Holy crap, meme that genuinely interests me. In fact, these questions sound almost exactly like the kind of questions I've often posed, especially on Yiffstar and Furtopia forums, in the past.

See also:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1335581/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/569449/
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/569022/


1. Do humans exist in your furry world? If so, how do they treat/how are they treated by the furries?

AND

2. Do non-morphic animals exist in your furry world? If so, how do they treat/how are they treated by the furries?

Generally: No.

The reason many furry RPers reflexively adopt a "I hate hyoomans" attitude has zero to do with disliking humans, it's just a rationalization for the intuition that humans don't belong in the setting that avoids the argument wherein some idiot inevitably spouts: "But it's just a fantasy, so anything can happen," which if you understand what fantasy IS, is the dumbest stance EVAR.

(Also Furry RPers get irritated with people who have no interest in furry RP wanting to mix in thier human characters because they don't understand the rationale for wanting an all-furry setting.)

Good fiction creates the "fictional dream." That is, a believable setting and storyline that doesn't distract from itself by seeming incoherent, interjecting the author's voice inappropriately, and so on.

Anthropomorphic characters as such, are the core idea in furry works. Where there are non-anthropomorphic animals and/or humans, they distract from the anthropomorphic figures, pure and simple. SURE, they create interesting situations to explore, too, but then I think you're dealing more in science-fiction or other kinds of fantasy, rather than dealing directly with the furry genre itself. They're distractions. The Goofy/Pluto (old school Disney characters-- an anthro and a non-anthro dog that were seen in eachother's company) illustrate that such juxtapositions are implausible and best done for laughs.

In the end though, it's not about what's most realistic, it's about going with the (perhaps even UNrealistic) premise that's easiest to not be distracted by.

Put another way, the situation is this: you have three kinds of beings in mind-- humans, anthros, and non-anthro animals. Keeping all three creates unwanted, unpredictable conflicts that distract, because in real life, there aren't three seperate classes of beings, just humans and beasts. So what do you keep?

If you keep humans and anthros, get rid of animals: Anthro predators are either vegetarians (utterly silly) or or eat sentient beings (completely alienating). So whether silly or disturbing, you have a real distraction that has nothing to do with anthropomorphic figures in their native world, per se. Plus there's the question: do humans have some priviledged place as "first evolved" among anthropomorphic speices-- which is still distracting. You're still left contrasting humans-- which everyone finds believable, with anthros, which are much harder to fully visualize.

If you keep animals and anthros, get rid of humans: This isn't so bad, but it has a problem with another kind of distraction: nowhere in nature is there anything like a parallelism sentient/upright and nonsentient/nonupright in otherwise identical appearing species, much less in many or all species. The closest example isn't: chimps and humans are hugely much less like than sentient and nonsentient huskies, say. So either there's massively paralell species and they can intebreed (bestiality [aka 'zoophilia'-- animal rape]), or they can't, (which violates our sense of natural order-- things that look nearly identical are compatible). Either bestiality or an unnatural order-- both very distracting.

What if you get rid of both humans and nonanthro animals? You have a situation unlike real life, too! The questions about sentient predators' prey remains, although the special distraction of priviledged and familiar humans goes away.

My solution to this has generally been that there are two distinct lifestyles-- the civilized and the feral. Every higher species (besides humans, who don't exist) is anthropomorphic and only anthropomorphic, and lives as both feral and civilized-- but the two groups cannot speak each other's languages or recognize each other as sentient, for reasons that go deep into lifestyle, habits, and values.

Feral anthros all speak a common species language and think of any animal outside of their genus (e.g., horses, zebras, donkeys, or Lions, Tigers, Leopards, etc), as unintelligent animals. They regard civilized animals, even of their own species, as terrifying zombies. They live in the wilderness, have little tool use and no clothes, and their "speech" is extremely dependent of body language, scents, and so on.

Meanwhile, civilized furs all speak local common languages, live in cities and towns, regard those who speak a different civilized language as 'foreigners' and assume ferals are all unintelligent animals.

Feral predators hence hunt civilized and feral prey animals. Civilized predators hunt feral prey only. Most tasks done by the labor of domesticated animals, is done by that species of civilized anthropomorphic animal-- e.g., there are no horse-riding cavalry, but big, mobile horse infantries, as Equestrian divisions, are strategically similar.

3. Do non-mammalian “furries” exist in your furry world? If so, how do they treat/how are they treated by the mammal-furries?

