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Today's Document
One Nice Bug Per Day
Cosimo Galluzzi
d e v o n
KIROKAZE
sheepfilms
DEAR READER
dirt enthusiast
Peter Solarz
art blog(derogatory)
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
tannertan36
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
izzy's playlists!
Love Begins
Show & Tell
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I'd rather be in outer space đ¸
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@qremlin
Pinned Post
Iâm Qremlin (KRem-lin) or Elu, Iâm 26 and use he/him pronouns. Iâve been awakened as a wolf therian for 10+ years now. đşđŠľ
Iâm transmasc and queer in multiple other ways. Iâm engaged to my wonderful mate, @paleobull.
I follow back from my main blog, @flipclock. If youâre on Bluesky, Iâm on there under macchiato.bsky.social!
I found this sign 2 years ago in paris after entering the hĂ´tel de ville metro station. normally these symbols just show a regular human but this particular one portrays a fox because the station runs parallel to the rue du renard (âstreet of the foxâ). I also saw one in this style with a bird-person (a pigeon?) but I donât know where, didnât take a picture and also donât know why that one exists
"monster" Please, if you are reblogging, avoid the hashtag "dog". Because I portrayed wolves.
i just bought one of the most affirming pieces of gear i own- ahhh!!
run to spencerâs MEOW! claw rings!!!!
itâs a set of 5 but the other two donât fit my smaller fingers, iâll split them evenly on my other pawâs pointer and middle :33
i also almostttt bought a collar (brown with silver bone charms along it) but chickened out :(
I'm seeing a lot of posts on my dash lately about how therian culture has become more materialistic, how therians feel the need to have masks and tails because everyone on TikTok has them, how back in the day we didn't do any of this and connected with our theriotypes in ways that didn't require money.
I get what they're trying to say, but I want to share a different perspective.
I made my first piece of gear when I was 11, in a time not just before TikTok but before most people had internet in their homes, period. I didn't know what a furry was, let alone a therian, but I knew that the tails and costumes in Super Mario Bros. 3 made me feel a strange longing.
I made that first tail out of felt, superglue, fabric scraps for stuffing, and a safety pin to attach it to the back of my pants. With the materials I already had in my house, it couldn't have cost more than ÂŁ5 and was probably a lot less. It wasn't an act of shameless consumption or an attempt to get likes or views; I did it because I felt bad that I didn't have a tail and felt better having one. I was dysphoric.
When I first discovered the online therian community (at the time it was called the were community, as in werewolf), I found that most people had negative attitudes towards tails, ears, and what we now call "gear". It was associated with the furry community, and furries were "gross perverts" who were "just roleplaying" animals. If you were really an animal, you didn't need any of that stuff, you were just a poser.
As a result, I ended up spending a lot more time in the otherkin community, where things like costuming and even getting your ears pointed were more accepted.
When I see young therians today, with their cardboard masks and yarn tails- things that probably didn't cost any more to make than my own first tail- I don't see rampant consumerism. These are mostly people putting in effort to handcraft their own appearances, or in some cases, buying them from small makers. In them, I see myself at 11 trying to feel better about my body.
Plus, I see a wonderful way for people to share photos and videos of themselves that are affirming, without doxxing themselves. Showing your face on camera is a huge risk in this age of surveillance, and it's especially risky for young people. If it's a trend for folks to wear face coverings when posting pictures and it makes them feel euphoric, it's a trend I wholeheartedly endorse.
I'm glad they have that outlet. I'm glad it isn't "cringe" anymore to wear a mask or a tail, or to draw lines on your shoes with permanent marker to look like paws (another practically free trend that I see a lot). I'm glad therians have more ways to recognise each other in public. I'm glad if, in this world where we'll probably never have the bodies we long for, we can at least have something.
And yes, it's worth challenging our relationship to material goods. But ask yourself if you're more angry at the miniscule amounts of consumerism you can see, just because you can see it, than at the big companies that are generating the vast majority of emissions, plastic waste and food waste. A little industrial sabotage would do so much more good than shaming every therian on TikTok, which will do precisely zilch.
And also? Materialism and consumerism aren't unique to therians. Our society has become increasingly focused on cheap clothing and trinkets the past few decades, and kids are growing up with that as their normal. It's not these teens' fault that the generations before them made a world where materialism is easy and encouraged, nobody is born with an innate understanding of capitalism and sustainability and it's weird to act like kids participating in the society they were born into is some sort of vice. If there had been easy access to cheap therian accessories when I was 14 I absolutely would've purchased some, and anyone who says they wouldn't have done the same is lying.
