Just a bit of a quick thought that's occurred to me whilst watching something political on the television about trying to create strong local communities. After being active in the fandom for more than a year now, I've seen a number of exposé articles about the furry community. Within these pieces, what keeps cropping up is the sense that the fandom provides a welcoming community that people feel at home in.

Combined with the fact that today modern living does create an impersonal environment in towns and cities, I would actually venture to say that the fandom is merely doing something that's disappeared from society. If modernity leaves people feeling isolated, where their only social experience is with colleagues at work, then the fandom is a modern creation that has the strong community that the offline world can lack.

I think you can say this is true, as the fandom is a very organic community despite largely being organized online. I've met people through friends of friends, I find artists and writers, art and writing, though word of mouth. What this means is that people are at the heart of the community here, and sociability is something that is integral to this community to function.

Moreover, the fandom isn't primarily a consumerist platform. Yes, there is the circulation of goods, but the point to notice is that the fandom is a self-sufficient community. The community creates the products the rest of it consumes. What this means is that the fandom is productive - it isn't a sink merely for things to be sold. We don't just buy, we also sell, and the majority of the things we buy come from people within this community. In short, the fandom is not being sold to be external companies. It isn't like there are clothing companies directly manufacturing fursuits for people here to buy. Besides, when we talk of consumerism and commodities in the context of the fandom, those terms become a bit shaky as far as I'm concerned. Since it is art, literature, and craft being marketed, these artistic endeavours destabilize those notions, as to go Marxist on you, they're not products created by an alienated workforce. In essence, we very often know the people who create these gods, and we know that they create the whole thing, rather one small part. We're not consuming art where we know nothing about the people involved in making it. There's no chain of production in creating goods here.