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FURRIE

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZnAY8yNjJE

Spoilers, this is best watched without introduction.

...

Anyway.

From the subject matter, one could easily dismiss FURRIE as yet another hyperbolic treatment of furries: a work unmasking the devious sexual, extremist spectacle hidden behind an innocent fluffy charade.

And, yeah, I definitely wouldn't show this to someone new to furries.

Despite that though, I love this animation. I'm not quite sure how to label the feeling I get when I watch it. Not recognition, nor camaraderie, and definitely not arousal -- this animation is so deeply unerotic. Though what first catches my attention are the contrasts: the chalky pastel art coexisting with scratchy crisp sounds. The suits without paws, extruding human hands. A human inside something inhuman. A fleshy heart wrapped in polyester carpet, beating, alive...

But within all this, though not being pictured, somehow I feel seen.

- - -

From the sound design to the scenes to the entire concept of furry, the interplay between isolation and sincerity is one interwoven through all levels of this animation.

The sound design is unadorned and pointed. You cannot help but have your attention captured.

The squeaking of pool toys.
A noodle slipping.
Cartoon noises.

Through isolation and clarity, they achieve a piercing sense of sincerity and presence.

It just is what it is.

In the same way, the characters are depicted as completely aloof, if aware at all, to being observed. At no point does the gaze of any furry come across the viewer. At no point is this a performance. We get to see ChR-IS_KinK_FoX93's inner and outer worlds become one and the same, consumed by a cereal box. Witness the intimacy enabled by the fursuit through CCTV view. Hear the self-satisfactory sploosh as an inflation fetishist flops into the pool.

In being unaddressed, we, the viewer, are left alone. But we're also with the furries, as they present themselves sincerely. We become alone together.

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The Proto-Furry and the Mask

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Why do I feel at home, or at least as comfortable as I've ever been, in trans-oriented spaces? I'm not, as far as I'm aware, trans or gender non-conforming. I will admit I don't feel "masculine" either. I just don't like being looked at. Standing out makes me uncomfortable, so I'd rather stay invisible. Standing out means performing... I'm over two decades old, and I still don't get it.

For me, conforming is easy. But it doesn't feed me.

When I was like 13 or something at some summer camp, I vaguely remember telling other kids I was a cat. I don't even know how I got to that point. I'm not sure in what sense I meant it.

Weirdly enough, this isn't even a nascent-furry thing: my best friend in high school had a running gag where he was referred to as a member of a separate species among his friends, a [HIS NAME]. It served as both an inside joke and an explanation for his quirks (e.g. chewing on clothing and placing everything in his mouth). It sets him as something other than human while simultaneously not dehumanizing him. Actually, you could say recognizing him as something Other was necessary to refrain from dehumanization...

(I did verify this inferred characterization after I wrote it. That this thing occurs spontaneously, independently, and with acute cultural legibility indicates a marker for A Certain Kind of Kid reacting to a circumscribable niche...)

In the same sense, in referring to myself as a cat, I didn't mean it literally. Nor was I pretending or roleplaying -- I wasn't thinking about what a cat would or should do and how to embody that.

Instead, I liked the way they reacted. I liked what it made permissible, from my perspective.

Things just made sense.

I felt free.

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"We are people playing pretend | That's all it is in the end"

There is a ploy going on here in the final notes of FURRIE. Pretend play is seen as insignificant, entirely detached from the real world. Escapism is a large component to furry, and for some, that's all it is. You can interpret everything you just saw from the lens of pure fantasy (though I don't know how that intends to explain nazi furs... a power fantasy???) But I don't think that captures it all.

In being unaddressed, we, the viewer, are left alone. But we're also with the furries, as they present themselves sincerely.

Revisiting this, how can we possibly feel like the furries are "presenting" themselves if we are unaddressed? For one, the animation helpfully takes the tone of a documentary from the outset. It doesn't feel so voyeuristic that way. But more importantly, we're not actually unaddressed.

Once, a furry does indicate: "tilly have the sweetest eyes".

Is this for us?

ChR-IS_KinK_FoX93 thinks quite a lot, but this longing seems more directed at a void lying beyond his window. The object of his fantasy remains literal to us, trapped within his screen. We see him and his world, but he's not unambiguously speaking at us. We're watching from outside the cereal box as he yearns within.

