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The real and the fake in furry
15 years ago
So when Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther (a book I haven't read, mind you, but have come across it as a phenomenon multiple times), he really let the genie out of the lamp. For all intents and purposes, the young Werther—a passionate and sensitive artist who moves to the country, falls in love with an engaged woman, fails to woo her, and commits suicide because he can't live with the pain—becomes a real presence haunting poor Goethe until his old age. Teenagers of the time read Werther and start dressing up like the main character. They identify with him. Some even get it in their heads that they should commit suicide over unrequited love, just like Werther. The Werther fans were, apparently, excruciatingly annoying to Goethe. No lie! He'd be relieved that Faust gradually overtook it in renown. Good for you, Goethe.
This is all, of course, to anchor what I'm about to say in some sort of historical context before I bend it into ridiculous areas. Human beings are hilariously prone to taking people who don't literally exist and giving them a great deal of power and influence. This is because, according to my exhaustive research (NOT!) human beings are pretty apathetic about this whole difference between real and fake people. It didn't matter that Werther wasn't a real person... he was made real by the fans. You see the same thing with actors being mistaken for their characters, and you see it with Otakukin.
Mass media only makes this easier, of course. And today, in this postmodern and increasingly posthuman culture, the lines between what's real and what's fictional are blurring more and more. We're desperate to cling to something that's real, and with the glut of novels, comics, movies, TV shows, advertisements, plays, images, non-fiction books, religious and political screeds, merchandise, music, fashionable clothing lines, all fussed over by designers trying to reify the concept that their thing is supposed to fetishize, all crossing boundaries of genre and media as if the concept couldn't be contained in just a book... we have a lot of options to choose from, and they're all very compelling!
And here, us furries... well, we invent cartoon animals and then pretend to be them. Or at least, we draw and write about them as if they had actual views and desires. They have wills of their own, certain mannerisms, and if you've ever fursuited or animated or even just RPed before, you'd know this intuitively. We really immerse ourselves entirely in a world that is fictional while at the same time acknowledging the real (breaking an intense RP, for example, to go to the bathroom). People had trouble recognizing me at AC because they were honestly expecting a four foot tall white cartoon critter with big fluffy ears (SO MANY PEOPLE told me this).
But they aren't crazy, that's just part of the bizarre yet fertile irony of the fandom I'm trying to get at here. When Orwell wrote about doubethink, it was cloaked in radical social engineering and entrenched in a sensational dystopia. Counter-intuitively though, I think this kind of doublethink can be good for us. Is it possible to acknowledge the truth of these ghosts without sacrificing our grip on reality? Can we believe something is authentic and fake at the same time without being taken out by a bout of cognitive dissonance?
This is pure Baudrillard, and naturally the critiques of Baudrillard also apply. Forensically, scientifically, anthropomorphic animal characters don't exist as creatures with their own agendas. In the world of the hyperreal, though, they're all over the place, having a surprising amount of influence over our daily decisions. Spend enough time here, and you sort of get used to the ghosts of characters you no longer play coming back to haunt you, demanding to live again. And yet, I think we have more perspective than Baudrillard did. The real and the fake aren't quite so interchangeable, as any skeptic in their right mind will tell you. To Baudrillard, the border isn't there. However, I think we (as furries) understand that it IS there, but we also understand that the border doesn't always have to apply. So we can feel free to enthusiastically experience the fake (being in character in a fursuit) as a genuine experience.
In fact, and I might be stepping wildly into the the cloudy zone where I lose everyone, but let's talk about furry porn for a sec. It's undeniably fake*, and yet the arousal we experience is genuine. In order to feel aroused, we need to physically embody one of the characters in the image, or else imagine ourselves in the room voyeuristically observing the scene play out.
Especially concerning physically impossible fetish scenes, there's a real paradox going on: it's not real and logically we KNOW it's not real, but our minds and bodies and emotions react as if it were. That's fucking CRAZY, don't you think??
I wonder if the attitude toward this dichotomy in the fandom might be useful for understanding what's going to be happening in this coming century. I predict that it will become increasingly difficult to understand the difference between what's real and what's just a marketing gimmick (take a look at this book for instance) and that there's already a need to seize this power for good instead of for money. Interesting times, my friends.
