If I can shamelessly self-promote for a moment, I actually made an effortpost arguing this a while back.
God I remember when punching down on furries was something everyone did and not just edgelords. I'm glad furries are now more accepted by people, the internet at large used to be outright hostile to them.
I'm so old I remember in the stone ages of the internet the furry community being among the only ones that would defend or at least be non-hostile toward the transgender/gender nonconforming communities.
Because furries are largely queer, and homophobia was way more mainstream back then.
I definitely support the furry community. I also support the scalies and whatever other subcategories there are. Are people wearing slug or earthworm Jim style outfits slimies? I stand behind them. Are there chitinies from the insect fanbase? Do we need separate categories for The Tick and the Mothman? I think everyone should live their best lives and I’ll use whatever collective nouns are appropriate.
But I cannot accept the Snake of the Lake having hands. Snakes very intentionally got rid of their hands in evolutionary time and it just feels like it’s breaking a rule. I could go for a Skink of the Lake - they’re pretty snake-like. It’s just that snakes are one of very few groups of animals that said “Fuck legs, they just get in the way of slithering,” and I think we need to accept that.
Are there chitinies from the insect fanbase? Do we need separate categories for The Tick and the Mothman?
We're just another subset of furries, really
So I confess that I have a bit of a specialization in ants. I’m struggling with a collective noun for the fandom that likes to take on ant role playing, though.
Can we call them ant-hropomorphic?
I swear I really have studied ants quite extensively and I didn’t make that up for the pun.
Honestly, I don't know if "the fandom that likes to take on ant role playing" is enough of a thing to need a specific term. Bug furries are a tiny proportion of the overall fandom, and what few there are mostly pick species like bees and moths. I do like the pun, though.
Anyway, the releases of Bug Fables and Hollow Knight were pretty big boons to us.
That makes sense. And honestly, being an ant wouldn’t be a lot of fun unless you wanted to do a Bug’s Life version of what an ant is. Being an ant would be like being a liver cell. You get some inputs that map directly to outputs, and you’re not an individual so much as tiny part of a colony, which itself is closer to what we’d call an individual. I could go on for hours, or literally a semester. Ants can be told “We need you to be a girder. We’re building a big nest, and we need you to bite this other ant on the ass and stay there until you die so we can have a superstructure.” And the ant is like “Cool, on it!” And there’s all kinds of levels and differences and everything, but most of it isn’t aspirational except insofar as cooperation is a good idea.
If I might suggest something for the potential bug furries, using the term loosely, I’d say take a look at the jumping spiders. They’re very intelligent - like they can learn to solve puzzles. They’re beautiful and friendly and there’s an absolutely brilliant science fiction trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky called Children of Time that is based on the idea of that kind of civilization spiders would create if they kept their spider nature but were given human-scale intelligence. It’s extremely well written both from a literary perspective and as science.
there’s an absolutely brilliant science fiction trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky called Children of Time
I've had this series on my 'to read' list for a while, but I don't remember adding it and didn't remember anything about it. Thank you for this great description that doesn't give anything away with the story, you have helped move this series to be my next read.
Glad I could help! I’ve been reading science fiction for 45 or so years now, and this series - from the first book - entered into my top 5.
You almost never find a book that does hard sf on biology. Physics and engineering, sure. The only other book that comes to mind is Legacy of Heorot, where the authors went hard sf on biology and ecology.
I was constantly surprised how often in the first book I expected to scoff derisively but did not because he actually knew what he was talking about.
That makes sense. And honestly, being an ant wouldn’t be a lot of fun unless you wanted to do a Bug’s Life version of what an ant is.
Yeah, that's the approach I usually see. "Anthro" implies some level of humanization after all, and that includes human cognitive ability and ways of thinking. Something like this pic is a lot more representative of typical ants (and other bugs) in the fandom than what you're describing.
Never heard of those books, though, they sound pretty cool. Might have to check them out.
On the one hand, I feel like this is a betrayal of true ant nature in the same way and to the same degree that I felt with the introduction of the Borg Queen instead of having the original colony-identity emergent phenomena of intelligence and behavior type Borg.
On the other hand, they look cool and like they’re having a great time.
I could swear I once read a scifi book which had a spaceship with an uplifted ant colony living in the walls and serving as a crewmember but I can't remember any of the plot or what it was called
I'm still of the opinion that argonian breasts are literally just fat deposits located there because the hist thought it would help them fit in with the mammals better.
anthropomorphic reptiles
humanized reptiles
humans have tits
where's the problem
I have a whole Star Trek related rant that I shall spare you about this very subject.
And as a frequent attendee and big fan of drag performances, I’m not going to be the boob police.
