📼 𝐇𝐄𝐌𝐌𝐒𝐅𝐎𝐗 𝐒𝐓𝐔𝐃𝐈𝐎𝐒 📼


These ideals are fine as long as you're not expecting everyone to go along with them.

Lead by example.

That's not really an answer, and nobody's asking you to lead anyone anywhere.

1. Self-defense is a pretty good reason to hurt someone. Besides:
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
― Bob Marley

2. No, we're not. We're a diverse fandom comprised of a multitude of people who come from a wide variety of cultures who possess a wide variety of interests. While we should all do our best to respect each other the fact is that it is our diversity that makes us special. If everyone were into the same things, and only did the things everyone else in the fandom does it would be a pretty boring fandom.

3.Against who? Who is out there trying to fight the fandom? Nobody. Just because we get a few goofy TV shows featuring people from the fandom does not mean anyone is 'out to get us'.

4.Who gets to define what 'virtues' the fandom stands upon? You? Me? This fandom isn't a religion, and I damn well hope it never ends up becoming anything like that. What you're talking about is conformity. Screw conformity.

5. People should respect, and take care of themselves first, then family, then friends. The fandom can take care of itself.

6. "The only thing sacred cows are good for is making hamburger." The old adage is true. There is nothing in life that is inherently worth revering. All placing people & things on pedestals does is create that much more crap that's going to fall on you when someone or something knocks it down. You can respect people & artists in this fandom but as soon as you start treating one class of person more special than another you are creating inequality, and an environment that can lead to othering as well as oppression.

7. What if it's harmful to them? Or disrespectful to themselves or someone else? Explore yes but always keeping ones self-respect & respect for others in mind.

8. What about all the uncreative people in the fandom who enjoy the creativity within it? All this does is shame & exclude them.

9. "A Furry should embrace difference and diversity in their life and the lives of others, holding for themselves their limits, and not press them upon the lives of others."

I'm leaving this quoted here because your 'ideals' directly contradict this statement. You're asking for a less diverse, more structured, and stratified fandom that inherently demeans & others while reducing the amount of diversity within the fandom all in the name of developing 'traditions'.


10. Some people lack the capacity to love. They don't understand it. My partner is unable to feel love. Again, expecting everyone to fit your ideal of what you think people in the fandom should be like ends up excluding an awful lot of people.

11. Some things can't (and shouldn't) be forgiven or forgotten. There are times when peoples lives depend upon shutting people out of their hearts.

You want the fandom to be one thing-your thing-when the fact is that it's many things to many people. While generalized definitions exist the fact of the matter is that when it all comes down to it the thing that makes this fandom special is the fact that everyone gets to define it for themselves. Take that away, and force it to be one thing for all people whether that one thing is something they'll enjoy or not, and you kill the main thing about this fandom that makes it unique, and awesome.

I think you completely and utterly lost the point of everything I wrote. Nothing there is about conformity. But I don't care about arguing on the internet when I am too busy making it happen.

It's a discussion dude. Stop taking everything having to do with cartoons so damn seriously.

You don't even live up to this yourself, especially #9. No offense dude, but you have to be one of the most negative and judgmental people that I have ever met in my entire life. You routinely criticize anyone who practices a different way of thinking about the world than you do. I have heard you complain about all kinds of things and people, from personal attacks on specific furries, to a general disgust you expressed about military furries, to complete derision towards anyone who you don't perceive to be as tolerant and progressive as you are. You have a negative attitude towards competition and masculinity, and seem to disbelieve that some people naturally feel or identify as competitive or masculine. In your own words you told me I "don't deserve to wear a fursuit," I think the reason was that I'm not open-minded enough, by your standards, to wear a symbol of our community or something. Great job at "leading by example."

I cried a lot at BLFC. That ride was completely horrible, and I felt like nothing but a punching bag and a victim the whole time. You even made me question giving up being a Furry. I couldn't believe how you treated me, goaded me on, tricked me into saying things just to laugh at me. You triggered so many flashbacks of my father hitting me that entire time. I felt worthless, pointless, and useless. You kept trying to enforce some trap standard of one upman shit on me. I didn't even feel like getting close and cuddly with anyone at that con I was in such a bad place. I dont want to go to that convention again. I don't want to be around those kinds of people. I felt so ashamed of myself that entire con.