All air-breathing vertebrates with 2+ distinct limbs are anthropomorphic in my worlds, generally. This excludes snakes, cetaceans (dolphins &c), and fish. I also exclude great apes. There are reptiles and birds; the former tend to become not-so-bright when they're not sufficiently warm. Birds are strictly four-limbed, and make do with beaks, and a thumb and forefinger on each wing, rather like bats.

Feral furs all treat any species much outside their own circle as animals. Civilized furs express a kind of racism toward any species that's neither native in the land, nor a member of a priviledged culture invasive to the area.

4. Do other mythological creatures (dragons etc.) exist in your furry world? If so, how do they treat/how are they treated by the furries?

I prefer no mythic species, though I've been known to smile on griffins from time to time.


5. Does Magic operate in your furry world? If so, rate its frequency and power on a scale of 1 to 10.

Depends on my mood. In my ideal setting it either doesn't exist; 1, or is significant but subtle, elitist, and doesn't play an overt role in world history; up to 5 or so.

6. Describe the technology level of your furry world?

I'm very fond of fin-de-siecle settings-- the Victorian age plus the Wild West, plus some other anachronistic features in a familiar 1890 earth-like setting, sometimes with steampunk added, are probably my ideal. I'm also comfortable in soft scifi/cyberpunk settings.

7. On a scale of 1 to 10 how animal-like are furries in your world?

As animals are humans and the scale is vague, I'll put myself down as a 7, and explain:

Features that aren't directly necessary for being an upright, tool-using, talking, intelligent, social animal with a humanlike lifespan, should conform to the animal species. This includes the elaborte facial expression normal for humans, bipedal stance-- but huge-footed digitgrade stance in digitgrade animals, bigger crania, thumbs, a fully pivoting shoulder joint, and a tendency to be take a keen interest in anything that seems sentient. (Probably also crypo-ovulation and some sort of semi- or non-estral cycle.)

8. How do the different furry "species" get along in your furry world?

They get along fine, though there are racial-like tensions between species that are vs aren't indigenous to a given area, and ethnic tensions between civilized "natives" and members of invading civilized cultures.

They certainly can't interbreed, except where species interbreeding is possible in real life. E.g., there are cat/lynx hybrids and zebra/horse hybrids and what have you, but there are no fox/raccoons, etc. Generally speaking yiffing outside your own species is looked on as roughly as deviant as homosexuality.

Civilized furs carry no noticeable trace of the predator/prey intimidation factor that would be the feral norm. Civilized sheep and wolves, lions and wildabeast, readily hang out together. Nobody jokes about preying on one another, the same way the British and French don't joke around about Wellington and Napoleon. There may be the potential for a sore spot, but 99% of civilized furs 99% of the time consider any such reaction silly or completely irrelevant. Individuals and groups may express disdain for traits of certain species, e.g., short vs tall, predator vs prey, etc, but as a rule, harping on that kind of difference among civilized furs is seen as irrational.

Feral furs treat anybody outside their species family like unintelligent beasts. Civilized furs treat all feral furs (even members of their own species) like unintelligent beasts, too.

Somene's taken the time to build something that ranks FA membership, watchedness, and so on.

http://superwailingbonus.com/farank/

Apparently I'm in the top 24%, at #12144. Hehee.

Of the very topmost people on FA that have, it seems to me, well-known and unmistakable talent, and of whom I know:

dingbat #74 (top 1%)
louvelex #224 (top 1%)
goldenfox #1252 (top 2%)
silentravyn #360 (top 1%)
arphalia #177 (top 1%)
kacey #19 (top 1%)
poetigress #4099 (top 8%)

I guess that sounds about right. Kacey's industrious and extremely well produced. Louvelex will fail to get cred because she doesn't draw much pr0n. Idiotic-- but also, reality. Dingbat's plainly awesome. But so are goldenfox and silentravyn (the former just needs more exposure, I think). I suspect that arphalia's developing an authentic style is a little to much for the average furry palate, for all that she does draw pr0n. Poetigress is more lit than art, which also I suspect throws people.

Private favorite Kwan is too new to FA to really have a fair chance, but has indeed already beat me, being #10208, and in the top 19%.

Oh. I just noticed something else. Java, who is one of the people I watch and didn't quite make it into my top-seven list above, is ranked #62.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Java's work tons-- in fact strictly speaking I may have more of her work fav'd than anybody else. But most of what I've seen is teh Pr0nz. This is strong evidence re: what I already knew: FA is overWHELMingly pr0n oriented.

