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anthropomorphism

Flayrah investigates: Are Pokémon starters too anthropomorphic?

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In a screenshot from Pokémon Violet, Penelope the Meowscarada has a picnic.

In the core Pokémon video game series, most main entries begin with the player making a choice between three Pokémon, one each Grass, Fire and Water type, which becomes their first Pokémon. These Pokémon, known as "starter", and also their third and final "evolutions", are given unique prominence in the minds of players, mostly for sentimental reasons, as everybody remembers their first, and partially because these Pokémon are slightly stronger than average, especially during early game. They are also rare, as the beginning of the game is usually the only time they are available, outside of trading with other players or breeding duplicates (which the game makes harder for starters by making them predominantly male, when offspring species is determined by the female in a breeding pair).

Due to this prominence, the character designs for the starters and their final evolution are heavily scrutinized. In more recent generations of Pokémon, a common complaint has been a rise in bipedalism and "human like" designs for the characters, a complaint that resurfaced with the evolution of quadripedal Grass Cat Sprigatito into bipedal Meowscarada (bipedal cats seem to especially stir strong reactions, if the earlier reaction to Incineroar is any indication). Now, partially, this is all aesthetic preferences, and it all comes down to personal choice, but there does seem to be a strong "no furries" aspect to the complaining from some quadrants. Furries definitely seem to prefer the bipedal look, with Meowscarada showing up over 550 times on e621, while Quaqaval the duck is a distant second with just over 60, which is still double third place Skeledirge the quadrupedal crocodile with not even 30 pieces as of this writing. And there is reason to doubt this is a "recent" trend among Pokémon starters, as well.

Furries Are Being 'Cancelled' for 'Feral Porn Art' - This Is a Problem

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About 2 years ago, I started to see a growing debate about 'feral' NSFW art, and it was mostly more calm. The first time was when FurryLife.online started to ban most feral furry pornography, which has sparked a lot of debate online here (in the comment section), Twitter, and some other online sites. In the discussions, there were a lot of folks defending it with a fair amount of logic, mainly explaining that human levels of intelligence creates a difference. There were also folks reasoning that many of such ferals being attractive were exactly the same reasoning why furry characters such as Nick Wilde would be considered attractive by many other furries, by the fact that they have animal parts.

After such drama emerged, it felt as if it was dying down, thankfully. However recently on about June 19th, a popular furry known as KaimTime has been publicly “exposed” after some furries found out that they had a “feral” focused NSFW Twitter account known as Feral Fawcet. As a result, angry furries accused the person of being into “zoophilia”. as well as many Twitter folks ending up doing the whole “if you support this, block me” style posts. There was even one popular YouTuber, Crying Blossom, who made a call-out video against KaimTime mainly for KaimTime having the separate Twitter feed with this art on it, and their response video defending their right to have this separate page and fantasy. All of this, likely because of a furry artist partly having an interest in having fantasies with anthropomorphic animals on all fours.

Voting is open for the 2021 Ursa Major Awards

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The Ursa Major Awards logo.The vote for the 2021 Ursa Major Awards is happening this month! Send them your e-mail address, and you can vote for any of the nominations in 14 categories. Voting closes on Thursday, March 31.

Links to the content in question are provided, some may be for mature audiences. Ursa's Twitter Feed also provides a summary of each of the nominees for the categories.

Spread the word - Please re-post this announcement if you're on an active furry message forum or social media site!

This year's nominees are...

'Savage Species': that time Wizards of the Coast called furries a bunch of jackasses

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Savage Species Onager In the far-off time of 2003, Wizards of the Coast published an expansion to the rules of its popular Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game known as Savage Species. It’s purpose was to allow players to choose one of the many monsters the game featured as a playable race and still allow them to play with players sticking with one of the Player’s Handbook pre-approved playable races, who were either human or basically humans, just with pointy ears or a shorter build than normal.

The appeal to furries is obvious. The Monster Manual contained various anthropomorphic animal races, including minotaurs, gnolls, kobolds and many others that furries would almost rather certainly play than just vanilla humans and the human adjacent. In addition, tucked into the third appendix of Savage Species was added a new “creature template”, which could be added to existing creatures, specifically animals. That template was known as “anthropomorphic animal.”

Unfortunately, this was the far off time of 2003, and the reputation of the furry fandom among other geek cultures was not good. Wizards of the Coast didn’t mind if furries wanted to buy their expensive add-on books, but they also wanted to make sure to signal to all the other non-furry geeks this wasn’t a furry book and also they didn’t really like furries either. They did this with the selection of the example animal that the template was applied to: a donkey, which we’ve covered the symbolism of elsewhere.

Winners of the 2020 Ursa Major Awards

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The Ursa Major Awards logo.The winners of the 2020 Ursa Major Awards have been announced on YouTube!

Nominations for the best work involving anthropomorphic animals in 2020 were taken this February, and the top five in each of fourteen categories were voted on during March.

