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It's so telling that it's been a long established chanlord policy that "anything goes" on /b/ except furry art. Gore and snuff are fine, but that? Outrageous! 
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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I definitely support the furry community. I also support the scalies and whatever other subcategories there are. Are people wearing slug or earthworm Jim style outfits slimies? I stand behind them. Are there chitinies from the insect fanbase? Do we need separate categories for The Tick and the Mothman? I think everyone should live their best lives and I’ll use whatever collective nouns are appropriate.
But I cannot accept the Snake of the Lake having hands. Snakes very intentionally got rid of their hands in evolutionary time and it just feels like it’s breaking a rule. I could go for a Skink of the Lake - they’re pretty snake-like. It’s just that snakes are one of very few groups of animals that said “Fuck legs, they just get in the way of slithering,” and I think we need to accept that.
We're just another subset of furries, really
So I confess that I have a bit of a specialization in ants. I’m struggling with a collective noun for the fandom that likes to take on ant role playing, though.
Can we call them ant-hropomorphic?
I swear I really have studied ants quite extensively and I didn’t make that up for the pun.
Honestly, I don't know if "the fandom that likes to take on ant role playing" is enough of a thing to need a specific term. Bug furries are a tiny proportion of the overall fandom, and what few there are mostly pick species like bees and moths. I do like the pun, though.
Anyway, the releases of Bug Fables and Hollow Knight were pretty big boons to us.
That makes sense. And honestly, being an ant wouldn’t be a lot of fun unless you wanted to do a Bug’s Life version of what an ant is. Being an ant would be like being a liver cell. You get some inputs that map directly to outputs, and you’re not an individual so much as tiny part of a colony, which itself is closer to what we’d call an individual. I could go on for hours, or literally a semester. Ants can be told “We need you to be a girder. We’re building a big nest, and we need you to bite this other ant on the ass and stay there until you die so we can have a superstructure.” And the ant is like “Cool, on it!” And there’s all kinds of levels and differences and everything, but most of it isn’t aspirational except insofar as cooperation is a good idea.
If I might suggest something for the potential bug furries, using the term loosely, I’d say take a look at the jumping spiders. They’re very intelligent - like they can learn to solve puzzles. They’re beautiful and friendly and there’s an absolutely brilliant science fiction trilogy by Adrian Tchaikovsky called Children of Time that is based on the idea of that kind of civilization spiders would create if they kept their spider nature but were given human-scale intelligence. It’s extremely well written both from a literary perspective and as science.
I've had this series on my 'to read' list for a while, but I don't remember adding it and didn't remember anything about it. Thank you for this great description that doesn't give anything away with the story, you have helped move this series to be my next read.
Glad I could help! I’ve been reading science fiction for 45 or so years now, and this series - from the first book - entered into my top 5.
You almost never find a book that does hard sf on biology. Physics and engineering, sure. The only other book that comes to mind is Legacy of Heorot, where the authors went hard sf on biology and ecology.
I was constantly surprised how often in the first book I expected to scoff derisively but did not because he actually knew what he was talking about.
Yeah, that's the approach I usually see. "Anthro" implies some level of humanization after all, and that includes human cognitive ability and ways of thinking. Something like this pic is a lot more representative of typical ants (and other bugs) in the fandom than what you're describing.
Never heard of those books, though, they sound pretty cool. Might have to check them out.
On the one hand, I feel like this is a betrayal of true ant nature in the same way and to the same degree that I felt with the introduction of the Borg Queen instead of having the original colony-identity emergent phenomena of intelligence and behavior type Borg.
On the other hand, they look cool and like they’re having a great time.
I could swear I once read a scifi book which had a spaceship with an uplifted ant colony living in the walls and serving as a crewmember but I can't remember any of the plot or what it was called
"Myrmidons" lets go classy with this one
Lizards can have fat titties as a treat
I'm still of the opinion that argonian breasts are literally just fat deposits located there because the hist thought it would help them fit in with the mammals better.
where's the problem
I have a whole Star Trek related rant that I shall spare you about this very subject.
And as a frequent attendee and big fan of drag performances, I’m not going to be the boob police.
They used to go by skink of the lake, but then they'd always have to spend 10 minutes explaining what a skink is, only for the person to go "So you're the snake of the lake!"
I would totally support that. I would say that holding their hands up in a “Hey now” kind of gesture might be trying to play both sides of the coin there, but at the end of the day I am a humanist before I am a biologist, and I accept your rebuke.
there are legless lizards like the slow worm
Yes indeed, but they are rare and I’m just saying that we should embrace them for their choices.
Well, that might be a bit much, especially for the venomous ones. We should respect their choices, and it’s obviously worked out for them.
I do love the boa constrictors with the occasional random tow, though. It’s like a Hemingway cat, but for snakes.
It's not really a choice it was a genetic mutation. Also snakes do have a gene to grow legs it just grows penises instead so if it is a choice it is a weird one
We frequently use words like “choice” to speak about things like evolutionary dynamics because they make the talk more interesting. It’s a deliberate misuse of the phrase in some ways, but it implies that natural selection ended up canalizing snakes into a specific evolutionary pathway - one instead of many possible others - based on innumerable factors but all being by definition locally (in time and place) more or less favorable.
I appreciate the input and thank you for the clarification for readers - although I don’t imagine many people thought there was some Ur-snake who said “fuck these legs.”
For the record, I am an evolutionary biologist.
quite literally they grow penises in their place which was the weirdest fact I learned today
The snake from My Gym Partner’s a Monkey who has no arms but wears a shirt anyways