Notices by Lady💅 Trogdor 🔥🐲 (charizard@monsterpit.net)

Can you all please upvote the Masto GitHub issue that requests an API for post length?

I specifically chose this instance for its expansive character limit, but it does me no good on my phone because all the apps are hard-coded to make me shut up after 500 characters.

I am glad there does not exist a #taco stone for evolving my #Eevee to a taco #type, or else I would be too #obese to #fly and retain my #flying typing and all the #typing of all my #Eevees would be #ghost (and so would mine, due to the #coronary #problems induced to my #arteries).

https://monsterpit.net/media/1oAJxgSATZ_0fv5Tq5Y
#vore #Pokémon #grimdark? #heartattack

It's technically true, if your definition of a #furry is someone who bases a significant portion of their #identity on a fan of #anthropomorphic #creatures (the "significant portion of their identity" phrasing is to nip any "#everyone is at least #somewhat furry" arguments in the bud). Under that definition, #bronies are absolutely a #subset of furries. However, there are enough cultural differences that treating #MLP fans as just a #unique partition of #furries who happen only to care about #ponies just isn't accurate.

(Demographic note: this is all from an uncaged pocket #monster who is really only an active part of the proudly bad side of the pony fandom and associates with lots of furries online but has no desire to go to a fur #con or make a real 'sona[0])

First, the #pony fandom is much younger than the furry #fandom.
There are probably some OG furries around, but the vast majority of furries (especially around here) are younger than I and know that the fandom has existed long before they were likely born. It probably was around before the furries I know IRL (who are a couple years older than I) were born.
The #horse fandom has only existed in its current form since #2010, which means I could have been one of the "since the very start" members if I had different drinking buddies a year and a half before I watched my first pony episodes, or even a "founding" member if I browsed #chans instead of mastering the art of fire-breath.

About half of the cultural divide between furries and bronies is simply due to how new and seemingly temporary the pony fandom is and the fact that the MLP fandom exploded in popularity and has been gradually shrinking ever since (with the infall of new bronies being much smaller than the outflow of burned-out bronies). There may have been times when the furry community grew as fast as MLP in 2011 (I don't know, but there may have been some relevant #Disney movies—#LionKing), but there was an existing core community before the new fans left and a modified core existed after the fair-weather fans left. MLP had no such store of cultural knowledge, and (especially with the G5 rumors) has the constant threat that the fandom will probably dissolve once #Hasbro or #DHX stops making as much #money as they'd like.

Ponies' reliance on a single defined #IP also creates the second difference: there is no expectation that you make a pony OC (in fact, it's sometimes mocked), while the furry community is all about your 'sonas. It's the difference between living in Hasbro's world of #Equestria (or forking it when they cancel the show or make intolerable changes) and making your own characters to interact in the real world as the starting point. See note [0].

Going back to the youth of the pony fandom, the broken delusion that there ever was a unified fandom still leaves its tracks in how sub-communities interact and have control. More importantly, I've seen the following difference in attitude from "normal" folks in regard to the two fandoms: furries are "weird, please don't do it in my face, but w/e"; bronies mostly "who doesn't like MLP? they just take it too far". It seems to be how the two groups interact that the attitude difference is apparent (though it's calmed down compared to 2014): bronies either have dual fandom citizenship (in both directions) with the fur community, but furries are either neutral or hostile to bronies.
I suspect this has to do with the "respectable" subset of furries generally winning the major PR and the "bad" side mostly accepting that fact, so they can coexist. There still is an active #respectability politics push in the brony fandom (that may not resolve by the time it falls apart), which fuels the bad side to proudly proclaim they are #horsefuckers just to piss off those who want to improve the image of the fandom. I have seen orders of magnitude more #jokes about #bestiality aimed at bronies than furries (though this was very different in 2005, if my understanding is accurate), and I suspect all the "proud #horsefucker" #shitposts are a major reason why. The majority of the bad side of furries keep their shitposts and humor on the DL and are content to let the respectable half take the spotlight, while the "#proud pony #degenerates" love to remind the world that the family-friendly half of the fandom is just good PR cover for the trolls as well.

I think this leads me to my conclusion & tl;dr:
The chan origins and massive #growth of the brony fandom imprinted a very different set of initial conditions on the pony fandom from the evolution of furries, so the fandoms are not #miscible with one another, even though they share many members; the growth & presumed ephemerality of MLP itself render futile any attempt to resolve any major fandom splits (either a clean split or agreeing to merge).

