Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Forgettable Furries

General Writing Discussion
#1

I am reading a book of furry stories and I have come across a well known furry writer who has once again done something I find happening way too often in published furry works. I have already forgotten the species of one of the main characters because the author has done absolutely nothing to make the species of the character relevant to the story. Am I the only person that really gets annoyed by this?

It feels like laziness on the part of the writer, and since I’m paying money for these books, it kinda bugs me.

I honestly don’t like the term, people in fur coats, but so often in furry writing, that is exactly what happens. You might as well make them people because you’ve done nothing to make the fact that these characters are furry important to the story or the world that has been created in any significant way.

And there are so many things that can be done. Do dogs live and function in packs? Is there an alpha that makes the decisions and keeps the others in line in a household? Do sheep wear the same clothes as pigs given a particular climate? Do they wear clothes at all? Do certain species fall into certain classes in the created society? Do certain species have specific jobs because of their natural talents? And this is just me pulling things quickly off the top of my head. I imagine there are writers here who are far more creative. But time and time again, this same situation comes along. I am reading a furry story, I have forgotten what species a main character or even a ton of support characters are supposed to be and I start to care less and less about what’s going on and simply want to skip the story entirely and move on.

Why are more writers not taking the time to develop a world and a plot that makes these furry characters stand out and relevant to the story?

#2

Actually durocpig, you are not the only one who is particularly irked by this. I’m even at fault for doing this as well as I began to write furry fiction (though I still do make the mistake from time to time).

I’m not sure why it’s done but if I had to take a stab at it, it would be because of force of habit as some writers (such as me) have started out writing other things and then moved to writing furry works which may cause them to write a “sci-fi story” and not a “furry sci-fi”. I don’t know if that’s right but that’s what I’m going with until someone comes up with something better, I suppose.

I suppose the only way to help keep yourself from that pitfall is research on animals and their behavior (though I don’t know if that’s too much). Also maybe a push for more world building would help as well. I’d like to hear others thoughts on this; I’m immensely curious if there is a way to avoid this pitfall.

#3

I’m definitely guilty of this, because I often write furries as though they’re characters in a comic strip, and those are often populated with furries who Just Are.

The problem, of course, is that in a comic strip you’ve got the pictures to remind you what each character is. I do try to throw in a hint about ears and tails every so often, but I generally don’t go as nuts with the possibilities of anthropomorphic animals as I could. It’s not something that bothers me particularly when reading; if I’m interested in a character and they’re depicted vividly (personality, I mean, rather than appearance) I’ll remember the species without prompting, if not I won’t.

What does bug me is when every other sentence about the character starts ‘The wolf’ instead of his name, as a reminder. (Again, probably guilty on occasion!)

#4

I tend to go on long, long rants about this. I’ve also started discussions about it on Twitter that eventually slid downhill due to the fact that I DO view it as lazy writing.

In my opinion, if you aren’t going to do something with the fact that your characters are anthropormorphic animals, then why are you writing furry?
The answer is, you shouldn’t be. Why play in a sandbox if you aren’t going to use the toys in that sandbox to make the best damned sandcastle you can? Otherwise you’re just scooping sand into a pile and calling it Mont Saint-Michel.

I think more and more furry writers are taking this route because they either forget that they are writing furry, are lazy, or simply just don’t give a damn. No one is going to call them out on it. We have so few furry reviewers and only a couple (Fred and myself come to mind instantly) will call people out on not making their furry story, well, furry.

You can’t have science fiction without some kind of science. You can’t have fantasy without some kind of fantasy. So why is it okay to have furry without any furry?

#5

Personally, I must dissent… to a point. When you’re dealing with something that’s common and shared amongst denizens of a universe, little about it will be novel to them. Excessive characterization in that vein is obligatory and crude, to my eyes.

Subtlety is a tool.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m perhaps defensive-because-guilty—“the state of being furry” is taken for granted in my universe because … well, everyone is. Further, the process of genetic design that they underwent was intended to preclude the extreme outlier traits. Adaptation and evolution continue, and there are subtle—and unsubtle—traits that do shine through, but fundamentally my characters are, as someone else said, ‘people’. It doesn’t mean that their entire inherent and developed psyche isn’t utterly dependant in every way on their animal side, nor does it mean that their perceptions, reflexes and instincts aren’t inherently colored—sometimes strongly. What it means is that I don’t feel that every character in my universe needs to display the endless tropes or anti-tropes that riddle furry works. I’m much more interested in how my characters have grown and developed to fit into their universe than I am about how the animal that lends them its physical characteristics would instinctively react in the same situation.

