What’s wrong with having a furry mascot exactly? I mean the Japanese Air force had a furry mascot for one of their bases, not only is he a furry but also a femboy. His name is Omaneko (おまねこ)
Omaneko images
not only is he a furry but also a femboy
Are you sure it isn’t the navy?
Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF)
Yeah I’m sure about that.
It was a joke.
I love him 😍
He is very cute.
GoogleDeepl’s translation of the text in the first pic:Cat with magical powers
Motif: “Nekozuka,” a tourist attraction in Omaezaki City
A member of the 1st Nyanya Police Force. He is currently stationed at the base because he wants to play with the radar dome.
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He is 176 cm tall, or 40 m. He is good at sports, but not good in water.
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He is a male.
The second pic:
Sign:
Do not touch
✔️ Line up to take a picture
❌ Delay
❌ Ambiguous items (e.g. model guns)
❌ Touch the staffSpeech bubble
Welcome to KEMOKET!
Welcome to Kemoket!Text underneath
Self-Defense Recruitment
https://www.mod.go.jp/gsdf/jieikanbosyu/index.html
Air Self-Defense Force Omaezaki-chi Kouyatskree - “Omaneko”
Is that tall? I like it more now
It’s ambiguous. Either above-average male height (by Japanese standards) or 23 times that.
Its 10cm more than me, I take it.
…or 38.4 m more than you
Ah wait, I get it now. Macrofalco moment.
-
I’m no scholar, but I believe when it’s an anime furry you call it kemono
All countries need official fursonas; can’t change my mind.
It’s called a national animal
Nope. Animals aren’t fursonas. A fox fursona isn’t a fox. Fursonas are anthropomorphic.
Your mom is anthropomorphic
You’re not wrong…
Let’s just anthropomorphize the animals then
Oh yes!
FYI: anthropomorphic just means it has human-like qualities of any kind. It can still be a regular looking animal and talk like, or behave like a human to be anthropomorphic.
🇩🇪: German Sheppard (obviously)
I agree with that, at the very least more countries should have them.
Hungary should have the mangalica, it’s a furry pig, and it fits sooo well.
All countries need official moës as well. If not, moës will be made for them.
Moldova=sheep/goat
Weird. A real thing that somehow made it through every level… This is truly a remarkable example of the Swiss cheese model in action.
I give you, an eBay listing: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/314945286881
I don’t see why any level would go “Oh furries are going to love this, and we can’t have that” and change the design.
How many NBA mascots would lose their jobs if we were all so uptight about shit like this?
This guy is safe
I feel unsafe looking at that picture.
Displaying that mascot qualifies as large scale mental abuse.
Agreed, @sangriaferret@sh.itjust.works would be best if you wrap that image in a spoiler.
The girl looks uncomfortable being next to it too
If I’m put in charge, that guy is the first to go.
Giant zombie baby from Dead Alive?
Based on the photos of the mascots, there’s no way they didn’t hire a furry to draw those.
It’s funny how it’s so distinctly “furry” over just “animal mascot” but I can’t put my finger on the details that make it so
$50 all in w/ shipping to the US‽
Jesus take the wheel I’m about to make some poor financial decisions
TIL Swiss cheese model
Lizard kinda cute tho 👀
That’s Lizzie! She’s adorable!!
She’s the Paralympics mascot, and a frilled lizard! Her frill is shaped like Australia!
Why would it be a hazard or remarkable or even something special that it “made through”… It’s just a mascot, and a good one as well
Because it’s very very obviously a fursona
… and?
Why would that be a hazard or remarkable or even something special that it “made through”… It’s just a (furry) mascot, and a good one as well
That’s not something that’s generally appropriate for a government to post, or anyone in a professional setting.
Because…? In what way is a fursona not “aPpRoPrIaTe”? That literally just describes half of all mascots, furry is essentially just an antropomorphic animal. Again, you haven’t given any real reason why there would be anything wrong with this, at all.
Because a furry is a sexual fetish/kink and a mascot is not typically a fetish or kink.
Hey, sorry for the really late answer lol; I was busy and then forgot about it. But I hope that you’ll still see / read this.