But then, tilly the pool toy blinks.

With that movement, it's clear "tilly have the sweetest eyes" is engaging us in dialogue, inviting us in. We're addressed not by the furry themselves, but through their lived fantasy, through their vision and imagination. This is the significance of furries: engagement with fantasy is not mere fantasy-fulfillment.

Consider: is the woman in the first scene having sex with the fursuiter, the fursuit, or the idea symbolized by the suit?

I would agree this scene represents pure fantasy fulfillment if not for a complication: the existence of fursonas. But in the suiter taking on the character symbolized through the suit, isn't this just a shared fantasy then? Sure, that's possible. But what's also possible is considering the fursuiter as furry, and fursona as an identity rather than an impersonal object. A furry has ownership over their fursona. Once you take the fursona seriously, as furries do, then a different world opens up... what kind of people are furries, and what are they up to? Must there be any distinction between the "person" and the sona?

And so there was the artist's ploy. We're pretending, but also sincere. Both serious and playful. Human and inhuman. It's within these contradictions that we communicate, and this artist does the same -- it's quite the irony to present the guts, shadows, and extremes of the fandom, only to end with a message that amounts to, we're just silly little creatures :3c

Because we are. And we aren't.

Hidden in that final squeal are the reverberations of someone screaming to be seen.

"Nobody knows your gender or race | When you're talking animal | instead of a human face"

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The Mask, The Sona

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I don't like how my body looks.

I mean, I don't dislike it either. I'm privileged to have a body type which many work hard for. I recognize the convenience.

For the most part, I just care about how it feels to use it, to exist and move within it. My nails get clipped when it feels weird to type or when they get chipped at the gym, whichever comes first. I get a haircut when my bf or parents tell me to.

I lack an aesthetic vision for this flesh I inhabit, and honestly, that's fine. If I started worrying about gender presentation and athletic performance at the same time, I'd just be causing problems for myself. And for what? I get my joy elsewhere anyway.

As for where that is... it says something that the only shirts I think I get any joy from wearing feature cat drawings (thanks to my bf for finding a supremely rare gift I enjoy).

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My bf does something funny when he sees a fursuiter on his feed: he has this instinct to try to find out what they look like under the costume.

I, on the other hand, hold zero curiosity for that.

I don't think my lack of interest is due to it being a bit of a faux pas among some furs (pun intended). There's something deeper which produces that norm.

Furries have this quirk where even when they are purportedly representing themselves as they are, they refuse to depict themselves as human:

This does not yield to irony.

(titled "Behind the Veil"...)

It's like fuckin Matryoshka rag dolls or something...

And then you have the whole beheading etiquette...

(don't even get me started on the poodling ""drama"".
(to be clear, my stance is do what you want, god is fake. and please don't heatstroke.))

If a furry goes out of their way to depict themselves as a human when they normally don't, you know they're really going through it...

(this was from an entire animated music video about struggling within the mental health system with existential depression. the artist later deleted it.)

I'm reminded of when I wrote "Reaction to an Anthropology Thesis on Furries"

(feat. Creature comfort: anthropomorphism, sexuality and revitalization in the furry fandom, Matt Morgan, 2008, the TL;DR of the TL;DR of that being furries are using furry imagery to rework how they see themselves via creating a culture around it.)

It speaks to its viability that this can easily insert itself into sexuality, the most intimate and personal of spaces, as the paper explicitly unpacks (though it doubts whether this can last as a social movement...)

Though the paper focuses on murrsuiting (fursuit sex), this isn't something I have any experience with. The first time I had sex, it was with another fur I'd known short-term online. I met up blind, no idea what he looked like. Upon first sight, I felt nothing. But as soon as he started talking, I recognized the orca I'd been yapping to online, and suddenly I just perceived him as something other than before... everything felt right. The experience turned out to be everything I'd wanted, and more.

The power of fursonas, once indoctrinated and encultured, is such that one can carry it around and perceive them even without a suit or other elaborate imagery. Or maybe this is just my autism speaking, allowing me to override a human face (in which I see nothing in anyway) with something of significance. Maybe there's some credit to portraying furry as an autistic phenomena...