*Any sort of illustrated porn and to a certain degree a lot of softcore porn follows this pattern, compared to the amateur, hardcore fucking that tries to pass itself off as real. Most people seem to jack off to this kind of porn and it actually kind of grosses me out so I haven't watched enough of it to form a real opinion on it.
This is all, of course, to anchor what I'm about to say in some sort of historical context before I bend it into ridiculous areas. Human beings are hilariously prone to taking people who don't literally exist and giving them a great deal of power and influence. This is because, according to my exhaustive research (NOT!) human beings are pretty apathetic about this whole difference between real and fake people. It didn't matter that Werther wasn't a real person... he was made real by the fans. You see the same thing with actors being mistaken for their characters, and you see it with Otakukin.
Mass media only makes this easier, of course. And today, in this postmodern and increasingly posthuman culture, the lines between what's real and what's fictional are blurring more and more. We're desperate to cling to something that's real, and with the glut of novels, comics, movies, TV shows, advertisements, plays, images, non-fiction books, religious and political screeds, merchandise, music, fashionable clothing lines, all fussed over by designers trying to reify the concept that their thing is supposed to fetishize, all crossing boundaries of genre and media as if the concept couldn't be contained in just a book... we have a lot of options to choose from, and they're all very compelling!
And here, us furries... well, we invent cartoon animals and then pretend to be them. Or at least, we draw and write about them as if they had actual views and desires. They have wills of their own, certain mannerisms, and if you've ever fursuited or animated or even just RPed before, you'd know this intuitively. We really immerse ourselves entirely in a world that is fictional while at the same time acknowledging the real (breaking an intense RP, for example, to go to the bathroom). People had trouble recognizing me at AC because they were honestly expecting a four foot tall white cartoon critter with big fluffy ears (SO MANY PEOPLE told me this).
But they aren't crazy, that's just part of the bizarre yet fertile irony of the fandom I'm trying to get at here. When Orwell wrote about doubethink, it was cloaked in radical social engineering and entrenched in a sensational dystopia. Counter-intuitively though, I think this kind of doublethink can be good for us. Is it possible to acknowledge the truth of these ghosts without sacrificing our grip on reality? Can we believe something is authentic and fake at the same time without being taken out by a bout of cognitive dissonance?
This is pure Baudrillard, and naturally the critiques of Baudrillard also apply. Forensically, scientifically, anthropomorphic animal characters don't exist as creatures with their own agendas. In the world of the hyperreal, though, they're all over the place, having a surprising amount of influence over our daily decisions. Spend enough time here, and you sort of get used to the ghosts of characters you no longer play coming back to haunt you, demanding to live again. And yet, I think we have more perspective than Baudrillard did. The real and the fake aren't quite so interchangeable, as any skeptic in their right mind will tell you. To Baudrillard, the border isn't there. However, I think we (as furries) understand that it IS there, but we also understand that the border doesn't always have to apply. So we can feel free to enthusiastically experience the fake (being in character in a fursuit) as a genuine experience.
In fact, and I might be stepping wildly into the the cloudy zone where I lose everyone, but let's talk about furry porn for a sec. It's undeniably fake*, and yet the arousal we experience is genuine. In order to feel aroused, we need to physically embody one of the characters in the image, or else imagine ourselves in the room voyeuristically observing the scene play out.
Especially concerning physically impossible fetish scenes, there's a real paradox going on: it's not real and logically we KNOW it's not real, but our minds and bodies and emotions react as if it were. That's fucking CRAZY, don't you think??
I wonder if the attitude toward this dichotomy in the fandom might be useful for understanding what's going to be happening in this coming century. I predict that it will become increasingly difficult to understand the difference between what's real and what's just a marketing gimmick (take a look at this book for instance) and that there's already a need to seize this power for good instead of for money. Interesting times, my friends.
*Any sort of illustrated porn and to a certain degree a lot of softcore porn follows this pattern, compared to the amateur, hardcore fucking that tries to pass itself off as real. Most people seem to jack off to this kind of porn and it actually kind of grosses me out so I haven't watched enough of it to form a real opinion on it.
It would be interesting, I guess, to see how non-furry people react to furry porn. Obviously a lot of folks find it sorta gross or weird...so does being able to enjoy furry porn come from some chemical or wiring difference in the furry brain? Or do furries learn to like animal critter porn?