Because that’s actually just a misconception and not true. Being a furry is nothing inherently sexual.
I even know quite some furries that are asexual and do nothing sexual or kinky in any way. Of course there are furries that also see it as something sexual, but that’s just a part of it. I think you can compare it to anime. Anime is just an art form that many people find interesting and like. And yes, there is hentai, yaoi, etc. because you can sexualize anime, and some people like sexual animes, but that doesn’t make the concept of a anime itself sexual.Being a furry is primarily just liking anthropomorphic animals and the art that contains them. Furries like stuff like Zootopia or Robin Hood (Disney), The Fantastic Mr. Fox or Puss in Boots. Many furries like to draw art of their own anthropomorphic version, their fursona, something like the image above. And some furries have fursuits in which they can feel more liberated as their persona they identify with. In the city here, there is a public fursuit walk once a month where hundreds of furries walk in fursuits through the city. None of that is sexual whatsoever; they’re just people that like the concept and art of anthropomorphic animals.
I got reminded of this because I’m currently on the university fair (of my uni) with my official university furry group (I’m a member). And that is nothing sexual either. We’re just some nice people that chill here, some wear ears or tail (one even a full fursuit) and we just like anthropomorphic animals and find them interesting.
You’re a furry if you like anthros, like media of them (like movies) or like to draw them by yourself, maybe make an own character. And yes, some also like this in a sexual way, like you can sexualise everything that’s part of your life, and any art style. But it’s really just wrong to say being a furry is primarily something sexual, because it’s primarily just liking this kind of art, like anime fans are primarily fans of such an art style and liking anime itself is not a fetish either. There is nothing inherently sexual or bad or inappropriate about furries.
I don’t see why any level, even knowing “furry” would find these particular designs “objectionable” and worthy of rejecting. They aren’t even vaguely fetishized.
So in recent weeks I’ve learned that furries are a lot more shunned than I thought, and it’s one of those things like Bronies where it’s not the subject of their obsession but the enthusiasm they have for the subject of their fandom.
I grew up with Disney and Warner Brothers classics, read the Albedo comic anthology and a few others, but don’t see myself as a furry enthusiast (contrast my enthusiasm for late 20th century are we the real monsters? science fiction). Furry porn and furry-themed sex fantasies aren’t particularly my scene, but this is true for the majority of furries as well.
But our society has gotten weird about furries and anthros, which I guess became evident when the US right-wing started spreading the litter-boxes in schools canard. Curiously, in the porn media community, animal genital shapes are a controversy, and mainstream media platforms that sell furry porn will not allow for anthros with canine or equine genitals. I think VISA specifically will not allow transactions for such works, which is stunning interventionism both in its overreach and specificity.
And then some social media sites have special rules for furry content, that even SFW furry content can only appear inside furry-inclusive perimeters… unless it’s classical like Warner or Hanna Barbara. Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge Freefall (1998-present) one of the long-running fairly-hard-science-fiction webcomics (that gets into space-travel culture and robot culture), specifically because it has an anthro as a main character, more precisely, a genetically engineered wolf, next to a robot and a non-human trader.
It’s not that furries are weird. It’s that society is weird about furries.
I had an idea that the paws salute should become the official salute of the new resistance (since furries have been marked as a target for fascist enemy within rhetoric), but then trying to do some basic web searches, I couldn’t find a proper conventional name for the pose, nor easy-to-find art of it, even though I’ve seen the gesture made by catgirls often enough to know it’s a thing, and one of the salutes I might consider when standing before the firing squad.
In the last few years, I went from being resignedly a man to being enby, having become disgusted with how dudes obsessed with manhood have conducted themselves in our society. Before, I didn’t care that much, and my own notions of what it was to be a man turned into adulting in the 2010s (take care of business; make sure rent and utilities are paid; don’t do violence, especially when nuclear weapons are involved). Now men look like Matt Walsh and Donald Trump.
I’m not a furry or otherkin (yet), but considering how the furry community is among the untermenschen, I’m half-inclined to develop a fursona for sake of solidarity.
And I still think the paws salute should be the sign of the resistance.
