Furry subculture

[KarlOmega1]

This thread kinda makes me thinks of a question to ask...If Anthromorphs (furries) really existed, what would life be like?

[Gareeku]

This question has been asked too many times to mention, but here's my stance on it:

If anthros had existed throughout the history of humanity, there would most likely be racism, fear of each other (humans fearing anthros and vice versa) maybe war too. Over time, there may be a change, such as moving towards equality and stuff.

If anthros just suddenly happened to pop up around the globe, again, there would be much fear and racism.

[Netami]

Dan and Mab's Human Adventures.

[Destina Faroda]

If anthros really existed, I'd shoot them, then eat them after they've been purified by purifying tongues of flames.

Hey, they'd do that to me, and they wouldn't even bother to cook me first.

[Tapewolf]

This question has been asked too many times to mention, but here's my stance on it:

If anthros just suddenly happened to pop up around the globe, again, there would be much fear and racism.

You missed the 'First Contact' possibility.  That has different dynamics in that if they had the technical know-how to come here, fear and racism wouldn't do any good (I'm ignoring the possibility of a vicious race like the Kzinti since unless we managed some kind of miracle a'la The Greks Bring Gifts by Murray Leinster we wouldn't be able to defeat them anyway).

Given the number of furries I often wondered if it would be like the James Tiptree Jr. story And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side.  If you've read the story it's probably not something you're likely to forget.  Not for younger eyes, either.

If you haven't read it, a plot summary can be found here but don't come crying to me 

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Hmm. I could swear I've read that somewhere.

Most interesting commentary. Thanks for linking it...

[DigitalMan]

If anthros just suddenly happened to pop up around the globe, again, there would be much fear and racism.

That's the theory I use for my storylines. Then again, I'm pretty much just looking for an excuse for my character to go to war and blow things up, so I don't know how accurate that could be.

[Alondro]

*chuckles* If furries did show up, that'd have to mean they were aliens.  Genetics is no where close to creating such a complex genetic chimera that would be viable.  And to get here in any reasonable amount of time, they'd have to have faster-than-light (FTL) travel.  Any species capable of FTL travel is not a species you want to upset.  The amount of energy they would have at their disposal would be beyond anything we could even hope to counter.

*remembers the Simpsons episode with Homer on the space station... and the escaped ant colony... then Kent Brokman's sign*  Hail Ants! 

[Xuzaf D]

If furries were real, they would make fabrics in my sweat shop. When one of them dies from exhaustion, their pelts would be harvested to make even more shirts.

[Imperial fox]

If anthros just suddenly happened to pop up around the globe, again, there would be much fear and racism.

That's the theory I use for my storylines. Then again, I'm pretty much just looking for an excuse for my character to go to war and blow things up, so I don't know how accurate that could be.

*ahem*
Blacktapestries
that concept has already been Comicitized
you may have to read from the start to get a picture of whats going on, or just a few months in the past. (MA)
its a war between the two Human and Kateif (furry) there is an elite group of mages calling themselves the order with the ability to use the ART...
in short main charecter trys to kill chief of a Kateif town. plan goes wrong turns into a Kateif. kills him becomes human again. he comes back alive. curses her and she swaps between forms against her will, and is now hunted by the order who are willing to do anything to kill her.

[KarlOmega1]

If a war was started between Humans and Furries, Count me as a defector...because I'd join the other side due to my tiring of racists behavior of humans (I figured the humans started the war)...and when I get into a battle and someone from the human side asks"why did you betray us?", I'll reply "Betray you?! HA! You betrayed yourselves to being a bunch of racist b*****ds!"

[Zina]

If a war was started between Humans and Furries, Count me as a defector...because I'd join the other side due to my tiring of racists behavior of humans (I figured the humans started the war)...and when I get into a battle and someone from the human side asks"why did you betray us?", I'll reply "Betray you?! HA! You betrayed yourselves to being a bunch of racist b*****ds!"

Isn't that racist?

[KarlOmega1]

*faints due to zina pointing to self-irony*

[Gareeku]

Duuuuude, you got seerrrved. *snaps fingers*

[xHaZxMaTx]

Oh schnap!

