When it comes to the furry side of things, a lot of the traditional animals you see in these sorts of stories, well, they tend to bore the shit out of me. This isn’t to say there aren’t good stories out there with felines, canines and rabbits, just that I don’t find those forms all that…inspiring.

That said, I don’t think this has to do with those particular animals themselves. See, when it comes to furry stuff, you can go two routes. You can start with animals and then give them human traits, that is, anthropomorphize them into characters for stories, or you can take human characters and make them feral–give them animal qualities until they stop being entirely human, but sit in the middle somewhere. The feral is what I find appealing about these sorts of characters, and that’s where my stories tend to rest.

That said, those are all animals that can be adapted into a feral furry story, but coyote and tiger still feel a little…expected? And sharks go the other way–I’ve seen some furry shark stuff, and I always just kind of walk away scratching my head. This isn’t to say I wouldn’t write them if it felt natural, but I choose the animals in my stories based on plot–I don’t start out saying, “Let’s do a shark TF” and try to retrofit a story to it. Gators work because they are a natural extension of “The Swampmen,” it’s a modern myth which adapts to feral stories easy. It’s a fine line, but if a story misses is, it’ll just be crap.

Sorry, I don’t think that answered your question very well. The answer is yes, I’d write them, but because of how my writing process works, I can’t just sit down, pick a TF, and make it work. It has to be more organic than that.

The opening to city of bears series three involves some…religious stuff, but that’s all I’ve done with it.

That was the essential idea I had in mind, for sure, but we’ll see if I get a chance to expand it.

Um…not really?

I was the bully in elementary school, actually. Then my parents moved out to the Northwest, and at my new school, I was the slightly bullied loner kid for a few years until high school, where I played the role of the gay-guy-pretending-to-be-a-straight-guy-pretending-to-be-gay, if that makes sense, and I wasn’t bullied then either. So I wouldn’t say that’s why at all.

I guess, if I can say this without coming off like a completely self-righteous prick, I have a…keen sense of justice. That’s not to say I go around being judgemental or anything (or at least not on purpose) it’s just that people treating other people badly makes me feel really awful and angry. I mean, I look back on how I used to be a bit of a playground bully as a little kid, and I kind of just wish someone had slapped the shit out of me sometimes. We live in a really unjust world at the moment, and looking at it just tends to make me sick to my stomach. My stories help me combat that a bit, I guess. The fantasy of people finally getting what they deserve is just, well, relieving in many ways. Of course, fantasizing about change doesn’t do much to actually effect change, so it’s kind of worthless in the end I suppose.

I’m not sure what “she’ll” is, but I can probably put something on the docket for the other two next week. 

Um…gah, why the hard questions today? I would say that, in general, I agree with Derek Parfit as far as the self in concerned, though I with some modifications needed to account for the principles of narrativity. Basically, yes, the self must be mutable. Over my lifetime, I will be, essentially, several different people who, while they might be mentally and physically continuous over time, are likely to be vastly physically and mentally dissimilar when compared side by side. However, I think that what holds us together is as a single self are a number of socially constructed narratives–that is, we are actually our own histories, both those which we construct ourselves, and the ones constructed at large. To answer your question more directly, I would say neither–I would say that “the self” is a fiction we create because of how we perceive time, and for ease of social interaction. 

tl;dr: Neither; there is no self which is metaphysically continuous over time, only our beliefs that there ought to be, constructed through stories of responsibility and intention.

As for my personal fantasy, *sigh* I suppose it would be to be a shapeshifter, able to morph my form into any human form at will, ala mystique from the X-Men. The reasons for this choice ought to be self-explanatory. 

Hmm…well, I’m going separate those two out, because they are actually pretty different, even though the second usually entails the first to some extent. Dumbing down is, I think, appealing to me in different ways depending on the story. In the context of a revenge story, it can be satisfying to have a character who lords their intellect over all else be reduced to an idiot, but that kind of assumes that intellect is intrinsically good, and a lack of intellect intrinsically bad, and I don’t necessarily feel that way. I think that dumbing down can be positive as well, to put it differently, in that thinking simpler is often a way of thinking wiser. Intellect can over complicate the world, and often leads to as many problems as it solves–having that taken away can free characters sometimes, and that freedom is an interesting idea to explore.

As for white collar to rednecks, I pretty much resent business culture and everything about it and trailer trash is generally considered it’s opposition. Having the first become the second is the simplest contrapasso, I suppose, though again, country life has it’s benefits. I think it helps to remember that dealing in stereotypes, while usually sexy, is not true to life in any sense. But again, I think that the appeal of rednecks in pop culture, and in porn, is that similar sense of freedom, which people long for, I think. But in this case, rather than it being a personal freedom, a freedom from the qualities holding you back, it’s instead a freedom from a culture which is overly restrictive and demeaning.