I think the other piece people tend to miss about "gear" is that the reason most of the nonhumans doing this are teens is because they're at a developmental stage where they're becoming independent and forming their identity. Young therians wearing gear in public is functionally no different than any non-alterhuman teen expressing their identity through the way they dress, it just requires more work because animal parts aren't standard clothing items. A teen therian making a dollar store yarn tail reads exactly the same to me as a trans teen making a packer out of a pair of socks. It's all just a way to alleviate dysphoria and show your inner identity to others. I think it's an incredibly brave and honest thing to do.
Teenage and young adult years are all about self-exploration and experimenting with how you present yourself, but adults have a tendency to see that in younger generations and go "ugh, cringe" as though they've forgotten they were haphazard teens themselves at one pointâ or just as likely, they do remember but have decided to be embarrassed about it and project that feeling onto others. There's also been a historical tendency in the therian community to avoid being associated with furries or roleplayers as a way to make our identities somehow more credible or respectable, and I think that's an incredibly silly and frankly miserable mindset to have. I think more adults need to remember what being a teen was like, and to channel that same unabashed willingness to experiment with self-expression and defy social norms in their current lives. Everyone would be better off for it.
My single qualm with the current gear trend is that it's lead to some people thinking wearing gear is a requirement to be nonhuman, but that's due to misinformation floating around places like tiktok and not really anyone's fault.
It used to be more common to see "kin kits" and the like that were just collages of items a person could buy, to fit a theme of an animal or character. That's more consumerist than some handmade crafts. Like, by nature, making some stuff with items around your house for the purpose of enjoyment, not making money, is the opposite of consumerist lol.
I mean yeah, think about what being nonhuman means to you beyond just a fashion statement, and remember that it's more than instagram likes and performing for followers, but there's nothing wrong with wearing a funny little mask while you're at it. It doesn't work for me because it just emphasizes the incorrect body underneath, but more power to you if it does.
Oh, and a thing I forgot- a few years back @dragotoxins bought a lion tail for Halloween. It was like $10 and attached to our belt, and we wore it to work and around town for a couple weeks. I think that was the closest we ever got to the euphoric vibes that gear gives some people. It didn't totally relieve it, but it helped. I think the best feeling was actually seeing how it changed our shadow in the sun. It was enough to trick our mind a little bit. Maybe we'll do it again! Buying an occasional trinket or thing isn't a sin, just don't spiral into trying to fill your dysphoria with more and more objects.
I don't disagree with y'all's core points. Gear can be very meaningful, even sacred. I've seen it help people feel aligned with themselves. I mean hell, I just got some pointed ears myself â That's not what I and others making these arguments are pushing back against, though.
What frustrates me is how the entire image of therianthropy (and by extension alterhumanism, and by extension nonhumanity in general) has been swallowed by the mask-and-tail aesthetic. It's not that the kids are making cardboard wolf heads, it's that now, that is the only thing anyone sees. The serious spiritual and psychological dimensions of being nonhuman are drowned out by a constant stream of performative gear videos. It is virtually impossible to find real discussion anymore without wading through a thousand videos or images of people crawling on all fours in the same $20 mask.
And, if we're being honest, most of these masks (and tails) aren't lovingly DIY'd in some etsy store run from a heartfelt cottage. They're mass-produced, bought from Amazon or Spirit Halloween, customized, and flipped. Nothing wrong with that, but pretending this is all handmade resistance to capitalism is revisionist. It's aesthetic consumerism dressed up as self-expression, and that's fine, but let's call it what it is.
I'm not saying "no one should wear masks." I'm not even saying "If you wear or buy gear you're a consumerist hack." I'm saying I'm tired of masks being the only language this community speaks anymore. It used to be about gnosis, about embodiment, about mystery and longing â now it's just another visual trend algorithmically boosted into dominance. Doesn't that bother you?
Doesn't it bother you how our forums are archived and erased? Doesn't it bother you how much of our community has moved onto private discord servers, making information impossible to index or access? Doesn't it bother you that it's been reduced to an aesthetic, a commodity?
I want there to be space for the real thing again. The heavy, strange, unmarketable and unrelatable-to-a-human parts of this experience that don't photograph well. Not just the costumes.
I mean, I'm personally not seeing the serious discussion drowned out by performative gear videos, but I'm also not on TikTok. If you go on TikTok you're going to find short videos of things that photograph well and not much discussion, because that's what TikTok is for. It's a short video platform. It's not a discussion forum.
If the complaint is that the kids today are all on TikTok instead of discussion forums... well, that's a problem that's a lot larger than therianthropy. It's about a handful of social media giants and how they try to monopolise our time and attention to make money, and to sway the political landscape.
