# The Past, Present, and Future



## WoodworkerDan (Aug 17, 2016)

Yeah, they walked into a bar. Yeah, it was tense.

Fell free to roll your eyes at me for a bad pun and overused joke. However, what I should like see discussed is the social, technological, and developmental time period a story setting is in - and whether Furry stories are best set in one of the three states of each of the three categories.

In other words, do you like stories set in a certain time period almost identical to literal history, or bend certain developments so that others can make certain plot elements possible?


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## quoting_mungo (Aug 18, 2016)

While I have a soft spot for traditional "medieval" high fantasy type settings/time periods (which don't tend to be entirely historically accurate in the first place), to me the more important aspects are plausibility and internal consistency. 

So your story is set on an Earth where furries developed (chronologically) alongside humans? How might this have changed e.g. the slave-trade era (if relevant to your story)? Kinda hard to argue that dark-skinned humans are subhuman apes when your neighbor is a walking, talking fox and one of the more prosperous merchants in the city, is it not? (Not to say some people wouldn't try, of course.)

I guess to me "can you convince me?" is more important than the actual information presented.


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## WoodworkerDan (Aug 18, 2016)

quoting_mungo said:


> While I have a soft spot for traditional "medieval" high fantasy type settings/time periods (which don't tend to be entirely historically accurate in the first place), to me the more important aspects are plausibility and internal consistency.
> 
> So your story is set on an Earth where furries developed (chronologically) alongside humans? How might this have changed e.g. the slave-trade era (if relevant to your story)? Kinda hard to argue that dark-skinned humans are subhuman apes when your neighbor is a walking, talking fox and one of the more prosperous merchants in the city, is it not? (Not to say some people wouldn't try, of course.)
> 
> I guess to me "can you convince me?" is more important than the actual information presented.



You bring you a relevant tangent - since humans have a long and imaginative history of degrading minorities based largely on such insignificant differences like skin pigmentation and eye shape - would the additional variations in mixing in anthropomorphic people increase or decrease the number of occurrences? Would additional sensitivity to olfactory and auditory differences make xenophobia easier, or allow more subtle/irrelevant variations easier to overlook?

This hypothetical raises an additional (unfortunate) aspect that can be used to discriminate; natural sensory limitations between species. I can imagine how different it would be to experience the worlds as a colorblind human - but to experience a culture that can naturally see a broader range of visible light as a normal for one race and a broader range of olfactory input for another seems almost like living in an Escher painting that can't figure out why you cannot smell the fact it is asking you a question.

Just contemplating the exponential levels of potential differences that can be leveraged is giving me reams of ideas for new story prompts and components.


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## Jarren (Aug 18, 2016)

Future or past/fantasy seem to work the best in my opinion as they allow for more freedom from certain expectations and encourage your audience to suspend their disbelief a bit more than they otherwise might. Also, given the subject matter of furries, both allow for easier justification of their presence (i.e. magic, technology, aliens, other races, etc.) Also, both are genres which tend to perform better with internet audiences, so there's that.


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## DanielSmith (Sep 20, 2016)

The past is  past.Don't think about that.Think about present and future.peoples are living for future.To reach future they work in present.


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## Jarren (Sep 20, 2016)

DanielSmith said:


> The past is  past.Don't think about that.Think about present and future.peoples are living for future.To reach future they work in present.


If one completely ignores the past, they are a fool. Also, the point of this thread was more about the craft if writing, rather than life outlook (unless you're advocating writing exclusively speculative scifi) but good in you for being forward looking.


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