Worldbuilding Wednesdays: Furries Are Not Ewoks

Welcome to Worldbuilding Wednesdays!  Every Wednesday, we spend what is probably far too much time walking through our worldbuilding process.  This week, we're looking at the culture of the tree-dwelling furries.  Surprisingly, they will not be devoted to being "one with the land."

What We Have So Far

We're going to include here a little reminder of what furries are like so that people reading this don't have to flit back and forth between this post and the one describing furries.  First, furries stand about chest high to a human and weigh about half as much.  They are, as the moniker we've given them suggests, quite furry, and resemble arboreal red pandas with some flying squirrel mixed in.  They're cute by human standards, operate mostly at night, and mostly hunt by dropping onto their prey from above, like adorable ninjas.

Traits they do not inherently possess include a strong sense of environmentalism, and we are harping on this point because we want to dissuade people from making incorrect assumptions.  Since we're building our world almost entirely out of a series of assumptions, we don't want to warn you away from assuming altogether, but you really should avoid making lazy assumptions.

An Aside About Elves

Modern perceptions about elves primarily come from two sources, both British as it happens: folklore about the fae and J.R.R. Tolkien.  One makes sense in context, while the other results from not reading critically.

In British folklore, the fae (or fey, or the Elvish Court, fairies, and any number of different names for the same critters) exist in a mysterious Other or Under World, connected to ours through natural portals.  Arches created by trees, circles of growing mushrooms, caves, and even hollowed-out logs are potential portals that will lead incautious humans into a world that resembles our own but operates by different rules altogether.  The masters of this world are the fae, who bear a twisted resemblance to people but are masters of this other world.  They are capricious, fickle creatures, the folklore explains, but can be dealt with in much the same way that any stranger can: with an abundance of caution and an excessive level of politeness.

Because of the way that fae are encountered (out in the wild, far from the works of man), one can be forgiven for assuming that all fae live in the wild.  And indeed, some do!  It's just that there are an even greater number of fae who live in, for example, castles, such as the Castle Revolving (an enchanted castle whose exterior wall is always spinning, making it impossible to reach the entrance) or the castle of the Green Knight.  Others ruled entire kingdoms that resembled the countries of Man, like the otherworldly land of Annwn in Welsh mythology.  The primary difference is that, in folklore, people never made it that far.  They stepped briefly into the edges of the other world, realized their folly, and backed out before they were too late.  In that sense, assuming that everything in the world resembles the backwater location you found yourself in is perhaps a bit presumptive, but at least makes sense.

J.R.R. Tolkien, master of fantasy, had a lot to say about elves.  Unfortunately, almost none of it was actually read carefully by the population at large.  It is for this reason that in the movies and shows about Tolkien's Middle-Earth, every elf bears pointed ears and long flowing hair, despite Tolkien describing elves as "like humans, but immortal."  Similarly, everyone "knows" that the elves of Middle-Earth live in hidden kingdoms deep within the wilds, their civilization in complete harmony with their surroundings.

That bit just isn't true.

The closest to this image are the wood elves encountered during The Hobbit, and even there, the description isn't apt.  While wood elves love and care for their woods, and they have enough time to coax many trees into the shapes they see fit, the primary residence of the wood elves was an underground palace in a hill.  That was intentional; Tolkien drew from the descriptions of the fae in British folklore when he first started putting together the elves.  Later, when he conceived of elves as a step between the angelic Ainur and mortal man, they became (for the most part) representations of what man would be capable of, given time and patience.  The other elven kingdoms described in The Lord of the Rings are bucolic and pastoral, but they aren't environmentally pristine.  For example, Rivendell, the capital of Elrond's country, is described so precisely that we know which real-life town Tolkien based it on- Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland.  It's a pleasant town of some 2,000 or so people, a stretch of green pastures located in a valley surrounded by steep hills and cliffs, and the vibe given off is of idyllic peace... but the people there (in real life as in Tolkien's works) live in actual, normal houses.  Nice houses.  Big houses.  But not 100% organic, free-grown, ranch-fed houses.

Despite this, because elves are so often encountered in the woods in Tolkien's works, people who weren't paying much attention became convinced that the elves lived in the woods.  Because so many of them seemed to be living in the woods, people assumed that, in the absence of a clear population center, the elves must be so attuned to nature that they were... "as one with the wilds."  As for the pointed ears?  A combination of early movies conflating Tolkien's elves with the fae and a desire to make it visually clear which people were human and which were elves.

We've gone on a bit too long about this subject, but in summary:  elves were never strict environmentalists attuned with the land.  Because they were so often seen in the woods, people assumed that they were.  In order to head that off, we're making it clear repeatedly here:  furries are also not strict environmentalists attuned with the land.  They just happen to live in trees, which in our world are big enough to easily support a civilization.

Clear?

The Cultural Kit

As we established last week, we have four parts of a culture that we'll be looking at for each of our species.  Those four parts are Language, Values, Norms, and Social Organization.  Thanks to the groundwork we've already laid, we don't have to spend as much time establishing the "why" of each of these, and can instead focus more on the "what."

  Language of the Trees.  If you've ever been in a large forest, as opposed to an open plain, you might have noticed something:  sound carries.  It carries really easily, in fact.  In a quiet forest, you can hear a snapping twig echoing through the woods from hundreds of yards away.  Echoes reverberate from tree to tree.

