malymin

Originally 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.

Please visit it.

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.