my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

Originally posted February 25th, 2024 on my Cohost account. Copied from this archived page.

Note: In retrospect, I think there are nuances to be had about the distinction between the "main bloodline" furry fandom, and the "animal xenofiction" bloodline.

The "main bloodline" originates from 1970's "funny animal fandom" associated with humanoid animal cartoon characters. (hence why skunks were popular in early furry culture - Pepe Le Pew, and in the 90's Fifi La Fume, were characters from popular funny animal cartoons!) This strain of furry fandom had a prominent NSFW scene from the beginning, and has been widely gawked at since the early internet for its association with particularly idiosyncratic kinks and fetishes, relative to other online subcultures. I can't imagine that many NSFW writers on Ao3 are into their whumpees turning into pooltoy versions of themselves and getting inflated big and round, you know? At some point, airplane, robot, and other inorganic characters became accepted parts of the scene, as long as they invoked animal shapes like snouts and paws; I'm pretty sure airplanes are so popular because they already kind of look like they have snouts.

The animal xenofiction bloodline is largely focused on sapient but non-humanoid animal characters; its associated "formative media" features casts of non-humanoid animals who talk (although that speech is not understandable to humans, in settings where humans exist), and who may (especially in literary examples) display elaborate cultural traditions despite their lack of hands. Characters anthropomorphizing objects or made of artificial materials are relatively rare, compared to the funny animal bloodline. Animal Xenofiction fans, and media fandoms within the Animal Xenofiction, are generally less interested in NSFW than either "mainline" furry fandom or human-centered media fandom, and when kink appears it's in relatively mainstream forms like Dom/Sub and sadomasochism.

It is more stereotypically associated with children and teenagers, especially teenage girls, than "mainline" furry fandom, and this reflects the difference in bullying the two strains have received. Main bloodlines, from what I remember of the aughts, have largely been lolcow'd for being weird and offputting autistic adults (and ugly and fat - didn't matter if this wasn't true, it was assumed) with childish interests. This is a type of harassment that, in media fandom spaces, targets both male and female fans (and both transformative and curative fans) who are in their adult years. Xenofiction strains - such as "wolfaboos" - were often bullied for being emo kids who made edgy and overpowered OCs with unnatural colors and tragic backstories, being too into alt fashion and anime-esque narrative melodrama; sometimes this bullying even came from other xenofiction furries, who felt they were superior to their peers for sticking to biological accuracy in character design. I'm sure many Dreamwidth users can see the parallel to how teenage girls in fandom have been historically treated - by people outside fandom, by men in curative fandom, even by other women in transformative/shipping-culture fandom, who sneered at "Mary Sues" as affronts to canon and literature.

These strains of "furry" have melded into each other over time, but I believe treating them as synonymous is a category error on par with treating anime fandom "yaoi" fans like they're just a weird mutant subspecies of K/S-descended "slash" fans - they have convergently evolved similarities, and they have overlapped hybridized over the decades, but they are different animals, with their own evolutionary histories and quirks stemming from that history.

With that out of the way, let the original post stand unaltered. In addition, under the cut, tresfoyle gave me permission to add her commentary from when we were both on Cohost; her commentary is in the readmore under mine.

( the joy of rainbow lions )

( furries and transformers, contradiction, and communal creation )