Postfurry

That's a very good question! Ask N people who identify as postfurries, and you'll most likely get something like N² answers, particularly if they're all in the room together to start discussing it.

A few things can be said for sure. The Postfurry community grew out of the larger Furry community, which itself generally defies any sort of generally-accepted concrete de""I PICK THE GOD DAMN terror of the fucking gods out of my nose! Pardon my language. But YEEEEEHAW, let the sons of God and man bear witness! Even in the belly of the Thunderbird I've been casting out the False Prohets; I'm busting a gut and blowing my O-ring, and ripe to throw a loaf! For I speak only the fucking Truth, and never in my days have I spoken other than! For my every utterance is a lie, including this very one you hear! I say, `Fuck'em if they can't take a joke!' By God, `Anything for a laugh', I say. I am the last remaining Homo Correctus, I am the god damn Man of the Future! I'll drive a mile so as not to walk a foot; I am a human being of the first god damn water! Yes, I'm the javalina humping junkie that jumped the Men from Mars! I drank the Devil under seven tables, I am too intense to die, I'm insured for acts o' God and Satan! I was shanghaied by bodiless fiends and alien jews from a corporate galaxy, and got away with their hubcaps! I cannot be tracked on radar! I wear nothing uniform, I wear no god damn uniform! Yes baby, I'm 23 feet tall and have 13 rows o' teats; I was suckled by a triceratops, I gave the Anti-Virgin a high-protien tonsil wash! I'm a bacteriological weapon, I armed and loaded! I'm a fission reactor, I fart plutonium, power plants are fueled by the sweat from my brow; when they plug me in, the lights go out in Hong Kong! I weigh 666 pounds in zero gravity, come and get me! I've sired retarded space bastards across the Cosmos, I cook and eat my dead; YAH-HOOOO, I'm the Unshaven Thorn Tree of the Atlantis Zoo! I pay no taxes! The Devil's hands are my ideal playground! I hold the Seven-Bladed Windbreaker; the wheels that turn are behind me; I think backwards! I do it for fun! My imagination is a fucking cancer and I'll pork it before it porks me! The say a godzillion is the highest number there is. Well by God! I count to a godzillion and one! Yes, I'm the purple flower of Hell County, give me wide berth; when I drop my drawers, Mother Nature swoons! I use a python for a prophylactic; I'm thicker, harder and meaner than the Alaskan Pipeline, and carry more spew! I'll freeze your seed before it hits the bathroom tile! YEE! YEEE! I kidnapped the future and ransomed it for the past, I made Time wait up for me to bleed my lizard! My infernal breath wilts the Tree of Life, I left my spoor on the Rock of Ages, who'll tear flesh with me, who'll spill their juice? Who'll gouge with me, whose candle will I fart out? Whoop! I'm ready! So step aside, all you butt-lipped, neurotic, insecure bespectacled slabs o' wimp meat! I'm a Crime Fighting Master Criminal, I am Not Insane! I'm a screamer and a laugher, I make a spectacle of myself, I am a sight! My physical type cannot be classified by science, my `familiar' is a pterodactyl, I feed it dipshits! I communicate without wires or strings! I am a Thuggee, I am feared in the Tongs, I have the Evil Eye, I carry the Mojo Bag; I swam the Bermuda Triangle and didn't get wet! I circumcize dinosaurs with my teeth and make 'em leave a tip; I change tires with my tongue and my tool! Every night I hock up a lunger and extinguish the Sun! I'm the bigfooted devil of Level 14, who'll try to blow me down? I've packed the brownies of the gods, I leak the Plague from my nether parts, opiates are the mass of my religion, I take drugs! Yes, I'm a rip-snorter, I cram coca leaves right into my arm-veins before they're picked off the tree! Space monsters cringe at my tread! I wipe the Pyramides off my shoes before I enter my house. I'm fuel-injected, I'll live forever and remember it afterwords! I'm immune! I'm radioactive! Come on and give me cancer, I'll spit up the tumor and butter my bread with the juice! I'm supernatural, I bend crowbars with my meat ax and a thought! My droppings bore through the earth and erupt volcanoes in China! Yes, I can drink more wine and stay soberer than all the heathen Hindoos in Asia! YEEE HAW! Gut Blowout! I am a Moray Eel, I am a Komodo Dragon, I am the Killer Whale bereft of its pup! I have a triple backbone, I was sired by the Wolf Man, give me all your Slack! I told Jesus I wouldn't go to church and He shook my hand! I have my own personal saviors, I change 'em every hour, I don't give a fuck if there's life after death, I want to know if there's even any fucking Slack after death! I am a god damn visionary, I see the future and the past in comic books and wine bottles; I eat black holes for breakfast! I bend my genes and whittle my DNA with the sheer force of my mighty will! I steer my own god damn evolution! I ran 'em out of Heaven and sold it to Hell for a profit! I'm enlightened, I achieved `Nirvana' and took it home with me. Yip, yip, YEEEEEEE! I'm so ugly the Speed of Light can't slow me down and Gravity won't tug at my cuffs! When the Rapture comes, I'll make 'em wait! They'll never clean my cage!finitions. Still, Postfurry shares quite a few features in common with general furry interests, like the anthropomorphized-animal aesthetics, the heavy use of the internet, and a general liberal/queer leaning.

