furry art

my opinions:

• all fandoms are consumerist to some degree due to how capitalism equates identity to consumption, but this effect is very starkly apparent in the furry fandom to me. there seems to be a major divide between engaging with the fandom as a form of self-expression and identity exploration versus flipping fursonas and character designs like they're trading cards.


• following up on the above: closed species are silly to me, and i see them as kind of emblematic of the commercialisation of furry fandom. i can understand giving credit to someone who first came up with a particular style of character, or choosing to respect the social contract & refrain from making a closed species character without fulfilling some requirements. personally though, if i wanted to make a character with particular traits, and someone was to tell me that i actually need to pay for that first, i'd tell them to pound sand.


• anyone with a fursona that uses the colours and patterns naturally present in the coat of the animal it's based on needs to get accustomed to the idea that some people will have fursonas that look similar to theirs. i feel like considering this 'copying' is generally an unfair assessment. no singular person can claim to own what an animal looks like.


• i personally don't vibe with a lot of the more toon-like furry artstyles. mostly i just don't enjoy them from an aesthetic standpoint, but they also come off as commercialised to me – easy to produce, easy to replicate when commissioning art, easy to translate into fursuits and plushies, and so on. but to be fair, that's not necessarily why these styles are popular, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with these styles.


• furry same face syndrome. i would assume it happens because some artists get started drawing just one or two species of animal, which then informs how they approach drawing other species. i think wanting to keep characters reference-accurate doesn't help either, and leads to some degree of homogenisation.