Where are the plant-based fursuiters?
Botanical furries? Hello? Show yourselves! I'd love to see some Triffids...
My first casual search turned up this carnivorous beauty. Can you name more? Or could this be a new frontier for novelty anthropomorphic performing?
My original submission was very brief, but apparently made a psychic link to provoke the same question on Tumblr a day later.
Flayrah's benevolent dictator GreenReaper sent me a gentle reminder not to be such a slacker with writing. (Hey, I'm reallllly busy with a new semester starting... I'd love to research more, but I'd prefer to ask for comments.)
GreenReaper: If you had searched Flayrah, you would have found this (includes both a Plante, and a plant):
Video: National Geographic profiles fursuiters on 'Taboo'.
Perhaps Alkane could lead you to more? There are also several Plant-type Pokemon which should be considered.
So far, we have these Botanical furries:
Ois: "a common Australian Eucalyptus Tree"
Thorn: "mostly vines, takes the form of a leaf-nosed fruit bat with grass instead of fur and various floral aspects"
Alkane: "a hybrid of fox, Komodo dragon, and plant"
Potato Otter: "half-potato half-otter"
Terrance Jones: "a hybrid of red fox, fennec fox, and green apple."
Fox/dragon/plant? Potato Otter? This is very silly... but I like it, way better than made-up hybrids of common animals. (Personally, I think they're kinda half-baked.) How about a Parisian potato/dragon who makes his own French fries... eh?
Dressing up like Asparagi is super funny, but let's avoid pee jokes... that would be so wrong. And if you say "Asparagus isn't furry", you've probably never shared a fridge with a slob roommate.
I like my women like I like my asparagus... planted in the ground, and delicious when you dig 'em up. Kidding!! Firm with a pinch of pepper, but a little tender too.
About the author
Patch Packrat — read stories — contact (login required)Fursuiter and unconditional linty hugger
Comments
Furries are anthropomorphic animals, not vegetables. Technically, it's a whole different fandom. ('Veggies', perhaps?)
You also don't see all that many people with characters who're likely to get eaten, unless they're into that kind of thing.
Lastly, fursuiters tend to move around, which is something relatively few plants are known for.
I believe there was a strip from the funny animal webcomic "Purple Pussy" (clever) making fun of furries by having the author avatar character draw anthropomorphic vegetables. He eventually storms out of the vegetable fandom because he doesn't like vegetable suits or basically vegetable Otherkin, which is really unfair, as those are two completely different areas of furry fandom being taken to task. It struck me as a clever, if obvious, original idea with really belabored and obvious execution. Though it was not an "exhibit" on PoE, I saw the stip on a link there; the author/artist had a love hate relationship with furries. They were basically his only audience, but they bugged him.
I wonder what that's like.
[comment removed on request]
They'd be a literal wallflower!
There aren't many plants in the fandom.
But there are a lot of vegetables.
If you catch my drift.
There are also quite a few fruits.
Ha! ;)
oh snap!
Anthropomorphic vegetables!
When I was really into Belgian/French comics in the early 1970s, I discovered Nikita Mandryka’s “The Culinary Adventures of the Masked Cucumber”, a satire on American costumed heroes. Today the Masked Cucumber has his own website: http://www.leconcombre.com
Although it is not anthropomorphized, I always felt that “The Little Shop of Horrors” with the carnivorous Audrey Jr./II – the 1960 movie, the 1982 musical, and the 1986 movie -- was not as funny as the 1978 Czech live-action feature “Adéla ješt? neve?e?ela”, a.k.a. “Adele Hasn’t Had Her Dinner Yet”. It was shown at the FILMEX Los Angeles International Film Festival, and I thought it was hilarious. Wikipedia’s plot synopsis: “It is the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The Prague police commissar Ledvina asks the famous New York detective Nick Carter, who is on a visit to Prague, for assistance to solve the strange case of a missing dog. Mysterious murder cases happen during the investigations, done by the malicious botanist Baron von Kratzmar and his carnivorous plant Adele. Von Kratzmar kidnapps his victims, binds them and whenever he plays a gramophone with the melody "Schlafe, mein Prinzchen" (a lullaby by Bernhard Flies but previously associated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) it is the time for Adele to awaken and eat her victims for dinner. Baron von Kratzmar considers himself a misjudged genius and wants to take revenge on one of his former professors. He calls himself "the Gardener", a notorious criminal, who Nick Carter thought had died in the swamps years ago. With the help of bizarre inventions, Ledvina and Carter succeed in catching von Kratzmar and delivering him to the legal authorities.”