What Postfurry generally adds to the furry aesthetic is more of a focus on the futuristic, the transhuman, and the countercultural. Rather than using imagery of a standard anthropomorphic wolf or tiger, someone involved in Postfurry is more likely to present as a lava-lamp vixen, squid-otter hybrid, or sentient black hole.

History

[WIP]

• DScream
• Puzzlebox
• Seattle

Diverse Thoughts to Be Organized

A wonderful braindump from Kincaid, reading this might give a bit more of an idea what we're going for! We trust in Wiki Magic to refine these.

Elements of Postfurry

• extending queer identity theory to species and fantasy selves
• extending roleplaying tropes to real life
• bringing metafiction to furry roleplaying
• fetish based on unreal things
• xenofetishism, fascination with alien beauty
• fascination with liminal states
• extension of natural neuropsychological tendencies
• keeping of "headfriends" long into adulthood
• using furry metaphors to explore altered states
• using BDSM and hypnosis to experiment with power dynamics, empathy, and trust
• political culture of radical empaths and daydreamers
• an exercise in making DIY, non-hierarchical pantheons
• "making people nice"
• using postfurry to interrogate the boundaries of "human" behavior and how real/necessary they really are
• a refuge for sensitive, otherworldly, introverted nerds
• an attempt at "daughter/son" religion instead of "father/mother" religion: spiritual entities that we create to be assistants in cosmological exploration, front-ends for the Divine, little gods for whose behavior we are solely responsible, not vice-versa
• basing scenes around narratives for sex instead of actual sex; expanding sexuality into the unreal
• the fetish of finding new things to fetishize
• umbrella term for all the kinks that can only take place in an imaginative world
• the notion that furry doesn't need to be realistic; the corollary that reality doesn't need to be realistic (i.e. our social and mental worlds are mostly abstract and arbitrary anyhow)
• merging furry with the world of theory -- taking things from literature and academic as inspiration for our perverted flights of fantasy
• playing with the erotic aspects of reality-bending
• an attempt to split the difference between the furry "fans" and the furry "lifestylers", taking the neo-pagan elan of the alt.lifestyle.furry folks and cutting its literal-minded tendencies with more critical and metaphorical ones
• discuss Daphny's remark about otherkin/trans narrative from the 1/24 Kotaku article.
• going beyond "furry is a way of life" to "furry is a counterculture, with potential social significance, a preparation for a world of virtual identity, self-narrative, and constant immersion in non-material realities"
• self-referentiality and Hofstadter -- meta-reference opens the door to so many interesting things...
• first step is to answer the question of "Why furry?" not with some literal-minded justification (i.e. history, anatomy, pantheism), but with "For whatever reason we want"; the second step is to answer the same question with "Because it's a subculture where the answer is 'for whatever reason we want.'"; the third step is to ponder WHY furry is so good at accommodating "for whatever reason we want," and seeing just how far you can stretch those reasons beyond what was previously considered "furry" -- the same way other "post-" movements have taken genres apart and put them back together with new influences
• mention soulbonders and otherkin as part of the spectrum -- postfurs are somewhere between them and fans!
• sociological and psychological theories of play

Postfurry Roots

• furry lifestylers
• Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
• transhumanist sci-fi
• genderqueer movement
• literary theory
• semiotics and postmodernism
• metafiction
• inadvertently perverse action cartoons
• postmodern/eclectic/chaos magic
• guerrilla ontology
• Discordians and Subgenii
• psychedelia
• BDSM culture
• beatniks and flower children
• RAW's theory of "neophilia"
• "Religions of Paradox and Play" in Margot Alder's Drawing Down The Moon

Frequently-asked questions, with few answers

Isn't postfurry basically just sci-fi furry fetish?

