/fur/ - Furry★

I talked about this in the lit thread a long time ago, but I'm down for another mention of Spirit Bound.

As a preface, I am/was quite obsessed with Spirit Bound for a while. Despite having very serious structural flaws, it hits on a lot of tones that makes for something I can excessively indulge in. In many ways, it's a lot like Twilight, which a friend once accurate described to me as being 'brain candy' - not particularly great for you, but it's still very enjoyable to consume despite that. I believe, even, the author was quite heavily inspired by Twilight, in fact. It focuses greatly on characters during their High School years, centered around their formative years as romance blossoms around their coming-of-age, with the mix of fantasy tropes creating something that is simultaneously very down-to-earth and real but also contains elements that are far beyond what we experience in our own dull lives.

In general, I like these types of stories, and in fact my all-time favourite series is precisely this - the Midnighters series being quite reflective of my rural upbringing in terms of school life and offering another perspective that I never got to experience, but also hitting on some deep supernatural tones that makes for an enjoyable, mysterious ride not bound by the constraints of reality. Twilight, however, was so poorly written and dull to me that I could not finish the series - but on top of that, I accurately guessed the contents and premise of the final book to a friend because of how predictable it became.

Spirit Bound, on the other hand - I've read from start to current three times (less as we approach current chapters, of course). This is an absurd amount of reading - the last time I bothered to calculate the length of the series, many chapters ago, I came to the conclusion that its word count was like half of the Harry Potter series. At this point, I'm probably approaching the length of two full Harry Potter reads on... self-serving furry smut with the guise of a plotline. I had to stop regarding those who really got into Twilight as scum simply because I've done a far greater 'sin'.

I think Spirit Bound could have been really good, if only it were restructured a little bit. At this point, there has been a pass where it has been edited (pretty well) so that each individual chapter makes more sense, but to be a properly good story it just needs to be scrapped and restarted. The premise is as such: Nathanial Marks, teenaged Akita mage, falls in love with Geoff McDougal/McIrishname (probably listed in pic related) who isn't a mage, but is in fact a Spirit - a supernatural being whose power manifests through its own element, which in Geoff's case is Darkness, one of the two most powerful Spirit types and such a great rarity as to send several countries of Spirit Clans into political turmoil and warrants Faelen, Mist Spirit, to always hang around and be a bodyguard. Nathanial isn't a very good Mage, having weak powers, until he is seen by the 'Ancient One' Liam, a soul who reincarnates and remembers previous memories, enabling him to gain greater knowledge and powers than a regular Fur would. Liam gives him some sort of medication to help break a curse upon Nathanial, whereupon he suddenly becomes basically a magical god, able to control magical forces without incanting or the use of a focus (as most mages would). Nathanial also gains the power of omniscience, being able to cast his senses out basically infinitely. Also, these four characters all fall in love with each other and have a lot of sex.

The premise is interesting, albeit everyone being a bit too powerful for their own good, but the terrible part is that several plot-threads are literally tied to sex (Nathanial's enhanced Mage powers draw from his Chi, where he typically uses a lot of Light-aspected powers - then gets railed by his boyfriend Geoff's big dog cock who infuses Nathanial with more Darkness Chi through his cum, so the solution is to have Nathanial get fucked Faelen, basically creating an arbitrary plotline of cuckoldry, except with less shame and more orgies) and even worse than that, plot-threads just don't get cleaned up. I mentioned that it's the size of half of the Harry Potter series? Some four fucking years of Potter puttering about? Yeah, the first chapter is their First Day Back to School, the 110th chapter is Nathanial's First Date (actual title) and the current chapter in the 160s is like.. November. Of the same year. It hasn't even been a full semester in hundreds of thousand of words. Nothing that has happened in the first chapters that has bearing on the actual plot has been resolved - a succubus attacks them as the first big conflict they encounter as a group, and it's still an ongoing issue. NOTHING HAS HAPPENED IN THIS STORY EXCEPT FOR A LOT OF TEENAGE SEX.

>>82770

But ok, I will rant less and participate.

First, that fucking lousy Star vs The Forces of Evil comic that's a drag to squeeze money out of its readers (not posting because not furry).

Otherwise, pics related.

Regarding the first pic: Anything from Zaush is wasted potential because he could draw great stuff but his stories are shit.

Also: Anything from Doxy and anything from Miu.

Kinda funny how good or original artists prove that skill is nothing if you literally can't do anything else, like use it for something.

>>82449 (OP)

Did I win

Tales of the Questor and Quentyn Quin: Space Ranger! They were carefully constructed, intelligent storylines full of two-fisted action, realistic danger, and clever use of simple engineering. And a lot of Murphy's Law.

