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[Fineas]

I feel a well defined fursona is....

whatever you damn well please.

100% agree. People that try to dictate other people's (very personal!) choices kinda piss me off.

Ok, I see.
Could you elaborate?

[Cheetah]

I feel a well defined fursona is....

whatever you damn well please.

100% agree. People that try to dictate other people's (very personal!) choices kinda piss me off.

Ok, I see.
Could you elaborate?

I'm guessing, but I think he's annoyed by people trying to define what a "real" furry or a "proper" persona is based on narrow personal criteria, ignoring the factual social norms that REALLY define it It's a common mistake, and it wouldn't be worth mentioning if it didn't occur so often, and if didn't frequently result in sometimes funny, but sometimes outright embarassing overreactions, such as this:



(Recently found in someone's FA journal.)

[Fineas]

Well if that is it that I can understand.
Sounds like a pretty harsh thing to do; just block people out because they don't fit too your 'standards'.

I find it even more depressing to see within the furry community. We are already not the most popular fandom on the net and common media.
That while anime and fantasy for example have been adopted pretty well overall.
So I would love to see as many people get along in our 'little group' as possible. We will have enough hardship without 'fighting' one another.

Sounds like a rant from 2, about Animal Spirits:
http://www.ranting-gryphon.com/Audio/Rants/2rant-animal_spirits.mp3

Short summery: Before he was a furry he was in the werespirit community, that at some point went as far as saying that you can not have an animal spirit that isn't native to your location.
Which 2 (obviously) opposes to because he thinks that's completely bonkers.

[Zefiro]

I think I joined the fandom before the word "(fur)sona" became fashionable. We just called it our "character" back then, which is obviously a term borrowed from theater/roleplay, to refer to the not-human-part.

I'm not sure I know what a "fursona" IS. Do I even have one? Up till now, I'd have synonymed it to furry character.

I am a dragon. Winged, green, fire-breathing. Dragons are cool creatures, and that's nice, but basically I... just am. I didn't "chose" the dragon for any reasons, especially not because I associated power, strength, elegance, whatever with it which I saw on myself or wished it would be there. A less accessible part of my brain just decided for me, puzzling myself. I'm not special, I'm not magic, not shapeshifting, not hybrid. I don't have cool tatoos, scars, or colors. Besides being one of the coolest creatures there are *g*, I'm rather boring and mundane. I am just one in a douzens of other furs. And I struggle to life, searching for friends and happyness, using what I have and am, not trying to out-compete by how special I am. Could I even?

I regard myself as a furry lifestyler. Nearly everyone around me - friends, family, work - knows my dragon side. I regularly do fire-breathing. Tried paragliding. I own a fursuit. Lots of dragon pictures, statues, plushies. I just am - a single being, in a human world, in a human body, with this nice hobby pretending to be draconic.

So I don't have a background story (this would imply there's a difference between me and my character, which I actually try to reduce), no special visual differentiators (similar to me not having them among 7 billion humans), and especially no "character to play". I just AM - I'm myself, for myself, not as an amusement of others or a protagonist in some kind of fantasy story.

If this means that the word "fursona" does not fit me, so be it. I don't need this word. I'm a Furry nonetheless.

*purrrrr*

[Cheetah]

Fursona is the fancy-pantsy fandom neologism for "furry alter ego". In the old days (mid-90s) you'd go by your real name, and sometimes BBS handle or nickname, but nobody would necessarily associate any kind of animal species with it. You'd have a "character" or "avatar" on furryMUCK, and that was explicity your role playing character. Some people played multiple characters at the same time, or changed characters. And quite often, they did not think of their characters as an online representation of their real life persona, but a very distinct roleplaying character specifically created for that purpose. When the former FurryMUCK-Community began to spread to IRC (where playing a fictional character was considered "faking" and not legitimate roleplay), the idea of a "personal furry" was born - an online personality that was representative of your true self, and not a fictional character you made up.

That was still years before costuming became a thing.

The idea that everyone of us has one definitive "fursona" that defines our virtual self / inner self just like our "persona" that defines our physical self / outer self is a relatively recent development - I'd say, something that evolved within the last 10 years or so.

Funny enough, with fursuiting being the number one fandom activity these days, the trend is diluting again, as your physical appearance is now as interchangeable as your virtual / imagined / spiritual appearance, and people get a lot of fun out of playing characters distinctively different from their regular selves.

[Runo]

I feel a well defined fursona is....

whatever you damn well please.

100% agree. People that try to dictate other people's (very personal!) choices kinda piss me off.

Ok, I see.
Could you elaborate?

Very simple. "Fursona"s are a very personal concept. It it something everybody has decide for himself, and feel comfortable with.

Thus, if they feel comfortable with Sparkledogs… their choice. Doesn't mean I can't snicker or refuse to draw it, but it's their damn choice and not anyone's place to argue against it.

They like changing their fursona to the cool new species of the month? Who am I to say that's not correct, that's not how they feel? Etc pp.

Trying to dictate what 'is good' and what isn't is presumptuous. Feel free to model your own fursona by those rules, but trying to push others to adhere to your rules… well, that's pissing me off.


Besides that, what Cheetah, and especially Zefiro, said.

[Fineas]

I think I understand your collective point.

However, if I understand well what you are saying is that: your are comparing the notion to the freedom to say "that is a pretty flower" to say "that is a flower" and that everyone should accept that it is a flower and that the collective or our individual notion that it is to our liking in any number of attributes is nonsensical and wrong.

If so I am divided in this opinion in that:
I feel any person or collective is also free to say what they want about any one, as long as your goal is NOT just merely to provoke or hurt.
The same goes for your freedom to express yourself in any way you like for the same notion.
Which in essence is what you do when you make a fursona or avatar to present you.

If you have no doubt that what you are doing is/feels right, then you shouldn't let any ones personal opinion sway your resolve.
If you are however doubting, because you might feel new in all this and it's all alien in concepts and that you yearn for that sense of belonging, but do not know how. Then why not let a collective or individual set you up with an idea.
Maybe it fits, maybe it doesn't. It's going to need nurturing to grow (and become what you wanted it to be) anyway, it has to start somewhere.

My goal with this piece is to vent an idea and put it to the test. Even if a collective would (completely) agree or disagree. I still see it as a guideline.
It's on the same level as why we ask an architect to draw our house and an engineer to make the numbers fit so it is structurally sound.
Because if you have the knowledge and guts you can just bypass all that and do it in whichever way you want.

The difference here is that you are right in that it is a very personal thing. Expressing oneself.
And that their not a lot of absolute values you can use to measure any kind of performance or 'fitfulness for a particular job'.

So it has never meant to be a set of strict rules one should abide by, however like with many things if you stray to far from anyones collective understanding or acceptance of something. Then it's going to be harder for you to make it understood to others and after that for people to accept it.

It's just as hard to explain why someone is gay, a furry or why one would drink wine. You can not explain the concept without feeling it, however, people accept it because the concepts got refined over time, we now have the words that can define something and the notion that a whole bunch of people embrace that value make it easier to accept.

So I accept any ones opinion that I might be right or wrong.
To contribute, oppose or be indifferent.
To accept it, to reject it or ignore it completely.