I read somewhere that someone’s attitude to furries is a great litmus test for how tolerant that person actually is (assuming that person isn’t a furry, of course). I’ve always found myself mildly confused by furries (and I used to be somewhat weirded out because I mainly knew of furries because a friend bought a house from drawing furry porn). Hearing the litmus test thing helped me to chill out a bunch and recognise that seeing lots of furries in and adjacent to my community was a sign of a healthy social ecosystem, so to speak
I don’t understand them. I doubt I ever will. But I know I do not hate them. They’re doing nothing wrong, hurting no one, leave em be. Simple.
God I need to get better at drawing
I’m not really a furry but I like drawing anthropomorphic characters, but sometimes that alone is enough for some people to shun you and kick you out of groups no matter how much you try to be accommodating.
I could have enjoyed drawing only humans, only women, only scenery. No problem. But the minute I stick cat ears on a human, it’s a problem?
Yeah, I’ll cut my losses and hang out with someone else.
Yes, furries seem to be the new group everyone is ready to hate no matter the political inclination. Gays are accepted more and more, trans people are far from safe, but at least have allies, furries seem to be the easiest target now. I need to learn the paws salute.
Please don’t compare your love for cartoon animals to being lgbt
Tbf, furries are ⅔ LGBT.
There’s research on that. Thanks, Canadian goverment.
Edit: ITT: Someone spends 10 fucking hours responding to every single reply thats even remotely empathetic towards furries, while being a wedge-issue little shit. This is so sad.
Furry or not; we are stronger together.
That can be true at the same time as “being a furry doesn’t make you an at risk minority”
I see a huge potential for them to become an at risk minority. Why shouldn’t I defend a group that I think is innocent and under threat? I don’t want them to be next. Bullying of groups of people who do no harm, just want to express themselves in their own way, makes me sick.
Because being a furry is a hobby, engaging in a hobby doesn’t make you a minority.
No matter what happens, you can always stop looking at cartoon animals on the internet, can’t really stop being gay or trans.
Are we gatekeeping being rejected now?
Let’s not tolerate narrowing the spectrum of ways people can enjoy their lives. That’s what totalitarian regimes do. They prohibit this and prohibit that, and in the end, you are only allowed to watch the approved movies, listen to the approved music and wear the approved clothes. You can stop expressing yourself, you can stop engaging in your hobbies, you can stop living the way you want to live, you can survive. But it sucks all happiness from your life.
This reads to me a lot like “I don’t care what they do in their bedroom, but why do they have to be that way in public?”
While furries aren’t a marginalized group, 99% of furry hate is a proxy for queerphobia and ableism, the criticisms are almost 1:1 with the shit those same people say about queer and autistic folk.
Tell me you don’t know queer subcultures without telling me you don’t know queer subcultures. Would you like to complain about drag shows while you’re at it? I hear it is very in vogue at the moment.
Why? If someone’s identity as a furry is as much a part of them as your identity as gay, or for that matter, Marcus’ identity as black, isn’t it similar enough a violation that society deems you can’t be that and be a full equal?
This, to me, is the problem. Mystique shouldn’t have to hide her mutant status even though she could.
Disney adult ass reply
What? The reference is pre-Disney.
I’m the one who thinks the scream-extractor is a good symbol for capitalism. Also Buy N Large.
And besides which, do you have a problem with adults who are big into Disney?
Wow, bigoted much?
SFW furry? There’s kinda no such thing.
If it’s identifiably furry then it tells me something about you and your sexual preferences that I didn’t want to know. The same if you had a Bad Dragon sticker or an Ahegao sweatshirt. Just because it doesn’t have explicit nudity doesn’t mean it’s not sexual and doesn’t mean it’s appropriate.
Y’all want to do things anonymously on the internet, great. Y’all want to have conferences or get together in spaces that support that, also great. You should absolutely have those spaces. But so many furries that I’ve met overshare about it. Don’t use your fursona as your work profile pic. Don’t tell me you’re a furry when I didn’t ask anything remotely related. Don’t openly thirst over Judy Hopps. Ain’t nobody going around saying “I like tentacles and I’m proud of it” - take a note.
SFW furry? There’s kinda no such thing.
