THE PACK Message Boards

First off, I'd like to say that Therianthropy and Furries are two seperate entities. A lot of furries can be therians and vice versa but they are not the same thing mostly. The defination of the word furry really does not help with this though. Secondly, SA pretty did what they did best with that article. They picked up the worst example of something and mocked it without end and rightfully so given the attitude of those Packland people.

Personally for people who are over the top like such Packland people, I see it as three types of people.

1. Idiots who have no grasp of reality
2. Loonies
3. Immature people who have not realised how far they are going.

Now most therians I know are reasonable yet there are always some who have flown over the Cookoo's nest, so to speak. These types also tend to be very defensive of their notion of therianthropy and will blow up quite fast if you challenge it.

The whole "humans are evil thing" stems from love of the enviroment. For a therian pov it makes sense. You are an animal and seeing said animal butchered by humanity sets you off. Some therians have also have bad experiances with people that own furthers this and humans are seen as dirty, cruel and vile. They also build up an image that wolves are proud, noble and loyal and do not sin against mother nature like we do. This is a debatebly stupid, attitude wise to take but it explains why some are so hateful to humanity. In a way its kind of an extension of the Noble Savage image.

Frankly its a hard issue but I've given my 2 pence.

Ever wonder why there are fifty billion wolf therians, vastly outnumbering any other kind of animal? Ever wonder why none of the "p-shifters" can ever provide one shred of evidence for their abilities? Curious about how they can go around blasting "hoomans," and yet continue to happily live out their high school suburbanite lives, buying useless plastic junk, browsing the Internet, and generally acting like the very fleshy pink creatures they claim to hate?

Because for every 1 therian genuinely interested in some kind of real psychological or spiritual phenomenon, there are 10 goobers who latched onto it for the social aspect. These latter therians are the ones you'll encounter most often on the Internet, and they're the reason why if there's a "real" therianism out there, you'll be hard pressed to define it. They understand therianthopy only as some kind of subculture, or social identity, where they can live out their magical animal fantasies with other people who are just like them. It's all a fantasy RPG daydream, and in this respect, it's different than furry fandom; at least furries have the good sense to publicly acknowledge that cartoons aren't real.

There's a reason why most of them are teenagers. In 10 years, they will look back and realize with embarrassment how lame they were behaving.

The bottom line is: don't take internet therianism seriously.

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.

One could also see Therianthropy as a form of Shamanism, and Furriness as a form of Recreation...

But that's no fun, is it?

RedEye wrote:One could also see Therianthropy as a form of Shamanism, and Furriness as a form of Recreation...

But that's no fun, is it?

You could do that, but I don't shaman-people regulary curse out 'humans'.

RedEye wrote:One could also see Therianthropy as a form of Shamanism, and Furriness as a form of Recreation...

But that's no fun, is it?

The percentage of wannabes per actual practitioner are probably identical to therianism as well.

Wicca is like that too. For every one person who takes it seriously, there are a thousand dumb tweens that just sit around trying to cast stupid love and revenge spells while they sit around eating cake and listening to Evanescence on the weekends.

Terastas wrote:

RedEye wrote:One could also see Therianthropy as a form of Shamanism, and Furriness as a form of Recreation...

But that's no fun, is it?

The percentage of wannabes per actual practitioner are probably identical to therianism as well.

Wicca is like that too. For every one person who takes it seriously, there are a thousand dumb tweens that just sit around trying to cast stupid love and revenge spells while they sit around eating cake and listening to Evanescence on the weekends.

Well... wicca is a bad example, because wicca itself is kind of a joke; I can't take any pseudo-religion seriously that was popularized by a voyeuristic old codger whose primary objective was to try and get women to take their clothes off.

Thankfully, I only had a mentality similar to that when I was like, twelve and swiftly got better. As a furry I don't hate humanity (quite the opposite actually, being as I love technology and civilization), and I kept my s*** on the down-low because, y'know, if people wanted to know, they'd ask, right?

Morkulv wrote:
Now I know that articles on SA are not to be taken seriously, but if those screencaps are real from that forum Packlands, I am kinda worried about the people who post there. I've also been a part of various otherkin/therian communities over the years and I must say that I also encountered a lot of over the top posts about people who seem really confused with the reality of things in my opinion. Especially people who talk to down to other people as 'humans' seems to be a good example. Its easy to laugh at these sort of things, but I kinda feel that its a bit sad at the same time and I hope that people like that are young and will change their perspective with time.

Oh, they're real. One of the sites I frequent has been in the WW once and I can assure you they editted nothing. With a big enough site (or a few sufficiently crazy members) you get more than enough material for one of these articles.

All they really do is pull them out of context. Though most of those aren't much better in-context, I'd wager. I'm fairly certain Ebon Lupus has an ED article or so dedicated to his antics, for instance.

Oh, and:

The article wrote: Tim Allen spotted, fifth post down

I lol'd hard. xD

That was awesome.

Best part of the entire thing.

About the SA article:

1. Snippets of conversation, originating anywhere and from anyone, tend to sound hillarious and bizzarre. Go to highschool, stop by a random lunch table, and start eavedropping -- I promise it'll sound weird.

2. Snippets of conversation are also generally taken out of context.

3. Even therians find a lot of other therians to make absurd claims, but are often too polite to call them out. Think of the strange comments we get on the Pack -- would you like to be characterized by them, too?

4. Therians are not alone -- many of these posts could have easily have been written by a non-therian.

5. The atmosphere at most therian forums tends to be unusually open. Therianthropy is a personal topic for most therians, and is considered the core essence of their person -- as a result, to be capable of expressing your therianthropy to someone also means feeling like you have the liberty to express...everything else.

6. I'm a therian, I LOL'd at a good number of these. : )

outwarddoodles wrote: 3. Even therians find a lot of other therians to make absurd claims, but are often too polite to call them out. Think of the strange comments we get on the Pack -- would you like to be characterized by them, too?

Indeed. Especially in the introducting-section there were a couple of people who introduced themselves as a genuine wolf or werewolf, but usually they restrain from posting much since my guess is that they don't like people who don't believe their story.

Morkulv wrote:

RedEye wrote:One could also see Therianthropy as a form of Shamanism, and Furriness as a form of Recreation...

But that's no fun, is it?

You could do that, but I don't shaman-people regulary curse out 'humans'.

Actually, they do, especially when those other humans are screwing around with something important to the Shaman's community. Shamans use their animal counterparts for contact with the world above; if somebody starts killing off those contact animals, comminication can become difficult or impossible.