[KarlOmega1]

Duuuuude, you got seerrrved. *snaps fingers*

Yes, I know...sometimes I get so fanatical on subjects that I end up being the thing that I become disgusted with...

[EvilIguana966]

Why is it always that people assume any other sentient species would be so superior to humanity?  Humanity has its issues, but I'd argue that as long as the fundamental laws of physics are constant, another race of beings would behave much the same way we do.  People also like to look at the animal world and draw conclusions about humans based on their typically horribly flawed observations.  Here again we see more misguided idealism.  The natural world, sans humans, is an incredibly violent and dangerous place.  If anything humanity is the least violent species on the planet, so much so that we are shocked by it when it occurs. 

So here is the thing.  Imagine that we are placed on a planet with 2 alien races at a similar stage in evolution and civilization.  One race is made up of bipedal humanoids with many features of canines, and the other is made up of bipedal humanoids resembling felines.  For whatever reasons, on their planets it was not primate-like creatures that evolved the farthest, but rather canines and felines respectively.  You really think that they would be superior to us?  My guess is that just like us, they would have in their midst bigots.  You know maybe on their home planet the brown furred doggy people had the most advanced civilization, and at one point in time enslaved some of the white furred doggy people.  And at certain points in time, the kitty people with tufts on their ears warred with the kitty people sans tufts.  Why wouldn't such a thing happen?  Purely from a scientific standpoint, ignoring theology for the time being, there is very little basis to say that they'd be totally free of violence, prejudice, injustice, and all the other not so fun things that we humans have here on earth. 

And this is all intimately related to the concept of anthropomorphism as a whole.  Strictly speaking, anthropomorphism is applying human attributes to things that are fundamentally not human.  It is a concept as old as human civilization.  But it is fantasy.  We are humans, things that aren't humans are, well, not humans.  When you cherry pick the pieces of humanity that you apply you risk creating something that is simply never going to be real.  Of course, there is nothing wrong with some fantasy, but some people take it too far.  I think KarlOmega is at least toeing the line that marks that boundary with his previous post.  And quite frankly, that is one of my biggest objections relating to furry subculture.  Wolves, lions, tigers, and foxes are live far more violent lives than we do.  You are far better off being a human than you are being an animal, so stop talking about humanity in such a negative light.  If anything, file a complaint with your diety of choice for creating such a harsh reality. 

[Tapewolf]

You really think that they would be superior to us?  My guess is that just like us, they would have in their midst bigots.  You know maybe on their home planet the brown furred doggy people had the most advanced civilization, and at one point in time enslaved some of the white furred doggy people.

Well that's the thing, isn't it?  To the best of my knowledge animals don't usually do that.  Okay, if you have an albino crow, they will usually be killed by the others.  But consider melanism.  You have black leopards, jaguars and so on.  When I first learned that it was a fur condition rather than a species, my initial reaction was "why aren't they killed at birth?" when they look so different to the parents?  Apparently the actual answer is that it's because they smell right.

There's a collie that lives somewhere in my street.  Whether he's a stray or owned but being left to his own devices during the day, I'm not sure.  But he keeps trying to get at the labrador-like mutt down the road.  In a friendly way, I might add.
We aren't talking different ear-tufts, we're talking a whole different coat, different colours, different skull shape.  But they're friends (or lovers.. I'm not sure).  It might be that this is where people are getting the idea from.
Note that in many cases of anthro fiction there are prejudices between wholly different species, felines vs canids, for example - but even that doesn't entirely wash.  We've all seen photos of cats and dogs that get on well.

Now maybe your argument is that they would develop irrational prejudice as a necessary part of civilisation.  I'm not so sure - one possibility is that we do this because humanity is descended from a relatively small gene pool so apart from local variations we are more similar to each other than most animals are, and therefore we notice differences more than a wider pool would allow (lots of variation in fur colour even within the wolf pack and so forth).

Now Larry Niven did exactly what you're suggesting in his short story A wolf in my time-machine where Sven ends up in a world where people are descended from wolves.  In that one they have a cold war between Europe and north America because they are different species.