We should brainstorm a way to develop a ranking of artists strictly by merit ASIDE from pr0n. I'm not sure if this should be based only on non-adult works, or should be some intuited "is there anything to this besides pr0n" measure.

I want to try to try out doing a few "Character/Fursona Reference Poems," a novelty I've had in mind a little while.

Text description can do a lot that's hard to do with drawings, especially sound and smell. It can also readily show action, change, and idiosyncratic habits and speech that drawings have a tough time capturing. And they can directly summon up metaphor. Poetry, then, can cleanly frame that description and focus readers on it, make it memorable, and help it pierce our skeptical everyday outlook.

I don't have any really good examples yet, though "On Honey," "Vera," and "Tiger Milk" were in some ways on the right track.

So if you have or can come up with many of the above details for a fursona or other memorable character, and want to provide them, other references, and some notion of underlying mood and/or meaning, ask here and I can give it a shot. However much you want to put into it-- versification is easy, getting the nuances right according to you will be hard unless I've got plenty to work with.

Anyway, just in case people were interested, I'd work 2 at a time. Pref goes to anyone I myself am watching.

Here's what I had in mind, earlier today:

Red is just ridiculous,
Orange is artifice and rust,
Yellow's atmospheric, pretty to a fault,
Green is home, gestalt.
Blue is deep and intellectual,
Purple is exotic and insane,
And white is grief, the color of the world.

But Black. Black is human.
Black is sex and the imagination.
Black is marks on paper
Pupil of the eye.

It occurred to me just now that I've done (mostly lately) a lot of work with deer:
Summer and Fall: Seasons of the Hart, Troth of Actaeon, If they Dare What I Dare, On Honey, Awinta's Hat. One is an idle daydream, two are meditations on procreation, and two are meditations on women's gender identity.

So I got to wondering what other patterns are in my species picks? Here're felines:
Vera, Tiger's Milk, A poetic Form, Definition?, Petit Roman D'Estruce Feline, Flexible enough to sin, Lou, Circus Leopard. Two of these are poems about (something striking about) somebody's fursona. A couple have just passing mentions of felines in them, a couple are goofy pieces of erotica, and the last is an RP character I was trying to draw.

Horses:
Who would eat horse?, Omnomnom, Rhiannon, Rhiannon And Prometheus, Mare Liberty. The first four revolve around the fourth, a soft sci-fi story about a planetary colonist's son and genetically engineered horse-people, the first two being pr0n, and the third, a song written by the main character.

The last, though, is essentially mythic in reference. Which brings me to...

Cattle:
Hakael, Happy Yule, Legend of the Lunataur. Two drawings and a poem, all steeped in mythology, and hinging on the perhaps clichéd perception of cattle as maternal.

Foxes:
These rest don't bear individual listing. With my foxes, the common theme is that they're transgressive/poronographic. A conscious decision about how to portray the species, not that it was overwhelmingly original of me. Then again, I also have a volleyball playing fox who's fairly tame, and a friendly barking poem at a nice vulpine gal here on FA, Goldenfox, neither of which are meant to be obnoxious.

Rabbits:
Also a foil for overt pornography, mostly, this time in the person of a single character, Cocoa.

Bears:
Well, there's the lovely sketch of my fursona that Goldenfox did, as well as a poem or so about myself. Also, there's a pregnant brown bear.

Other species:
I dwell on a Woolly Mammoth in numerous pieces, as well as a Skunk in several, but they're individual characters. I have John Brown as a goat, and an encyclopedia entry about a kind of magic goat. The mammoth is joined by a pig and a coyote at some point, where they're portrayed as goddesses. I have a couple girl dogs in unconventional lesbian relationships. A naughty drawing of a hyena. And a looong poem about Cacomistles.

I find this breakdown odd, finally, since I think of myself as mostly a dog/bear fan. OTOH, deer have been a long-recurring theme, with me. I dunno why, but if there's a "first" in the catalogue of furry daydreams, it's definitely one about a deer-taur (later a were-deer).

So, I've been saying less-than-effusive things about Obama's win lately. I don't want to be misunderstood.

In the first place, I realize being a downer is never popular. I don't like that it makes me less than likable, that I carry on being skeptical of things I think deserve skepticism. Let me lay it out:

I got up an hour earlier even than I usually do (which is about 5 hours earlier than my ideal, but then I AM a bear), and went to the polls, and lost and hour's pay to boot, in order to vote for Obama/Biden. Not that I couldn't have voted early. But you know, it makes a good story of miniscule hardship, right?