The only clip on YouTube doesn’t show Adele at all – just the Czech Ledvina introducing the American Nick Carter to Czech beer. It looks more like an adv’t for Czech beer and pretzels! Boo, hiss!
http://www.themoviedb.org/movie/20087-ad-la-je-t-neve-e-ela
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2YWUpcPGzg
Fred Patten
I don’t know whether this counts as vegetative Fursuiting, but there is an episode in the TV anime “Galaxy Angel” where Mint Blancmange, the turquoise-haired lop-eared bunny girl, wears a full-body broccoli costume. This has less to do with that episode’s plot than that the program was produced by Tokyo-based Broccoli Co., Ltd.
Fred Patten
"Feeeeeeeeeeed me Seymour!" Probably not the only one to think that seeing that opening pic.
By the way, as a roo, I think Ois sounds like a delectable person.
There has been a recent rash of video game cosplayers dressing up as Plants vs. Zombies characters. Probably because it's a pretty simple cosplay to do easily, and pretty much everyone knows Plants vs. Zombies.
It's hard to anthropomorphize something if you don't have a lot of historical material to work with. You can go searching for such things and certainly find them, but they're not imbued into our unconscious like animal characters are.
As Greenreaper said, furries are anthropomorphic animals. You seldom see plant furries because anthro plants are not something the furry fandom is about. I imagine they are also very few in number overall because plants aren't as interesting when anthropomorphised (although there was that tree in Pocahontas and the flowers in Alice in Wonderland). Similarly, the fandom doesn't have many anthropomorphic inanimate objects (Hello, Brave Little Toaster) because it's not the right fandom. If you looked in a more general anthropomorphic fandom, there is a group like that on DeviantArt, you would likely find more.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~
I'm sorry plants and vegetation out there, but I really don't think you should count as furries at all. You're anthro, sure, but you're as furry as the bronies, talking cars, robots, aliens and anything else. Regardless of your 'fur'suits and your personas, it is only anthropopmorphic and to say that you're furry is like calling you animals. I totally agree with the guy above me and its a little surprising that it isn't common logic.
On another note, I really don't empathise with these guys... Scalies, bronies and the like I can understand completely, but I don't understand why someone would have such a relationship with a plant persona. In fact, what even composes a plant fursona? Even if you're not interested in personas, what are you interested in then? No offence, but do you go around watching animations on corn people and talking roses? I guess I can partially understand the concept of merging a fursona with a plant, but honestly I want to know more about all of this; I hate being ignorant, especially to something so close to my culture.
(And yes, I consider the furry fandom a fully-fledged culture, not a subculture in any way considering brony hood would be a subculture)
There is a very anthropomorphic "Mr. Oak" in Ronald McDonald's McDonaldLand, with a smiling face in the middle of his trunk and the ability to wave and clap his branches. McDonald's made several animated children's DVDs for sale at McDonald's restaurants only, about 15 years ago, recommended for ages 2 to 7. Great for the Barney and TeleTubby crowd, not us; but Mr. Oak was definitely an anthropomorphic plant.
Fred Patten
Among 10,000 wolves, foxes, and other "garden variety" characters, you can find 1 like a potato/otter. The cool part is that only one of them. As fandom expands, you might see a little more of that. When you hear "that's not furry", an appropriate response is "why be so literal?" Is that what furry is about?
When you see a plant "fursuit" made by a fursuit maker, then actually, that meets the definition of furry creativity because a furry made it. Most music made by furries doesnt have too much furry relation besides that either, but it still gets called furry.
I feel a little annoyed at the term "garden variety"... in these days of industrial monocultured agribusiness, it really means the opposite of what it implies! Think of these plant fursuiters as kind of the farmer's market heirloom tomato next to the GMO supermarket corn of your average fox and wolf furry. I'm being silly of course because furry is still a largely DIY activity and thats why I love it :)
You need boundaries - otherwise you end up like Fred, who is a fan of everything anthropomorphic or animated. ;-)
More seriously: there is some wiggle room, but without maintaining a focus you risk turning off visitors. If people find that they are only interested in 1/10th of the content of a community/website/convention, they are unlikely to stay.
I don't think music has relevance to furry fandom just because a furry made it, any more than I think the software I make, websites I run, or photos I take are naturally furry just because I am. Some are on furry topics, and those count.
Uh, not so sure about the 1/10th comment; I'd say most of the sites I visit regularly feature just about 1 in 10 articles I actually feel the need to click on. Even the one site I regularly click on most articles, Cracked, features, I'd say, 1 in 10 articles would normally interest me; I just trust the writers and editors on that site to make me interested in whatever they're writing about.
Kind of an awkward time to make the argument for "lots of new content is best," but the recent lack of updates (given the nature of the site, totally understandable that that'll happen sometimes) does help to illustrate the theory; if there wasn't a hiatus, do you think this article would be getting this many comments otherwise?