In any case, though fursuiters can take on a variety of motivations for doing as they do, there exists a continuum of identification that they experience with the portrayed character. Obviously, not all (or even most) furs go so far as to eschew the importance of their human face -- if you scroll around on Barq, you'll see quite a few face pics along with art or fursuit shots. But furries have it set in that should one wish to take their fursona in full seriousness, there's an audience to recognize the act.

One can be seen how one wants to be seen, with the only limits lying in their knowledge and imagination. But simultaneously, we're not beholden to the vision. Even when taken seriously, there's always some aspect of silliness, fantasy, or idealization that never goes away.

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An interlude on AI art (feat random rant i sent to someone):

[A while ago], I started making little assemblages on google slides of pieces of art I've saved. And I began to notice that the way I was grouping things spatially according to visual characteristics in rendering corresponded to certain social tendencies, and I thought that was really cool.

Like that you can guess someone's sexuality by how they render fur is kinda wild.

Anyway, there was this one piece in my collection that stuck out to me because it was stylistically coherent, but just "sat" oddly with respect to the rest of the pieces around it, so I took a closer look.

TL;DR it was AI lol (and I'm pretty sure the only AI piece I put in my slide [all others were from "known" artists]).

So I had this thought about how when people make art using gen-AI, it ignores all the greater social context and movements around different visual signals in art to just give you a nice render.

And that weird link in my assemblage, that didn't correspond to anyone learning or speaking or anything. And I wonder if the dilution of being able to signal who and what you are with the increasing indistinguishability of AI art from the real thing is an actual threat to art.

Unfortunately the "being able to speak and signal" isn't an explicit focus of the internet art world. Art is seen as a product. An identity product, sure, but when you press people, it's reduced to money exchanged for a pretty looking thing. And that leaves us vulnerable to the dilution that happens with not just AI, but also homogenization of internet spaces. People have trouble picking out what signals what and who they want to draw like, how to show where they belong. And I think that's potentially a huge loss.

The first time I sketched openly at a furmeet, someone approached me and was like, "You're a Warriors cats fan, aren't you?"

No, I am not.

But then I took a second to reflect, and oh. All the art I consumed as a 14-year-old came from people in that area. And I thought about what just came out of my hand and yeah, I was using that voice at the moment. Huh.

Anyway. Here's some of my drawings.

Shoving them here is only as narcissistic as writing these words.

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So what do I think furry is?

Historically, the debate has centered around trying to define furries as fans of "anthropomorphics" and arguing over the boundary of acceptable degrees of anthropomorphism and whether corporate media can be inherently "furry" (ader_fr on discord has done a... quite thorough... investigation into the definitional issues which I've insufficiently summarized here, if you'd like to read a hundred pages lmao. or you can ask for my Ader-approved summary).

Sidestepping that whole mess, Patrica Taxxon in "On the Ethics of Boinking Animal People" redefines furries as fans of very specific media qualities (the symbolic, sensory, and the autistic (i.e. human and inhuman)) embodied through animal imagery.

I quite like Taxxon's restriction, but ultimately I sit somewhere else (though still adjacent in important ways). To start, I am biased because I'm trying to understand myself and where I fit in this whole thing lmao. And like FURRIE, I am interested in the extremes of the fandom and the validity / usefulness of characterizing furry through presenting its fringes as a core (because in part, it's often agreed that an essence to furry is being othered...) So I prioritize the question, what is it that furries are doing, and what can they be? Are they really just fans? I'm not so sure.

I prioritize the fursona as the central object which identifies "furriness". You don't have to have a sona to be a furry, but you do have to be adept in "understanding" them. Fursonas are a modern (possible due to the internet), furry-developed, and furry-specific technology -- the culmination of experimenting with tooling animal imagery for self-identification.

Recently I was talking with a visiting fur (@dragonlabs on bsky) and they had the interesting perspective: "Azure [their sona] is just a character -- i'm not them." (this was in the context of gender identity, the human behind Azure was diverging away from Azure's masculinity)

As for myself, I very much disagree.

Context on my autism diagnosis: the clinician who diagnosed me (as an adult) noted I don't mask... "I don't even need the interviews or questionnaires -- I can just tell."