Now, it's lucky to update once a month, and the writer/artist RH keeps running to his fandom over every little financial problem, constantly begging for hundreds, even thousands of dollars. He's been bankrupt, hospitalized, bankrupted again. Instead of large updates in the wake of these, we get drops of Nip and Tuck- or more begging. He's promised commissions, he's promised cameos. He's done a small handful of those. Where he aught to be expected to complete one 40, 50 page comic per year, RH hasn't been that active. Even when many artists would surrender to math and start drawing nudes, anything to get the money, RH just ... hasn't done anything. Everything just fell apart for him.

Triggered my mathematics.

Zach should expend on his mathematical hypothesis. I droped after this page, completely ruined it for me.

>>82476

>>82480

Quite the write up. Would you recommend this, despite its flaws? The supernatural elements seem a bit cliche, nor is the pacing, as you've mentioned, and it seems to me the balance of serious lit to smut isn't very good, even detrimental.

>Spirit Bound is also one of the things that inspires me to try to be an artist.

Glad to hear that. If you were to do that, maybe you could restructure the narrative and fix the pacing, that'd be even better.

>>82810\

>Zach should expend on his mathematical hypothesis.

He already did.

>>82820

>implying Honesty and Campion haven't ladled the psychobable on thick

More seriously, XY getting XX/Fig out of the brothel has done a lot of good for her situation and character, not to mention she might be able to do something to stop the perilous situation at the brothel because of her physical training.

>>82824

He's back, but not doing the best financially at the moment, it seems. I feel that XY's going to become just like Acai. He's not having any luck at selling any of XX's paintings and he's bound to run out of credit at some point.

>>82895

>Would you recommend this, despite its flaws?

The short answer: Sure! With a few conditionals -

0. 1000% gay. in fact, thinking on it a little bit longer, probably half of the females featured are also outright villainous even - looking to it for anything but excessive m/m stuff is pure disappointment.

1. it's a very, very long read, with slow payoff. Again, half the Harry Potter series could be read instead of Spirit Bound to date.

2. it starts out smut focused. In fact, that's how I found it - smut is what I prefer to jerk to, and I kept returning and knocking out a few chapters. Then, a few dozen chapters in, it suddenly shifts gears and actually cares about plot that isn't arbitrarily resolved through sex like a bad porno. You get some interesting drama and plotlines, but it's very bad for jerking to.

3. it's also a teenage drama/romance novel. I can say it's probably as true to form as a Furry Twilight as anything will be, right down to being hypersexualized as furries like to do - so someone that doesn't understand why others would like Twilight would probably not understand Spirit Bound.

4. there are three fetishistic things that are primarily focused on that could be 'deal-breaker' for something so smutty.

-first, it's cub/hebephilia. The sex all focuses on the main four of the cast, which three are "just barely legal" (16) and the fourth is literally a 5000-year-old soul in a 14-year-old's body, to justify consent. There does feature some stuff with younger characters, but they also get "justified consent" if you will.

-second, the canines have feral dog dicks including knots.

-third, there's a lot of partner-swapping. It's not quite cuckoldry as there's no shame involved, but there's a hamfisted love-triangle that could, theoretically, bring that in the future.

I think the main draw of it is that the world-building is surprisingly solid, despite being just a bunch of haphazardly thrown in examples from real world. Mage furs draw from a lot of our own fiction regarding witch/wiccan society, but is structured to be more like actual wizardry; Spirits draw largely from fiction of Vampire society, but is more like elemental bending from Avatar taken to a more detailed extent. The Spirit Bound world in general is our own world, except with just a few things swapped around - furs instead of humans, and the Olympian faith having a front-and-center position as the world's religion.

Honestly, it just makes me pine for some proper furry supernatural fiction that just takes furry creatures for granted. I like seeing this society of animal-people tackling what are otherwise "human" issues, especially with supernatural stuff in the mix, but there's very little of it. I can get down with some furry porn as with anyone else, but that's ultimately not why I'm a furry. Even without the porn I'd still have a significant preference towards furry media, of which there's just a real lack of outside of children's cartoons, so they tend not to seriously tackle more mature ideas.

>>82927

>It sounds terrible, as they all do, but if the writer's any good, it shouldn't matter too much.

It's very bad, but it's bad in a way that's almost good. It's like candy, it can taste good but it'll give you a bellyache too. For the most part, the teenage drama suffers from pacing in just generally the same way as everything else. I can totally sympathize and connect with many of the issues the characters go through (especially Nathanial) except the pacing leaves some things hyper-accelerated and other things remain at a freezeframe with no resolution. In a way, it's actually painfully true to real life, but it doesn't make for compelling writing.

The main thing for this though is the writer isn't great, but you can definitely see how he improves over time. The main takeaway, like in my original post, is the entire thing just needs to be scrapped and rewritten from scratch, because its foundation is too messy to clean up. Any other sins in the writing are almost entirely forgivable given that.

