@Antanicus u damn fucking right 👏🏼😩

@literorrery i wouldn’t call the furry community a “fandom” in that sense cuz there is no centralized source material to be loyal to. which is why i rlly love it and i’m glad to call myself a furry. because there is no Required Reading to devote to and no stupid ass headcanons to accept as religious fact either. all u need is to like seeing anthros and maybe think of a version of urself as one. it’s only a “fandom” as much as like, contemporary paganism or basketball is. 🙂💞

@weirdoslam Interesting distinction! I still call it a fandom -- hence my question -- but the lack of a central media list does weird the space compared to other defined fandoms. It often feels to me as though furry shares more in common with religious spaces than media fandom, but I fully accept that may be more because of my own value system and beliefs than because of anything inherent in furry. Within the potential of furry, maybe, but not obligatory to participation.

@literorrery yeah yeah yeah!! i think ur absolutely right on that!! furryism is an open source interest-community 💕

@weirdoslam
Counterpoint: I think a lot of them are just trying to find a community, a place to belong, and an identity, which is not easy when everything and everyone is commodified.

I'm all for proletarian politics, but I do think that most of those you speak of are just teens who want to be good people, and aggression won't be the way to convincing them.

@krakob yeah i know that too. i WAS one of those tumblr teens just a few years ago for fucks sake. that’s why i’m angry. not even so much at the teens themselves but how much youth culture has been authortarianized by neoliberalism into almost just a marketing demographic

@weirdoslam
If it's a distinct group you can bet your ass someone's gonna profit off of them /shrug

@krakob it wasnt always such a overtly corporate playground tho. probs the example i can best give to compare to now (with my knowledge as a amateur music historian and critic) is the left-libertarian youth-led music movements of the past: punk, post-punk, grunge, rave, disco, even nu metal: the point of these communities wasnt to worship the works of a singular artist or group, in fact some flat out discouraged that. it was very focused on how ur own individuality was accepted communally

@krakob u were very much encouraged to make ur own music, host & dj your own parties, write and sing and/or rap and/or scream your own lyrics, make ur own zines, learn your own three chords and start your own band. and once u did u had the full support of ur similarly rebellious and anti-corporate (and even some anti-capitalist) friends to express urself to everyone while still being able to pay basic rent and food. these communities still exist for sure, but they def arent the norm anymore. 🙁💔

@weirdoslam
Political music just seems so dead to my generation. Landed somewhere between millenials and gen Z and I can't think of more than one or two friends who even play instruments to begin with. It's a bummer.

@krakob ahh!!! i’m actually around ur age tbh and i kinda have a quite a bit of libertarian socialist music pals!! online mostly but still 💕 if u want u can pm me ur discord then i can add u to my server of them 😛

like the most recent thing, and probs the worst thing yet, i seen them fawn over is fucking hamilton. jfc for people who so want to be seen as committed to racial justice and promoting black culture on its own terms they seem to REALLY LOVE this fucking musical where well known genocidal slave plantation owners and bosses of early capitalism rap about their ideas of “democracy” and its “progressive” now cuz they are played by poc. what the fuck

@weirdoslam and yeah more then a few times i saw fan art of hamilton were those same slave owners are now queer poc 20-somethings living in brooklyn and are now Woke Baes and it never ceases to make me nauseous and want to send them a epub copy of The Society of the Spectacle to them

@weirdoslam I don’t think that the Hamilton fandom understands this, but what’s progressive about that show isn’t the characters in it. It’s that PoC, whose stories are told for them over and over again by white people, took The Whitest Story Ever Told and told it for themselves in their parlance. It’s appropriation vengeance, and I love that part of it. (Though I have a lot of issues with the show itself.)

@SuzanEraslan but it’s not critiquing any part of it tho. it’s literally retelling the same story of genocide and slavery and domination without any real negatives. the most u get is just a “welp that’s bad but what can u!” which i hate even more then explict endorsement. and also it received massive endorsement by white neoliberal statecrafters which should say a lot about this postmodern minstrel show

@SuzanEraslan https://www.currentaffairs.org/2016/07/you-should-be-terrified-that-people-who-like-hamilton-run-our-country this says it better then i can

@weirdoslam Yeah, I read that two years ago when it was first written, and I think it (and said white neolibs) missed the entire point. Which... is sad. It’s not a celebration of the founding of the US as written, which the Clinton-types and even the Obamas, etc., seemed to take it as.

@SuzanEraslan nah i think it was. i mean, look at all that shit that lin-manunel since? clinton fundrasers? toothless charity singles? disney soundtracks? rlly u shouldnt be expecting any less centrist imperalist bullshit 🤧

@weirdoslam I mean, I'm going to have to disagree with you here, because I've met the guy, know several people who know him quite well, and live in his neighborhood... like, is he hip to the idea that The State, as an institution, is bad an intrinsically oppressive? Nah. But the guy is Nuyorican, so his relationship to the United States, and *particularly* imperialism, is a lot more nuanced than just "RAH RAH, HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT!"

@SuzanEraslan what? u actually know the dude? how? (and why even?)

@weirdoslam Because I work in theatre in New York. It’s a small community.

@SuzanEraslan oh that’s something 👀
i don’t know much about theater tbh but my taste is more brechtesque for sure
example 1: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/fugazi-returns-through-opera/