It's true; a great writer can make almost any topic interesting. However, it's harder for such a site to get funding - advertisers will say "what is this site about?" - and to gain a dedicated following. Plus, if you're writing about everything under the sun, you're probably not going to become an expert in any of it.
One reason I don't read Cracked is that it doesn't really cover anything in particular - they seem to just pick a random topic de jour, find a few remotely-related examples, and post a numbered list. It's disposable content.
Yes. In part because it has a giant picture of Audrey II on it, and in part because it's one of those discussion-type posts which encourages comments.
As a practical matter, a brief hiatus - which in this case, as usual, is entirely my fault - doesn't matter as much as you might think. Most of our audience visits individual stories via a referral (usually social networking) or search, whenever we happen to post. 60% came directly to this page, and the ratio only increases when another site links to a piece.
Yeah, because reviews of My Little Pony DVDs aren't disposable at all.
(You're still mad they made fun of WikiFur, aren't you?)
Nope. They sent us some traffic and linkjuice, which was nice. I just don't think much of the content.
Those DVDs will be around a while, at least. Hopefully there will be readers for those reviews!
Actually, I'd say news, by definition, is disposable. Why people line their birdcages with newspapers.
And in fact, their very disposability is what makes them such important historical artifacts; they aren't meant to last, therefore they are a window to that historical moment. Yeah, we learned a lot from King Tut's tomb, but that was supposed to last. In other words, we learned more about what King Tut wanted us to think of him, rather than what he was actually like. We'd have learned more if we found his garbage can; in fact, most archaeologists prefer a good garbage midden to a tomb nowadays. Because you learn more.
Wait, weren't we supposed to be talking about plant fursuits?
Yes and no :) im not going to put out a regular plantsuiter update for my own amusement, but I enjoyed doing a 1-off... content wise, think of con panels. Go if you like it, or do something else. Take a "fitness for furries" panel. I wonder how many of those could we find if we looked at the panel list for Rainfurrest this month? (They exist, I won't belabor the point though.)
You can find lots of fans of furry's music! FA's main submissions seem to be photos, drawings, stories, and music. Bet you could get more than a few furry web designer/developers to socialize too (maybe the same ones needing a fitness for furries panel ;) Of course the more off topic it gets, the more it calls for its own site. Thats why the furry music articles I have in the queue are cross posted to fuzzynotes.org to help out Roo's furry music focus.
... and another thing. Speaking of relevance, plant pokemons, and pokemon/furry fandom... I think "gotta catch em all" is one of the most annoying phrases in the english language. (Or was... didn't they retire it long ago... hey look, I'm out of touch.) I think that franchise and the cheaply produced anime is the antithesis of character and personality based storytelling like I try to teach animation students. And doesn't fit well with furry. I would prefer not to read about it. But on the other hand, I suppose it's something you get in the most entertaining way by playing a video game. I'm not going to trash talk it (or the game medium) just because I don't have time for games and I'm too old and crotchety to get it personally. So I just don't pay any mind, and let people enjoy what they like. :)
It's not a plant fursuit, but the most unique full-body critter costumer that I remember is Blobulous. From the front and the side from FC 2004.
An amorphous pile of slime, It's certainly couldn't be further from a literal "fur"suit. Watch out for the eyes!
Of course, that's from before I was even aware from the furry fandom. I wonder where the costume is now.
Out of 24 comments, no one has mentioned VeggieTales? I'm shocked!
Sure, they're based on Bible stories, but they're very entertaining (or at least the ones I saw when my kids were young enough to watch them were) and some of the songs are funny as hell. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything has become a cult classic.
On another subject, to the Ents, from Lord of the Rings, qualify as plant-morphs?
The Ents are a tricky case, as they share unique features of both animals and plants. There's been some discussion. I'd say they're transformed plants as they can "become treeish" and are on a continuum with the Huorn.
I must admit to a liking for Dogtato (fan website with downloads), who is more clearly a talking animal-vegetable hybrid.
If we're talking about Ents, we should definitely talk about the Harvard Lampoon's Bored of the Rings, which features actual vegetable people as their Ent spoof led by the Jolly Green Giant(the bogies, the hobbit parody, also are clearly rat-like, and feature "vestigial" tails).
All in all, the Jolly Green Giant joke is about par for the course for the lame jokes of the spoof, but it had it's moments. The Bilbo parody trying to welsh on a bet with the Elrond parody about whether the main characters would even make it to Rivendell was pitch perfect, and of course the wonderful line, "This is going to be a long epic."