I also stayed up to watch returns come in well past the point at which my state, Ohio, clinched the election by showing it had decisively gone for Obama.

Obama himself spoke out against unecessary cynicism, and, at least indirectly, the damage that hopelessness can do to the will of the electorate.

But most people stop running when they think they're not in IMMEDIATE danger. We need to keep running. Criticism and skepticism are GOOD. We do not have a liberal mandate or a very liberal president, unfortunately, we have a liberal leaning centrist.

And among other things, CA passed prop 8. As I've said elswhere, what a sad little piece of fuckery. However little it affects me directly as a straight atheist Ohioan, what a referendum on the intelligence and decency of U.S. citizens THAT is.

This is just the start. Think this was awesome? Then rededicate yourself to thinking, to researching, to staying abrest of the news, communicating with everyone, looking critically at everything everyone proposes, challenging anything and everything and demand change. Hell, just find people you trust with diverse views and set an example of willingness to think, criticize, and speak. Obama isn't the change we need-- he's just a facilitator.

And I suspect, a good one. When I dare to hope, a GREAT one.

So, under what circumstances DO you watch people here on FA?

As a rule, I only watch people here on FA if I either a) they've produced two (2) pieces of art I've fav'd, or b) I know them from OUTSIDE FA.

And speaking of people I know outside FA, check out  Kwan, who is awesome!

Finally, make sure you vote if you haven't already, people.

Just a note on anything obnoxious that crosses my submissions and your new submission list from me:

About 20% of my work is by conventional standards extremely obnoxious, in one way or another.

For the record, I don't write for shock value (occasionally I may select subject matter for shock value, but not usually, and if I do, I'm still tryingto be authentic), nor out of a sense of the nobility of the subject. Nor randomly. Nor for any single purpose.

Moreover, I've never believed in the ethics of disgust. There's nothing in the world that's "just wrong," except stuff done without compassion and/or reason. And distasteful is very different from unethical, and the line is very, very clear.

I certainly welcome criticism of whether some subject matter is aesthetically unsuitable, assuming you have something intelligent to say.

So, though I've occasionally had people point out one or two poets on FA, if you know any decent ones, especially poets who aren't just writing to express a fleeting emotional trauma, and especially ones who actually have enough rythm and common sense to use real spoken meter in their poetry, share them here!!!

Sigh. The actor who played the almost-main-character of one of my ultimate favorite obscure movies, "Tous Les Matins Du Monde," died today, Guilllaume DePardieu.

He was 37, like me, and Guillaume's the French version of my name. And yeah, seems like I come down with a chest cold every time this year myself.

Mortality, people. There is no heaven or even hell. Give it some careful thought.

So, a poet's "eye" is a lot more stubborn and idiosyncratic than an artists', but supposing it were more like a camera, what sorts of things are you interested in reading poems *about*?

What other uses for verse actually interest you?

I want to write about the sorts of things that will tickle readers' fancy. any suggestions? Seems like a poem should be a lot easier to pick up and get a quick jolt of pleasure, or disinterest, from, more like a drawing than a long short story, but I dunno... people scarcely look at the stuff I scribble, no idea why.

This can also be read as a "plz critique my work" and/or an "open for requests" post.

You know what I actually sort of hope for? I hope for our civilization actually stepping off the one-upmanship treadmill, forgetting about having more of the latest and greatest everything, going everywhere, using every drug, knowing everyone, and generally subjecting the feed of their consciousness to maximum input all the time.

Time for people to, you know. Reflect on their values. Have quiet, slow conversations with a very high meaning to word ratio, with people who're worthwhile.

Time for people to dream and make believe. Live in your head a little. *

Time for people to just observe. Live in your moment a little.

Share things. Have some fantasy other than "Soon I will be a wealthy rockstar! Or have epically failed to earn it!"

You know it's just like the old freeform chatroom RP, where everybody on entering has exotic-hued dancing orbs (their eyes, that is), prancs across the virtual space, suddenly becomes demonically posessed such that they end up massively injured, and then somebody nearby magically heals them, and everybody assumes lots of stilted language.

That *is* our culture. You know, aside from venal politicians scheming to give your parents' retirement money to investment bankers and insurance giant CEOs.