I don't live up to this list, but unlike so many others I am constantly rebuilding myself and learning from experience. I hardly ever repeat mistakes. Gandhi wasn't great because he had no demons. He was great because he always tried to conquer them. When I posted these everyone took it as some kind of preach or derision upon them, but no. These are what I try to aspire myself towards. These are what I reach for. These are goals.

You've Proven to me I need to work on #9 a lot, and now #11 aswell.

You complained the whole entire time. You took every single thing that anyone said that you didn't like or didn't agree with as a personal offense and assumed people were mocking you... even when you were not a part of the conversation. That is not my fault. Sorry I don't issue a "trigger warning" before joking around with my friends. I wanted you to have a good time and joke around but you cannot lighten up enough to do that apparently.

Dude, I have been nothing but nice to you. I let you stay in my house (which you complained about) we gave you a ride there, I came back to your house, brought you back your poster you left behind, didn't ask for anything to return it, not even the money you owned us. We bought you dinner. We did all sorts of nice things for you, brought you drinks and snacks and stuff for the trip. My boyfriend and I have been entirely generous, kind and accommodating to you. Apparently the fact that I'm too cocky or whatever matters more than any of that.

If you don't want to go to BLFC, its because you don't like anything. You said so, BLFC was/is a "party con" so I guess it doesn't fit your idea of what furry should be about. Likewise, it's not that I don't aspire to things, I do, it's that I don't agree with your ideals in the first place.

Someone else said it best, "furry is about furry." It's not about any kind of social movement that goes further than that. It just happens to be a diverse, creative and totally unique community, but only because many different kinds of people happened to be interested in it. It doesn't go any further than that.

Oh but it does have very solid unified beliefs. This Fandom is the most important thing in my life, and all my work and energy goes into it.

Why don't you believe in diversity? That's the cornerstone of every successful venture, society, and creature. Variation is key.

Actually furry is more about diversity than it is about being unified around a central theme. 'Cartoon animals' isn't even what most of the fandom is about anymore. 'Giving anthropomorphic features to things' is a unified theme -I guess- but when you look at the myriad of ways this is expressed you gotta admit that even the single most unifying theme contains a ton of diversity within it.

Also occupy didn't really 'fail'. While in the short term it didn't seem to accomplish as much as folks within it would have liked it brought a lot of issues to peoples attention, and got a lot of people involved in politics, and involved in social causes who might not have otherwise gotten into them. I'm pretty sure it succeeded far more often than it failed. Just look at what's going on with 'gay marriage', and all the states where it's now legal. Occupy helped a lot with that.

Fair enough. Good points. I stand corrected.

Religion is a very important thing in a lot of peoples lives but it doesn't make it right when some of them go around expecting everyone else to believe in it the same way they do (or at all). I'm glad your way of looking at the fandom works for you please have the decency to not try to force your way of looking at it on others.

It's really sad that you take everything personally. Nothing about this is attacking you. I feel so bad every time I post something because I know you will rage about it. It's why my posts to this are so terse. The time I spend arguing is time lost making this happen.

You having these ideals really doesn't affect me in the long run. Post whatever you like. Why do you let what I have to say affect you? If your ideals are that important to you, and you're that sure that you're right about them then whether I agree with them or not shouldn't matter.

If you're going to expect more people than just you to share your ideals then you're going to have to expect to deal with people questioning those ideals. I'll just say that you're off to a shaky start if you're letting some dude who pretends to be a kangaroo keep you from expressing your beliefs.

I mean is your belief in your ideals so weak that a little thing like my questioning them gets to you so much? As far as my questioning them goes it's not like I'm calling you an idiot you seem like a pretty intelligent person. I get loving the fandom a lot thinking it has tons of potential etc but then humans have tons of potential.

I mean I have lots of ideals but I'm not about to force them onto anyone. Believe whatever the hell you want that's what I'm saying but you also have this attitude that everyone should believe the same as you. I don't really get how you can't see the parallel between something like Christian fundamentalism, and your furry 'fundamentalism'.

Yeah. It's that kind of attitude that concerns me. It's not necessarily that it's 'furry' they're talking about here. I don't think we're going to see a furry 'uprising' any time soon.

