And what happened next: a philosophy of the evolution of furry.
Of course, reading that article led to me writing an essay at work. On work time. Because I was really really bored. And it's long, and twisty, and philosophical, and stuff.
I consider myself to be a postfurry fellow traveler. The postfurry definition itself is probably rather fluid, more a product of a postvixen/postrodent philosophy than anything else, although I think I like the idea in itself. In short (correct me if I'm wrong), postfurry basically tries to meld concepts of furry whimsicality with a sort of post-cyberpunk stress on seeking out new experiences through self-enhancement, generally of an artificial or scientific nature: wetware, drugs, genetic manipulation. Things that are generally possible at some point technologically, taken to their furthest extremes. And so because I embrace a larger definition, perhaps I'm not quite a postfurry myself. Or perhaps I am. It shouldn't matter. (I responded to Puzzlebox with Kurt Vonnegut. Or what I know of Kurt Vonnegut. Hey, you can be faux-literary and kinky. Or maybe I was just picking up the wavelength of the Butterfly Effect.)
Today I run across the article mentioned in the previous post. An artist making a splash by mocking the universe, using furry forums as part of a stab at a sort of fantastic absurdity. And so I start thinking (at work, because I'm bored). Furry could be far greater, my friends. Enough people have been doodling up furry art that you might be able to legitimately bring furry into the Real World (tm) as a genre, a sort of stylized whimsical counter to a droll, boring, insecure, cold postmodernistic existence. Tolkien (now that culturally we've brought him up again) was a whimsical horrified reaction to an increasing industrialism that would increasingly not permit mythology. I think the movies manage to show that particular fact very well (orcs, elves). So why can't furry be a whimsical reaction to an Orwellian paranoiac society?
One of the best story ideas I had last year involved the idea that the spirits, the tribal ancient natures that we used to revere, were in face reborn as anthro cartoons. ("Can't stop the spirits when they need you, this life is more than just a read-through.") Bugs Bunny as a crossdressing trickster Coyote. A new cultural mythology of absurdity to reflect increasingly interconnected (but mechanical) lives. This is why I feel like people are getting so attached to furries at all - all the old themes of life and myth return again, particularly those concerning transformation, rebirth, and reflection. It always struck me as odd that you could have fetishes concerning things that were mythical, that could never really truly happen in life - ever. But the feelings, the attraction, remained regardless.
I think furry could well go mainstream - or at least as mainstream as, say, art deco - and I think it's very likely that this will happen. But perhaps we should take a moment in time to seriously consider the implications of what we're building here. I have always seen people so concerned about how furry appears in the mainstream - debates, endless discussions, flamewars, hatred, more flamewars, calls to take back furry fandom - particularly noting the adult, sometimes absurdly stylistically explicit nature of whimsicality (Doug Winger) and wanting to suppress it - because it's lewd, because exposed to the light it can be quite embarrassing, and it detracts from the "furry cause", say...
What concerns many people is the explicit adult nature of the whimsicality. Some people I've seen over the years simultaneously indulge in strange fantasies and show concern about how (embarrassing) they appear in the larger scheme of things. This is not hypocritical in an environment where sexuality is considered at best something that should be kept behind closed doors and at worst outright taboo (which taboo, of course, makes it wanted, and fetishistic).
I don't see a good way to indulge whimsicality and at the same time keep it all PG. Eventually someday there inevitably will be Inflating Breast Syndrome. Eventually someone is going to think how yiffy it is to watch toons explode. It's part of the oddity how we're programmed as adult (and yes teenage) members of the species. (People pick up kinks in the strangest ways...I'm not sure I've ever told some of the stories I've heard.) We can create a shared environment because of the interconnected hive nature of the Internet, but we simultaneously cannot easily exclude people who we feel have no right to be there, for whatever reason. Take spam, please.