>This is disappointing, but as long as the author isn't proselytizing the virtues of cub polygamy for pages on end for every other page, it should be tolerable. I doubt there's many people in the fandom who wouldn't mind dog dicks though.

It was more of an afterthought, honestly, given where I'm posting this and that I've seen some avid dog-dick-haters (or probably just one guy samefagging). It's actually all extremely tame, which should be telegraphed by the fact that I'm having to call "partner-swapping promiscuity" a fetish, which is almost antithetical to how extreme fetishes get in some furry smut writing. I guess on second thought I should have mentioned there's incest, as well, but that very quickly takes a backseat once the main 4 characters get established.

I glossed over it, but I don't think the legality of any of the smut is really even approached. I'm pretty sure every underaged character gets "justified consent" - which is that, for some reason or another, the sexual activities stand to be a good thing for them, with no sign of sexual abuse. There's the ancient soul in a kid's body, but for the other two underaged characters, one becomes infused with the energies of a succubus and the other is a 'changeling' - born of Fae, nymph in particular, thus having increased sex drive. Everyone else is 16 or older, so legal in most modern countries. Really, you could just pretend they're all in college and almost have the same practical effect, except for them being tied to their parents as dependents being a tangible part of design.

Like I said, it's probably the closest to Furry Twilight I will ever read. A lot of it is just straight up pandering to the audience that would read it (as well as being pandering for the author's own imagination, really - you can basically see the author's mental health reflected in the chapters themselves). It's not at all "good" in an objective sense, but if you are the target audience it's like candy.

>>82925

>What the fuck IS this pseudophilosophical and linguistic bullshit? What the fuck is it even supposed to accomplish? Is it a parody of meme autism??

What, XY's diatribe on sex and society? It's an important belief his character holds that has some important foreshadowing and some truth. It's also very relevant to other themes in the story. Here's the other two pages to finish off his train of thought.

>One can refer to "the ass" of a vehicle like a car or a boat or a airplane; eg: "They seated me in the ass-end of the plane" would be perfectly understandable.

Exactly, you're statement is an example of a mentonymy. In language, this ability to connect a technically unrelated object with another and preserve one's understanding of it is just symbolism, just like art.

>>82928

>In a way, it's actually painfully true to real life, but it doesn't make for compelling writing.

Hah, that's a good observation. Maybe even the best writing might not be so true to life.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. I'll give it a read sometime soon and give my opinion either here or the lit thread.

>>82927

A quick example as to its untapped potential:

The title of the story is Spirit Bound, and it stands to be an incredibly clever title with several meanings. The first meaning would be clear in that Nathanial (the Mage) falls in love with a Spirit - where Mages and Spirits are not exactly on good terms with each other. The beginnings of a big politimagical movement are telegraphed as part of this relationship, but not much has really happened yet because pacing. In this sense, Nathanial's life is now bound to his Spirit boyfriend.

There is, however, a potential second meaning for it. One notable theme in the story is that all of these beings have differing lifespans - specifically, Spirits live (again, like Vampires) for a few hundred years. Liam reincarnates, but he stills lives the lifespan of regular furs, so for him to be in love with a Spirit means that he will, in the prime of his boyfriend's life, die and be separated for at least a few decades. Same thing with Nathanial, except as a Mage he won't reincarnate. He'll just be dead. So Geoff will spend most of his life with his mate dead.

There's one big exception that stands out with this: For arbitrary reasons, Liam and Faelen through the power of sex have tied their souls together, so when Liam dies, so too will Faelen, but they will both reincarnate. So they too are bound by spirit.

My personal theory (and, I suppose, headcanon as I don't expect the story to ever truly finish) is that the ultimate conflict in their lives revolves around this issue of separation, and.. There's really a lot of ways it could be handled. If it weren't for the pacing being literally slower than realtime, this could be a great source of an underlying pressure that motivates them towards whatever path they need to go. And it's a pretty cool one, being an idea largely untouched.

Reality, though, it's not something that really gets addressed outside of the one spoiler bit which is like never brought up again.

>>82929

>Maybe even the best writing might not be so true to life.

That's the thing of it. There are some things that are better given so much more life, so much more detail than they get in real life. Things that we wouldn't appreciate if it were not brought to our attention in art. But on the other hand, there are also some things made even more mundane by trying to depict in art. A real world conversation is engaging when you're there, but if you're just reading a comic book representing that same conversation truthfully, it'd just be some people moving their hands and saying a whole lot of words. It's true in all art forms, and mastery over making compelling details is probably one of the greatest signs of an expert.

>I'll give it a read sometime soon and give my opinion either here or the lit thread.

Good luck man. It's a uh.. journey lmao.

>>82935

You are miles away from what the comic is or what the author is trying to accomplish. Try reading it instead of projecting, it's a very good webcomic. Not the anon you're replying to, btw