Anyway, that's a little rambling, but your journal seemed to need more than "Cool dude!" as a comment.
I don't want to fantasize about basic missionary sex when I can imagine absurd biology-bending feats of super-eroticism!
I think, though, that anyone who writes within any sort of fictional universe with fictional characters or what have you will experience the same sort of dichotomy, for the same reasons. I don't think the furry part of it factors in quite so much as the fact that the furries themselves are fictional. It is interesting to be so connected to something not really humanocentric, though!
Hope I didn't sound like a complete bozo here :>
Anyway, you have to consider the influence ideas can have, with fursuits being a prime example of fiction manifesting itself in reality. Furry art and fiction in general is an attempt at having an artificial experience. If you can have one that feels authentic enough, there wouldn't be much of a difference than if it had really happened.
I guess every writer or artist puts a little of himself in his creation. But few fandoms offer so many possibilities to expand on personal fantasies than the furry world.
My character has been an escapist extension of myself since I was a kid. I started drawing comics with Pinton at very early age (and probably before the world, “furry” ever became popular)
Pinton did everything I would love to do and life and couldn’t. In my case, the main theme is not sex but action and adventure, but the reason behind it is the same. My character lives in a fantastic universe that contrasts with my own dull surroundings.
Our furry counterparts are the release valve that lets us play our fantasies. Some people re-enact strange fetishes, others draw themselves in the body they would like to have in real life. Others have in paper the perfect romantic relationship the lack in real life.
Some times I’m asked “why animals?” Why not draw humans engaged in your wildest fantasies and dreams?
The short answer is animals are much more fun!
The long answer can get a little complicated. Animals have been symbols of specific human traits for centuries. Every ancient culture has fables with animals playing human archetypes (Dog symbolizes loyalty, Fox: cunning, Lion: royalty, Peacock: vanity and so on) So a simple animal designs tells many things about the character by just looking at the picture, saving a thousand words that a human character would need to start describing his personality.
Animals also offer an unlimited range of abilities and variants. They come in all kinds of sizes, colors and breeds (unlike the rather limited palette of humans) they can have horns, fangs, tails, wings…
I also think the animal thing has to do with most people considering animals to be “freer” than humans are. Not bound by most moral and societal rules and humans. Therefore, interaction between furry characters can go into all kind of crazy directions that would be unrealistic to expect between people.
Lastly, animals are easier to draw than humans (at least for the mediocre anatomist like me)
I don't know what the average joe unfamiliar with furry would think of how some of us live our lives. With fear? With intrigue? With much skepticism? It often depends but still, personally I'd feel they'd just see it as childish escapism and that I should just 'grow up'.
Sometimes I think of the fandom as one big social experiment. Some people feel the need to get themselves out there and really make something of themselves, finding it adding to their sense of self esteem and self worth. Others are happy sat in the background and watching the people who get themselves out there, seeing what they do right of wrong and formulating opinions based on these strange personas we make for ourselves without knowing the actual people behind them. I've downright disliked some people due to how they act online, yet met them offline and found them to be entirely pleasant!
This was an interesting read and yeah, i'd favourite this if I could. I sort of like the concept of furry being explored like this.
Yup. But the more I look around the more I realize that's not unique to furry fandom, or even to what we'd normally think of as "fandoms." Anime fans are famous for cosplay. Harry Potter fans do it, too. And we've all known someone for whom baseball or NASCAR or whatever was their life, the only thing they really cared about. Humans seem to be good at developing obsessions over particular concepts. It makes me wonder if there's an evolutionary purpose to it, and if so, what it was.
Also I've always felt it was socially unfair how it's acceptable (except to some stereotyped sitcom wife) some slob ex-jock can totally geek out on sports, spout more useless statistics than an economist, watch nothing but the same repetitive daily ESPN bit even in public, spend all day playing fantasy [item]ball, get gang like antagonistic on someone wearing the "wrong" colors, and camp out to be the first to get the yearly only slightly different video game; but you deviate from the sports culture and you're "a nerd".
I confess I'm a bit of a "conspiracy theorist", though I try my hardest to have discernment. This particular article addresses the ugly in mass media and entertainment, although I also agree that using ones imagination without getting too caught up in it can be a very special, therapeutic, and not to mention FUN experience.