This year's winners are…

Voting opens for the 2020 Ursa Major Awards

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The Ursa Major Awards logo. The 2020 Ursa Major Awards vote is ready to go! Send them your e-mail address, and you can vote for any of the nominations in 14 categories. (Last year's "Dramatic Series or Short Work" has been split into two separate categories.) Voting closes on Wednesday, March 31.

Please re-post this announcement if you're on an active furry message forum or social media site!

This year's nominees are... [Update (2 May): the winners have been announced!]

Winners of the 2019 Ursa Major Awards!

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Ursa Majors Awards.jpgThe Ursa Majors have announced their winners for 2019, celebrating excellence in the furry arts! Due to Covid-19, there was no formal ceremony at a furry convention this year; instead the results were announced on May 23, 2020 in a YouTube video.

Determined by popular vote, two categories were excluded this year due to not getting enough nominations (Fursuits and Non-Fiction).

The winners and runners-up are...

Winners of the 2019 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards

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Commission for SammyTheTanuki, by Ira-ArnThe winners of the 2019 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards have been announced! There are too many wonderful pieces to show here, so if you have the time, check out the complete list in their Google doc. (Some mild NSFW content.)

The judge's choice winner for 2019 is "Commission for SammyTheTanuki" by Ira-Arn!

And the people's choice winner, which beat the other contenders by a wide margin, is
"Painters" by BubbleWolf.

The other two finalists were "Wildflower" by Neonhorns, and "Adventure awaits!" by Hitmore. There were four runners-up to this category, and over twenty contenders on top of those! A special merit award was given to "Courage on Two Wheels", in honor of Dogbomb.

It's almost time for the 2019 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards!

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Art by Ilya Royz.When it comes to furry artwork, I love to see creativity in detail, mood, backgrounds, world-building and species. I don't follow specific artists, and the high-quality stuff is scattered all over the place, so most of the time I rely on stumbling across artwork I like by accident. Or I find an artist on Fur Affinity who's very good, look at their favorites, and explore sideways. So it's a nice surprise at this time of year to be reminded of the Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards, which gives me a fresh starting-point from which to discover new works!

Decolonizing the anthro-animal: Furry fandom, speculative fiction, and the need for newer directions

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The taxidermy of Walter Potter (1835-1918).Anthropomorphic animals have been a means through which we can think about and examine queerness, abject bodies and forms. However, it can be argued that furry fandom has relied on animals under the meanings that western, white culture imagines them to have. This essay offers a critique on how furry fandom, at this current point in time, needs to look for newer directions, inclusive of rupturing the animal concept as we know and think of it right now. Some possible directions include ideas from Indigenous literature and post-colonial identities.

Winners of the 2018 Ursa Major Awards

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The winners of the 2018 Ursa Major Awards have been announced at AnthrOhio - it's been a busy month for awards in the fandom. Lions and tigers coyotes and (now) bears, oh my!

This year's winners and runners-up (listed in descending numbers of votes) are...

Voting starts for the 2018 Ursa Major Awards

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The Ursa Major Awards logo.The 2018 Ursa Major Awards voting window has been opened! Send them your e-mail address, and you can vote for any of the nominations in 13 categories. Voting closes on Sunday, March 31. The winners will be announced at AnthrOhio 2019 (May 23–26).

Please re-post this announcement if you're on an active furry message forum or social media site!

This year's nominees are...

Ursa Major Awards 2018 - Nominations are open until Feb. 16, 2019

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The Ursa Major Awards logo.It's time to nominate the contenders for the 2018 Ursa Major Awards! You can send in your nominations until February 16, 2019. We'll see which of them get onto the final ballot in March, when voting opens, and the winners will be announced at AnthrOhio in late May.

If you really liked something in 2018 that had anthropomorphic content, either inside or outside the fandom, you can nominate up to five things in each category! Nominations are completely optional - you can even skip entire categories. All you need to do is go to the nominations page, click where it says "Enroll", and give it a valid email address. You'll be emailed a code, and you can use that to log in and fill out the nomination form.

Winners of the 2018 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards

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The Awards' Twitter icon.The results are in for the 2018 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards! I'm going to summarize the results below, but if you want the complete version with thumbnails of all the artwork, take a look at the official announcement posted to Google Docs.

Almost all the links go to FurAffinity pages, and they should open in new windows.

Get in on the 2018 Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards!

Your rating: None Average: 4.6 (34 votes)

Crossing, artwork from 2017 depicting a mammoth by Caraid and Nomax.I found out about the Best Anthropomorphic Artwork Awards only yesterday (Dec. 26th), and I wish I'd known about them sooner!

They're a labor of love to the fandom by Bahu, and I'm not even going to try guessing how many artists he must follow on an annual basis to narrow down 29,000 pieces of art to 875 contenders (3%), then working those numbers down even further. And that's not counting the People's Choice Award, which you can vote on before January 1st if you act quickly!