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Tag: money

Classism in the Furry Fandom: An Opinion by Nightf0x

by Patch O'Furr

Guest post by Nightf0x with a response by Patch.

Flying out to Pittsburgh this past June for Anthrocon was a fantastic experience. I got to spend time with my friends and see this convention for the first time. However there was something that felt a bit off to me.

It took a different experience at Anthro Weekend Utah to make me aware of what exactly I was feeling at Anthrocon. I had never noticed before, but there is a sense of classism in the furry community. (I didn’t experience any of this classism at Anthro Weekend Utah.)

A lot of people in this fandom are successful, and they should be proud of it! However, sometimes this financial success creates an aura of a “holier than thou” attitude that they may not be aware of. By spending copious amounts of money and keeping their social cliques to people in the same financial situation, it creates a feeling of the haves and have nots.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t strive to reach this kind of success. For the most part this fandom is full of people who are intelligent and apply themselves, and they should be happy that they are in their situation. All I’m asking is to just be aware that sometimes, all the extravagance and copious spending creates social rifts. It can be detrimental to a convention’s social experience. This fandom has definitely been through a lot of social change lately, and my hope is that the next change is to be aware that everybody is in a different socio-economic status, and to at least try to be inclusive in that regard. It’s great to see a fandom that is getting more and more inclusive. However I think as a community we could work better on inclusivity across socio-economic barriers.

I’m not saying you’re evil if you own a fursuit or have a lot of money.  But I think everybody should be entitled to have a fun time without feeling the socio-economic barriers they may experience outside of the fandom. In the end, no matter your current socio-economic status, we are all fans of anthropomorphic animals and we all share this in common. Let’s go out there and have fun without class elitism!

– Nightf0x

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Furry symbolism – money, flags and coats of arms.

by Patch O'Furr

Anthropomorphism is loaded with symbolism.  Foxes and lions from Aesop’s fables, and fauns and centaurs from old myths represent personalities, emotions and urges.  This influenced modern concepts of the subconscious by Freud and Jung.  In dream symbols, animals are very prevalent, appearing in as much as 50% of dreams of children.  It relates to the way animal symbols spread throughout prehistoric cave art, until today when media is full of animal cartoons.  Anthropomorphism has deep roots in the way people think.

You can read a lot more about this in Wikipedia’s page for Symbolic Culture and the study of symbolic language (semiotics.)  This broad background makes it interesting to look at symbols with very long traditions, perhaps as old as language.  Many furry articles could be written about different categories.

Fred Patten sent comments that lead to furry thoughts about Heraldry (royal coats of arms), Vexillology (flags) and Numismatics (money) – all closely related symbols of nations.

– Patch

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