You realize that you’re the one sexualizing them, right?
There absolutely are people who have a fursona or participate in the fandom in completely SFW ways. A fursona tells you exactly nothing about their sexual preferences. Honestly you sound exactly like homophobes insisting that two boys holding hands is obscene. Just because you equate a fursona with sex doesn’t mean that every furry thinks the same way.
Your point comparing furry haters to homophobes struck true to me. I don’t know much about furries, but I live in the home of anthrocon and the annual furry parade is one of the most wholesome things this city has. Families and kids love to see all the costumes, and furries are some of the nicest folks I’ve met. I’m always a bit taken aback when people call them perverts - it seems like a harmless hobby to me.
From Wikipedia:
Another survey at a furry convention in 2013 found that 96.3% of male furry respondents reported viewing furry pornography, compared with 78.3% of females.
I don’t have an issue with gay people. I don’t have an issue with anybody existing or being who they are. I have an issue with repeatedly learning sexual things I didn’t want to know about people, which has happened multiple times with furries specifically. Maybe I’ve been unlucky or something, but my experience has been that furries far more than other groups overshare and don’t respect reasonable boundaries around this.
People who read a lot of books often enjoy the occasional smut. People who watch anime are probably more likely to watch hentai. It’s not really surprising that people’s passions and hobbies leak into their choice of pornography.
What in the useless statistics Batman? So because a large percentage of people who identify as furries have viewed (not actively view, not prefer, quite simply have viewed) furry pornography, the entire furry community must be a sex thing? That misses more than a few possibilities. Fuck, I’ve seen gay porn, and I’m not gay. As far as “learning something sexual about someone”, unless you’re calling learning someone has a fursona learning something sexual about them, this whole thing is a non-sequiter based entirely on anecdotal experience.
There’s some self selecting bias there, going to a ‘furry convention’ is a rather steeper level of engagement than just, say, looking at a webcomic featuring art like this mascot here.
Those more hard core sexual furries scare off casual furries as well as folks a bit timid about being associated with the most… Forthcoming portion of the fandom.
It’s rough on some as they want to engage without sexual interest in the aesthetic, but as a result get grouped in with those with a sexual interest. They want to identify as something, and furry is closest, but they aren’t into the sexual facet and struggle with that broad association.
I know multiple furries personally who are asexual. You are speaking out your ass and fetishizing furries out of your own sexual repression.
Asexual people can and do still use porn for sexual gratification. Just like how some Asexual people still have sex.
Hm, does that argument ring hollow to you? Maybe because you were trying to make a point about the group and not every individual in it?
I’m speaking from my own experience which has been that in 6/6 cases when I’ve learned that someone was a furry the conversation quickly turned towards the topic of furry porn, which I did not want to discuss.
You know what they say about personal experiences pertaining to a group. It’s 100% translatable to the entire group. Yup. That’s what they say. Even so far to remove the asexual from a furry because I guess being a furry is so sexual that it must trump sexuality.
Wild take. Bonkers even.
You’re wilfully misinterpreting me.
You are maliciously attacking a largely queer community with accusations of sexual deviancy in a way that has been historically used to demean queer folk in general. You are hyper focused on that sexual aspect to the point that you believe it to be all they are to the extent to claim asexual furries compromise their sexuality in the face of the pure sexyness of the furry community. I am not willfully misinterpreting you. I am interpreting you through a lense that you find unfavorable.
What about people proudly showing things like this: 🏳️🌈
Please. I’d rather not learn anything sexual about a person.
/S
Sure. Lots of people do that as allies too and it’s just a flag.
Now say you did a rainbow flag shaped like a penis - that I would take some issue with.
Another day, another sensationalization of the sexual aspects of a queer subcultures. If it’s not the “inherent sexualization of discussing gay people”, or trans people as "autogynephillia and autoandrophillia’, it’s furries or kink at pride. It’s really disheartening hearing the same tools of oppression being deployed over and over again.
How am I oppressing these people?
