1344 Straight Arm.

by

I’ve been on the edges of the furry community for years now. In fact, from my perspective, the furry community is no more a community than any other loose conglomeration of people is. There are little cells, or cliques, but if there is a grand community I’ve never seen it. The perception of the group is only there if you are far enough outside to be outside. It’s like Anonymous. You can’t get an accurate accounting of what it is. You can only see that that there is a group of people with, more or less, the same interests or goals. I suspect that if you were actually in it things would seem much less cohesive. There are probably little groups of activists that actually get all the stuff done, while most of the group is just dickheads who like to put on Gut Fawkes masks and be intimidating.

That said, there must be larger groups that really buy in to the lifestyle. If there weren’t there wouldn’t be conventions. Now, as far as fursuits go, there are regional styles. In general American suits tend to look more like mascots, or looney toons. In Japan they tend to err on the side of the anime aesthetic. Shocking, I know. Both regions, however, have a smaller subset of people who make hyper realistic suits. To the point of it looking like huge taxidermy. For the record, those kinds of suits creep me the fuck out. I like a clear demarcation between reality and fantasy when it comes to anthro stuff. I don’t want a giant, dead eyed, fox prancing around in my general location.

Our new cast member has made her suit in a Japanese style. (Mostly because I can’t draw American style furries for shit.) The minutia of suit making is varied. Some people make very intricate internals for their suits, others just wear hollowed out rolls of carpet. You have to give at least some respect to anyone who can commit to a hobby at that level. It seems like once you make a suit you are all in.

The long and the short of all of this is that a fursuiter is no weirder a person that some chump who dresses up like Green Lantern at a comic convention. They want the same combination of attention and camaraderie.

For the record, I really like the girl in the suit.

46 Comments

Oh man, I normally don’t go in for the full on fursuit kind of thing, but just her mentioning sound piping got my inner engineer going…

I’m imagining something in the style shown above, but much larger. Hidden pouches for snacks on the insides, Wire supports for the arms so you can pull your own arm in without “Deflating it” Maybe enough room in front for you to pull your head in and read from a phone or tablet, or a book if you install a low intensity light.

…OH! You could make a turtle costume and style it after old cartoons where a turtle had the comforts of home in his shell! Only problem would be sitting down…

Would make waiting in lines a lot easier to stand if you were walking around in a mobile sitting room. Maybe install a kickstand type thing you can lean against…

So many ideas…. none of them truly practical…

Just like congress.

ROTFL!

Having dealt on a regular basis with the impacts of congressional and executive edicts that are clearly written by a bunch of lawyers with no understanding of the technical implications of what they are trying to legislate and regulate I have to agree that “So many ideas…. none of them truly practical…” is an all too apt description – although I would modify it to “just like congress and the executive branch”

I dunno, I certainly consider myself a “furry,” but I don’t go in for the fursuits, the conventions, the… um, porn… It’s just that I totally love the visual design, the representation and a lot of the popular tropes. It resonates with me in a weird way, and for that reason I feel a sense of community with (some) people who share those interests too.

That’s why I’d definitely consider it a community, even if – as you said – it’s really more loose groups of people who only occasionally operate in tandem.

I know you probably have a name set out, but may I nominate Kit, short for Kitsune a Japanese fox spirit that’s pretty popular in Japanese furry circles? At least that’s what Kotaku tells me. (She probably has a longer name of Katherine, and maybe called Kitty by her family.)

Well this is strangely nostalgic for me, As i literally lived something like this 5 years ago. Ended up dating a girl who was a little way into furry culture, can’t say it was worth it. can’t say it wasn’t

That’s beautiful, but under all that fursona looks like a girl that’s a mess, and jumpy. Heh, hopefully those were padded paws, otherwise that look like it might have hurt a bit. Ha ha! =D

Head-masks are not known for keeping hair neat and tidy. Makeup can also get smeared, and working hard on an involved project like that doesn’t do well-slept fresh-face any favors.

I know folks who dress up in kimonos at gen-con and such. End of the day, they’re rather ripe, and that’s less involved.

As to jumpy, someone she doesn’t know just got up in her face unexpectedly. Panel 5 is about 1 foot too close for comfort, at least.

This is about how I got introduced to furries, with similar results. They loved me for it, though, because my interest was genuine (and, being a Sonic fan, I feel I didn’t really have to “learn to accept” anything <__<).

Back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, I used to write software reviews for a magazine called The Rainbow. The magazine supported the Tandy-Radio Shack Color Computer, or ‘CoCo’, and ran a comic strip of a mascot called CoCo Cat. For their semiannual conventions, The Rainbow. had a fur suit of their feline mascot made up. It was only semi-anthropomorphic and was really cartoony. At one convention, I asked Lonnie, the publisher, where I could find one of the editors. He just laughed and said, “Find CoCo Cat and you’ve found her.” Well, how hard could it be to find a big, yellow mascot in a room full of flannel and T-shirt clad geeks? Not very.

