When creating a furry character, there are a number of unspoken rules many follow, common design habits and physical traits that, personally, make my eyebrow head for my fringe. I’m going to take a light-hearted look at them, highlighting a few curiosities along the way, and please remember – this is purely my opinion. I’ll start with the most prominent physical feature: the legs.
To be precise, digitigrade legs. The logic is simple and, on the face of it, sound – these are animals, so should have animal-style legs. It certainly removes any doubt of them being just a human in a furry costume. The problem, for me, is to do with the number of legs.
Digitigrade legs are uniquely found on quadrapedal, aka four-legged, mammals. Why? Weight distribution. With low centres of gravity and weight spread much more horizontally than vertically, they don’t need to have much of the four feet touching the ground, just the toes in fact, and it aids in agility, stealth and speed. Bipeds, however – two-leggers like us – have no such luxury. All our weight is pressing straight down, so in order to stand and move comfortably, we have big, flat, ground-slapping feet.
Pedant that I am, anthro bipeds with digitigrade legs will therefore almost always look awkward and faintly uncomfortable to me, the posture and proportions off. Sometimes people will try to compensate, and end up making things worse – huge, sprawling toes, chunky thighs, even entire legs so big and bulky they nearly dwarf the torso stuck on top of them. It can look pretty comical, like a back-to-front Chuck Jones bulldog.
All that isn’t to say it can’t work, of course, just that it’s hard to make work, and I repeat – at least there’s an understandable logic to it. The same can’t really be said of the next trait, one that I believe owes a lot to eighties and nineties anthropomorphic cartoons – hair.
I don’t mean the fur they’re covered in; I mean human-style hair on the head and elsewhere. In those cartoons, a common way to make a female character look feminine was to give her a shapely figure, and lucious locks of hair – just look at Gadget from Rescue Rangers, or Jenny from Bucky O’Hare, or even Sally from Sonic SATAM. Those habits have persisted, in the furry fandom and elsewhere.
There are a number of problems with this, though, and I must clarify something to start – when I say human-style hair, I mean it looks like our hair, not another length or colour of fur, ala a lion’s mane. To me, all too often, hair on a furry has the feeling of a wig dumped between the ears, an impression only heightened by more realistic, detailed takes on anthros; a beautifully rendered otter, for example, fur rich, head-shape perfectly captured, cleverly elongated torso…and long, glossy, blond, perfectly-tended locks flowing from their scalp. Erm…
The influence of those cartoons is felt in the fact that it’s still predominantly female characters given human-style hair – in contrast to digitigrade legs being a mostly male anthro trait – but you will still encounter the odd male furry with a mullet or a military buzz cut or a pony tail. And then there’s facial hair, moustaches and beards, which tends to make them seem to me like they’re wearing disguises in a corny spy movie.
The core issue is that far too often the human-style hair looks stuck on, jarring with their fur to a greater or lesser degree. For me, this is at its height with pubic hair. Yes, anthros with pubic hair is actually a thing. To be fair, it can actually work really well, if it’s distinctly a thicker growth of fur shading lighter or darker, but usually it’s a sleek, human-style patch, like they’ve shaved off a tidily triangular area of fur then pasted the hair on in its place; a kind of merkin for furries. I know of one artist who draws it like it’s pasted onto the fur, black straggles on top of the coat, which is its own particular level of weird.
These two contrast, so when they come together, an anthro with digitigrade legs and human-style hair, it creates an awkward contradiction – you’ve given them a clear trait to show they’re not human, then a just as clear trait that’s very human, and I have trouble reconciling that. Mixed messages, to say the least!
Next, we travel a little further south, to the genitals, and here’s where things get really confusing. Following the same logic as digitigrade legs, many anthros are given animal-style genitals, but for some, to me inexplicable, reason it’s almost exclusively those with penises. You hardly ever see an animal – or feral, to use the furry term – vulva on a bipedal furry, but there are no shortage of sheaths.
For me, this raises a couple of pretty big questions. One – how, exactly do you pee if your penis is in a sheath stiffly pointing upwards, or even fused to your lower belly? Do a handstand over the toilet? Put a urinal at the top of the wall and hope you’ve got good aim? Mount one in the floor, go down on all fours and cock a leg over it?
Two, and this goes out particularly to those with really large sheaths, like tree branches or even trunks rising from their hips – how do you wear anything with a waistband? Surely that has to be exquisitely uncomfortable, having your most sensitive part squashed tight at the midpoint? Makes my eyes water just thinking about it. And then there are those whose prodigious endowments magically disappear the moment they put clothes on, barely a trace of a bulge. Either that or they’ve been pressed completely flat. Ow.
Looking more broadly, it’s curious that animal traits are far more likely to be given to male anthros, and human ones to females, but when you realise that’s been the case in the mainstream going right back to the days of Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry – look at how Tom’s numerous crushes were depicted, compared to him – it makes a little more sense. Females need to be attractive, males not so much, and that seems to be so accepted people do it without questioning it, or thinking about it.
To close out, it seems only fair to detail how I design my anthros, which would undoubtedly be just as weird to others! For a start, no human-style hair or digitigrade legs, but subtler details instead. Hands and feet with more than a little of the paw about them, not least in having pads on palms and digit tips, and stubby claws that could almost be halfway to nails. In the case of those possessing mammaries, they usually have multiple, spaced in two or three pairs down the torso, smaller each time, or just nipples the same, strongly in the vein of real-life animals.
Behaviour is important, too. Ears perk and sag and fold back to reflect mood. Tails twitch, sink, sway and bristle. Whiskers flick as noses scent the air. They’ll even move somewhat like real animals – light and graceful for a fox, for example, or a steady, purposeful tread for a bear – and intimacy can involve nuzzles, and licks, and grooming.
In short, they’re intended to be animals who’ve gained a human-like upright posture and general body shape, but are still animals, complete with mannerisms and unique physical traits. Whether they work or not is subjective, personal, like everything I’ve detailed here. Someone else could write a blog explaining everything they find weird or illogical about my furries, and it’d be perfectly valid!
There is no right; there is no wrong; just the way you like to make them. 🙂
Foxy Musings 