Also, there was this neat book on the subject called "Killing Monsters", about reality vs. fantasy, which I though was an interesting read, if you want to look into it.
On a side note: I've had Malkyru as an expression of myself since I was 15, and he's more than a character. He is me. But I'm not him so much as he is me, so I think I haven't crossed the line, blurring my identity to the point where I'm dysfunctional about it. With that said, I'd have no qualms about dressing up as him, plus all I'd really have to be is myself in order to pull off "Malkyru", although I'd probably exaggerate it a bit for fun XP
Spend enough time here, and you sort of get used to the ghosts of characters you no longer play coming back to haunt you, demanding to live again.
This. This hits a very personal spot, for someone who's had a number of personal avatars who happen to have lives of their own. =U
In order to feel aroused, we need to physically embody one of the characters in the image, or else imagine ourselves in the room voyeuristically observing the scene play out.
This is very similar to why male actors in heterosexual porn are rarely all that good looking. (Take Ron Jeremy, for example...OK, granted, he's reputed to have an enormous cock, but other than that he's just this dumpy guy you'd expect to see working at the local Ford plant.) The reason is the male viewer has to feel like if that guy could make it with that beautiful woman, he could too. It makes it easier to insert himself into the scene.
But with reality TV as an example, we know it's fake. The only thing that's real about it is that it's not exactly scripted, even if lost moments are sometimes rehashed to be done again for cameras that weren't looking at the time. "Reality TV" is mostly just the new catchphrase for "game show", where there's a competition and a big prize at the end. Usually people are selectively picked to cause confrontations with each other, so we can all watch and say, "That's not what I would've done," or, "I totally would've done that if I were in the same place." Of course, there's very little that is legitimately real about the situations, and even the actual reactions are questionable. As Dian Fossey discovered, to observe something changes its environment. With humans having their own symbolic interaction with cameras and presentation before other human beings, there is no possible way that telling someone they're being filmed is likely to promote even remotely realistic reactions. In fact, the knowledge that one is being filmed is likely to make a person think twice, or several times about what they're doing when they otherwise wouldn't. In this manner, the people being filmed both believe it is real and acknowledge that it isn't; they become characters of who they want to be for the cameras, but at the same time it is real because that is who they really want to be. The people watching both believe it is real and realize the situation presented is entirely fake, a construction through which certain entertaining reactions will be filtered.
Still, it's accepted as reality even as we criticize it, and why do people even watch it? Are they so disconnected from any reality in their life, that they need to watch it on television to be reminded of what it is? After an hour drive to work, 9 actual hours of work (since most people work 8 hours with an hour lunch that's virtually useless as free time since they're an hour away from their life at home) and an hour drive back home, do many people find themselves too tired to actually interact with the world on any level they would find meaningful? Or perhaps we desire to see our own daily events simulated in a recognizable fashion as participants confront each other or problems, and hope to see that our own solution was employed in such a situation with successful results (or reverse, the solution we avoided was employed and met with failure.) Seeing our own situations embodied in media makes them more real to us, the way having a faceless, bland, uninspiring woman as the heroine of a novel series has made "Twilight" a rabidly popular franchise. It's not that Edward is made real by the fans, it's the reverse. Edward and his interactions with Bella, for many of the fans, is what makes the fans feel real. The identification with another person, however real or not, staves off the effects of anomie through the realization that your problems and desires are not solely in your imagination.
Now lets switch the lens to the furry fandom. We know our characters aren't real, but desire to have our characters drawn, to draw our characters, to write about them, or have them written about. Especially in situations which aren't even remotely realistic. There's a number of people where we find their character(s) in the same situation, over and over, commissioned by different people. In this case, the commissioner subconsciously most likely doesn't desire to see the situation, they've already seen it, they've thought about it, they've determined their own outcome for it a thousand times over. They know it's not happening, they know it's not real. But what is real, is that once it's drawn again and again for them, each time another person has shown them that someone else can envision their fantasy and bring it to life in a way as well. It gives a moment of identification with another person that makes the fantasy feel slightly more real in that another person can be affected by it as well.
