The Therian Current

Furry subculture is not about animals. The innate segue is that, rather, it deals with animality — that is, diversity, in its primitive, Darwinist sense (and the virtue of distance that it entails). Regress to that moment your voice first cracked, allowing a flood of mutagenic hormones to fill the holes of your face with glutinous white fluid. You attempt to initiate yourself into the pornographic meshwork of the infosphere but none of the bodies projected onto your screen are getting even remotely close to letting loose. The burnout artefact of something that was at one point white culture is a stonefaced man, dehydrated to invoke washboard abs and ramming his bog-standard cock into some indifferent aperture or other. All parties involved have this constant look on their face as though they are about to sneeze. Yet only a couple clicks away is a stylized sketch of a man suspended in azure void, holding up a towel that barely covers his crotch and blushing. It is endearing. Amateurs on PornHub leave nothing to the imagination, erotic artists, on the other hand, are flirtatious, coy. And what to make of the wolf-faced figure that lurks an increasingly shrinking number of clicks further in? The neophyte will find that there is not actually that much difference between an abstracted wolf's physiognomy and that of a human. They are both able to be displaced into any expression whatsoever. If anything, the wolf's face is differentiated through being able distort more drastically. He will find that he can see himself in the werewolf quite easily, more than any fictional man with his implied race, integration into a social body, and all other implied et ceteras... The world drifts upon a porous wilderness not too dissimilar from the cratered impact site of your pubescent visage and you will find that it can be departed from endlessly. A body need not be realistically proportioned or physiologically sensible. It can shrink and swell at will. It can be one species one day and another that same night. How could you go back to PornHub? Your face has been marked with the discharge of real excess, the luxury of raw possibility.

The Fursona is that invocation by which a practitioner of the Therian Current within the Occult Order of the Machinic Will (O∴O∴M∴W∴) converges upon a name, species, appearance, atmosphere or set of other surface-level attributes, and declares the assemblage of these to be an extension "of themselves". The practice can be identified with a crucial step in the Hermetic ritual towards Knowledge and Conversation with the "Holy Guardian Angel" as well as — folded outwards — in the production of Voodoo shrines; implication being a primordial custom from which all these derive, dating to that event which first imprinted culture with the desire for traffick with discarnate intelligence. The Fursona is at once wish-fulfillment, a machine for self-knowledge, hypersexual surrogate, and cryptographic key towards communion with the larger furry congregation. The Fursona is you, its actions are your actions. Successful coincidence with the Fursona grants engagement in the endless stream of speculation that constitutes a majority of the subculture's online presence. It is important to note that this is not just the writing of fiction, already an inherently transgressive expenditure of the body's resources towards nothing actual. It is the writing of secondary or degenerated fiction, apocrypha, for a "work" that exists — at best — in the nebulous space between nervous tangles of anonymous online debauchery. Contact is established through the yantra of one's Fursona copulating with a blank, dog-shaped space consecrated with the words "YOUR CHARACTER HERE." The adept may have multiple Fursonae, or a Fursona with a variety of different settings / varieties / modes / phases (i.e. on all fours, in a friend's 'Dungeons & Dragons' campaign, ..). It will find itself (in itself) split across all of these.

A hunger for identity with Something Else is manifest in the sexual material itself. The most popular and widespread fetish within furry pornography is that of transformation: a character, still human or already beast, is transmuted into some thing inhuman or another species of inhumanity. Usually this coincides with initiatory shock on the part of the transfigured and, more often than not, terminates in a cathartic moment of ecstasy. Textual pieces frequently have the victim inoculated into an esoteric social body of Fursonae (e.g. joining the werewolf pack and celebrating with an orgy, serving the dragon lord's carnal needs as a newly reborn reptilian concubine in his court, ..). Sometimes it is the process of mutation as such that leads to orgasm, without any other stimulation necessary (identifying the very phenomenon of evolution with desire). Most importantly: a Fursona never transforms into a human. The relief of becoming other is emphasized. Rapturious prose and careful lines stroked into Wacom tablets describe hands splitting open into claws, tails and horns extruding from the head, hyperreal closeups of the circumcized human penis gaining knots and flares and barbs and ridges. The brittle phallus shatters into infinite shapes and sizes, requiring no consistency whatsoever from one moment to the next. (This is a model for the constant reproduction of time.)

It is the blur of the transformation sequence and the prismatic splintering of identity across one or many Fursonae that is, essentially, the libidinal attractor. While true that a great many adherents to the Therian Current claim — as a form of public relations, or lamentably exoteric tactics — that furry is not a dark art, not to mention even inherently sexual, they are dissembling. The proclamation is a veiled truth, as is the manner of all great secret societies. It is not attached to sex in the way that tabloids reporting on one of the many furry conventions would conceive the matter. It does not take any stance regarding penetration on the scale of persons. But there is no denial that the act of taking on a Fursona and letting it live through one's body, taking it personally, is clearly penetration, "though after a different manner".