In many ways, I see furry sexuality as an extension of the '60s counterculture of free love and expanding your mind; it did, after all, have to go somewhere after the '70s and the '80s and AIDS. But how to promote furry without promoting its excesses? I would say you can't, not as it is, partially because media love wild stories, and partially because freedom to be creative - to recreate yourself as something drastically new or strange - is embedded in the creation of all of this. But, as we try to face a world hostile to this sort of sexual expression, I would suggest the only thing we can do is somehow create a wall, or find a way to create a safer furry that people who are interested in that wavelength can tune into. Right now, if you select furry, you select everything or nothing, and perhaps it would be better to separate off part of it as I've seen people suggest time and again. I think it's possible, but it would require a radical restructuring of what I see as the cornerstones of how we establish furry (the mucks, the VCL, Furnation, etc. etc.) Image control really isn't my definition of furry, though, and I'm not sure that trying to put the genie back into the bottle is going to work.
So I'll call myself postfurry, and other people can deal with the semantics and the definitions and the exclusions and the reasoning and they can have furrydom. People who care about furry's image, I'm guessing, aren't too plussed about dealing with a metamorphic philosophical fetishistic rubberskunk anyway. It's too off the wall, far too outside the box. Strange, taboo, wrong. (See any reason why I'm so paranoid about dealing with reality intersections with Cerine?)
In my opinion, the true nature of postfurry is to push furry into situations where it has never been seen before. If we're going to create a mythology, perhaps we should try to use the mirror to reflect what is as well as what could be. Use it as parody of the now, then push the whimsicality to its furthest reaches, use it as a vehicle for a new mythology, a new representation of what our existence truly means. An expanding of consciousness.
Of course, having been the purveyor of one of the more whimsical evolutions of furry conceptualism, I guess this is what I should be saying, yes? But anyway, I'm quite interested in starting JAH (as stated earlier), thinking that it's someplace furry has never really gelled into. I will have to work out some issues first, but I think I am going to seriously try to put some effort into this. It should be fun, eh?
And if this entire speech made no sense at all, please, just ignore me and let me rant incoherently. I think we all deserve to be able to rant incoherently every so often, mmmkay?
Oh, by the way, supposedly version 3.0 of Hypnotizer came out. The link is somewhere down the blog. Somewhere over the rainbow...
I consider myself to be a postfurry fellow traveler. The postfurry definition itself is probably rather fluid, more a product of a postvixen/postrodent philosophy than anything else, although I think I like the idea in itself. In short (correct me if I'm wrong), postfurry basically tries to meld concepts of furry whimsicality with a sort of post-cyberpunk stress on seeking out new experiences through self-enhancement, generally of an artificial or scientific nature: wetware, drugs, genetic manipulation. Things that are generally possible at some point technologically, taken to their furthest extremes. And so because I embrace a larger definition, perhaps I'm not quite a postfurry myself. Or perhaps I am. It shouldn't matter. (I responded to Puzzlebox with Kurt Vonnegut. Or what I know of Kurt Vonnegut. Hey, you can be faux-literary and kinky. Or maybe I was just picking up the wavelength of the Butterfly Effect.)
Today I run across the article mentioned in the previous post. An artist making a splash by mocking the universe, using furry forums as part of a stab at a sort of fantastic absurdity. And so I start thinking (at work, because I'm bored). Furry could be far greater, my friends. Enough people have been doodling up furry art that you might be able to legitimately bring furry into the Real World (tm) as a genre, a sort of stylized whimsical counter to a droll, boring, insecure, cold postmodernistic existence. Tolkien (now that culturally we've brought him up again) was a whimsical horrified reaction to an increasing industrialism that would increasingly not permit mythology. I think the movies manage to show that particular fact very well (orcs, elves). So why can't furry be a whimsical reaction to an Orwellian paranoiac society?
One of the best story ideas I had last year involved the idea that the spirits, the tribal ancient natures that we used to revere, were in face reborn as anthro cartoons. ("Can't stop the spirits when they need you, this life is more than just a read-through.") Bugs Bunny as a crossdressing trickster Coyote. A new cultural mythology of absurdity to reflect increasingly interconnected (but mechanical) lives. This is why I feel like people are getting so attached to furries at all - all the old themes of life and myth return again, particularly those concerning transformation, rebirth, and reflection. It always struck me as odd that you could have fetishes concerning things that were mythical, that could never really truly happen in life - ever. But the feelings, the attraction, remained regardless.