They used to go by skink of the lake, but then they'd always have to spend 10 minutes explaining what a skink is, only for the person to go "So you're the snake of the lake!"
I would totally support that. I would say that holding their hands up in a “Hey now” kind of gesture might be trying to play both sides of the coin there, but at the end of the day I am a humanist before I am a biologist, and I accept your rebuke.
But I cannot accept the Snake of the Lake having hands. Snakes very intentionally got rid of their hands in evolutionary time and it just feels like it’s breaking a rule
there are legless lizards like the slow worm
Yes indeed, but they are rare and I’m just saying that we should embrace them for their choices.
Well, that might be a bit much, especially for the venomous ones. We should respect their choices, and it’s obviously worked out for them.
I do love the boa constrictors with the occasional random tow, though. It’s like a Hemingway cat, but for snakes.
It's not really a choice it was a genetic mutation. Also snakes do have a gene to grow legs it just grows penises instead so if it is a choice it is a weird one
We frequently use words like “choice” to speak about things like evolutionary dynamics because they make the talk more interesting. It’s a deliberate misuse of the phrase in some ways, but it implies that natural selection ended up canalizing snakes into a specific evolutionary pathway - one instead of many possible others - based on innumerable factors but all being by definition locally (in time and place) more or less favorable.
I appreciate the input and thank you for the clarification for readers - although I don’t imagine many people thought there was some Ur-snake who said “fuck these legs.”
For the record, I am an evolutionary biologist.
I don’t imagine many people thought there was some Ur-snake who said “fuck these legs.”
quite literally they grow penises in their place which was the weirdest fact I learned today
The snake from My Gym Partner’s a Monkey who has no arms but wears a shirt anyways
It's so telling that it's been a long established chanlord policy that "anything goes" on /b/ except furry art. Gore and snuff are fine, but that? Outrageous!
On the plus side it probably contributed to their lack of cultural in-roads in the furry community and is part of what makes it generally a pretty ok crowd barring the extremely tiny minority trying to make nazi furs a thing.
Tangentially related but Tezuka also wrote an Astro Boy story where he shoots down American planes over Vietnam
It's so telling that it's been a long established chanlord policy that "anything goes" on /b/ except furry art.
my son, times have changed, I am sure there are /s/ fur and /g/ fur threads active at this very moment
What if I told you that 4chan and kiwifarms made a baby that possesses the worst possible traits from its parents?
Calling Tezuka the "inventor of anime and manga" is a bit of a reach.
I was always fine with furries, the problem on /b/ and 4chan (other than all the other problems with /b/) was that if you allowed furry-posting, all there would be was furry posting (by trolls) because there is so much of it to post. I wasn't a fan of the creation of /trash/, but I do remember how much of the forum it cleared up. That said, it really was mostly indicative of the blatant homophobia of the site that that was the policy, rather than just a topic quarantine like most other things.
Oh no, it doesn't. 4chan can rot in hell and the world would be better off with the entire site banned and erased from the collective memory. It's just that was the policy rationale at the time. The gore and snuff was far from endless. You'd get maybe 40-50 posts like that max a day, but people would post hundreds of furry pics on loop spamming all the sub forums.
It wasn't about getting a rise out of people it was that you would have to wade through pages and pages of unique furry porn (and the only real rule of /b/ is no reposts) to get to anything that wasn't furry porn. I was a dead-eyed teenage lurker at one point, and that was what people were complaining about. There was always homoerotic material on /b/, it's just that the amount of unique furry art made spamming it easy.
The eventual policy itself (an invisible only searchable community called /trash/) is indicative of the homophobia with the admin, but the complaints were almost entirely "I have to scroll through pages of 'trash' to get to any interesting content, this is some fucking bullshit."
I'm not going to contest this anymore though, as those years were some of the worst of my life and I'd rather not think about them anymore. 4chan is a homophobic hellhole, but thinking that you can 'shock them' with furry porn is misunderstanding the posting mindset. The real way to piss them off is to overwhelm them with content they consider 'boring'.
I disagree, they should have either had an actual moderation policy or started just straight up doing IP bans, but 4chan's moderation was and is shit that just breeds Nazis, it's no wonder the majority of posters there are boomers now.
I'm gonna pick the centrist opinion of saying furries are cool with me and that I don't watch anime.
I have the opinion that furries are pretty much cool but anime fans seem to be a bunch of weird perverts
People who make anime their personality are huge weirdos, but the average person who watches, like, dbz or sailor moon, seem fine.
yeah obviously it's a broad genre I just mainly associate it with its most obnoxious fans
They're definitely some of the most vocal online, that's for sure.
I should clarify at this point when I say anime fans I don't mean people who like anime I mean the people who keep insisting that various characters are actually hundreds of years old
crowd