Furry subculture is not about animals, but it also rigorously prohibits any comfortable distance from base materialty. The Therian Current is the lure of abstraction. Given a sexual unraveling sufficiently labyrinthine in nature, it becomes strictly inevitable. What is bestial completely surrounds that which is not, just as the feminine envelops the non-feminine; the chaotic seas of loss always already enclose any island of cohesion. Walking away from the non-furry for long enough, the adept will find the furry appearing to "him" at the crossroads. Leaning strong enough into the will (to become (Something Else)) — the fundamental drive of perversion — will provoke the angels of chance to commune with you by dreams of weird cock. In the stillborn metaverse, a human and hyena respond exactly the same when blown up with enough cum to fill an aquarium. Does it matter what species the subject is? A species is already an abstractive debasement away from anything subjective. A species is a kind of beast. For the adept titillated by the concept, not only is there no sufficient reason to prefer the human over the hyena, there are in fact forces driving “him” away from humanity altogether.

The pressure-valve of the pipeline from the human to the monstrous is the demonic. How could a BDSM lifestyler dream of anything but hell? THe leather-strangled and rubber-bound already fantasize about having their fetish gear permanently grafted onto their skin to sense nothing but the unscreened power of matter pulsing according to the rhythms of machinic desire for all eternity. Entertain these thoughts for less than a second and you are already growing horns and claws. Fetishists already dream of things impossible or impractical to attain: ghost chasers, giant worshippers, submissives vying for literal spirals-behind-the-pupil mind fuck, life-time master / pet dynamics unglued from the need to pay rent, eat, shit, and not risk your wellbeing. These are already decrepit creatures surviving on poorly drawn cartoons and endless hypotheticals alone. Inevitably, all find that the more abstraction is permitted, the more content can be received. Those that already have fetishes that do not require the genitalia of 2 humans — the balloon enthusiasts, ticklers, foot fetishists, sneeze fiends, living furniture pieces, vore freaks, inflation connoisseurs … do you think a car cares if it's a dragon or a human fucking it? And who would have a more enjoyable time fucking the car: your pathetic body or one you could custom-make for the occasion? The more bizarre the desire, the higher percentage of its human hosts will have anime fox icons on their Twitter.

Theriomorphic art bemoans naturalism. There are artisans which model bears and wolves with strikingly detailed fur and dark, beady little eyes. These are impressive and labor-intensive and also very difficult to get aroused by, resembling freakish acts of taxidermy entirely devoid of the ability to deliver a come-hitherly gaze as they are. Desire incentivizes simple, cartoonish, and mass-produced imagery: 5 slots for sketch commissions, 50 bucks each, filling up in 15 seconds. The voracious appetite of furry consumers demands this foremost because it wants more art, more situations, more Fursonae. I want my particular dragon-boy, with these coloring variants, blushing there, in this position, with these other characters, wearing a suit and tie, on this particular street corner, … and I want all of them more than I want any particular element to be a masterpiece. But beneath the surface, the less the image is specified the further the Fursonal vessel is able to travel, the deeper it is able to plumb.

Take every sexual act that has been, or will be, or could have been committed by any group of people throughout the entire history of such entities and map each one onto a unique integer. There are only a finite number of such "obscenities" that must be enumerated, so this will not be exceedingly difficult. At the end, plenty of integers will be left over. The real numbers, here, are the Therian Current. The Lebesgue measure of vanilla sex, temple of the human, is crumbling. The Fursona is the spell that slices you into a pest lithe and flexible enough to survive underneath. Once you have unwound your self to this “point”, you may access the Tantric chapters of the Necronomicon, Shadow Kamasutra: acts of eroticism that can be defined but never executed, that can only be zeroed in on from various levels of unconfirmed suggestion, can be alluded to but never calculated; a set of perversions that can only be approximated through increasing economic expenditure, and which lie in the qliphothic trenches opened by the potent spell "HAHA, ACTUALLY, WHAT IF” as it is apprehended while teetering bat-like from the underside of a tower of hypotheticals.

Would you give my Fursona a hug? What would you do if you found it in this position? What would your Fursona do? What if you woke up you and were your Fursona? What would you be? What if you were permanently aroused? What if your shaft was 3 feet long and 4 inches in diameter and you were always erect? What if you were part of a clan of goatmen who lived in the mountains and wore nothing to conceal their pendulous genitalia? What if you were captured and made to serve that clan of goatmen? What if they made you their pet? What if I made you my pet? What if my Fursona kept a collar on you and never took it off and never let you cum? What if the living-latex nanobots finally arrive from outside the Kuiper belt and transform you into a sleek, rubbery reptilian who dreams of nothing but further expanding the swarm? What if you were forced to lay the eggs of the Queen for the rest of your days? What if my very body transformed into the enormous phallus of a hulking, virile dragon? What if it was all sensation, texture, idle thoughts with zero consideration for spatial possibility or the motility of anthropic musculature? What if something was to finally peel me open like the overripe fruit that I am?