And this is all intimately related to the concept of anthropomorphism as a whole.  Strictly speaking, anthropomorphism is applying human attributes to things that are fundamentally not human.

Apes aren't human either.  I don't really find them interesting personally, but I suspect you'll find they are violent in the wild.  The question is whether wolf or feline creatures that somehow evolved into humanoid form would retain their violent past.

Personally I suspect that if they existed they would not eat raw meat very much.  Charles is probably best to answer this but I've heard is said that there is a trade-off between intelligence and toxin-resistance, in that the optimisations necessary to achieve human intelligence in a brain make it more fragile - so it's quite likely that they would cook their meat.  How they get it is a different question.

Anyway, this is a passage from chapter 11 of my 'Chronicles of Jakob Pettersohn' series.  It's part of my attempt to explain the animal-human dichotomy in Furrae.

I am a wolf, a predator.  Millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned my senses and hunting instincts.  Only comparatively recently has it become necessary to hide these urges so that we can partake in society with what would once have been prey races, but they aren't gone.  They're still there, deep down, under the surface.  One crossbow bolt through the heart of a true friend and they all came flooding back.

Partly it's because they've achieved a technological civilisation.  They still have issues but it's basically boiled down to problems between Beings and Creatures.  Unless you have one single race that totally wipes out the others or only one species that becomes sentient on that planet, I don't see any way that a truly cosmopolitan world like DMFA, Kevin & Kell or the Napping Cat's Dream where all species have become sentient could attain a star-going civilisation without some kind of checks and balances against rampant prejudice.

In a nutshell, if they reach a point where they can visit us, they either evolved alone or managed to curb their racial problems.  (Or a small group of them bought the technology off the Outsiders  )

Ultimately, I think a desire for anthromorphics who have a better civilisation than ours is based on a longing for perfection - creatures free of what we consider to be flaws in both the human and animal condition.

[King Of Hearts]

PersonallyI''d prefer if that anthros did exist, is that they evolved alongside humans easing tensions between them as sentient species.

[Reese Tora]

I'm going to try and do this without quoting everyone, let's see how this goes...

In reguard to humans and furries going to war; Who's to say the furries wouldn't have started it?  Animals and humans can each be just as territorial against members of thier own species, let alone competing species.

Reguarding reasons furries wouldn't develop biggotry against other dissimilar members of the same species.  It's entirely possible that other members of the same species that do not share the same parents will not smell right.  Also, humans are the only creature on the planet to develope the level of rational thought that we have.  (irrational thought, most often), and it's this thought from which biggotry stems.  Human children of various races don't understand what race is or show any particular biggotry until they learn it as a behavior.

To a lesser extent than humans, various apes exhibit the same characteristics.(especially the chimpanzee)  Even amongst these more simple primates, behaviors like biggitry will develop, though it's usually directed against specific individuals that show abberant behavior, rather than entire groups.  Considering the size of packs, and the lack of communication between them, I would say it's only a matter of lack of scale that keeps us from seeing examples of biggotry in the lower primates.

<rewind>

I remember stumbling on the site OP links to, I thought it was a very interesting read.  A lot of different groups have been formed and come under fire fro what is considered main stream, and I'm glad that some people are taking the time and effort to look at more than one facet of our "fandom" (more like an arch-fandom, really...)

[DigitalMan]

If a war was started between Humans and Furries, Count me as a defector...because I'd join the other side due to my tiring of racists behavior of humans (I figured the humans started the war)...and when I get into a battle and someone from the human side asks"why did you betray us?", I'll reply "Betray you?! HA! You betrayed yourselves to being a bunch of racist b*****ds!"

At this rate someone's going to steal my idea for a comic before I get around to making it myself

Though do keep in mind that where racism pops up, you're likely to have the "Black Panther" types (no pun intended) that cause a problem as well. Human supremesism would be countered by anthro supremasism. Of course, both crumble before shotgun supremesism, sharp object supremesism, and boot supremesism.

[Xuzaf D]

Furry Fandom is great. Just look at what it did for Timothy Treadwell. 