(I encourage you to read this post that I just recently reblogged, if you want a sense of just how fucked up things are at these places.)
And it's not everyone. There are lots of therians making sites on Neocities, and with their tag system it's easier than ever to find them. Look at 'em! I see more therian and otherkin zines now than ever. We have online conventions like Othercon and the Centaurus Festival. And all the time, here on Tumblr, I see people making thoughtful posts about their kintypes. I really don't think the meaningful conversations have lessened. I think the easy-to-share content just got louder.
No, I don't like the algorithmic firehose of short-lived, superficial content either. That's why I'm not on TikTok; I'm here, where we actually do have discussions.
We're having one right now. Here and now, we're talking about dysphoria and the sacred and how gear and other forms of body modifications can affect those things. We can talk more about that! You mentioned pointed ears - what kind did you get, what did that mean to you? Was it a surgical ear pointing procedure or did you get the latex kind that are applied as prosthetics? I'm genuinely curious. (I considered getting ear mods myself, but my 'type doesn't have external ears, so it was more of a generic "wanting to look more animal/less human" thing. The artist who was going to do it for me was doubtful he could do them in the "flopped-over" canine style I wanted, so I never ended up getting them.)
We only get more of these conversations by having them ourselves. The space for the heavy, weird stuff appears as soon as you choose to make it - Neocities is free, talking here is free, making a shitty printer-paper zine is free, running a panel at Othercon (which they will archive if you want them to) is free. These things are never going to be algorithmically boosted because they're not marketable; that's a good thing, I think we'd both agree. But it means that you won't see them as much as you see the easily sharable photos and videos. They're still going to be a little bit out of the way, just like they were on the old web. They haven't gone anywhere.
does any other caninekin happy stim by wagging their tail? like just swaying their hips side to side or is that just me ok thx
A drawing I just made :3
Based on true events xd
i know we all love to overthink stuff but its important to remember not to lose yourself in the process. sometimes you just are, and thats okay.
this. 1000x this.
*bunny noises* <3
The comments under this post fucking suck. The therian community can be called queer, queer is a deviation from the norm and beings need to stop policing what is and isn't a therian.
Also to all those saying that "therians shouldn't be sexualised" grow the fuck up.
No I mean literally. Wait until you're an adult to have a say in this shit. I hate the therian community's attitude towards anything that can be perceived as sexual.
This post doesn't even have to be read as sexual.
I hate the therian community, I hate what it's become.
Completely agree.
Heaven forbid people find out about the freaky ass shit I, a therian, do on the regular in bed. Yeah, a good portion of therians are adults with active sex lives, and that's gonna overlap with their therian identity. Grow up.
job?? bills???? RENT???? what are you talking about!!! we are LITERALLY wolves having fun together.... let's roll around in the snow and chase each other's tails
Rivers edge
In my local craft store, there are blank animal masks right next to quarters of faux fur and felt. Itâs a silent acknowledgment of therianthropy and other ways of being nonhuman.
With platforms like Tiktok and Youtube becoming so popular, we are seeing more nonhumans/alterhumans than ever representing themselves authentically for the entire world to see.
Isnât it just amazing?
You can go onto big shopping websites and type âtherianâ or âotherkinâ and get pages upon pages of products both mass-produced and homemade. This wasnât a thing when I was a kid- if you wanted a pin or a necklace, you made it yourself.
Nonhumans and alterhumans are contributing to internet culture, making music and other art, and operating thriving businesses. Weâre in the dictionary! We have always been here, but now we are more visibly here.
Cubs out there, please STAY SAFE.
I get that you want to meet a fellow therian irl so you donât feel lonely and can have some friends like you, but please, stop making group chats, google classrooms and asking random people to join (I see so many of these on Pinterest and sometimes on Reddit itâs unreal).
The internet is full of evil humans that pretend to be someone they arenât to harm you. I totally understand that you want to be friends irl with someone like you but, especially if you ask online and post group chats or classroom codes that everyone can see, it could be very dangerous. Youâre giving your email and/or phone number to strangers when joining. Also, donât meet up with random people you get to know online alone, go with a trusted adult.
Please, think about the risks you could put yourself into. Be cautious.
With love, an animal who wants cubs to be protected.
when i miss my gf I text her wolf howl gif and sometimes she howls back and it makes me very happy awooooooo
Worldâs laziest wolf tries to howl
Still, I Rise | Abi Ashra (Tumblr)
We are NOT beating the âtherians are all tween girlsâ allegations
