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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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I doubt any kid is gunna wear a full mascot costume to school outside of the actual school mascot. Those costumes cost thousands of dollars to buy and at least half a grand to make from scratch and proper cleaning and maintenance means it fits into furry culture in the same function as wearing a tux . It's a rare highschool student who can afford one and a rarer one who would risk wearing one where it might be ruined.
The most you are likely to see is Halloween style cat ears and tails of the variety that are readily bought at the gift shop of a zoo... Which kids love to wear because kids like animals in a "I'm pretending I'm a tiger grrr rawr!" schoolyard kind of way.
Kids like weird stuff and have a narrow band of time to play pretend and express themselves beyond adult judgment. Trying to up the humiliation factor and traumatizing kids for doing regular kid stuff and coming down hard on a largely made up problem is just double mild weak sauce in action. Guy's a jerk.
I don't know if any kid beyond the age of like 5 that acts like an animal. 30 years ago when I was in school it was never a thing either.
There's a huge difference between a kid (under 10) and a young adult (17, 28 or older) doing this stuff. You know as well as I do that Furries aren't just a group of kids playing as animals on the playground for an hour, it goes a lot deeper than that.
I mean 20 years ago it was already a thing. I have enough friends who were at very least furry adjacent to know that for the majority of them it was basically a lower key funny art thing with an element where people were expressing themselves kind of the same way they resonated with like horoscopes and things with a fashion element. Like we had people who wore cat ears because they thought they were cute or drew avatars of themselves and their friends as animals because of some sort of perceived caracature of your traits physical or personality based.
Cosplay culture was something that was on the rise when I was a kid but being a goth was huge when I was in school. It was all skulls, vampire shit, and leather spiked collars, bracers , trenchcoats and fishnets and kind of kitschy fake witchcraft you pretended was actually spooky ... But of all the kids that kind of were into it most were completely oblivious to how many of those fashion elements came from the bdsm and fetish community and really couldn't have cared less because that wasn't why they liked it. SO many of us were complete prudes by any standard. Like, of my cohort of goth kids about 75 percent of us were still virgins when we graduated.
Teenagers like to play dressup just like your 5 year old does, that's why anime conventions are so dang popular. We're just old now and the stuff changes and it doesn't make sense to us.
Wearing cat ears or drawing someone as an animal isn't as extreme wearing a full-body animal suit and telling people to call you "buttercup", that's the shit I'm talking about.
Also you can't even compare being Goth to being a Furry.
Yeah I can. I know enough furries through the queer community that I can see the parallels.
Don't give me that full body animal suit bullcrap. Most your particularly well off kid can afford is a head, gloves and tail and you can't even wear those things for more than a couple of days a month without ruining them. The heads and bodysuits are big sweaty nasty things that need to be aired out regularly and break down internally over time because foam doesn't hold up forever. Even your hardest core furry isn't going to waste the limited hours of wear of their precious suit to school barring maybe a show and tell assignment or Halloween.
Laws like this are just gunna target the kids who are harmlessly wearing animal ears and tails like we wore spiked collars and bracers and wasting everyone's time on an imaginary problem that's gunna hit the struggling "weird kids" in desperate need of joy. It's tiring.
Regardless of all that, dressing up as an animal and taking on that persona is odd. Goth kids are still dressing like humans , Goth kids are about as close to Furries as Punk kids are to Furries.
So your argument is that Furries are weird? You've met teenagers right?
Both subcultures are a self expression thing. Is it cringe? Sure, to us but so is Goth kid ennui and the obsession with The Craft and putting in fake vampire fang. But to that kid it's a fun something that helps alleviate some of the stress and boredom during a stressful time where they don't have a whole lot of autonomy yet.
And the whole "fursona" thing is generally fairly tame. I doubt they really choose to express that much in a school setting just like we left the Vampire the Masquerade Tabletop RPG at home because letting your full freak flag fly at school still has consequences of other people not understanding your niche and being jerks about it.
The exception is those that have have some sort of mental disability in which case the animal aspect of chosen presentation is really not the problem because the kid will still be odd. The autistic kid really into anime who Naruto runs through the hallway between classes would just find something else to be odd about because that's just how it is. Teachers still enforce boundries of what is acceptable non disruptive behaviour in their classes and all but the least able kids know that there is a place and time for doing as they please. Do we really have to care what harmless weird things kids are up to between classes?