*Have you ever considered that the fandom, for all its silliness, is one of the few places left in the entire world where unfettered imagination is respected, and nothing is marketed any more relentlessly than somebody saying "OMG, I'm moving and broke, PLZ!commission me!" As the last bastion of daydream for daydream's sake and pure interpersonal collaboration without guidance or interference from corporte comittees, we actually do awfully well, people.

Just in case civilization collapses tomorrow: you're all beautiful, and hopefully the next species gets it right.

Also, please draw more girl dogs kissing until armageddon DOES arrive. <3

Okay, so I'm working on a new iteration of matching personality traits in the Jung/Myers-Briggs personality typing scheme (q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBTI) with various animal traits.

I'm trying to make a coherent match between characteristics of species and personality traits-- yes I know this is an implausible and even doomed fantasy matching, but that's just the kind of thing I do with my time. For the edificiaction of anyone who already knows the Jung/Myers-Briggs scheme, the types I've matched to specific animals decisively (and which the rest is based on) are:

INFJ Skunks
ISFP Mice
ISTP Raccoons
ESFJ Horses
ENFJ Lions
INTJ Tigers
ENFP Rabbits
ENTP Foxes
ISTJ Bears
ESTJ Wolves
INTP Leopards
INFP Domestic Cats
ESTP Domestic Dogs

That leaves me with many popular species and 3 types left unmatched, obviously, including importantly Hyenas, Otters, Coyotes, Ferrets, Kangaroos, Cougars, Squirrels, and Cheetahs, with ISFJ, ESFP, ENTJ.

I want to normalize the "bad" matches in my previous decisions and figure out the other three types. So I've got a list of specific animal traits:


I(4) Nocturnal -- E(4) Diurnal
I(15) Solitary -- E(15) Pack/Herd
I(5) Arboreal -- E (5) Ground Dwelling

N(5) ColorExotic -- S(5) ColorPlain
N(5) Carnivores -- S(5) Herbivores

T(4) Large -- F(4) Small
T(1) ColorExotic -- F(1) ColorPlain
T(5) Carnivore -- F(5) Herbivore
T(1) Arboreal -- F(1) Ground Dwelling

P(8) Small -- J(8) Large
P(8) Domesticable -- J(8) Wild
P(3) Arboreal -- J(3) Ground Dwelling

So-- two questions:

1) General Feedback on categories so far.

2) What animal trait categories am I missing? Besides diet, coloration, time-of-day, sociability, size, domesticability, and arboreal/not?

I've heard mention that furries, ancient greeks, and so on and so forth, can be numbered among the most disturbed people evar.

I submit the Welsh Mabinogi heroes, brothers Gwydion and Gilfaethwy, who, as a punishment for taking advantage of one of their father's favorite serving maids, are transformed into a mated pair of animals, male and female, successively (deer, pig, and wolf), over three years, and have offspring each time.

This outre form of punishment breaks, in some sense at least, just about every conventional taboo I can immediately think of except cannibalism. Which is, you know, not unimpressive.

My excuse for not getting anything done in the last month, in terms of stuff to post to FA, is that clearly, I'm just following along with the masses who themselves spent a productivity-free july-- and post only because they have exposure in the fandom, and people to seek the attention of.

U kno it's tru!

What type of animal is Barack Obama?

I just watched a speech of his from a while back that included a LONG, articulate discussion of secularism in U.S. society, (and what's effed up about the wackjobs who want a Theocracy in this country-- and he was even polite about it without giving an inch). And I think I'm now a fanboi.

I think he might be a cheetah. He looks like a cheetah. But cats are, (sorry, felines in the audience), just not exactly the deepest furs on the savannah.

He might be a leopard, except making him a leopard would beg to make him a melanistic leopard, which would evoke the somewhat extraneous things.

To be honest, I like to make people with strong well-reasoned convictions goats-- it works well with John Brown, anyhow.

But I'm not sure I want him as a Goat either. Some sort of African/North American hybrid might be indicated too... perhaps a North American Pronghorn and an African Antelope of some kind.

Still. Does one picture cervids as being invincible dreamer/doers? I almost want him as an elephant (except republicans have preempted them) or Rhino (taken to be more aggressive than bright.)

I strongly suspect I could vanish and nobody'd be the wiser, but I shall be gone through wednesday.

So miss me lots. >.>

OKay. The singers you could most have crushes on. Singing about angels in my examples is purely a coincidence:

Hope Sandoval, Mazzy Star. esp. "Be My Angel"

Katherine Whalen, Squirrel Nut Zippers, esp. "Blue Angel," "Is It You?" "Danny Diamond," "Wished for You."