Steal the name and use the "long epic" line as the tagline while updating the jokes to better fit the movies and other more recent fantasy films, and it could make a decent animated movie, actually. Just obviously let keep certain screenwriters away from it.
Yarst; why didn't I think of the Ents? And I consider myself a LOTR fan! Surely, the Ents are plant-people.
Come to think of it, the living flower garden in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", as well. Carroll's original story as well as the Disney movie.
And I saw the VeggieTales movie, though I am trying to forget that one.
Are there any plant-morphs in Clark Ashton Smith's horror story "The Seed from the Sepulcher", or just carnivorous plants? It's been about sixty years since I read it, but all that I remember is mobile carnivorous plants that chased the main character.
Oh, and "The Ivy War", by Doctor David Henry Keller comma M period D period. He was less famous for his stories than for being extremely pompous when s-f fans visited him during the 1930s and insisting that they remember that he was A Doctor. But it was a good horror story, or at least I thought so when I was in my early teens. Set in New Jersey, as I remember, about carnivorous ivy taking over the state.
Fred Patten
Hey, Patch, this is really off-topic, but are you going to see the 15th annual Animation Show of Shows when it comes to San Francisco later this month? Contact me if you need the schedule.
Fred Patten
Thanks fred! Yes I am, it's also 3rd anniversary with my partner who met me there for a first date. Will you get to see it near you?
Here is the schedule for the Bay Area. The locations with one star are those open to the public. “All screenings marked with an "**" require rsvp confirmation and are open to animation professionals, students and fans. Request a confirmation for you and one guest at rsvp@acmefilmworks.com, include the theater, date and time in the subject. In the message include your name, and that of your guest with both of your emails and cel numbers. NAMES WILL BE CHECKED AT THE DOOR or GATE.”
15th Animation Show of Shows 2013 Dates:
All screenings are restricted to employees only for the companies listed below, unless otherwise indicated.
9/23 - Industrial Light and Magic, San Francisco (12:00PM)
9/23 - ** ASIFA SF, San Francisco Dolby Labs (7:30PM)
9/24 - PDI DreamWorks, Redwood Shores (12:00PM)
9/24 - * Cogswell College, Dragons Den Auditorium, Sunnyvale (7:00PM) NEW LOCATION!
9/25 - Electronic Arts, Redwood Shores (11:00AM)
9/25 - Apple, Inc., Townhall, Cupertino (4:00PM)
9/25 - * San Jose State University, Morris Dailey Auditorium (7:30PM)
9/26 - Tippett Studio, Berkeley (6:30PM)
9/27 - Pixar Animation Studios, Emeryville (12:00PM)
9/27 - * California College of the Arts, Oakland Hall (5:00PM)
9/28 - ** Hess Collection Vineyards (10:30AM)
After September 28, it will move down to the Los Angeles area, where I hope to see it at the DreamWorks studio on October 1.
Fred Patten
The answer is and will always be hybrids and transformation. The only problem is cuteness. What adorable noises does a foxbroccoli make, and what cute sound effect plays when he changes into a girl fox?
Heh. If it talks and walks, it has a nervous system, so it's a hybrid and not just a vegetable. Vegetable furries are furries too!
"I'm nutritious!"
"half baked"
Boooo!
I sort of find anthromorphic plants, vehicles, and bugs more disturbing than just the generic animal to a point where I can't stand looking at them. But that's just me.
The phrase anthormorphic plant also reminds me of that guy in a strawberry mascot custome that was tackled by another man in a pacman suit at a grocery store in this one youtube video I ran across a while ago.
Anthropomorphic vehicles! I have a column on them half-written for Jerry Beck's Cartoon Research website. Disney's "Pedro, the Little Mail Plane" and "Little Toot" and "Susie the Little Blue Coupe" and so on. I'll hurry and finish it.
Fred Patten
Fred, I caught the Animation Show of Shows... fantastic. One of my 4 fave films from it was "My Mom is a Plane". There's more of that coming out in animated features soon. This one had it's own unique style though, very whimsical with un-hollywood DIY charm, Russian. Had a good time getting beers with Yulia and 4 other film directors from the show. Don't know if you had any ability to catch the show, but my favorite films were that one and: International Fathers Day, Ascension, and Subconscious Password. Even better, one of the directors was a guy one year behind me in animation school I hadn't seen in 11 years... quite a surprise when we met, great time catching up!
My invitation to the Animation Show of Shows is for October 1st at the DreamWorks Animation studio in Glendale. I am looking forward to it.
Fred Patten
Here is my review of the 15th annual Animation Show of Shows. I agree, Patch ... fantastic.
http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-2013-animation-show-of-shows/
Fred Patten
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