Somebody once said of the furry fandom: "Ask ten furs what it means to be furry and you'll get a dozen answers."
The same, I believe, is true of therianthropy. The two do overlap sometimes, but they are still separate entities. . .
Or so the therians claim. Berserker's right that, for every one true therian there are ten wannabes, but on top of that, for every one true therian there are also ten burned furs that don't have the capacity to just brush off $.A. and E.D. as a load of bologna and use "therian" as an alternative term to set themselves above the furry fandom.
That's not the only way in which therianism and furry fandom overlap, but it is the primary cause for confusion I believe: the fact that a lot of therians are basically just furries who are too uptight to call themselves such.
Regarding the "screengrabs," don't take them too seriously as Something Awful almost
never uses them within the context of the actual discussion. But yes, chances are that every single one of those "questionable posts" was written by some
ladedah for whom their therianthropy
only exists in their online lifestyle. In fact, I'm willing to bet that 99% of all furs
and therians don't let their interests influence anything
except their online activities.
Yes, they can be taken too far.
Everything can be taken too far one way or another, so I'm not going to bother going into details.
Yes, the ones that look down on "hyoomans" are the worst in my opinion too, but this is hardly a problem that's unique unto therians. It's human nature to want to believe that you're just naturally better than everyone around you, and you typically respond to that desire in one of three ways:
1) Try to
justify those feelings through accomplishment and self-betterment.
2)
Romanticize the life you're living now and/or wound up stuck in as somehow being "the only life."
3)
Rebel by associating with some counter-culture so you can look down on the "lemmings" without having to work for it.
Therians that look down on "hyoomans" in this case belong to the third category. It's likely that capacity to scorn the human race from a non-human perspective that was their only motivation in associating with therianism in the first place.
Part of the problem is that the one true therian, the ten wannabes and the ten "thurries" (I love calling them that - it drives them nuts ^_^) are all going to claim that they are that one true therian. Just like with the furry fandom, there are a million different definitions for what therianism means. It's not a question of how to define it so much as how to recognize one kind of therian from another.
