>>6505
>I love the share-world aspect of FiM. It means the fanfiction can focus on much smaller details, using known characters and settings to examine the part of the human experience that seems glaringly obvious, or odd, in that setting.
in this aspect, I agree. Even if these whimsical settings, you discover things about yourself because your rational mindset is being transmitted to species that by themselves are not rational. Therefore, you´ve got to give them those human characteristics in order to have enough room for character development and follow human logical but according to the physics, lore and the conditions of that specific setting. While writing about fantasy, you are portraying aspects of IRL stuff, let alone in fanfics which are more commonly used for personal desires and emotions connected to the author within that story.

The writing practice leads to what you have described (not necessarily all the time but it often carries that layer of examination portrayed in fictional characters in general).

>By contrast I don't much care about the zootopia shared world. It has all the same advantages but: I don't like the city, and I really don't care to dip into the casual disrespect all the characters there feel towards each other. Oh, that makes sense, because big cities are like that. But because I don't like the city in general, except to go shopping and then to leave for home again, it makes sense I wouldn't care about the 'shared world' of zootopia.
>So obviously Zootopia is a furry movie; one of the first that takes the concept seriously. And I enjoyed the movie, but never fantasized about being there.
that´s a matter of your personal preference and yeah, Zootopia would be like the closest reference of the furry term (explicitly speaking) that one could set the differences between furry and not furry. However, that problem still persists despite attempting to strictly define what qualifies as such.

>The Lion King might or might not be considered a furry movie. They're 'ferals' as with our ponies, but in tLK the societies are brute savages, having neither the time nor the resources to consider trappings of farming, commerce, politics, housing or clothing. Naturally this is also a part of the human experience, as I'm re-reading Genesis now and reminded they just got by as nomads in a land of nomads with no industry anywhere. But I do not want to live there, so tLK is not within my 'furry diagram' of "where I want to be"
basically, what you have presented here as furry is not about the body structure that tells the requirements of what tells a furry character or not but more like how human like the character is in its behaviour.

Namely, you are focusing a lot on the advanced formal ethics that settles a civilized society and the difference that sets them apart relies on those animals being either primitive or formal and organized in their daily lives. That´s your personal borderline. It seems fair and it´s cool to hear that you rely more on the psychological side rather than the physical one for this term.

It doesn´t solve the problem that the word furry implies in practice but alright, I understand where you are coming from with that association.