Furry, originally uploaded by Raul Crimson.

I’d like to start this Subculture series with furries. One of the oldest and subcultures in Second Life, in fact, as most of the subcultures they are older than SL.

Wikipedia says about furries:

Furry is an adjective referring to something covered in fur.

As a slang word, furry may also refer to:

• A member of the furry fandom—fans of artwork, stories, and related products (comics, movies, costumes, etc.) which feature anthropomorphic animals
• An animal character with anthropomorphic characteristics also known as:
  • Funny animal in cartooning (which may have human type characters and fandoms referred to as Skins.)
  • Kemono in Japanese art and culture
  • Talking animal

And the Second Life Wiki says… well, it says nothing.

There is a great variety of furries in SL, surely as much as furry residents, anyway there is a lot of foxes, maybe because the default furry avatar when you sign up in Second Life is a “cartoon fox”. There are a lot of variety, from dragons to bulls, from horses to bats, all kind of anthropomorphic animals.

Furries are usually discriminated is lots of parts of the grid (don’t ask me why, i don’t understand any kind of discrimination), I saw some clubs with a “No Furries” sign in the entrance. This discrimination is also called “Furrism”. In Search you even can find “Anti-Furries” groups calling for the “total annihilation of the furries” (sad, but true). Some months ago, there were reported a lot of attacks to furry residents by members of this groups. Most of the “Anti-Furry” groups were deleted by Linden Lab because TOS violation, but still you can find some.

Maybe because all this discrimination, furries normally stay in their own regions and normally they don’t mix too much with “humans”, Furnation is one of the furry continents (private owned).

Lately, some narrow minds accused furries of bestiality (because their SLex, also called “Yiff” by furries), if we follow this logic we can call “killer” the people who play with weapons in SL or “gangsters” who play some RPG in Midian City, so i consider this logic directly stupid.

Furry is a rich community, full of wonderful and nice people, full of fantasy. The bad part is sometimes they go on the defensive because all this problems i mentioned before.

Looking at each other eyes, originally uploaded by Raul Crimson.

Reading this Looker Lumet post some ideas came to my mind. Specially this question: What is love in Second Life?

Eric and me were partners the last 8 months, we have a great Second Life together, sharing emotions, home, laughts, even some tear. We are SLovers too. We have projects, SL dreams. We love to spend time together. We respect each other, we trust each other. We are friends in SL. We are friends in RL, separated by more than 10000 km, but real friends. Is this SLove? Yes, i call it love.

Crazy people at a crazy party, originally uploaded by Raul Crimson.

The metaverse is full of different lifestyles, we can call them cultures, subcultures or whatever you prefer. I prefer the word subculture because i think Second Life is a culture itself.

I’d like to start a series about all this. For me is one of the most interesting parts of Second Life. Some people choose to be a part of a subculture as a way to express themselves inside a group, ok, but why?

I think some people does it for aesthetic reasons (kinda “nekos are coool”), some for philosophical reasons, some just because his friends are in this subculture, … Anyway, i’m not here to question the reasons of people, we are all free and mature enough to do our choice, or, at least, we are supposed to be.

Most of the subcultures of Second Life distinguish by clothing, body parts, avatar style, places to be, attitude or social behaviour, even aggressiveness to another subcultures.

I want to celebrate diversity with this series, but, in my opinion, some subcultures have… hmmm… “dark sides” (not sure if this expression is good enough). I’ll try to talk about them with respect, but always giving my thinking.

Of course you all can use comments to say your thoughts, to say “hey, Raul, you’re terribly wrong” or “Yes, but i think…”, well, feel free to comment.

Oh! I almost forgot the disclamer!!! “The comments and posts by this blog’s editor are exclusively his opinion and don’t pretend to be universal truth, besides, are opinions about groups of people, for this reason they can generalize too much.”