furry stuff, what's left? Some movies, some comics, some games, not a lot holding it all together. It can't function like a fandom for a TV show.
But then on another end of things, I think about the Transformers fandom. Which is, obviously, defined by a total media glut. It is a full-spectrum blast of Content to buy and arrange and be a database fetishist about and you could spend your whole time in there alone, watching shows and buying toys.
And yet when I think about folks making brand new self-indulgent shit for its own sake in a fandom, the first thing that comes to mind is like. Jeetdoh and his pizza delivery robots AU thing. And that guy is constantly riffing with folks, there's a back and forth going on with these characters and other people's creations and these little independent ventures that is so familiar. And that's hardly the only example that springs to mind! I've seen people do so much wild, creative shit just with the toys—kitbashes, mods, open-source 3d-printed parts, shit is incredible.
So, point being, clearly this isn't something defined just by the level of the fandom at large's detachment from a single mass-media Brand. I think it's something to do with having an object of affection that is huge and full of contradictions, that comes in many permutations, because I think the things the botfuckers and the furries have in common come down to there being so much Stuff to what they're into that no one could possibly hold it in their head at once. Something about that friction, the inherently contradictory nature of it all, creates lacunae that invite this sort of endless riffing and gleeful self-insertion that is such a transparent source of joy.
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Date: 2026-01-10 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-10 03:07 am (UTC)Oh! Sorry, that was a mistake. I just fixed the link; this should work fine.
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tresfoyle gave me permission to add her commentary from back on Cohost, so I'm going to do that in a hot minute!
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Date: 2026-01-10 03:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-10 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-01-11 02:14 pm (UTC)Come to think of that, that's another thing that I remember, settings that very obviously take inspiration from existing properties but aren't. Even my own current main setting does that. I guess a common example would be the multiple dragon bonding cyberpet agencies which were very much Not Pern but clearly inspired. Compare with stuff like Warrior Cats where people lift the clan structure, ranks, naming systems wholesale, their settings are more obviously Warriors But Elsewhere. I don't think I've ever seen a setting inspired by Warriors but still its own thing? Could be wrong, though.
I don't know if that's to do with legality, I was never into Pern but I heard stories about how lawyer-happy things got. Then by the time you get to Warriors fandom is more accepted. Maaaybe? But huh I went and looked up when it came out and the first book is from 2003, that's a lot older than I thought. I admit I don't know a ton about the timeline of legal acceptance of fandom, not really my area. I guess I'm better off leaving that to the experts. Maybe it's just that Pern was just that bad for legal crap that you had to diversify. But either way I don't see that same level of "cool idea, I'll borrow it and make it my own" so much?
Anyway this is getting rambly and off the point... but I think you're right about the two different strains, to get back onto it. I never thought much about it because they were always overlapping for me, but it makes sense. Especially the differing levels of kink - I did like drawing and making up furry characters but the amount of fetish content was always so offputting, and I feel like I've given up trying to say it's not inherently fetish art when the fandom seems happy to embrace it. Which is fine, but sometimes I want to draw animal people without everyone jumping to conclusions.
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Date: 2026-01-11 06:08 pm (UTC)I feel like, nowadays where free fanworks are less likely to get C&D'd, the only time I see "obviously inspired by but not exactly" is when something is being sold as a product. Clangen is freeware, so it's openly a warriors fangame; Cattails started as a warrior fangame, then changed its lore and setting to original ones to allow it to be sold as an indie game. And I have to wonder... is that literally it? Is the only deciding factor between making an expy vs a direct fanwork money, for most people? As someone who both believes in the right to directly retell existing stories and likes to see "original" riffs on a particular work of fiction's concepts, I don't know what to make of it.
(I've definately seen kids on Tumblr make "redesigns" of the Wings of Fire dragons that are so far removed from the originals in appearance and biology that, like... I wonder if they wouldn't be happier making completely original dragon species. For example, Skywings in those books are blatantly supposed to fufill the niche of "generic smaug expy fantasy dragon, baseline all the quirkier species are compared against" ala D&D red dragons, being red/orange/yellow mountain dragons with even stronger fire associations than other dragons. When you decide Skywings should actually be feathered, gryphon-like creatures colored like real birds of prey, either dropping the fire association entirely or making them more "phoenix dragons" than "classic dragons"... making similar alterations to every other species to give them more mammal and avian traits, radically revamping lore and characters until nothing recognizable remains... are you sure you don't just want to make a new setting? Do you know that's allowed? You can even have the original story's characters have AU counterparts or expies in this setting if you want. If you can make "homestuck AU" or "BHA AU" or the like versions of another canon's characters, you can make "my original setting AU" versions of your blorbos too, right?)
As much as I think nobody wants to admit it now that she's gone down a right-wing radicalization pipeline and is using her hoards of money to spread hate speech and destroy trans people's rights... I think JKR's openly accepting attitudes towards fanworks for Harry Potter was a historically significant turning point in fandom history, and fandom's "mainstreaming", for better or worse. I remember adult fans of the books on fansites and forums being really excited about the fact that she openly encouraged fanart and fanfic, because they were expecting as a universal law that any explosively popular SFF writer would take an Anne Mcaffrey or Anne Rice stance on people playing with their characters and settings. Warriors, having its first book published in 2003, for a middle reader demographic just like the early Harry Potter books, would have its fandom born into this newly developing world.
Oh yea. While this is purely conjecture, part of me wonders if animal xenofiction nerd cultures attract asexuals more than "mainline" furries or media fandoms around human/humanoid characters. I feel like it wasn't uncommon to see boredom, or even in extreme cases outright disgust, towards the features of human bodies in "wolfaboos" on deviantart; I myself remember feeling a confusion as to what people even liked about human bodies enough to have sex (or make porn) about it all. (In my case, also the fact that romantic attraction was utterly alien to me, and I was only able to care about a "ship" if it was written in a way that was coherently parsable as a particularly intense platonic friendship.) A feeling that animals bodies are more cool and beautiful, but that feeling of being beautiful and of the pleasures of an animal body are more wrapped in power fantasy than in the sensual eroticism you see in many mainline furry's interest in humanoid bodies with animal features. Especially as a kid and teen (who developed a misanthropic streak from bullying that I still lapse into when my mental health's in the toilet), I felt like it would just be more enjoyable to live most of my life as a quadrupedal wolf, cat, or dragon in a secluded forest with a cozy cabin, and then shapeshift into a more humanoid form whenever I really desperate needed speech or hands (asking for help, reading books and playing videogames, etc).
Because, like. Sexuality plays a big part in both mainline furries and in ship culture. Obviously furries have an interest in the body, which is reflected not just in sensory interest in fur, tails, and pawpads, but in the general bodily nature of furry-specific kinks: transformation, inflation, vore, etc. In media fandoms, most M/M writers are attracted to men; F/F is usually more common than M/M in spaces traditionally full of cis dudes attracted to women, like Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity. As open queerness becomes more a part of fandom cultures, you also see a bunch of the "straight women" in M/M ship spaces come out as gay or bisexual trans men, and "straight men" in brony fandom and the like come out as gay or bisexual trans women.
But I don't have much of a libido, nor much of an internal sense of gender. For me, while I logically know wolves and lions have sex drives and sexual instincts of their own, part of the appeal of animal characters (in addition to Animal Cool and Awesome) is that a talking dog isn't held to the expectations of human gender and human sexual desire, you know?