I think furry could well go mainstream - or at least as mainstream as, say, art deco - and I think it's very likely that this will happen. But perhaps we should take a moment in time to seriously consider the implications of what we're building here. I have always seen people so concerned about how furry appears in the mainstream - debates, endless discussions, flamewars, hatred, more flamewars, calls to take back furry fandom - particularly noting the adult, sometimes absurdly stylistically explicit nature of whimsicality (Doug Winger) and wanting to suppress it - because it's lewd, because exposed to the light it can be quite embarrassing, and it detracts from the "furry cause", say...
What concerns many people is the explicit adult nature of the whimsicality. Some people I've seen over the years simultaneously indulge in strange fantasies and show concern about how (embarrassing) they appear in the larger scheme of things. This is not hypocritical in an environment where sexuality is considered at best something that should be kept behind closed doors and at worst outright taboo (which taboo, of course, makes it wanted, and fetishistic).
I don't see a good way to indulge whimsicality and at the same time keep it all PG. Eventually someday there inevitably will be Inflating Breast Syndrome. Eventually someone is going to think how yiffy it is to watch toons explode. It's part of the oddity how we're programmed as adult (and yes teenage) members of the species. (People pick up kinks in the strangest ways...I'm not sure I've ever told some of the stories I've heard.) We can create a shared environment because of the interconnected hive nature of the Internet, but we simultaneously cannot easily exclude people who we feel have no right to be there, for whatever reason. Take spam, please.
In many ways, I see furry sexuality as an extension of the '60s counterculture of free love and expanding your mind; it did, after all, have to go somewhere after the '70s and the '80s and AIDS. But how to promote furry without promoting its excesses? I would say you can't, not as it is, partially because media love wild stories, and partially because freedom to be creative - to recreate yourself as something drastically new or strange - is embedded in the creation of all of this. But, as we try to face a world hostile to this sort of sexual expression, I would suggest the only thing we can do is somehow create a wall, or find a way to create a safer furry that people who are interested in that wavelength can tune into. Right now, if you select furry, you select everything or nothing, and perhaps it would be better to separate off part of it as I've seen people suggest time and again. I think it's possible, but it would require a radical restructuring of what I see as the cornerstones of how we establish furry (the mucks, the VCL, Furnation, etc. etc.) Image control really isn't my definition of furry, though, and I'm not sure that trying to put the genie back into the bottle is going to work.
So I'll call myself postfurry, and other people can deal with the semantics and the definitions and the exclusions and the reasoning and they can have furrydom. People who care about furry's image, I'm guessing, aren't too plussed about dealing with a metamorphic philosophical fetishistic rubberskunk anyway. It's too off the wall, far too outside the box. Strange, taboo, wrong. (See any reason why I'm so paranoid about dealing with reality intersections with Cerine?)
In my opinion, the true nature of postfurry is to push furry into situations where it has never been seen before. If we're going to create a mythology, perhaps we should try to use the mirror to reflect what is as well as what could be. Use it as parody of the now, then push the whimsicality to its furthest reaches, use it as a vehicle for a new mythology, a new representation of what our existence truly means. An expanding of consciousness.
Of course, having been the purveyor of one of the more whimsical evolutions of furry conceptualism, I guess this is what I should be saying, yes? But anyway, I'm quite interested in starting JAH (as stated earlier), thinking that it's someplace furry has never really gelled into. I will have to work out some issues first, but I think I am going to seriously try to put some effort into this. It should be fun, eh?
And if this entire speech made no sense at all, please, just ignore me and let me rant incoherently. I think we all deserve to be able to rant incoherently every so often, mmmkay?
Oh, by the way, supposedly version 3.0 of Hypnotizer came out. The link is somewhere down the blog. Somewhere over the rainbow...