one of my favorite albums, too!

BTW, I know there are a lot of people to whom the furry community is just a thing that produces furry porn for them to consume and "being a furry" = looking at furry porn sometimes. A lot of those people on the outside have been joining the community and finding out how awesome it is since covid.

We need to be mutually held and participate in community, but not just online if it's found family. I sometimes look at how acquaintances I have in this community live and think: is this all we want to settle for? Being stuck in the same loops of distraction and dissociated into screens so much?

For a lot of us here, the most we can ask is to deal with our own religious trauma and just try to keep our heads above water in this brutal economy that provides no certain future for so many. And we're often so addicted to screens and distraction, we're going through days on autopilot.

I want to be able to have a found family to be mutually interdependent with. Even though I'm not having kids, I hope to live in a multigenerational community with shared values, who try to be there for each other and help each other be good people. Religion, in the best case, does this by default.

I think a lot of people do have that kind of loyalty, and families abandon and reject and neglect people in the family as well. But families are by default socially expected to be highly loyal to each other, including when someone is struggling and it costs happiness to people helping them.

If a community of friends and found family comes together and stays together because we all like our mutual company so much, then our social value to each other is kinda conditional. Will people be there when your struggling, even when it compromises your ability to provide good company?

So part of the function of a family support network is to provide mutual help even when it compromises individual happiness. One of the scenarios my (neurotic) mind goes to is developing a health condition that would not only disable me, but affect my personality where I'd be harder to be with.

Because it's spawned from online culture, it can have an easy-come, easy-go tendency where connections are formed and lost easily. If a relationship isn't contributing to your happiness anymore, there's not a strong sense of obligation to that relationship, people move on quickly.

I've experienced the furry community as being the most badass, thoughtful, empathetic, open minded and wonderful people anywhere, so I'm glad to find found family there. At the same time, our culture is deeply individualistic and individual happiness is valued above a lot of other values.

This community functions as a place to be received by found family for many people who are trying to replace what's lost by the ongoing disconnection from traditions and extended family networks one could plug into before. But I often think "found family" is an idea that's thrown around too easily.

It seems that in North American, in the past couple decades, a lot of people looked at organized religion and decided organized religion ain't it (probably from receiving the message they weren't welcome there from fundamentalist religion).

I could never to a lot of smaller, cheaper commissions, like colored sketches, in my experience. I just don't have the right brain to keep coming up with new things that fast and switching between projects throughout a day. I wanted to be able to do these for Patreon and stuff, but I always failed.

Then they're just anthro wolves! And that depends whether we're imagining a universe where anthros are accepted in society etc

Asking questions like these are how fan fiction gets written.

you can't just out yourself like that, like superman revealing his secret identity or whatever!

He has a good physbone setup in his paws

Bane of Kings is a badass title