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Comment by wnkrshm | Hacker News Reader

Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.

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Hello fellow furry pornmonger :)

It’s fucking GREAT really, furry is poison to megacorps and there’s a ton of room for individual creators to thrive without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash extraction at huge scales.

It’s poison to mega corps because it doesn’t fit into contemporary “coolness”. Using furries decreases sales and that’s all they care about.

The fandom creates such an incredible environment for creators to thrive in. I went to a con near me and a walk through the dealer's den showed the vast variety of creators. Of course, there were artists with prints and merch, but there were also furry musicians with CDs of albums and DJ sets, a woodworker with carvings and laser-cut journals where the pages were magnetic inserts, someone selling fursuit parts like eyes and horns made out of resin, even a small handful of adult businesses (behind a curtain and with staff checking ages, of course). Music, games, books, especially art, it's all by furries, for furries, with the exception of a few mass-market friendly franchises that furries happen to love like Beastars or Zootopia.

I have not been to a con since a few years before the pandemic, I really gotta figure out what’s around me now that I’ve moved.

Yeah, it is nice being in at least one fandom that is mostly left alone from most of the mainstream.

One thing I love about the greater furry community is that a LOT of art gets aggregated to a certain site, which I am sure you are aware of, that puts high value on proper sourcing/tagging. (And still respects the wishes of the creators)

Maybe unrelated: Do you think furry commissions are so expensive because so many furries are wealthy, or do furries pursue wealth to pay for commissions?

There's tons of broke-ass furries who can't afford a ton of commissions. There's also a lot of furries with tech jobs who have more money than they know what to do with, and are willing to pay artists fees that approach a significant percentage of what the techie's hourly wage works out to.

Furry art is a significant part of my income and trust me: furry commissions are crazy cheap. Yes, even that one guy charging in the low four figures - he does some pretty complex work that I'd charge four figures for too, if I was willing to work that long on a client's piece.

I could be making a lot more money if I'd stayed in the animation industry, or if I was hunting corporate illustration work. But then I'd have to deal with much tighter deadlines, restrictive style guides, clients who really have no idea what they want and no idea how to articulate how what I just spent a while working on fails to capture what they want, figuring out how to make the lucrative but incredibly boring world of, say, standardized shipping pallets visually interesting, and a whole bunch of office politics. Drawing happy animal-headed people having a good time is a lot more fun. It's nice when a corporate gig comes my way now and then because it can pay a few months rent, but it definitely takes its toll in the amount of tedious bullshit I have to deal with.

I'd also maybe have things like "health insurance" and "a retirement fund" but, hey. It's a tradeoff.

>Furry art is a significant part of my income

looked up your art, pretty cool style youve got going.

And yeah, corporate anything can be a pretty miserable experience.

Also, maybe I shouldve added a /s to my implication that most if not all furries are somewhat wealthy.

Thanks!

And yeah, it didn't read as sarcasm to me, oh well :)

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