As I approached the mascot, one thing I noticed was the constant whirring of electric motors. I asked the editor about that later, and she said that the hotel ballroom was already over seventy-five degrees, and moving around in the fur suit warmed things up real quick. There were several battery-powered fans that pulled air through the suit, keeping it bearable.

That was my first experience with a fur suit, and watching somebody ‘pull their head off’ was a little… disturbing.

I had a girlfriend who had to wear a mascot suit for a company as a summer job. I was her “handler ” on a couple of occasions. Really I was there to keep a supply of cool drinks and help her in and out if the suit. While I didn’t have any first hand experience, it must have been damn hot as I literally had to peel it off of her at the end of the day. Skin, sweat and foam rubber is a terrible combination.

You know… I’ve never really been one for furries, and the fursuits have always creeped me the fuck out. And there is a very good reason for that.

My one real experience with anyone who I know for a fact is a fursuit-er, is when I used to work at a UPS store. Every November, this guy would come in to use our computer/color copier to print out hundreds of badges, fliers, posters, etc. for the local furry convention that he was in charge of. He didn’t hide the fact that he was a furry, and was quite open about his use of fursuits… and based on the stuff he was printing, it was obvious what other aspect of the fandom he was most interested in. When the badges that a man prints up for a convention that he himself is running prominently feature a wolf girl wearing makeup and with huge tits…

And, you know, he was a nice enough dude. I guess. I mean, he was friendly. And he could afford to print out several hundred dollars worth of badges and fliers. But there is one thing about him that I will remember to the end of my days.

The smell.

Now, I’ve been around a lot of unwashed nerds in my day. In fact, there have been times I’ve been one of those unwashed nerds. But no other group of nerds that I’ve ever interacted with – not trekkies, not otaku, not gamers, not browncoats, nobody – has ever smelled quite as BAD as this guy. The miasma that accompanied him every time he walked into the store, and that lingered for hours after he left… it made me want to vomit. Seriously. It was BAD. And I still don’t know if it was just something specific about that guy, or if it had something to do with the fursuits he admitted to wearing.

Now, do I think all furries are like that? No. Absolutely not. I can’t make an accurate hypothesis based on a sample size of one.

But I’m not really interested in TESTING that hypothesis, either.

Furry or not, hygiene is something I hold in high regard, and would enforce at gunpoint if I had it my way. I abhor people who reek so forsakenly awfully that people would lose their appetites–all of them–for a few hours at a time. Plainly put, there’s no fucking excuse for that shit!

I got into the furry community as an artist. I don’t like the stigma that goes along with admitting you’re a furry so I usually just say that I’m an anthropomorphic artist. When people give me shit about it, and I have had people give me shit about it without even trying to get to know me as a person, I just ask them if they ever watched Bugs Bunny cartoons and if they liked them. If they say yes, I say welcome to the furry fan-dome, because what I draw is along the same lines. I don’t do porn, or fetish pics.

For some it’s any eye opener, for other’s it’s just more of an excuse to call me a pervert and assume that I don mascot suits and join in on furry orgies. Which I have never encountered in my entire experience as a furry by the way. I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen, just that I have never seen or been invited to one.

I have been to my share of furry conventions though and as an artist, I have both attended and hosted any number of art jams. Art jams for the uninformed are basically small room parties where groups of furry artists get together and pass around personal sketch books and trade art. You generally just sit around chatting with each other and doing artwork all night long.

To head off problems with the type of art you get in your sketch book, most artists will write a description of what is and is not allowed to be drawn in their books. I have a strict policy about mine, I don’t mind nudity but I do not want porn in my books or anything of a “Wet fur” nature or anything sexually explicit. I don’t have anything against people who are into all that, but it’s just not my thing.

Okay, now that the back story is out of the way I will get to the point of what I actually wanted to talk about, and that is odor. I was at an art jam one year and another artist and I were working on each other’s sketch books and just generally chatting while drawing. The room might have been a little “funky” but it wasn’t that bad, some folks might have needed a shower but I’m pretty sure most of them had at least had one that morning.

However, there was one guy at the jam that I was pretty sure was not in the habit of showering more than once a month if that often. At one point he seemed to get interested in the conversation that I and this other person were having and he kept edging closer and closer so that he could hear better. His stench was such that I found myself thinking over and over again “God does he ever bathe?”

But he finally got so close that I was trying not to breath through my nose or my mouth because the stench was so bad I could taste it… try not to imagine that. I was thinking soap over and over in my head so much that when my conversation partner stopped talking expecting me to answer a question that he’s asked me, I blurted out SOAP! at the top of my lungs. Everyone else in the room shut up and just looked our way.

