Cynegetics

As furries, we sometimes find ourselves in the rather awkward position of trying to explain what, exactly, all this animal business is about.  You might be at a furry con, brushing elbows with unwitting hotel guests or some other convention that got double-booked.  Or maybe family members got a little nosy, and now you and your parents get to have a conversation that’s wildly awkward for everybody.  Or you might just be explaining your custom-made pfp to somebody on a big public Discord server.  We all have to manage the interfaces between our furry selves and our non-furry lives one way or another, and it does get a little complicated sometimes.

When this comes up for me, I always feel a little bit like Calvin in one of my favorite old comic strips:

CALVIN AND HOBBES © Watterson. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All rights reserved.

It always seems so weird to people, and I’m conscious of that weirdness on some level, but at the same time, like… I’m pretending to be a coyote on the internet, man.  It’s not that complicated.  I don’t know what kind of answer you’re looking for here.

But the problem is, I get curious.

Curiosity is one of those barbed virtues, the ones that get you in trouble.  And I’ve never quite been able to leave well enough alone, not when it comes to the stuff I really care about.  So after I get done laughing at other people for asking what’s up with all this furry stuff, I have a way of leaning back in my chair and asking myself, so, what’s up with all this furry stuff?

This essay exists because I have a sneaking suspicion that the question is more interesting than it seems, and that the answers we get from it might be more useful than one might expect.

The default way to answer this question (both to outsiders and to one another) is to call it a fandom. From what I can see, “the furry fandom” is far and away the most common label for the community of people who identify as furries, and for the stuff we do and make together.  And it’s not like that’s totally off-base, right?  We make and swap art, we go to cons, we gather online to talk about our shared interest in animal-people.  So far so good.  But the longer I spend as a furry, the more I find myself starting to use the word ‘fandom’ a little euphemistically.

If nothing else, fandoms are traditionally built within audiences.  A fandom is a group of fans!  Usually they’re about specific cultural products designed to make somebody money, such as franchises (e.g. the Star Wars fandom) or genre categories (e.g. the sci-fi fandom).  Even the ‘anime fandom’, probably our closest active equivalent, is still mostly centered around the economic products of a specific culture, visual style, and medium.  There are audience-driven products that are recognizably furry (hi Zootopia!), but I don’t have the sense that ‘furry’ itself is a thing that exists for an audience in the same way.  If anything, it’s almost the reverse.  Just about every furry I’ve ever met has been creative in some way or other, eager to show off their own work- original characters, stories, art, technical achievements, or any number of other things.  

And anthropomorphism was never designed, certainly not for profit or anything like that.  The thing we’re calling the ‘furry fandom’ is unique in being oriented toward something much broader; our subject matter cuts across many different narratives, cultures, art styles, mediums, and genres, and it’s been doing so since before the invention of writing.

Way before.

This is the Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, carved from mammoth ivory some forty thousand years ago.  When humans built the first pyramids and drew the first alphabets, this furry guy was already well over 30,000 years old.  Furry art had been around for at least ten millenia when we invented clay pots.

The Lion-Man is the oldest statue we have, of any kind. The Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest known sexy lady statue, is a bit younger.  Let me repeat that for the folks in the back row: there’s every chance that the human species has been making art of buff furries for longer than we have been making art of girls with big tits. And behind all the damage from weathering and time, it’s not half bad, even by modern standards!

Turns out that the talking lion really was there when the old magic was written.  Whatever the furry fandom is playing with, it goes very, very deep.

If you reeeally stretch the definitions of genres like science fiction and fantasy, you can place their origins pretty deep in the history of literature– but that’s only four thousand years tops, even if you get greedy and claim Gilgamesh at the dawn of literature itself.  And any kind of deliberate, self-conscious attempt to “do” genre work in sci-fi or fantasy is even younger than that.  A few hundred years, give or take.  A blink of an eye, by furry standards.  Our art is far older than these modes, older even than the concept of genre itself.

Which is funny, because the furry community is actually the youngest of all of these, with distinct origins branching out from other fandoms back in the 1970s.  It’s a robust, millions-strong bunch at this point, and it’s particularly well adapted to our Very Online Lifestyles for any number of reasons, but even as furry art reaches so far back in to prehistory that it beggars belief, the particular subculture that we all play in together is so new that it still exists entirely within living memory.  Whatever we are together, it depends both on profoundly ancient and profoundly modern components.

But, yeah, okay.  Whatever.  Maybe there are some signs that furries aren’t a ‘fandom’ in the traditional sense.  But it hardly matters, right?  At least we’ve got a word to throw at people when they ask what we are, and it’s mostly nice-sounding and familiar enough to move the conversation along without getting bogged down in the weird sex stuff.  The important thing is to have some kind of label so we can get on with the fun part, which is pretending to be a coyote on the internet.

Right?

Hmmm.  Well…

I guess that’s correct as far as it goes.  The important thing really is the community itself.  We should care most of all about the creators and enthusiasts who come together to build a shared sense of identity.  But I also feel like we’re missing an opportunity here, and that settling for these half-right, good-enough labels isn’t enough if we want to find the best version of ourselves.  Words like ‘fandom’ can do the basic work, they can get us all in the same room so that we can have fun together.  But I think they hold us back from looking really deeply in to the mirror, or from really understanding the story that we’re all telling together.

And what I believe is this: the better we can understand the origins, the structure, and the potential power of that story, the more fun we’re bound to have.

So I guess what I’m after is pretty simple, more or less.  I want something to call us.  Something that avoids the errors of reductive, too-simple terms like “fandom” or “kink.”  Something more insightful than generic catch-alls like “community” or “subculture.”  I want something I can really hang my hat on, something that points me towards a powerful understanding of myself and these people that I love so much.  Something that acknowledges the forces and the choices that make this strange, wonderful world of ours so unique.

This ends up being really hard.  I’ve been thinking about causes, histories, taxonomies, organizing principles, and all the accumulated peculiarities of a grand masquerade that’s been partying non-stop since at least the 1970s.  And wrestling with big questions in that way risks the worst kind of mistake: the error of taking it too seriously.

It’s a type of play, that’s all. There won’t ever be a correct or objective answer to this kind of question, and I certainly don’t imagine myself to be arguing for a canonical interpretation of anything.  In the end, this is just a record of my own personal travels through the furry world, and some of the ideas that I’ve been having while I’m there. If some of those ideas interest you, feel free to try them on for a while, wear them around town, see how they fit.  If they don’t, then no biggie; I hope I’ve at least been entertaining.