Why is there so much freaking latex and plastic?

Do you people know how pretentious you sound?

What were the DScream, Puzzlebox, and 12Fold?

Do you know how clumsy and sentimental your work sounds?

Yeah, of course we do. It's folk art.

By calling it "postfurry" are you saying what you're doing should replace furry?

Yikes, no.

Postfurry Philosophy

• has roots in a phenomenon of fantasy-prone people continuing to have rich imagined internal lives well into adulthood
• perhaps also in the proposition that something in our culture is stimulating more of this imaginative "virtual" life
• in particular, the Internet has given these fantasy-prone adults a safe place to "come out" to each other
• inevitably, this has led to a desire to bring these fantasies -- and the joyful social connections made under the
• importance of joy and festivity to postfurry culture
• importance of paradox and "play" in the sociological sense, cf. Margot Adler
• a means of dealing with fissures in our neurology and identity that many of us have felt since we were young
• a "microgenre" or "microfetish" melding transhuman/cyberpunk attitudes about bodies, identity, virtuality, and personal freedom; high-tech fairytale aesthetics; transformation fetish; psychedelia; non-dualistic philosophies in queer theory; and the animation of our childhood nostalgia
• mental, narrative, and ritual transformation as a lifestyle, with animal people as the preferred front-end
• an aesthetic of alienness, a xenofetish, valuing the novel, paradoxical, complex, or liminal for its own sake -- loving things we have been told are on the outside
• a "transspecies" movement paralleling the "transgender" movement -- not in any way insisting we are *physiologically or genetically* non-human, but opening up a category of "socially non-human" -- taking on names, personas, and histories of our own creation and rejecting the self-serving ones that society hangs on us
• saying that one's narrative "reality" need be hooked to physical reality only to a certain degree -- so much of our social reality is based on fictions imposed by mass opinion to start with -- rejecting the idea that we are who our parents named us, defined by our jobs, given a loyalty and affiliation based on what nation and species we're born into, as if being human obliges us to any specific behavior, appearance, or propriety beyond basic kindness towards other humans
• inherently somewhat leftist, in that we believe in the improvability of human nature, a certain degree of cultural relativism (in that we love to play with hypothetical cultures), hive minds, and multiplicity of narratives and perspectives instead of one objective and unchanging historical truth, and some of us really really really like jargon associated with left-wing identity politics :)
• we're also keen on sex, pleasure, and harmless-but-transgressive behavior
• values emotional sincerity and openness; pursues pleasure out of a sincere belief that pleasure is a "useful" cognitive state -- bliss reduces the urge for conflict and hasty, survival-driven thinking in places where it's not productive -- we want to create safe spaces for Nice People to play very very perverted mindgames in safety
• we're very uptight about respecting "OOC" consent even as we play with it -- we play consent games because we're genuinely curious by the moral phenomena -- we play with ethics because it's a matter of huge interest to us
• cultivation of a Cosmic Trigger-style suite of persona modules, alternative reality filters, and other tools
• Further elaboration needed on
  • neurotypicality
  • magic and postmodern animism
  • Why we do things like talk to our plushies and let them live vicariously through us
  • gender fuckery
• (A way of taking the basic concepts of furrydom - adoption of alternate personae, casual roleplay, unfettered intimacy - and pushing it to the next phase; not abandoning but pushing the boundaries further)
• phenomenon of “imaginary friends” and imaginary worlds persisting among adults, normalizing
• themes of “making people nice” in our roleplay
• metaprogramming tools
• building empathetic communities
• fantasies of artificiality among the non-neurotypical
• playing mental, physical, and social control games in order to understand how they work, and soothe the parts of the human brain that is innately obsessed with them
• this is a game we play because we’re human -- it’s innately and immensely humanity-affirming to play these games -- but it’s also affirming that we’re not limited in our identity and behavior by our species and our assigned set of neurological urges
• a safe haven for people who aren’t neurotypical
• a sense of kink and fetish as tools, not as things that define us but as things we can define. Broadening of horizons, modular combining of tropes, rather than narrowing to more and more specific combinations.
• extension of animism into an emotional toolset for modern life: plush shamanism, warding behaviors, etc.
• expanding the “queer” concept into forms of perceived misembodiment or different embodiment beyond gender and sexuality, extending into species, history, name, metaphysics, reality level...
• [add more!]