Furry fandom and my personal experience: Just so we’re clear, this is my experience. If you can relate, fantastic. If you don’t and you’re offended, that’s ok.
The furry community is paradoxical, in that it is both very diverse and very homogeneous. A fandom of anthropomorphized cartoon animal enthusiasts, the Furry Fandom is known for its artistic expression through art, dance, and online videos. Unfortunately, furry fandom has a conformity problem when it comes to entertainment. Nowhere is this more evident than with fursuit dancers and furry YouTubers. To put it shortly, they all do the same damn thing.
First are fursuit dancers. They all use the same Pop-EDM remixes of whatever is on the top 40. Rarely would you ever hear music that doesn’t belong in a club. Same goes for dancing. The dancers not only perform the same dances as each other, but they don’t seek to improve on technique. A quick look through furry convention dance videos is proof alone. To quote furry YouTuber Blü The Dragon, “Basically you have the performer coming in at one level and they stay there. Yet the support just goes up and up, to the point where they get this over inflated ego because they think they’re way better than they actually are”. Because this is so common, emerging fursuit dancers/performers will do the same. They see the success, so they just go with the flow. This creates an enormous collection of people with a serious lack of individuality or creativity. The problem is near the same with furry YouTubers.
New furry YouTubers mimic the most popular furry content creators. While there are many unique and interesting creators like Lovely Parasite, Dojo Dingo, Blü, and occasionally difFURently and Frankie, most just mimic one another’s style to the point of creating a monolith. The mass majority of their videos are just vlogs of them talking to the viewer in a suit about the same genetic information from another creators channel, opening fan mail, or going to some local retail store or tourist trap in a fursuit. Personally I believe that if it weren’t for their good looking fursuits, and the same generic cute voice and flanderized flat personality they have with their persona, they’d have much less followers and traction.
I hope that over time people will get irritated with this lack of creativity, but unfortunately it’ll take awhile. Because the fandom is highly supportive, yet hypersensitive to criticism among its members, these entertainers will not change overnight. It will take the fandom collectively asking to change or for new creators to emerge and break the norm.
Written by Genesius Wolf
Edited by Kenneth Engelhardt