But with that said, my opinions as a reader influenced my decisions as a writer.

You can have science fiction without androids, starships or ray guns, just as you can have fantasy without magic, wizards and gods… and those are principal genres. I don’t write furry as a genre, and I don’t read books whose raison d’être is ‘being furry’.

Keep in mind that I am, first and foremost, furry. I’ve been involved in the fandom since my early teens—about twenty years ago. I have very little interest in writing human characters, so keep that in mind for the sake of perspective. But there’s plenty of room for all writing on the ‘spectrum’ of furriness. One of my bigger ‘genre’ pet peeves is furries in modern-day or historical settings. I actively dislike stories like that… but I have no place to say the authors have no business writing them. I acknowledge that it’s simply not my preference as a reader.

-Fox
NB. Afterthoughts: I suppose that, in the end, I’m looking for a good story… and I can forgive a LOT in the pursuit thereof.

#6

This is a personal pet peeve of mine. I personally want a reason for my characters to be furry, and the more I have the better. I’m at a point where I’m aggressive about squeezing every last little bit of relevancy out of my characters being furry (though honestly I try to squeeze every last little bit of relevancy out of everything) that I can. That being said, I also write with a mainstream, non-furry audience in mind. Not to say I don’t also write with furries in mind as well :stuck_out_tongue:

However, if a writer is writing for a furry audience I mostly ignore this aspect as furries don’t tend to care about this. I’ll mention it as an aside, but not mark it strongly one way or the other.

Personally Sasya I’ve never found your work to have this effect even though you don’t emphasize the furry aspect :stuck_out_tongue:

#7

Skies above, it drives me nuts. Non-furry furries are just…bland. At best, your fiction is acceptable as mass-market fiction and frankly you should be angling for those for a broader audience and more money. If you’re going to do furry lit, do furry lit.

Duroc, you mentioned a ton of interesting hooks based around biology. There are two directions that goes. One, biology influences culture (What would a bear society look like, where their cities literally shut down for 3-5 months of the year? How would an herbivorous dude handle his girlfriend’s literal need for meat?). Two, without getting graphic (ahem) biology influences, well, biology. There’s a lot more to writing furry porn than just giving everyone (everyone!) a knot and calling it a day. Many cat species require pain for procreative sex, for example. What does that mean for felines in the bedroom? And that’s a conventional vertebrate mammal! How do naked mole rat hives work? Arthropod anthros where mating cannibalism is endemic? Etruscan shrew furries (again, conventional mammal) where males die from seizures post-copulation?

In sum, as stated above “people in fur suits” furry shows at minimum a refusal to think through all the interesting facets furry lit can provide.

#8

I consciously write two kinds of furry story: ‘out-and-out furry’ and ‘mainstream-ish’. The ‘out-and-out furry’ stuff is set in furry-only worlds, with no explanation for the furriness and very little deviation from our own world; what I think of as ‘textual comic books’. Examples would be Magnificent Dogs in ROAR 4 and everything I’ve had in Heat.

‘Mainstream-ish’ tends to feature humans and furries, or humans and non-anthro talking animals; stories like Cold Scent, which I feel a non-furry could read without feeling baffled/excluded/turned off.

It does feel kind of self-indulgent to write the ‘out-and-out furry’ stuff. But if I enjoy writing it, and furries enjoy reading it, where’s the harm? The reason for the characters being furry is that furry characters are appealing to a certain audience; the same reason another author might write a book set in a hospital with doctor and nurse characters. Do you want a lot of detail about medical procedures to justify the hospital setting, or are you interested in the characters and their relationships, with the setting as window dressing?

#9

I can see this argument, and there’s definitely a trend in the fandom toward “furry characters just because” – but the thing is, even if I might not necessarily refer to myself as “a furry,” I’m certainly part of the furry fandom, and I do care about it. Duroc’s furry, and he cares about it. Same with others in this thread. So we might say, okay, the majority of furry readers don’t care about it, so if you’re writing for furries it’s not important… but honestly, you could also say that the majority of furry readers (and readers in general) don’t really care that much about good prose or the subtleties of craft as long as the characters/plot/fetish appeal to them, so then why should we worry about any of that?