If I'm just "being myself", my voice oscillates wildly from flat, mumbly, and monotone to exaggeratedly sing-songy and cartoonish. I don't have much volume control when I feel "in my element". In spite of practice in front of mirrors, I can't "project" emotions onto my face, nor is that something I often think about... looking angry is especially impossible for me.

Yet I understand the demands placed on me. I rather dislike gifts because I can't "show" appreciation, which upsets people. Interpersonal relationships are especially troublesome: I perceive I'm never "feeling" the right things, that I don't love enough, that I must not have valued what I have due to my lack of apparent distress when it's gone. And because of it all, there's something wrong with me, because I'm the weird one.

And so to meet those demands, I contort my emotions: actually feeling something is the only way I know to function within those norms. This is insidiously pernicious. My happiness, my pain, my emotions as a whole, do not belong to me. I lack the words to describe my emotional state because in any situation where I'm "supposed" to feel sad, happy, connected, or whatever else, my emotions are instead some unidentifiable twisted clusterfuck from me trying to blend. I can see what I feel, I just can't say it (at least, not short of paragraphs). And even worse, I can't tell which of what I'm feeling is myself anymore. The words which are supposed to facilitate communication instead lock me in my head. Maybe this is the root of my extreme alexithymia...

Anyway, at first I just consumed furry art because I thought it was neat, and I liked animals. But I soon found something interesting:

Art is silent. It doesn't speak back to you, criticize you... you're alone with yourself, and you can see who you really are. You can synthesize yourself within a personal unintelligible symbology. You have privacy.

When I get obsessed with a random 1-minute furry animation meme and loop it for hours on end, the world falls away, and I begin to understand who I am.

This isn't necessarily furry-specific. Once while I was playing Beat Saber, I had a similar experience where my bond with the media transcends anything in the media itself. I was on the verge of joyous tears. It felt like I was seeing myself from above in some sense. As I was describing the experience to my clinician, I was at a full loss for words. Stammering and sobbing, all I managed to say was, "it made me feel whole!" The clinician told me to stop that, that's not possible. Oh yeah. Of course Beat Saber can't make you feel human, that's ridiculous. It's just blocks on a screen.

In that moment, my humanity was denied. And so I constructed a narrative in my head to deny myself of my own emotional richness, convincing myself that my feelings and perceptions are illusory, and I returned to flatness.

So my fursona is my way of participating in the scene where I find myself. My sonas are my face, replacing the physical one I hold little control over. You don't know their meaning, the depth of what I see in them, and that's the whole point. It's just like the trope of staring into the depths of someone's eyes and "seeing" their soul within the blackness of their pupils.

But here, among furries, this face is recognized. And it's a face I see as my own. I'm finding out that's one of the most important things in the world to me.

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Lost in Signs

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I'd previously attempted to convey similar things about how I see myself in science. Unfortunately, from the perspective of society, science has much more in common with Beat Saber than furry, and I find language and preconceptions to be trapping me there. Maybe that piece of writing will always stay incomplete and unreleased. But really the essence is the same: just like animal imagery can be tooled to signal who you are, your taste and engagement with science and math speaks to how you see the world.

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I could go down the philosophical rabbithole of what happens when signs divorce themselves from reality and how I seem to be oriented in reverse, floating in a world of information and symbols rather than living in the present itself. And yet for me, it's the former that brings the latter to life.

Or there's the other direction of furry as embodying contradictions: serious and unserious, human and inhuman, together and alone, real and imagined. Of course, a true contradiction can't exist -- rather, embodying contradiction is just the business of exposing holes within existing concepts, categories, and ways of knowing. It's what you do to stay true to yourself when language would otherwise fail you in a conceptual world where you are seen as described (man, woman, human, animal...).

Why concern myself with all these questions anyway?

Primarily, I just don't want to keep numbing myself to keep working.

I don't want to just forget my problems -- I want to solve them and move on, but also keep those solutions with me, for what's the point of having encountered a trap if you can't tell anyone about it...

I've been writing the same things over and over. But now, I hope this is written plainly enough to be workable.

I know why I want to perform and who I want to become.

It's time to do science.

Goodnight and goodbye.