Perhaps you might examine the various way in which queer people in general have been marginalized by labelling all their activities as obscene and sexual. For example, you might take the example of teachers in Florida who are in a same-sex marriage being prohibited from mentioning their marriage lest they be sanctioned for sexual content, while teachers in straight marriages were under no such restrictions. Similarly, the existence of queer people itself has been deemed so sexual by some that even mentioning to a child who is struggling with their identity that queer people exist has been called–in all absence of reason–child abuse.
If you can take those example, and then consider that your perspective of furries, much like homo- and transphobes’ perspective of queer people, is skewed to view it as entirely sexual despite all the parts that aren’t and classify the parts that would be normal sexuality in any other subgroup as deviant. This, as you might be able to deduce, can be quite restrictive of those people’s “allowed” place in society.
I like Dusk: an elysian tail. Its a nice game with fun mechanics. And is a SFW furry game, just the people its animal like.
The problem is, I only ever see furries when they’re doing weird kink shit. I go to regional burns, and this last one had a small furry audience, not all from the same group. One day I was exploring on my bike and saw one of them doing a shadowbox strip tease. Later, another one (again, from a different group) wander into our camp wearing a diaper and holding a baby bottle. I know that the burn culture can be a little more sex forward, but I only seem to encounter furries at burns, and furries at burns only ever seem to be doing kink stuff.
Well, you’re only seeing a small subset of the culture. Most furries don’t do fursuits or cons or any of that stuff. Most are invisible, just like a brony or a Harry Potter fan or a comic nerd or whatever. It’s just an interest or hobby that you wouldn’t know about unless you knew the person.
I know someone who is into the general aesthetic of SFW “furry” stuff but is a bit weird about it because one of two things happens if she shares some content she likes:
- People turn away because they think she’s into that stuff sexually
- People get way too into engaging with her because they think she’s into that stuff sexually.
Feels like there needs to be some better nuance between “I like furry style SFW art” and “I’m all into furry in the the way people guess”. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, but it’s certainly something you should have to explicitly opt into rather than an assumption based on liking or doing a drawing or like wearing an animal ear headband or non-plug tail or something similarly innocuous.
what seems to help from what i’ve seen is to make it more cartoony and less, you know, suspiciously detailed…
it will of course not work 100%, but it at least sort of sets the tone of it not being sexual, like how mickey mouse generally manages to avoid being sexualized.
since furries have been marked as a target for fascist enemy within rhetoric
Likewise, fascists have been marked as a target for furry enemy within rhetoric, more or less since the first furries wearing Nazi shit showed up at a con.
One of the things I find myself reminding others about LGBT+ folk, is that we aren’t intrinsically good, just normal. It took into the late 2010s before trans folk got to eat at the same table as LGB; gays can be prejudice and bigoted too, with people like Peter Theil being current extreme examples. (Granted, being LGBT+ gives folks more experience and perspective on what it is to be regarded as a second-class member of society, so they tend to have empathy, but this isn’t always the rule, and as the gold-star lesbian movement has shown us, they can form their own classifications of prejudice.)
There are far right furry factions just as there are blacks and other non-whites in the transnational white power movement that is a superset of the White Christian Nationalist Movement. They exist, though they don’t represent furries, even if they are eager for leopards to eat their own faces.
Humans are odd, and to me at the moment, looking at the 2024 US election results, indecipherable, and I hope that doesn’t mean they’re just extremely manipulable and short-sighted or vindictive (which is as it appears). But people often exert their political power against their own interests, and that will sometimes include furries.
Sorry, furries are weird and will continue to be weird. Not the people who watch furry porn or cosplay furries, but those that actually think their furries and act that lifestyle, or the new buzzword, “identify” as such. It is cringe and indicative of mental health issues.
Yeah! You know what else is weird? You. For picking out a tiny subset of an already tiny community and picking on it like it is at all the norm. I can rip out a million tiny subgroups of groups and say “group” is and always will be weird because of “insert small subgroup here”.
It’s like people who say “I don’t like abortion because it shouldn’t be used as a birth control” like bokay, no one was doing that. Why are you fucking mentioning it?
Fine, I’ll rephrase: Furries that think they’re actually furries, identify as furries or actively take part in furry fantasies that are aside from primarily sexual and stray into more representative roles are weird and will forever be weird.