It's the attitude-the 'these are my ideals, and it's OK for me to expect everyone else to share them, and anyone who doesn't share them is an enemy'-that I find dangerous.

It's basically saying that if it's OK for people in the furry community to have that attitude then it's OK for Muslim extremists or Christian fundies to have the same attitude, and that's what engenders oppression, tyranny, and people flying airplanes into buildings.

Slippery slope? Maybe but since this journal is taking the furry thing way too seriously I don't think my taking things way too seriously is unjustified. Who knows? Maybe it will help prove my point. It's people pretending to be cartoons for crying out loud.

I aggree with you that it's kind of blowing crap way out of perspective, hell, a lot of this absolutist thought is still not healthy, Knowing some historical trends I can sure attest to your connection to religious radicalism. Perhaps we should try and find a copy of Luther's 95 theseses to nail to pope Hemms I's door

I understand that the furry fandom an important part of your life and I'm happy that you have found fulfillment there, but you can't assume that your views and ideals are those of the entire fandom. If you make the assumption you're just disregarding the views of thousands of furries and of course all of us know what a "blessed people" you hold us to be. In short, you need to just listen to how diverse it is and hear the different views in the fandom otherwise people will continue to see you as the radical one who wants an obedient dumb army of furrys to bend to his whim. I find that insulting to the individuality that i've found here

You haven't explained why furries SHOULD do or be any of these things. :/

Hemms, this is not a personal attack, this is an educated discussion about the drawbacks and good deals in the fandom, hell you hold it to such a high regard but you can't seem to be able to handle when other furries, your so-called "people" give you some honest opinions that you could possibly use to get a little perspective as to what the hell it's actually like and why it's so ridiculous that we should follow these absolutist guidelines of yours

But they aren't honest opinions. I am not defending my position because this went from 0 to Godwin in like, 2 posts. All of a sudden my words are compared to Facism, Extremist Islam, Fundamentalist Christianity, I'm accused of forcing this on other people, accused of wanting to be some kind of pope, of not hearing other people's opinions, accused of wanting to take everyone in Fandom and force some kind of conformity... its like either you guys all read into this something that wasn't there, or didn't read this at all. I'm sorry, but I am not going to get in an internet dramabomb on my own journal page when I have some serious work to do.

All I see here is the typical line that is toted by people who all want to complain and talk about something when they suddenly see someone DO something, and slap every label on it they can. I might as well call what you are talking about some sort of Tea Party radical individualism. I mean hell, I lost out the gate didn't I?

Wanna have a say in your Fandom? Volunteer at your next nearest convention.

do you not know the definition of tea party? the vogons have more individuity than the tea party! I was not making acuasations, not in the least. I was merely stating that the context of a lot of this idealology is contradictory and reminds me of an edict that could have been passed during the Truman administration. What you're also ignoring is that there are some in this fandom who do not have the economic or practical means of going to a con. I'd assume a furry con to be somewhat of a pilgramage in this lifestyle, yes? well I live clear on the other side of the second largest metropolitan area in the country and I'm too short on funds to attend. There is a good deal of the fandom thst takes place online too and this shows me that you take way too much in life for granted. Have you ever tried to go that far out of your comfort zone? hell, when my parents were still together and still did a lot of travel for work, I had the chance to travel to 10 countries around the world and those experiences showed me just how narrow the world view of anyone who hasn't traveled can be. Forget the talk of organized religion. I think your views are too centered in your ideal depiction of the fandom that you take all this for granted and either refuse to or simply are incapable of listening to other perspectives. The mere fact that you're letting a few honest view points get you this riled up shows everyone here how tied to your own ideas you are and what action does there even need to be? I mean we're free to make art, wear fursuits, chose our partners, figure out how to hold the fandom in our own life. Can't you be thankful for being able to be a furry in the first place? be glad you found something you're passionate about? I know a good many people who have lived and died just languishing and going through the motions. the fandom has created its own slice of society and already holds ideas of equality and diversity that you professed so riddle just what exactly has to happen for things to be "better" they're already pretty damn good as it is. The fandom let me find my mate who i've been with for six months and who I'm finally going to visit for the first time a week from now. This is a fact for which is truly grateful, but digressing on my point, what exactly has to be accomplished if the fandom in reality is already many of the things you profess? forget absolutist, it's downright repetitive