furry (dance, dance!)

[biddyfox]

its almost august, my birth month. summer is dwindling to an end. is it? i don't know. i remember plenty of gorgeously summery days in september. the change of seasons is always a little frustrating for me though because it's so nebulous. it's just suddenly fall at some point. i wish these things were more discrete. like most people i have a terrible mind for continuities.

since i started deliberately trying to understand myself, 2010/age seven has been the starting point. the developmental milestones of a seven-year-old are supposed to be reading and writing, right? i had been reading and typing for years. i guess this is when i started using the internet? this must be what it is. i don't really have the perspective or detachment to understand how other people would react to the idea of a seven-year-old getting on the internet. probably par for the course for a kid that age in 2022, but back then it was probably more unusual. i remember i got on the internet and i discovered newgrounds.com and i discovered deviantart.net and i started playing pokemon games on an emulator. i didn't know what it was yet but this was how i discovered furry content. is seven too young to become a furry? probably? i mean, they make warrior cats books for all ages, and those were the furry impetus for a lot of people now. plus, people online who are really into pokemon are either "basically furries" or about as far from a furry as somebody possibly can be. and you have to be kind of making a deliberate choice to be the latter. it should be noted also that after getting banned from a pokemon forum for being seven (lol) i also stopped trying to involve myself in internet communities, instead lurking and watching as an outsider. this was a habit i retain to this day, as much as i try to counter it. the main thing i end up doing is fall in love with all the complex interpersonal relationships and casual, socially-based works of art these communities make. whether little 2-frame "animations" of peoples fursonas lip-syncing to, like, third-wave emo, or german folk songs or whatever. or genuinely inspiring, high effort works of community art like eevee party. or like weird little skits of somebody and their friends interacting in a funny way. or a cute little comic about somebody and their friends interacting in a funny way. kind of a common theme there.

so the first thing i discover is online fandoms, and furries in particular. a few years later i also discover the my little pony fandom and briefly submerge myself in that as well. but of course in 2012 the zeitgeist is very cringe-focused. the few pieces of original work i made back then were often early attempts at deconstructing the things i found myself engaged in, so i was already kind of predisposed to trying to expose the Dark Side of whatever it was i was enjoying. with these sorts of beatdowns on perceived weakness, i could both easily Feel Like I Was Exposing Harsh Truths (the highest of highs,) and also feel like maybe it was a good thing that i was so lonely and isolated from these communities i so wanted to join. the artist petday wrote a very good explanation of this kind of phenomenon and why it would affect people so strongly on both sides of the interaction.

with the exception of a brief break around 2017-2018 (too much to go into here, maybe in another post) this philosophy of cringe has kind of stuck with me since then... i remember an instance only a year ago where i was so genuinely shaken by my enjoyment of my little pony: friendship is magic, "a kids show," that i had trouble sleeping at night. i'm only shaking that kind of thinking just lately. it's so deeply ingrained that i have trouble figuring out what i am without it, which is why i was scared to let go of it for so long in the first place. there's also a lot of truth to it... plenty of people online bury themselves in escapism, reject self-awareness entirely, i've met plenty of them. but it's not my business what they do with their lives, i guess. the big paradigm shift in thinking is just... not letting other people's lives affect mine in that way. rid myself of whatever savior complex that represents. my life is mine and theirs is theirs. still, there are some aspects of "furry" that make me hesitate to want to call myself one. lets have ourselves a drink and set ourselves up an unnumbered list, shall we?

THINGS THAT MAKE ME WANNA BE A FURRY

• i think the fandom has a really open and cool approach to transhuman and posthuman concepts and also a really healthy relationship to cuteness that you don't really find a lot of other places. like things are allowed to be openly cute in furry without being for kids or emotionally shallow or whatever which feels pretty rare. this is probably a trait of a lot of other spaces but none im super particularly interested in I think


• it seems like a really nice openly queer and accepting space. i have lots of friends in it and maybe fully accepting becoming part of it would help me a lot and help me feel more open and capable of exploring my sexuality and gender. why this would be is kind of hard to explain but a lot of my like repressed feelings about myself are connected towards Not Being Embarrassing or w/ever and being a furry would help detach from that. this is actually two reasons sorry.


• i cant really pass really well as a normal boring person anyway so i should like stop trying as hard as i do to


• nostalgia (worst reason)

THINGS THAT MAKE ME REALLY NOT WANNA BE A FURRY

• theres like an extreme prominence of sex and sexual content and like lots of sexualized stuff im not super comfortable with being public. and theres like no self awareness about it either, people just kind of scrape at anything to justify it...? like furries love to use marxism to justify their own rampant horniness and problems with boundaries. and it's like no, people who are really excessively publically horny at cons, you're not being anti capitalist and people aren't being puritans, you just can't handle people saying no to you. there was a bit in the jenny nicholson brony doc about this but i am not mentally ready to go and search through an hour long video to find it.


• basically no consequences for misconduct but that's an internet thing in general. like lots of really big name furries are like really prominent awful people in ways that are very easy to find but if enough folks like their art it does not matter


• people assume that you're a furry by default if you meet certain criteria and nothing makes me want to do something than people telling me i can't. (second worst reason)

see, writing this, i was hoping i would be able to come to some conclusion about how associated i want to be with the furry fandom, but like, i still dont know. definitely progress has been made and i expect in the future ill be able to look at this and think "ok, i think i know what i want now," but its still tricky as of right now.