Annie Lennox, Eurythmics, esp. "Talkin' to an Angel," "Who's That Girl?" and "Love is a Stranger."

Heart, live acoustic cover of "You Shook me All Night Long"

The time's come to make a list of all standard anthropomorphizations that could be applied to song lyrics and so on.

Songs about "girls" become, naturally, songs about squirrels. "Squirrels just want to have fun."-Lauper "Who's that squirrel?"-Eurythmics "Do you love me, do you surfer squirrel?"-Beachboys "Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrels," -Motley Crue.

"I've got you under my fur." -Furank Sinatra. Any other skin references in songs?

The Beatles: "I wanna hold your paaa-aaa-aaaw. I wanna hold your paw!" Any other hand references in songs?

Come on, people, you get the idea. Help me out here. This is of vital, nay, inestimable importance! Which is why I leave it to you while I sleep

I want to see this:

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1338605/

Done well. Or, it's the top thing in my scraps, if that doesn't work. It would be awesome and rocktastic.

So, when I get bored, sometimes, I crunch numbers.

Watching people tends to get you watched back. SO, which watches did you earn, and which are the result of just watching somebody? Well, here're two methods for calculating "friendly" (unearned) watches that I developed after looking at the number of watches and watchers various people I watch and who're watching me, have:

friendly watches = people you're watching * 0.512
OR
friendly watches = people you're watching ^ 0.901

Whichever gives the lower number of friendly watches, subtract that from your total watches. If the number's negative, clearly it's because people on FA don't appreciate you enough!!!!

So, to everybody out there struggling with imperfect life conditions, like for example, unemployment, hang in there. Be involved with politics to the extent you can be, even if it's just talking theory and candidates with people in your immediate life-- our problems are significantly top-down, I think it should go without saying.

Be excellent to each other.

-Bill

Recently, the clever and sometime-caffienated  foxytangerine posed the question: who doesn't get enough attention on FA?

Looking at the people I have fav'd, I used maths (Y= MX^N + B, and using three good datapoints to solve for M, N, and B, where X is the number of stars from 1-5 I would give somebody, and Y is the total number of faves they actually have-- for which values I determined M = ~1/72.5, N = ~8.48, and B = ~4.07), and was able to calculate how many times as many faves I think people *should* have, as they actually *do* have.


1.  McKenzie -- regrettably, McKenzie hasn't been active on FA in a couple months, but she's awesome.
2.  chimerabred -- also not active in the last couple months as far as I can tell, but superb.
3.  flye -- I like flye's stuff cuz I have always liked the way she thinks. And nobody is faving her stuffs. Hmh.
4.  Iriecat -- Irecat writes a lot of really great lyrics that nobody ever reads.
5.  Ratiries -- absolutely stunning stuff, and less than 2k faves. Weird.
6.  Michele_Light -- Weird inclusion, I know, but Michele's a friggin opus of superlative arts, but a lot fewer faves than I would have ever expected.
7.  DragoniaKMP --Really great colorful stuff from another person whose thought process I trust.
8.  Kaiven -- ZOMG caliber work, and still under-faved compared with some other equally awesome folks.
9.  SushiCougar -- creative and beautiful stuff, rather under-faved.
10.  Goldenfox -- more super-awesome stuff less faved that it deserves to be.

I was just looking at somebody's Icon, and an idea crossed my mind:

An artistic community or meme or something involving two figures-- each of which represents conflicting groups, e.g., communism/capitalism, Christian/Atheist, Islam/Israel, Republican/Democrat.

Anyhow, the pair should be engaged if yiffy/romantic foreplay.

Opportunities for symbolism in choice of species, choice of near-to-paw kinks, size differences and who appears to be the dominant partner (I'm thinking, majority or locally popular groups as the larger characters, but anxiously submissive to smaller dom partners.)

A good buddy of mine (who I learned much later, was gay), once advised: "If they're going to judge you by who you sleep with, then fuck 'em."

And the underlying concepts:

1) the same thing you can observe everywhere, but especially in school-- two people fighting frivolously often suggests that they're really attracted to each other (I mean, not always, but it can.)

2) Opposites are irresistably seductive

3) A projection onto power politics of the dom/sub observation that people tend in the bedroom to be the opposite of how they act in the public sphere-- powerful CEOs who sub for 'nobodies.'