i feel that there are some artists whose relationship with humans is much the same as a furry artist’s relationship with animals. that is to say, the artist admires these creatures, finds within them enormous aesthetic and tactile potential, and seeks to express themselves through that potential: but you could hardly argue that the end result of this process is a literal depiction of the creature in question. it’s, you know, a beautiful chimera, possessive of whatever aesthetic qualities of the source material the artist finds emotionally resonant.
when the source material is a non-human animal we call this “furry art”; when it’s a human we don’t really have a particular word for it. maybe you could argue that this is simply cartooning, though i’m not totally convinced.
most of my favorite cartoon art of animals that are ostensibly humans is by furries. furries fucking own: they just Get the concept of Embodiment. furries latch on to all the things that would rule about having a particular kind of body. furries know exactly what’s to like about having fur, or a huge tail, or a snoot and perky ears, or whatever. Embodiment! when that same lens is applied to the human animal, the resulting art often carries that same feeling. that feeling of, like, “this artist knows why this shape would be cool to be.” maybe what results isn’t a literal depiction of a human any more than any given anthro can be called a literal depiction of a fox: it’s a beautiful chimera inviting you to play in the space of Embodiment.
anyway that’s how i’ve been thinking about drawing lately. thanks furries. i love you
🎙️There's this concept our system keeps coming back to with regards to this, which is that furries often intrinsically understand that 'anthropomorphizing' something entails more than strict representation, and how that often correlates to neurodivergence and the experience of being dehumanized by society to the point you have to inject your humanity1 back into your own experience-of-self. Take one of my headmates, for example. She likes bunnies. She wants to be a bunny a lot of the time!
✨ Hi! It's true, I do. Gosh I love bunnies. Aaaaaaaaaaaa. I really really really do wanna be a bunny!
🎙️So why does she like... bunniness, for lack of a better term? Well, she likes the idea of having big ears she can tug on like hair when she's upset or excited. She likes having a fluffy little cotton-puff tail that bounces when she moves. She likes the idea of having big paws she can stamp really hard and bounce up and down on. She likes the idea of having buckteeth she can rub her tongue against and press into her lip when she's nervous. Incidentally, aside from the tail, these are all stims she has. So what's liberating about the furriness of this physical experience is, like... as a furry these neurodivergent habits she has are normalized. Or even desirable or cute! It gives a license to just Be What You Are without having to filter it for someone else.
✨ Gosh, it really is nice to think about. Being able to just... I dunno, exist and have my physical nature be something that people don't think is out of sync with my behavior.
🎙️ So we're already simpatico with the idea that like, furriness can give you back a sense of personal agency that someone took, right? Well, it turns out you can apply the same principles to... humans. You can use the idea of presenting a self for whom your weird habits and quirks and needs and wants are normalized to represent a human. This is where I get way deep in the weeds: I think you can make a completely human character, with no animal features, that is aesthetically furry. Because furry at its beating heart is all about yearning, about wanting to be more yourself through being something that isn't overtly representational of reality but is overtly representational of sensation and emotion.
✨ What makes furry special to us isn't that it lets us become someone else. It's that it lets us become ourselves. It's a nuance that's easy to miss because there's a lot of unfortunate rhetoric tied up around the idea of a 'fantasy life.' Maybe we're just helplessly furrypilled or whatever, but I kinda feel like I know way more about someone if they tell me about their favorite RP character they've played than what they do for a living. So when I say 'I want to be a bunny,' I'm also saying 'I want you to see me the way I really am, with all my weird foibles and habits and things I can't change or fix, and tell me you understand.' We can't escape the necessity of being-in-the-world, but that's really just preamble to being-in-self.
🎙️And this is why I think 'furry' is a genre as much as it is the literal furry subculture. There is this intersectional point of sensory yearning and intuitive aesthetic understanding. You can 110% make a human character that falls within the genre signifiers of furry. Because what defines furriness has nothing to do with any set or specific animal qualities; anthro frogs and turtles and snakes can be definitively furry and they don't have any fur. What makes something furry artistically is whether or not it can communicate that yearning and celebratory strangeness in an intuitive, emotionally-resonant way. The reason there's not a word for that when you do it with humans is because it already exists.
It's 'furry.'
1used in the sense of 'your broad ability to experience agency and personhood,' not strictly the sense of 'human' being inherently desirable at a baseline, no slam on our therian homies out there