STOP NORMALIZING MENTAL ILLNESSES!
Mental illness is normal in 2024, especially in the United States, which continues to go though a mental illness epidemic. The mental health sector of the world is looking at the results of the 2024 general election and noting the corellation not just of social and family dysfunction but intergenerational mental illness handed down through abuse and isolation, as a possible factor in the election results elevating a known threat to US democratic features to President of the United States.
While there may be correlation between mental illness and furry identity (I haven’t seen any data based assertion this is true) that still would not indicate causality. Interest in TTRPGs correlates since gaming can serve to aleviate symptoms, distract from trauma, and give people with social deficiencies a mechanism by which to express themselves safely.
Besides, there is a notable similarity when calling furry identity a mental illness is juxtaposed to the classic assumtion that LGBT+ identities were indicative of mental illness.
That said, some of us are actually diagnosed and contend with symptoms like suicidality and interpersonal dysfunction, so please don’t use mental illness as a subject of derision or contempt. We aren’t 1980s era slasher antagonists.
Fair enough, you may have misunderstood my initial statement. I will once again clarify. I meant to say to stop validating abnormal behaviours that are likely mental illnesses. Now, you can make the claim that if someone wants to act like a furry even though it might be a mental illness, then let them be. But i know that if i ever had a child that exhibited these tendencies, i would want them to seek help for it, because it is NOT NORMAL - at least in my opinion.
Also, I don’t mean to say that there’s a mental illness necessarily causing these tendencies, rather it is the fact that these furry tendencies - the ones that I’ve described - are in and of themselves a mental illness.
It’s entirely possible that i am wrong, and that it is not a mental illness, but i would bet big money that it is one.
Um, a mental illness is defined by being dysfunctional to the patient (and doing things that are odd enough that society throws rocks at them doesn’t count). So if the patient is spending her rent money on furry comics, or is consuming furry media to the neglect of food and sleep, you might have an argument that it’s a mental illness. (And then, in the 2010s, the psychiatric community has been having to consider that exposure to toxic circumstances: overmonitoring at work environments, bad bosses, not earning a living wage, excess rent, may be factors that drive dysfunction externally, figuring more largely in mental illness than internal factors like heredity. But that is bleeding edge still.)
But just a fanatic obsession of cute furry anthros, even if it is extreme, is not a mental illness, in exactly the same way that a man who is sexually and romantically attracted to other men is not a mental illness. Or if we want to get Victorian about it, exactly the same way a woman who refuses to accept her limited place in society is not a mental illness.
So I can assure you from here, the way mental illnesses have been defined since the 1990s, being a furry is not a mental illness.
Fair enough. It is a siiiiiiickneeeeeeess. Of the highest ordaaa.
Your rephrase is a double down on your own absolute inability to tell fact from fiction. Stop being weird dude. Make a furry friend and talk to a human being Bout this shit rather than just letting your sexual fantasies about them go wild
Sexual fantasies about furries🤨? Me? I really don’t know where you got this assumption from. I don’t discriminate against furries nor would i hesitate to talk to one. It doesn’t still change the fact that the specific furry I’m referring to’s behaviour is weird, and probably indicative of a mental illness.
I rest my case
So you have never talked to a furry and you are just throwing wild weird sexual fantasies you made up at them? And you are confused why I am saying you have weird sexual fantasies about furries? My brother in Christ, you made up a sexual fantasy about furries and now your horny posting on main about how weird they are.
Woah wtf is this😂. Clearly you’re uninterested in discourse, and are just resorting to throwing out wrong assumptions about me. Good luck man
How about you chill?
Furry here to confirm that Freefall is underrated as hell. In terms of really philosophical sci-fi that makes you think, I would genuinely put it on the same shelf as Star Trek.