I was really embarrassed by it but I guess the guy knew he was the reason that I had yelled out soap because he started edging slowly away from us after that until he was far enough away to slip out of the room without drawing too much attention to himself. I honestly hadn’t meant to shout like that, but I just couldn’t breath. After the guy left someone else got the bright idea to open up the windows and air the room out, and everyone’s conversation turned to just how bad that one guy smelled.

Much of the art after that turned to different ways our furry characters were combating con funk. I got some pretty interesting art that night, lol, from furry superhero’s chasing stench monsters with cans and bottles of Febreeze, to furry commando’s tossing air freshener grenades. Never saw the stench monster who prompted it again though, so yeah. Most furry folk know how to bathe and tend to stick with pretty normal hygiene but once in a while we do draw the one’s who seem to have absolutely no clue.

Most cosplays are just a fine layering of clothes. Fursuits however, are full body microwaves. Any smart con-fur keeps about 10 feebreez bombs for his suit because those things are stupid hard to clean and get very hot, very quickly.

A few years a go Japan came out with this air-conditioned suit that was basically a cool fan and motor attached to footie pajamas. I’ve noticed the tech in a few suits when I attend cons.

You can tell because even under all the fur the arms look kinda…….inflated.

I didnt realize I was a furry cause I didnt know what that meant until like 2009.
Before then I liked anthromorphic things and just saw it as another style to master.
But just about anyone raised on disney is bound to have a furry bone intheir body.
Ima giant perv though so I corrupt everything I see ; any art community that allows that is my kind of community.

Must be hard to talk in that thing, the mask doesn’t look to be much larger than her head. She is cute however, both with and without the head.

“For the record, I really like the girl in the suit.”

Is she based on someone in real life?

She has a neat character design.

Though I’m a bit surprised by her reaction. He just showed some enthusiasm for her craft.

I personally dislike the mascot ones the least, like they creep me the fuck out. Never seen a realistic one tho, so maybe that’s worse.

I dunno, the only suits that don’t scare me are the ones that look like a lot of effort and know-how went into it.

Also the remaster is nowhere as good as the original “Who are You”

I’ve never really been into the whole fur-suite thing, but if I were it would probably have to be a cross of the hyper realistic and the Japanese anime style. Realistic body, tail, and ears with a more humanoid face and color contacts. I’ve never really found the more animalistic features to be that attractive or interesting. I like more of a blending of human and animal, at least where the face is concerned.

So I would probably go more for make up and contacts to give me the look I was going for but the rest of the costume would be as realistic as I could get it. Though truthfully it all sounds like way too much work for my personal tastes so I will no doubt stay away from that aspect of the hobby.

My friends Diontae and Josh are furries. Not fursuit-level furries, but they definitely find anthropomorphs attractive. I love em like brothers, but… I really wish they’d stop showing me their interests all the time. They keep trying to “convert” me. It won’t work. I’m not men and I’m not into furries. Animal ears / tails are fine, anime has desensitized me to that, but muzzles and full-body hair are too far, guys. :/

Hope you see this reply.

I’m one of those furries that likes the stuff but doesn’t really -broadcast it-. Most people know that I’m one because of my online handle and avatar, and that’s -it-. I don’t show furry artwork to my non-fur friends unless it’s something that they’d really like, like fan art.

This has, oddly, made me one of the most accepted furries at various forums. Most people don’t associate furry with me, and that’s fine by me. I keep my interests separate, nobody gets bothered, and so on.

Case in point, I’ve been friends with someone locally since 1995 (we went to the same high school). I’ve been a furry since 1999/2000. I’ve -never- mentioned the furry thing to him, but he brought it up one day to joke with me. After knowing him for 16 years, he said “Yeah, I know, and I don’t care about that shit.”

I don’t understand why so many furries try to push the fandom on friends and others. I guess it’s because they want to share what they like, but… most people don’t like that stuff so I just don’t say anything unless they show an interest first. And even then I don’t go all out about it.

Well I accept them for what they are into, same as they accept me for being a “breeder.” And we all still have a blast together… it’s just those times when they insist on showing me that stuff. It urks me a little, but no more than when they show me incredibly girly anime or when diontae “just happens” to leave MLP:FiM on his TV when I come over (that would be a nail in the coffin, but I got back at him when he went to the bathroom one time by swapping the Netflix to the MLP movie where they turn into human girls with skin colors ranging from normal to Doug, kekekek. That got him).

In short, it doesn’t bother me enough to drop one of my closest friends over regardless of his interests or what he’d like to do to Bowser or whatever have you, same as he respects my interests and what I’d do to Cia from Hyrule Warriors. :F

Man, the first thing I thought upon seeing the comic was ‘Oy, oy! She’s taking off her suit’s head! That’s breaking one of THE big unwritten rules!

As for furries having/not having one big community…
Eh, I feel they have more of a community than most fandoms, partly because before they became well-known most people who joined where the ones who couldn’t get accepted elsewhere.
Mostly, there’s one big CULTURE, and many smaller communities.

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