Also, if furries were real, it would take some of the heat off the Blacks and Mexicans.

"Those furries just beat up that innocent gangbanger!"

[Alondro]

Well, any race that managed FTL travel, as I've said, would not bother with conquest because of the realistic requirements to develop that level of techology.  It's not anything like science fiction.  It involves more energy than most people can even fathom.  To control such a vast amount of energy and not use it to utterly destroy yourself in war would require a very rational and peaceful society.  Plus, once you have so much power at your disposal, conquest becomes completely pointless.  You can literally build your own planets with only a fraction of the energy it takes to propel a ship (or foold space) to achieve the equivalent of several times the speed of light.

Now, one can say that the reason we have seen no aliens is that FTL is impossible, but there is another reasonable possibbility as well:  an alien society with the equivalent of the Prime Directive, which is something any highly logical society would have to conceive of to prevent a violent and war-like race from discovering the means to destory whole worlds (which is what FLT gives someone the ability to do if used as a weapon... whink of what a mile-wide asteroid would do to Earth if it hit us at 186,000 mps.)  Any race with that leve of technology would also be able to hear our radio signals long before they came in range of our telescopes ability to reasonably detect them (we still don't even detect many asteroids less than half a mile wide before they've already passed the planet). 

Imagine you're an alien race that has conceived of the Prime Directive or an equivalent and you come within 60 light years of Earth (which is about where our early radio signals would be by now) and the first thing you hear is Adolf Hitler.  Now, you can't translate it as first, but as you get closer, you get more and more signals, then visual data on carrier waves that allow you to put objects and actions to the words.  Perhaps around 55 light years away, you get televised images of the atom bomb detonations.  Now you know this world has used highly devastating weapons.  You move closer, still far beyond what we can detect, and eventually get enough language information to translate the various languages of humanity.  You see our endless conflicts, televised images of atrocities, religious fanatics declaring their hatred for anything that opposes them, the willingness to kill... and still the aliens would be light years away. 

They'd have enough information about us before they reach the distance of Proxima Centauri... they'd turn around and warn every advanced race to avoid us like the plague.  Even if they also know about the peaceful aspects of our species, the chance that a radical fundamentalist element could gain their technology and use it as a weapon would be far too great and horrible a risk to take.  Even a single instance, one FTL ship crashing into a peaceful planet, would be too much for them to allow. 

I have always thought that our first contact will be almost identical to what was described in "The Day the Earth Stood Still".  They will face the hard choice of preserving themselves if ever our technology allows us to reach out and touch the stars.  Our first contact is likely to be a warning "Do not bring your hatred to us."  Technological advancement requires a certain level of civilization to achieve.  Steam power never developed beyond the basics in Rome because the huge number of slaves meant there was no reason to make machines to do work.  If you look at the works of Heron of Alexandria, all the components required for very complicated steam engines were already invented, primitive mechanical computational systems existed using ropes and pegs.  They had water wheels to grind grain and what appears to be a basic grasp of gravitational principles.  (I note that the fire of the Library of Alexandria was a devastating blow, so much knowledge was lost and had to be rediscovered) Simply put, the incentive to invent further simply wasn't there.  Too few were educated enough and there was too much secrecy in the exchange of information. 

The point of all this is, if our social order was what was needed to allow ideas for technology to sprout and flourish, what society is needed to go even beyond?  These futuristic technologies will come at a cost almost beyond reckoning, and there will be countless failures before it is perfected, if it possible to perfect such things.  Greed, money, selfishness, fear... all those must be eliminated to allow the kind of input needed.  A whole civilization must work as one to accomplish the feats of engineering a space-faring society.

Would a society that has sacrificed so much be willing to endanger it all by contacting us, a species that still speaks openly about annihilating whole populations of our own kind out of sheer irrational hatred?  No alien race with even a trace of logic would take such a risk.  There would be no reason for it, other than if they felt so inclined to attempt to keep us from exterminating all life on our planet. 