I’ll also mention that I would not classify Freefall as a furry comic. I read a lot of those, and Freefall ain’t one. Florence Ambrose (the genetically engineered wolf in question) is one of three characters in the entire comic that could even remotely be considered furry, the other two being Sam Starfall, the captain of the ship on which Florence is an engineer, who is an alien in an environment suit that makes him look a bit like he stepped out of Club Penguin, and one whose name is a major spoiler who is a genetically uplifted chimpanzee (and looks exactly like a regular chimpanzee but is able to talk). All of the other characters are either bog-standard humans, humanoid robots, or robots that look like construction equipment. The only other reason you could even theoretically argue that Freefall is a furry comic is that Florence gets involved with a human in the comic’s only romantic subplot. If that’s true about Wikipedia refusing to cover Freefall because it’s a furry comic, that’s bullshit on a number of levels.
Politics is boring though. The rest of this comment is going to be me trying to convince you to read it.
The central premise of Freefall is this: humanity, a spacefaring civilization with faster-than-light travel, has created robots with full human intelligence, and have only just now realized this. Now what? What are the social and political ramifications of that? Over the course of Sam, Florence, and Helix’s numerous adventures, Freefall discusses such varied topics as transhumanism, prejudice, the ethics of putting safeguards (restrictions on what an artificial intelligence is allowed to do and think) on what is, for all intents and purposes, a human mind, and how easily a suitably determined conscious mind can slip its bonds. (For proof of that last one, one need look no further than any place on the internet with a bad word filter.) Oh, and the author’s libertarian political views.
Artificial intelligences using Dr. Bowman’s brain design physically cannot disobey any properly qualified direct order from a human. There are virtually no limits on what these orders can do. For example, at one point, the mayor of the human colony where the comic takes place says to an artificial intelligence who disagrees with a political decision she recently made: “Direct order. You like me. You trust me. You want to make me happy. End order. Is that better?” The AI replies: “Emotionally, much better. Mentally, I think I’m screaming.” Later, that same artificial intelligence reminds a different human: “If you ordered me to chew my own fingers off, I’d do it! If I’m ordered to destroy all the turtles in the world, I would try to carry the order out! If you have a system set up where a single person can cause an extinction level event, it’s time to reexamine that system.” At another point, one of many vice presidents at the company that makes the robots gives a particularly powerful robot a direct order to “Make me the richest man in the solar system within 30 days.” The results of this can best be described as apocalyptic.
The comic also explores how well-intentioned safeguards programmed by humans can end up backfiring:
And how rule-based safeties can’t stand up to full artificial consciousness:
My favorite thing about the comic, though, has to be Florence, and not just because I’m a furry. She is an incredibly smart engineer (Mark Stanley does his research! Most of the science discussed in the comic is legit), incredibly kind and understanding even to the worst of people, but not afraid to use force when necessary. Honestly, she’s a better human being than any human being could ever hope to be. She is also, fundamentally, a dog. When there’s no one around that she has to be professional in front of, she enjoys infodumping about quantum mechanics and running around on all fours and playing fetch with a frisbee, often simultaneously. Speaking of infodumping when you don’t have to be professional, I’m not sure I’d classify Florence as autistic, but she’s definitely neurospicy. She’s completely levelheaded in crisis situations, she’s terrifyingly smart, she’s a self-taught engineer (when was the last time you met a neurotypical one of those?), she never hesitates to stand up for what she thinks is right and is willing to do anything necessary to save people she cares about (which is pretty much everyone), but she hates drawing attention to herself and prefers to fight from the shadows. (Okay fine I’m totally just gushing now but tell me you don’t get this way about your blorbos. Words cannot express how much I wish Florence was real. And before one of you jackoffs says it, not because I want to have sex with her. I don’t. I’m gay. I just have the biggest friend-crush ever.)
My second favorite thing about Freefall (after Florence, of course) is that it never fails to keep the tone upbeat. Even when discussing heavy-handed, uncomfortable philosophy, it ends nearly every strip with a joke. It never just says “this is an incredibly sucky situation” and leaves you on a downer. It always finds a solution that works out pretty well for everybody. Is that solution always perfect? No, but that provides a platform to explore its imperfections.
If you’re convinced and you want to read it, you can see it in all its Web 1.0 glory here, or via this third-party mirror that, unlike the main site, supports HTTPS (yes, Freefall and its infrastructure are that old). If you’d prefer, you can read the entire comic as one big almost-infinite-scroll webpage instead of as a series of pages to click through here. One other thing to note is that the story of Freefall is still far from concluded: Mark Stanley releases a new page every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at midnight Eastern.