  When people of the forests speak, they do so melodiously.  This isn't inherently due to artistry or aesthetics, but pragmatism.  If you speak up in the woods, you soon find yourself contending with the echo of your own voice.  Breaking words up by not just vowel and consonant but also pitch keeps monotonous statements from being washed out.  Shifting pitches throughout the language are common to both the woodland people of North America and of Africa.

  Combined with the relatively quiet nature of furries and the most likely sounds to carry through the forest (sharp, explosive noises or melodies from birdsong), the furry language is likely to sound like someone softly singing.  For funsies, we'll also add a feature of the languages of the Iroquois and the Finnish, both of whom live in forests: polysynthetic structure.  This is a feature of certain languages that allows entire sentences to be constructed from a single, long word, due to the fact that the individual syllables are what provide the meaning, rather than the words in and of themselves.  We have that in English, to a lesser extent; that's where we get portmanteaus, the invention of new words by combining two or more smaller words, like "suit+case=suitcase."  Apply that to an entire sentence instead, and you get the idea.

  Why Furries Are Best.  Unlike nu humans, who originate in a sea of grass the size of our planet, the forests of the furries are more scattered.  The furries in particular will favor the hyperforests initially, each "only" the size of a country rather than a planet, albeit often located in the heart of a much larger forest that can stretch for up to 20,000 km.  As a result, furries are more isolated from each other than humans are, and will have different breeds- not quite subspecies, but far more different genetically than, say, an Inuit and a Roman would be.  Accordingly, furry cultures will emphasize not just why furries are best, but why their particular brand of furry is best.

  Still, there will be several aspects of furry life in general that all furries will agree are important.  Patience and stealth will be of prime importance to furries; a loud furry is a hungry furry.  Perhaps surprisingly, courage will also be in ready supply.  Remember, if a furry misses a jump, it is 300 meters or more to the ground... and yet even young furries must make such jumps regularly.  Still, minimizing the risk is important, so skill will be valued, as well as those furries who are intelligent enough to come up with new, less risky tactics.  The furry who invented rope, for example, is almost certainly a mythic hero.  So will be the furry who invents the glider.

  Seen and Not Heard.  Since patience and silence are virtues, and furries are cuddlers in social settings, you probably won't be hearing many furry speeches.  Given their singsong speech patterns, this is a bit of a shame.  In fact, furries will likely be of the mind that excessive talking in general is kind of rude.  This means that, to an outsider, it can be kind of difficult to tell when furries are active, as opposed to when they're sedentary.

  As nocturnal creatures who live on a world with a roughly 40-hour cycle, furries will spend the darker hours engaging in most of their activity.  Knots of furries will socialize, while others engage in crafting or practice leaping from branch to branch.  When ready to hunt, they'll form hunting bands, individually pursuing smaller prey and working together to hunt something larger- not just because doing so is safer, but because much of the larger prey will be on the ground and they'll need to cooperate to pull it up into the trees.  As the pre-dawn light starts to filter through the leaves, the furries will retreat toward the trunk of their tree, eating enough to sate themselves for some time before slipping into an exceedingly long (by human standards) sleep.  20 hours of activity followed by 20 hours of rest will be their norm.

  Something to note: furries will be litterbugs.  It would be hard not to be; to them, nobody lives on the ground, so the easiest way to clean the branch they're on is to simply sweep things over the side.  Pre-civilization, this will only be a problem in the sense that you shouldn't try to sleep beneath a furry-occupied tree.

  Extended Family is Everything.  Furries move in hunting groups, and those hunting groups tend to line up 1 to 1 with family groups.  Socialization often includes sex, and furries trade members between groups the same way that baseball teams trade players, but the core of the group will be several adults and those children who aren't old enough to make their own way.

  Furries are polyamorous and non-monogamous, but this isn't to say that they aren't committed in their relationships.  A typical hunting group consists of a mated group (between 2 and 5 adults) that more or less remain in the group for life; a set of temporary partners, usually younger adults that are old enough to have sex but haven't yet found their permanent group (these are the members that most often move from hunting group to hunting group); and then the offspring born from the above, no matter who had them, are treated as the children of the group as a whole.  This is a furry family, and when furries get around to developing naming conventions, they will almost certainly have a personal name and a surname that corresponds to the group they were born into.  A furry's siblings will be those children that were also born to the group, and each furry will have a multitude of parents, some permanent, some temporary.

  On a broader social scale, furries operate as a hunting group.  Rarely is a furry alone; in a social setting, they'll almost always have their family with them.  Given their proclivities, the majority of interactions between families resemble casual, silent orgies, with various furries choosing to cuddle or "cuddle" as the situation warrants.

  Zooming out even further, furries regularly interact with each other when they all live in the same tree, but contact is more intermittent with other trees, and rare beyond the patch of forest that they call home.  While the primary social unit is the family/hunting group, the organization of furries scales upward; thus, a furry would describe themselves by name, then family group, then tree, and finally territory.  This would be most similar to a human introducing themselves by first name, surname, the apartment building they live in, and then city.  Unless two territories were very close together, furries from different territories would likely consider each other different breeds.

Conclusion

We're close to our self-imposed word limit, so let's summarize:  Furry culture consists of large swinger families that tend to hang out with the other families on their tree first and foremost.  They sleep away most of the long day, and are active all night, speaking rarely but in a quiet song often consisting of long, single words.  They tell tales of their sneakiest, bravest, and most skilled, they practice making difficult jumps when they aren't making rope, and they think nothing of dropping their refuse onto unsuspecting creatures far below.

Got it?  Good!  Next week we'll look at scalies.  And hopefully we won't spend quite so long ranting about elves.