[Cogidubnus]

  Vast amounts of power require a peaceful and rational society? Perhaps... I would say, however, technology has less to do with peace and rationality than it has to do with need. Weapons technology increases when war occurs. When you need to get a large group of people across a large distance quickly and realatively cheaply, one learns to build roads. When you need something better than bronze to build with, you figure out how to smelt iron. I simplify, but my point is made. Peace and rationality have very little to do with technological advancement, even on such a scale as faster than light technology. Indeed, technology has very little to do with the relative morality of any society.

Although, were I alien, I would run far, far away from man...

  Will mankind will ever be peaceful, and rational? Take a hard look at history, and see what man can do. We are not basically good creatures, good sirs. We are very basically evil ones - our history is a neverending symphony of infamy, deceit, duplicity, tyranny, and subterfuge. Genocide, forced starvation, slave labor, malicious greed: these are not new concepts, nor are they limited to our more 'primitive' history.  Man has shown his colors time, and time again.

[Shadrok]

our history is a neverending symphony of infamy, deceit, duplicity, tyranny, and subterfuge. Genocide, forced starvation, slave labor, malicious greed: these are not new concepts, nor are they limited to our more 'primitive' history.

*Watches tv only to realize he's watching Chapter Black video tape.*

the Chapter Black video tape, which documented the worst cruelty of the human race.

As for furry subculture

18. In fact, social conventions seem to go down like dominos once one gets started. That may be why so many (most?) furries are bi.
19. Let us now pause while the straight and monogamous folks come out from wherever they just dived into for cover.

and here I thought it was mostly straight, gay, and bi rather then mostly bi.

[Imperial fox]

for the if furries existed thing...i would go into what posibilities there isand give a few other explanations so its all pulled together, but i'm not because i would be grinded by you and the fact that one involves a little more complicated explanation and a bit of off subject content. and over all it would be too long thus defeating the entire concept of trying to explain because you would all be sleeping by the time i finish...
so moving on,
to tell you the truth i didn't think it was wide spread the furry culture, but i guess i was "slamed in the back of the head with a table chair" wrong.
but a few of the traits like friends adopted as siblings, does happen quite often...
i have 2 bro's back in Aussie. and i'm alone up here in Alaska.

As long as two free minds exist there will always be conflict, no matter where, who, what, when or why!

[Alondro]

I don't really have any of the common traits that are associated with furs.  I mean, I'm 30 and an virgin.

*Bill Gates, watcher of all the Internet, LOL!*  I'm an uber-nerd and even I got some! 

*Charles* 

[DigitalMan]

  Vast amounts of power require a peaceful and rational society? Perhaps... I would say, however, technology has less to do with peace and rationality than it has to do with need. Weapons technology increases when war occurs. When you need to get a large group of people across a large distance quickly and realatively cheaply, one learns to build roads. When you need something better than bronze to build with, you figure out how to smelt iron. I simplify, but my point is made. Peace and rationality have very little to do with technological advancement, even on such a scale as faster than light technology. Indeed, technology has very little to do with the relative morality of any society.

My thoughts exactly. If FTL travel is even remotely related to making something go boom, we will discover it. Assuming, of course, that nuclear warfare doesn't end us all. And out there somewhere is probably another warlike race that discovered FTL travel by making something go boom. And that warlike race has just as much power as the pacifist race, or maybe more, developed into weaponry. Then the pacifist race must take up arms or be destroyed, etcetera. If the most advanced civilizations were always the most peaceful, the world would be a much happier place. But sadly, many or even most of our technological achievements in the past 100 years have been brought on by the need to destroy faster, better, and bigger.

[LionHeart]

I don't really have any of the common traits that are associated with furs.  I mean, I'm 30 and an virgin.

*Bill Gates, watcher of all the Internet, LOL!*  I'm an uber-nerd and even I got some! 

*Charles* 

I feel your pain. (Bloody stupid expression, but there you go...) I'm 37...

And as for Bill Gates, well, having umpteen zillion dollars to your name probably helps somewhat...

BG: I'm an uber-nerd...

Women: Hmmph.

BG: ... with lots and lots and lots of money.

Women: Oooohh - isn't he sexy!!!

[xHaZxMaTx]

Ah l'Amour.