Sorry my thoughts on this are a little bit jumbled. I put this comment together rather quickly and sloppily, which I tend to do about things I’m passionate about and want to just get my thoughts out before the comment section becomes irrelevant. Lmk if you have any questions!
Bizarrely, I had never heard of this before, and I am Australian. So maybe it was released, but maybe quietly swept under the rug?
I’m in the same boat as you
Same here! I thought it must’ve been for the Brisbane Olympics, not the ones bloody 4 years ago.
Perhaps someone can help me understand the difference between an anthropromorphic animal mascot (which as a tale as old as time) and a furry? When does one cease to be one and becomes another?
There are animal mascots all the time in sports. Why is that not weird, but it’s weird to have a sporty animal mascot for coins?
The gradient from “cute” to “horny” is difficult to describe, but clear to see.
“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it”
Neural networks are proof that we suck at defining things, but our labels are excellent.
Dr. Dan McClellan has a great segment on Data Over Dogma about Prototype Theory ( On YouTube, time counter at 35:17), in which he points out dictionaries aren’t authoritative in telling us what words mean, rather they tell us what words have been used to mean so far.
He brings up the word furniture as an example talking about prototype theory, and talks about how we have a general sense of what furniture is ( we know it when we see it ) but we cannot define a set of features that includes all furniture and excludes all things not furniture.
Made even funnier by terms like “street furniture,” which includes the bench, the bus stop, the stop sign, and the curb.
Babs Bunny is a known nexus of this controversy, having been drawn a variety of ways from more chibi to more realistic and with various degrees of adult sexual characteristics.
To be fair, there’s been more public freak out over the green M&M redesigns.
For me it tends to be realism vs exaggerated qualities? I think these look like furry characters because they have realistic body proportions, structure, and expressions despite the animal faces and features vs something like Mickey Mouse or Sonic the Hedgehog. This allows someone to more easily see in them the physical features humans find attractive, even a lot of subtle ones considering these characters aren’t sexualized in their official art. It’s not perfect and obviously there are people who have cartoonish fursona’s and there’s cartoonish furry porn out there, but it’s a basic observation
I have no idea but the eyes and the smile definitely give a different vibe than most mascots.
The musculature and hands are what do it for me.
“Nine Inch Nails” has entered the chat…
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There is no difference. Anthropomorphics = furry.
was it made by a person with passion for the art, or a soulless corporation for the purpose of marketing and advertising? Usually, you can tell simply by the quality of the art which it is.
to me, just some guy, “a furry” is a person with this particular set of desires or sympathies, and an animal mascot is a marketing function of a business. Entirely subjective, reflexive and subject to cross over.
For one thing, you can find furries that get horny for any fucking mascot. I 'member Tony the Tiger being “sexually harassed” by furries on twitter.
If you can think of any animalistic or anthro character, there’s a very big chance furries want to fuck it.
I would say, given any anthro character, there’s a good chance a furry or some furries want to fuck them, but most furries don’t.
A large subset of furries want to be an anthro, though, and likely have specific characters they aspire to.
This has such MSI “there will be no bad dragons on my watch” vibes.
Bravo. The long con. Masterfully executed.
Those poor innocent feet
Honestly, I’m not surprised that any organization of sports would go for this design. It’s not a great or original concept to begin with. It looks like a cereal box mascot.
If i had a penny every time Australia hired someone without knowing WHAT they were getting, i would have 2 pennies
3 pennies if you include this https://youtu.be/cWmSB7QN1UU?feature=shared
Heh…
what…
Jelly
oh shit, i see now. says John but this is a photograph of Paul McCartney. also its difficult to get jelly in the uk
I hella want the coins. 😩
Speaking of no accidents: “innocent soles”, a bone apple tea or done on purpose 🤔
I remember when this happened, and I remember that post on particular from the artist. I’m not certain they swept it under the rug on purpose, but we certainly haven’t seen them since.
Side note, the Paralympics mascot is fine and I’m only a little bit fur-curious, lol.
