Halibut said:
also, anyone who goes on FA, has furry avatar picture, and a name like cottontail is onviously a furry.
Ha ha, well, thanks for that.
Again, I didn't leave feeling offended. Ultimately, "furry" is a term I'm applying to a thing, and the term can be wrong without that thing ceasing to exist. That said, I'm generally a fan of loose definitions because they foster a sense of community. The tighter the definitions become, the more possessive people become of them, and that just starts fights and ruins everything. Patricia at one point mentioned needing a "robust definition" of furry and seemed to be about to provide one, but then got into critiquing Zootopia and never explicitly circled back. I guess that sort of left me trying to extrapolate a definition from her own example--which was, again, articulated in a very entertaining way. Even if I disagreed, I'd say it was worth watching.
Halibut said:
still it eas nice for someone like me to see the "small vocal minority" defense bashed.
Right. I think it's pretty obvious, when you look at what content is being produced, that the sexual side of the fandom is very
... uh... "healthy."
The same goes for ABDL, really. It sort of reminds me of the "dark matter" theory of the cosmos. Feel free to argue that dark matter doesn't exist because it refuses to be directly observed, but its influences over what we
can observe are so apparent that we pretty much know it exists, and further, that it's extremely prevalent.
Halibut said:
I really liked her ultimate conclusion that furry art was about human outcasts who look like animals. I was drawn in by the sensory and especialy the symbolic... big cute animal creatures just come off as more "adult child friendly" to me than actual humans and especialy the athstetics of bdsm. and for the autism part, she uses the word in a pretty vague way, I think the word "outcast" might have been better at certain points. ultimatly diapers are pretty "autistic" as in the type of autistic thats synonmous with those cringe compliation.videos... and that is definitly the main reason I'm a furry.
The recurring "autistic" references were interesting to me. I'm not sure I
quite embraced the argument that furry is somehow inherently autistic, although to be clear I'm not disagreeing either. I can certainly imagine why, as a form of personal expression and social interaction, furry would appeal to autistics. (But also, it's totally possible that I'm on the spectrum and don't know it!)