Thanks! Being Mom (and a busy one at that), I'm not into furries and what they do (what DO they do, by the way, that's so disgusting? I'd like to know). It's just one of my daughter's pretty pics to me.
Well, she has a much wider range than that, so I'll showcase more of her work as we go along.
I appreciate your taking a peek!
There's nothing inherently wrong with the style, however there is a substantial minority of 'furry' material that is pornographic, and some people are bothered by this because it smacks of beastiality.
Jenny:
SCMC outlined a big portion of the issue pretty well here, and in retrospect, I think I should have been a bit more specific since it seems to have been taken with offense.
As I'll go into a little more detail about below, furries are generally only recognized (specifically as furries, that is) by people who are at least somewhat acquainted with common American interests in Japanese media. If someone doesn't watch anime/cosplay/play Japanese video games/read manga/etc., then it isn't very likely for people to think of furries as anything more than just "cartoon animals". Since you
are, however, trying to reach a crowd that is acquainted with, and in many cases, consumed with interest in Japanese media/culture, it's just an honest suggestion to try and stay away from furries in general. As SCMC stated, it
is only a subset art style, but subsets themselves become very big topics among subsets of culture as we see in otakusim. After all, the crowd you're trying to reach is a specific subset of culture itself.
Obviously there are plenty of anomalies, but in general, I'm sure we could agree that most people who are looking to find more information about Japan and its culture online are younger people who have coexisting interests in anime, games, etc. It's totally up to you, though -- I happen to be one of the nerds who've gone a tiny bit over the deep end, so I've had the displeasure of having furry pornography spammed on the websites I frequent, and it can be frustrating for that sort of thing to become associated with the Japanese culture stereotype by people who don't want to look deeper and understand that it really
IS just a specific fandom. This is the reason why so many people in America think that Japan is basically pervert land with panties in vending machines and tentacle porn available at your nearest video store, even though most Japanese people wouldn't have anything to do with it.
I digress, though -- I didn't intend to be mean or anything of that nature.
It's also peculiar to me to throw around terms like 'hardcore otaku' and 'weeaboo' as insults
There's plenty of people ready to call a person 'hopeless nerd' and 'worthless otaku' for reading manga or watching anime as an adult, so I'd think twice before flinging a barrage of rocks at the neighbors, it might just be a glass house I'm living in.
I actually didn't mean them as insults. They both have pretty negative connotations attached, but I actually refer to myself as an otaku/weeaboo crossie since I can't think of a more concise way to give people a general idea of my interests and standpoint in relation to Japan. When I said "hardcore otaku and weeaboo", I really just meant the demographic who are into the deeper and/or "darker" side of fandom, for lack of a better term.
There are plenty of people out there who watch a little anime when they have some free time and call themselves otaku, while on the other hand, there are people who spend as much of their free time as possible playing Japanese games, visual novels, watching anime, collecting figurines, cosplaying, etc., who I would consider to be the more "hardcore" otaku. Maybe one of us has the wrong idea about otakuism in general, but I've never thought it was any more of a derogatory thing than to be known as a "gamer" in America.
There are plenty of loathsome people who identify with the terms "otaku" and "gamer", but I don't consider either of those groups to be bad on their own. I'm certainly not referring to the stereotypical image of otaku. Just for clarity, is there a different word I should use in place of otaku? I, for example, play games, watch anime, and sometimes spend time with visual novels, but at the same time, I'm generally a socially responsible individual who isn't completely or irrationally consumed by my interests like the stereotypical otaku (like the sort of people who want to work in "kawaii" and "desu" into their English).
when you're talking about a subset of a subset of an art-style that you wouldn't even know about unless you were already a serious fan of some sort of comic/manga/animation that you'd know these details.
It's true, I do regularly see furry fan art since I frequent online communities dedicated to otaku culture and such, but I actually did see enough even before that to develop a negative disposition for it. I suppose the issue is really only specific to otaku or just nerds in general, but furries are looked at as a pervasive cancer on sites like 4chan, whose communities are are full of otaku, despite being open mostly for other interests.
