irony is the cowards way to enjoy things

be courageous, be sincere.

and most of all

be fucking weird with it

the whole "fandom" concept is, to me, entirely abhorrent

Because it codifies ways you must adhere to to enjoy something.

I think the strength furry has is that instead of centralized around intellectual property or products

it is about appreciation of other members and participants.

Which does lead to people getting fans of their own but it is generally an organically driven thing

Subculture feels restrictive for it as well but it is more than just "fandom"

Hi I'm gonna repost this with Unprompted Discussion :)

I think what I find interesting here is that on Cohost, as I've dug through the #fandom tag, the two most popular hits are Furry and Queer focused discussions. There's a sort of Tyranny in how human organizations tend to orient themselves towards particular aspects of their societies which are accessible at the time of founding. Very early on, certain elements of the Furry Fandom's foundation were inextricably linked to commercial works promoted by magazine.

With the Furry Fandom really getting its feet in the U.S. during the 1980's and then finding great and increasingly relevant success in the 1990's, contemporary media produced for entertainment and profit is at the center of the Furry Fandom's formation. Unlike the individual works simply composed together, the Furry Fandom is greater than the Sum of its Parts, thanks to the encouragement of creative arts and expression of individuality through fiction.

We see how the snake eats its own tail under our current commerce-oriented global society, in that to be successful as a creator one must monetize their works often through donation/crowdsource funding platforms like Patreon, Ko-Fi, and Subscribestar. Yet before that? Private peer to peer commissions done with traditional media through early networking at fur meets, sale of physical goods representing fandom icons commercial and non-commercial in origin, sale of products like fandom periodicals during the 'Zine era, so on and so forth.

We still have a strong historical connection to Disney's traditionally animated works. That damn Robin Hood furry movie, The Fox and The Hound, Balto, and more recently Zootopia, demonstrates that despite the arguments some have made about Fandom and Capital, the two are codependent, linked by popular works which must succeed given the circumstances of our society. Reflexively, the success of those works follow a natural comprehensibility and performative value or creative quality which requires the fostering of creative industry. It's all labor, one way or another.

Links included are various posts of relevance to the ideas, not direct citations, but I wanted to refer inwardly to other blogs here on Cohost who are discussing the same thing!

It's sort of come together for me at this point that the meme about a Deviant Art originated shipping/crossover fanwork has completed perhaps one of the most asymmetrical and disorientingly concise plot-arcs in meme history. This rambling essay will compile some recollections about ponys, pornography, and the poetry of emergent fandom.

This is very loosely structured, the TLDR of the text is that Memes can take us on a trip back through history, and there's nothing quite as Queer as being Cringe on the internet during the 2010's. Like seriously, we meme about the Gamergate to Transgirl pipeline, it's a thing.