Like you, I think at least in the realm of furry fantasy, the real and fake can be quite well defined and not interchangeable. But there's still many who desire to make them interchangeable as they convince themselves that as other people can see them doing what they can see themselves doing, they anesthetize themselves into this belief that even if it is just in attitude, that is who they are, whether or not they actually are that person. I recently saw a "lick meme" going around, which consisted of listing one's reactions to licks to a body part. In the response I saw to it, there was no designation of how the person would react in reality, how they think they would react as their furry representation, or how they wish their furry representation could/would react. This brings observation of oneself into the picture when someone responds to it. Self-observation naturally changes the environment of oneself as we become aware of things about ourselves which we like or dislike and do not wish to present or wish to exaggerate (even if we choose not to.) Suddenly the concept of reality and the fantasy becomes blurred. Sure, there was once a way the person would really react, but now being aware that they do not wish to react that way, is the decision to react to a lick a different way still a fantasy? Then, perhaps down the road, as self-observation leads to the discovery of personal fantasies being acted out as reality, when in reality the actions don't feel as good as fantasized, the reality is suddenly that the fantasy is the real behavior, and the desire for realistic behavior has become the fantasy.
In a way, I find things skewing in different directions depending on why and how people do things. I wouldn't say society is becoming more posthuman, but further and further from it. As some concepts of posthumanism underline embracing multiple viewpoints to create a heterogeneous self that surpasses the human condition. People who use things like personal fantasy, perspectives offered from reality, fiction, and research to realize what makes us wholly human and what limits us as human to try to go further and surpass those limitations are becoming more posthuman. Whereas those who use fantasy, perceptions of other people's reality, and research to justify their own perception and escape confrontation outside of their fantasy not only shrink away from posthumanity, but humanity itself by seeking out herds of animals similar to themselves who live on top of the environment of imagination and ward off anything who intrudes upon the drug of their combined mentality. The posthuman seems inhuman because of its ability to accept so much, whereas the "human" becomes inhuman because of its inability to accept anything. Likewise, some people create furry characters to try and take on viewpoints outside the human experience and find if they ever may be something more, whereas some take on furry characters to escape the human experience because they fear they are nothing but.
As a point of contrast, I'd like to point out the fetish scene of human-dog training. Some people use the scene to help solidify the fantasy that they are a dog by the fact that someone else treats them like a dog, and they behave like a dog. There are many involved in the scene who say they are incontrovertibly a dog, even if in all realistic aspects they are human, but they use the scene to forget that. Then there are those who indulge in it because they are human, they are not a dog at all, and it is a massive indulgence and exchange of symbolic power to train a human to act like a dog, or be trained by another human to act like a dog. The former camp of players involves diving into fantasy and using it to forget reality; the other camp embraces their humanity, but also embraces the contrast of the fantasy, and both create a heightened interaction that is a gift of finding your fantasy because of reality, and not in spite of reality.
Also, my own little input; the world can be a cruel or just plain dull place, is it really a suprise that people want to be something else? To escape from it all?
Why just last weekend we went to a historical re-enactors camp in the end there was a massive brawl between Vikings, WWI troops, Saxons, Suffragetes... all in character. With Swords. They make up the camps themselves and live in them for a few days. They call the 'fake', market tents 'Plastic Camp' and the Romans speak Latin. Now the credit crunch has hit the historical sector hard. But for that one weekend they can pretend it isn't going on. My father works in museums and his job could be on the line, the museum could close, because of cuts in funding. The only upside is that they need him to disperse the collections of artifacts and machinery.
I myself, in my current situation, would crave a simpler, animal life. And perhaps the reason theres so much Post Apocalyptic fiction out there is because society; work, forms, numbers, routine Is blown away, we can start anew and become something we wished to have been in the beginning.
Humans desperately don't want to be humans it seems.
I've just woken up, and theres probably a shit tonne of mistakes....
I know my ex-boyfriend couldn't manage to handle it. When he met me in person, he knew I was a big hairy perverted nerd guy, but he was still expecting a petite, energetic, cute girl, even if I wasn't really a 'squirrel'. Relee represents many things to me; it's my ideal self, but also a persona I adopt, but also a character I write about, but also the manic pixie dream girl I want so much in my life. She's as much me as she is my imaginary friend.
All in all, I am a happy participant in this vital charade.