That said, I think the main thing to keep in mind from this discussion is that the furry audience, like any other demographic, isn’t a monolith, and you’re not going to please everyone either way. If you write out-and-out humans in fur coats, some readers won’t mind, and others will.

#10

Personally, I tend to stradle both sides of the argument with this one. When I first started using furry characters, I needed a reason and a rhyme for their existance, and they were of a 50:50 / human:animal ratio in my mind’s eye. It wasn’t until I entered the fandom proper that I learned it’s okay for there to just be a world of furs with no explanation, and the characters tend toward more of a 75:25 / human:animal ratio at best, 95:5 ratio at worst. I’ve always been a detail-oriented writer, so having the fur and tail and ears and so many other things to play with for body language and expression was so much fun for me. There are those who would argue though that despite my use of ears twitching before focusing on a sound and fur bristling from goosebumps, I still have humans with fur since I don’t do much that would be considered species specific. I don’t have an aversion to it or anything. It’s just something I don’t give much thought to.

It also doesn’t help that I look more at plot, character development, and character growth than whether pack mentality or prey instinct is involved in the writing. Don’t get me wrong, I consider it a wonderful treat when such things are included, and at times have been downright elated when it’s done well. It can add so much more to a story, and allow me to become that much more immersed, and make the characters that much more memorable. However, the exclusion of such descriptors doesn’t necessarily ruin a story for me. You could use four-eyed horned demons with mouths on their stomach and ten arms and I’d enjoy it, as long as characters are interesting enough and the plot is intriguing enough and it’s well-written in general.

But again, that’s just me, personally.

#11

This begs the question, why would he have and be all these things if there was no point?

As an editor, If someone submitted a story to me and, in the middle of Dan’s pursuit of a villian, you throw in a line that Dan enjoys watching cooking shows on TV. It’s a well-written story with an interesting plot, but now you’ve distracted me with a detail that has nothing to do with the plot, even if it tells me more about Dan’s hobbies. I would tell them to delete that line without a moment’s hesitation.

Furries in stories are the same way. If you’re not going to make use of the fact that your character has claws/hooves/fur/scales/tails/etc, it’s a distracting detail. It doesn’t have to be much, like Munchkin pointed out. A twitch of the ear or tail here or brustling of fur there can go a long way. Also, an animal’s heightened/lowered senses (depending on) are ridiculously easy to utilize.

I’m even for utilizing the species as a pronoun, if it’s done sparingly. You do see “the man” and “the woman” in stories as pronouns, and in stories involving aliens you may be likely to see “the human(s)” if there are far more aliens than humans in the room. But using it as the only indicator that your character is an animal-person is, well, lazy.

Think of it this way: why are you a furry? Why have you made your own character with unique traits? If you’re a wolf: why is one wolf different from another? Why is a wolf different than a cat? They both have fur, so they’re the same, right? You wouldn’t want your wolf drawn with furless human ears or no tail (unless your wolf was SUPPOSED to have furless human ears or no tail) if you bought a commission, so why would you want your wolf to be basically a human when written?

#12

That’s exactly my point. That is fascinating. I would want to read that story. Maybe most of the society shuts down for 3-5 months but not everyone can. We have nights shifts and swing shifts and rotating shifts in our society because things have to continue (hospitals, production, utilities, etc.), so if you have a character in a bear society that has to stay up and be one of these people, how does this effect him and his relationships and his life? It creates a whole other conflict and dynamic to a story and it didn’t take much work at all to implement.

Plot and story are all fine and good, but if I forget what species a character is because the writer didn’t give a damn about that aspect and just wanted it to be a dog or a cat for furry sake and I have to fumble back to the beginning of the story to remember, you have taken me out of the story. I am once again reminded that I’m reading and I personally find it annoying in a lot of cases. Especially when it’s a published work I paid money for. If I’m reading it for free on a gallery site, that’s a different thing all together. You get what you pay for, or at least you should.

#13

You’re assuming here though that what I described couldn’t have a use (well, almost assuming, except where you asked X3). Sometimes by using fur, or alien, or something not human, the main goal is to further impose an alien atmosphere. A setting significantly different from our own. I agree though, that if it’s just a one-and-done description where the four eyes and ten arms are never used again, then it negates the point and, yes, you might as well have used human and been done with it.

