Just for some fun, random characterization… I feel like baby Cooper blows out the candle of his birthday cake by grabbing a fist full of the flame.
Also, definitely a rain boots kid. Even when it’s not raining. There’s always rubber rain boots stomping around.
eddie ends up just holding his hands and bouncing with him while everyone sings to him because he keeps trying to grab literal fire lol.
he's definitely the type of baby to just face plant into it too. he's not really sure at first, kinda looks at you and eddie like "hey?? you gonna help me orrrr???"
eddie feeds him a little of the icing, the both of you melting when his eyes light up at the taste. then he's falling face first into the tiny cake, fist fulls of cake, slobbering all over it and squealing with laughter.
he's a rain boot kid until he's a toddler and can make choices, then he wants boots "to match daddy" so you get him a cutesy little pair of cowboy boots. bright red or yellow rain boots?? stomping in mud puddles and giggling when it splashes up on him.
he gets so sad when eddie fills the holes. goes out after it rains to his usual puddle and he can't find it. "daddy filled it coop." you hum. "it's all gone."
"all gone?" cooper repeats, eyes rounded in the most pitiful way. makes you want to go get a shovel and re-dig the hole yourself. fling all the gravel in the yard so eddie will bitch when he goes to mow.
"all gone." you nod slowly, anticipating the tiny cry that comes, teeny toddler cooper running into your legs, rubbing his teary face against your jeans.
you take him to see eddie, both of you greeting him with matching frowns. "what?" eddie's amused face falls. "what'd i do?" he sighs.
"cooper doesn't have a puddle to jump in anymore." you glare at eddie.
"well, i had to fill it, sweetheart. i was gonna pop a tire-"
"-you said you'd leave a little bit for him." you huffed, giving him a pointed glare.
"i thought i did." eddie huffed, rolling his eyes.
"all gone?" coop's watery chirp of a tone has eddie's heart swelling, your glare intensifying, cradling the toddler to your chest.
eddie huffs, stomping out to the side of the barn. a small-ish bucket eddie usually brings with him to the creek is out there, he pours some of the water out so it's just enough for cooper. within minutes, your baby boy is back to jumping, holding eddie's hands while he stomps around in the bucket, giggling and splashing around.
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I write a lot to deal with my emotions and to process (right now I am processing a lot of anger, still). I don't share a lot of it, but I did write something to post on fetlife yesterday having to do with my friend, Remy's, death. The circles of people I have over there have no real context or frame of reference for any of it though. Since I'm still vaguely furry-adjacent, I figured maybe people (all like.. five of you) would get more mileage out of it here, so I'm crossposting it.
This is a small tidbit of furry history. Before you fly off the handle and send me anon hate, please take a minute to read all of this through. Plus think about what type of person would absolutely fucking loathe both queer people involved in WWII reenacting, and queer people dressing in uniform to do weird kink shit. (it's supposed to be fascists that idealize the era, they would have an aneurysm, but this is a trick question because apparently everybody loathes it)
Anyway. Pushing the Feldpost Envelope (furries and nazis and death in here.)
"History lesson.
I'm at the third year of my home furcon in 2005, attending opening ceremonies, wearing my officer's cap. All day, I've been nervously eyeing someone also in an officer's cap, albeit a different branch, worried that they're either going to be confrontational, or that they're a bad actor and a bigot. We'd unknowingly run in the same circles for a couple years now, but had yet to cross paths in any significant way until today.
"I like your hat" he smiled and piped up after the ceremonies were over. I, a very anxious sixteen year old girl at the time, had a flood of relief wash over me now that the ice had been broken and he didn't seem like a total asshole (joke's on me, Remy was still an asshole, just usually the good kind). "I like yours too..!" I chimed back. And the rest was history. "Living history", actually.