A more accurate statement is that "bronies are furries with a single canonical IP to reference", which is too major a difference for an "all #Dalmatians are dogs, but not all #dogs are Dalmatians" #analogy.
#Java analogy: Bronies and Furries implement the same interface, but bronies do not inherit from the furry class, even though they have many of the same methods and attributes.

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[0] If anything, @USBloveDog (formerly @USBhump) was a novelty RP that ditched the RP and became the avatar for my id, but it's not "the real me" in the way many furries view their sona or bronies would view their OC. Semi-permeable RP is how I like to run online accounts.
[1] Hopefully this was nice and coherent and I didn't miss too many points.
#essay

Specifically, "is this creature of sexual maturity for its species?"

Q1. Why not just go with the official #GameFreak #breeding mechanics and #egggroups?
A1. GF has some seriously asinine decisions of game mechanics getting in the way of coherent world-building (namely: Nidoqueen isn't in any egg group, but female Nidorans can breed—there may be valid gameplay reasons for this, but it is a giant continuity glitch).
This doesn't make any sense from a biological or art style perspective. If anything, Nidos King and Queen should be the only members of their respective lines who can breed. Maybe their middle evolutions as well, but that is highly dependent on art style.

Q2. Just make the final evolution of any line the only one that's sexually mature?
A2. That's one way to ensure you are avoiding any underage pokémon, but it's a rather legalistic way of thinking about it: it would be like if you only considered humans over the age of 25 to be properly mature (so you avoid taking advantage of anyone who refused to mature since their high school years, even though they are clearly above the legal age of consent)

Q3: Just trust the artist when they have that disclaimer on their page that all characters are [over 18, of sexual maturity for their species]?
A3: I'd really rather not. Those notices are like having a "Tobacco Use Only" sign at your local #bong shop. No, I don't care if she's technically an 8,000 year old cat goddess: if the art doesn't back up claims of maturity, it's no good.
Even that isn't absolute: some artists have an art style that runs young, but the characters they draw clearly aren't meant to be underage with a flimsy backstory to them. This is mostly common among #clop artists: if the art as-in were dropped into the show, it would read as a borderline filly. However, it's clear from the rest of the context that they are not drawing Twilight when she was a filly: it's just a quirk of their style. I do feel icky about those when the artist's style goes too far.
The "all characters are over 18" (with some concrete number) disclaimer also falls down once you want to world-build creatures that are more than just humans in monster costumes. 18 is the compromise that most human societies made between letting people have bodily autonomy over their decisions and giving legal protections to people whose minds have not yet fully developed. There are very good reasons why it's not a meaningfully smaller number, but there isn't any single particularly good reason why it instead is not 19 or 17½ or 23. If you're dealing with non-humans with wildly different maturation rates and/or lifespans, simply saying "18!!!!!!!!!!" doesn't cut it.

Unfortunately for those of you who want a simple heuristic, it depends both on each individual species line and (especially if the entire line reads as young or you're curious about middle-stage evolutions) the specific style of the artist (assuming you're looking at visual #poképorn).

I can't offer much advice on one-shot pokémon, but for three-stage lines, the first stage almost never has sexual maturity, the second stages are a species-dependent minefield (but usually no), and the final evolution is almost always good to go. The only exceptions I can think of on the first stage rule are #dratini and #rhyhorn with the proper art style.
Two-stage evolutions are trickier, since some lines are often drawn so that both stages look underage (#eevee family, I'm looking your way: where are my mature-looking leafeons?). Other species (#Vulpix), can be drawn so that the base evolution can look downright mature and in charge if the author puts their mind to it.

Not really sure if there's any firm conclusion from all of this.

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I hope you all enjoyed this foray into #blogging and didn't find it too incoherent or reprehensible (I'm not sure if I got any sleep last night: it was exceptionally drafty in my cave and I had to spend the whole night changing positions to keep the flame on my tail burning). It finally seems worth it to type out things here because:
1. There's about a 20x higher chance someone will respond compared to running my own blog (even with promoting it on other sites) or shouting into the void of Tumblr
2. I get to hear the click and clack of the keys beneath my sparkly pink claws (yes, Celestia, I bought my own).

I'll start my #CookingWithCharizard series once I either get 5 followers that aren't just [breaking character slightly] other RP accounts run by the same dude or I get someone who is passionate one way or the other as to whether the introductory episode should be about #Pikachu or #Haßenpfeffer.