So perhaps you summed it up best. It’s important to ask yourself why these characters aren’t human, and then remind yourself as you write the story. Because if you, the writer forgets the whole point, then so will the reader.

#14

I also find that this happens due to stuffing too many species into a story. We seem to have this notion that, like the fandom, where you can go to a gathering and get an assortment of species, that our worlds should also be filled to the brim with different species. Two characters can never be the same kind of animal and each one is randomly picked. The species choices just become another field to fill out on the character sheet.

Authors just want ‘variety’ in the characters. It becomes more of a mess of trying to remember which character is the wolf, which is the fox, who’s the ferret, and which one is the tiger because they all have tails and flick their ears like good furry characters.

#15

And here I always felt guilty for having a planet made of 90% felines X3

Seriously though, it’s not that difficult as a writer to remember who is what species when you’ve either written them or rp’ed with them often enough. There’s times when you specifically made this character a wolf for a good reason or that one a stoat for a different reason. However, it’s easy to forget that readers don’t have the same experiences with these characters as the writers do. This is why I like mixing it the species as the pronoun right along with ‘the child’, ‘her’, etc. As long as you don’t go overboard with how many species you’re juggling, and there are distinct enough actions and traits, it makes it far easier for the reader to remember, “Oh yeah, Frank’s a cat while Jane’s a rabbit.”

#16

This is why sometimes, instead of asking “could this character be human without changing any aspect of the story,” it’s worth asking “could this character be a different species without changing any aspect of the story?” It’s the same core issue, just looked at from a different side of the prism.

#17

Interesting that this thread should come along when I’m working up material for a panel I’ll be giving at MFF in a few weeks.

First of all, I do have a preference for furry characters/races where the animal characteristics are relevant to the story, the setting, the characters, and so forth. Everything from the kind of homes they live in, the way they socialize, what senses are dulled or enhanced, all make for interesting story possibilities.

Having said that, could there be reasons why one would choose to use furry characters in a setting that is largely human, and whose behavior is largely “humans in fursuits”? One possible answer has to do with reader/writer motivation. As the host of one furry podcast once said of writing, if using furry characters helps motivate you to write a story you might not otherwise feel like writing if you made them human, do you really need any better reason than that to use them? As a reader, I can think of a lot of stories where having furries as characters makes it much more enjoyable to imagine than if they were humans. I doubt I’d ever read a football-themed gay romance if it involved humans but I have enjoyed Out of Position and its sequels. A second possible reason to use furries, as more than one comic artist has pointed out, is that it sidesteps some of the race/ethnicitiy issues you’d have to dance around if you were using humans. If you start employing stereotypes involving blacks, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, etc. in your story, people are going to get offended, but you can use stereotypes involving foxes, wolves, rabbits, skunks, and so forth and you’re far less likely to upset people.

One observation that came to mind while writing this - if your story world has a menagerie of different anthropomorphized species, it is more likely to devolve into a mostly human-like world where the furry/animal characteristics are more cosmetic or superficial. If you want to go deeper into making your furry world and your furry characters more animal-like or alien, distinct from humans in more substantial ways, it may be easier to pull off if you focus on one or two species.

#18

All of these are examples of utilizing the character’s species in some way. Even in OOP the species has an importance, from things such as scent nutrilizers needing to be used in spaces where several others are likely to be stuck in a stuffy atmosphere (an airport) to the fact that that the species of the character plays heavily into the positions in football they play.

Even if your only reason to use furry character is to sidestep the issues with stereotypes and utilize those brought on by anthro animals, then that’s still a good reason to use them. It actually addds something to the story.

The general complaints come from the stories that, quite literally, have no reason for the characters to be animals. The stories that if you changed the prounouns and edited out the mention of them being the animal, there would literally be zero difference to the story.

#19

I think I used to be more like that when I first found the fandom years ago and was curious about whatever fiction was available. These days, I’m really not interested in reading furry fiction just because it’s furry – that is, furry content alone isn’t necessarily enough to pique my interest in genres I don’t typically enjoy. There has to be some other hook for me, however slight, besides just having animal-people involved.

#20

Too lazy to edit previous post… :slight_smile:

Not for the first draft.

For the second draft, though, I think consideration is probably in order, if you’re writing for any audience other than yourself – the same way you’d consider other aspects of your story as you revise, for the best possible effect.