Strange Topics Come Up Sometimes...

Somehow idle chat with a friend on Furryfaire turned to crossbreeds of "furry" species, and my opinion of opposition to them in general. He seemed surprised. Of course, you throw supernatural powers into the mix and anything's possible. But naturally-occurring? I'm against that.


First off, that sorta defies the definition of species as taught to me in high school biology. Part of the definition is "Two organisms that are able to reproduce naturally to produce fertile offspring." Now, there are things like mules - generally infertile crossbreeds - but if you can interbreed two species and get fertile offspring, it might be time to consider the possibility they were misclassified to begin with.

"Well, okay, disregard that - consider that definition wrong, or consider furry races to be sub-species." Gosh, okay, no more science arguments there. I can only say that it gets a bit silly pretty fast.
At the first level, hey it's kinda cool. Wolves with tiger stripes, foxes with wings, all that jazz. Once you get about four sub-species intermingled, though, it's getting into the realm of "what the heck is that supposed to look like anyway?" I think I've seen a "dracobattraisune" on the MUCK. Okay, so.. dragon, bat, otter, and multi-tailed quasi-spirit fox. Not only does that sounds physically difficult in some cases, but... WTF? Really? It's like a furry Frankenstein's Monster.

So... yeah... in my own little world it doesn't work that way. Even in the unlikely even you do get crossbreeds (generally through magic/superscience), they're still likely to take heavily after one species with perhaps a few recognizable traits of the other(s).

Mika used shapeshifting and magic very deliberately. Amber changed herself physically into a tiger (which was also an act of devotion). Of course, by the time we were transitioning from "FFa1" to "FFa2," it was clear I was in a minority in my beliefs, so I gave up sticking to my guns about that time.

Comments

  1. tashiroJune 15, 2009 at 3:10 PM

    If I did a complete and utter reboot of FFa, starting from the ground up, I would be disallowing cross-breeds. (In fact, for the RPG, I've set very specific rules to the matter) So, yeah, the silliness would be taken down a whole number of notches.

    ReplyDelete
  2. foxwingJune 16, 2009 at 3:15 PM

    I agree with you for the most part, hon. I do wonder your opinion on... Well... Elly, though. Conscidering her parentage is a mother who was a Kami and a father who was an Oni. o.o;;

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