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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Another piece of the puzzle: humans and wolves domesticated each other so much that our neurologies meshed and matched. We humans expect snouted faces.

Being autistic means a statistically higher chance of being furry or faceblind or both. I theorize being faceblind to humans leaves the expectation of snouted faces intact, leading to a default mapping of lemurian preprioception onto canine heads and humanoid bodies.

Evidence: Many pieces of furry art of anthropomorphic felids are actually a dog with feline features. Having lived with a cat, they’re far more alien than all the dogs I ever had. Even My Little Ponies have evolved from cutesified dwarf horses to basically dogs with hooves. (The gallery at the top is what I’m referencing. For Generation 5, they deliberately reduced the horse-like haunches of G4 to dog proportions to reduce the “male gaze” appeal.)

Many animations of animal art basically apply dog animations and gesticulation to other animals (not just in a furry context).

This is especially annoying in animated movies where horses act and move like dogs.

My god the gen 5 designs look awful, and they're even worse in the Steven universe Tumblr style they used for the 2d versions. The ride ending was a mercy.

You might be onto something, but I think it's less about dogs specifically and more the issue of human faces. I'm a furry autist and while absolutely not face-blind, there's something about the human face that is just a tad off-putting to me. Not to say I'm disgusted by it or anything, but recognizing a face as "a guy" always makes whatever it's attached to look a little bit worse in my mind. Just a little. Even when a character is clearly human, I always like them more when they have their face obscured by a helmet or something. But having a dog head instead works too.

Maybe Im autistic, but I dont see how this dog with feline features isnt just a cat, and if Im supposed to see some changing style with the ponies I dont either, other than the face between 2 and 3.

Being autistic means a statistically higher chance of being furry or faceblind or both.

Reference: I can't picture faces in my mind, but that's probably downstream of being unable to visualize anything. If I want to imagine what someone looks like I have to back-propagate from distinctive features and hope I get lucky, or simply trust that the inaccessible part of memory that holds face data remembers. Which, generally, it doesn't.

I don't expect humans to look like dogs or cats, because humans do not look like dogs or cats. Then again, I don't think most furries expect that either.

We humans expect snouted faces.

Humans kind of do have snouts, though. They tend to become more pronounced when they are distressed.

Compare G4, contrast G5. See that, compared to the anime girl examples, G4's faces are much closer to that pattern than any of the earlier generations- just like the above examples, the snout is "cheated" and forms the lower part of the eye in profile, making it look less pronounced than it should be. In 3/4ths, the 'nose' begins just above where the eyes end.

Furries, by contrast, tend to heavily accentuate the snout, which you'll notice is a [small] part of G5's changes; the switch to 3D doesn't help, partially because 3D can't be similarly cheated (so you get the snout as distinct from the eyes rather than blending seamlessly). It helps that since basically all the G4 cast is female (and the male character that gets the most screentime isn't a pony) they can get away with rounding the snouts; contrast the other side male ponies and their squared-off snouts.

For Generation 5, they deliberately reduced the horse-like haunches of G4 to dog proportions to reduce the “male gaze” appeal.

G5 characters look quite a bit more childish than G4 characters do- by comparison, G5s have truncated lower faces- (note specifically the one on the left)- and are generally lankier than G4s were. That, combined with being less objectively cute/aesthetically pleasing than G4 (big heads, huge eyes, blended well) generates uncanny valley concerns that aren't present with G4.

We humans expect snouted faces.

Can you provide a source for this? I would be surprised

Well, not "expect", but @DuplexFields might be onto something. Dogs and humans can read each other's facial expressions. A sad-looking dog is sad, a guilty-looking dog is remorseful, an angry-looking owner is angry, a scared-looking owner is scared. Dogs have bigger and more pronounced eyebrows than wild wolves to emote better to humans. A mixed human-canine face is perfectly legible and able to express the whole range of emotions in a way a different combo is not.

Sorry, I mean we expect most nonhumans we meet to have some variation of a snout, and we generally believe we can understand their emotions by their facial expressions and eye gaze.

Autistic males(which seem to be a… large contingent of furries) also seem to bond better with dogs than other people.

also seem to bond better with dogs

Dogs are predictable, cannot speak, and can't generally pose a martial threat.

Cats are like that too, but they aren't predictable; they're more advanced/internally mature than dogs but (partially as a consequence) are completely useless. Some autists make their peace with that, or accept that fickleness as the price of having an animal that doesn't beg to be let outside at 2 AM, but judging by the above e926 link dog-furry art is twice as popular as cat-furry art so they clearly aren't as highly regarded.

Humans are very unpredictable, speak, and are technically capable of killing you (either directly or by proxy) without warning roughly coincident with their having learned a language. They're much more complicated and interacting with them is extremely dangerous.