A couple months prior, Remy had created the Nazi Furs community, which I wound up co-running and co-moderating. The goal was to create a space for people with a genuine interest in history and reenacting (which despite the name wasn't limited to the German side of things) and/or for those who get their rocks off in uniform, a little more tucked away from early 2000s internet shock value, and most importantly protected from actual racists, bigots, and all around pieces of shit (which took a hell of a lot of work). Furries tend to cover the whole gamut of kink, and while Remy and I both leaned further towards the leather subculture, we tried to make space for all of the spectrum as long as it was related to that specific time period in some way.
We were not a popular or well liked group. But we were a necessary group. This is the south, if you weren't a cishet good ol boy, it was frankly just not safe to venture into any reenacting groups around here at the time. So, we made our own space for it, to be gay and weird and ourselves while we ran around in the woods. Even in kink, we tried to push the envelope for what was "acceptable" in the eyes of larger communities and carve out a little trench for ourselves, because often in the most accepting places, people would still take issue (and still do). We did our best to push back against people feeling closeted or ashamed for what they were interested in, kink or not. Don't be a shitty person is all we asked. We were young and we stumbled a lot, but we tried our best.
Ultimately, with the shifting perspectives in the fandom, in kink, and in general with online spaces being cleansed to be more palatable and marketable, we lost the fight. Part of it came from the evolving political environment in the US, it did become impossibly hard to weed out bad actors, and not be seen/assumed as a bad actor yourself. But part of it is from lingering social norms on what is "okay" and "acceptable" (even in alternative subcultures), instead of remembering that some interests can be solely academic and not a reflection of your own personal world views. Bleeding over to kink, it's exactly the same, and some people have forgotten that kink should be weird and ugly and not acceptable, it should challenge your emotions and perspective sometimes. It is the opposite of social norms, it's not meant to be sanitized and diluted down for the masses to consume. It's meant for you, and your self expression, self exploration, and your kameraden who share that with you.
Remy died on January 26th. He was one of my very best friends, and there are not many people left on this planet who know me like he did. I rushed to clean his house of things his mother did not want, or need, to see, because I was the only one left to do so. He is survived by communities that did not want him and refuse to see the work he put in for people to have a place they felt accepted.
I have no place in community anymore. But if anyone reading this feels ostracized for their interests or kinks, I feel the same so deeply inside me that it hurts my soul. You shouldn't have to feel that way. I do not have it in me anymore to try and create a space like Remy and I worked on in the past, but do know that you're not alone. I'll be here. I'm still here somehow."
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I would also like to add this summarized post that Remy made to the original group, the last post in the group, in 2017.
"In the wake of recent social unrest, we would like to take a moment to make a statement regarding this community.
Nazi_Furs was created by a bunch of nerds.
Yes, you read correctly. A bunch of big old nerdy nerds started nazi_furs to post stories, art, historical articles, images from WWII museums, reenacting and living history events, and sometimes little animated gifs of dancing hitlers that we thought were funny.
Most of our members were card carrying homosexuals. Almost all of our moderators were gay, trans, or some other color of "unacceptable" to ACTUAL NEO-NAZIS.
Many of us have well researched and thought out fursonas that inhabit a world set during WWII era Germany. The setting used in many movies like Bed-knobs and Broomsticks, Indiana Jones, Iron Sky, and Dead Snow lends itself well to fantasy. Setting talking animal people into this backdrop did not seem like such a huge clusterfuck at the time.
Nazis are a cliche', relegated to "the bad guys" in popular culture. The sharp uniforms, advanced military weapons and tactics, crackpot schemes, and paranormal ties are used all the time in modern media. They are a caricature of what they were 70+ years ago, much like ninjas (paid assassins) and pirates (murderers and thieves) are today. Once you have been relegated to a children's Halloween costume you no longer have the influence to command respect or fear.
Let us allow nazis to be just that, a cliche condemned to be the "bumbling bad guys". Let us laugh at them and rob them of any authority they feel they may have. There haven't been any "REAL" nazis since the downfall of the NSDAP in 1945, and any members of that movement would be pushing 90 by now.
The "alt-right" are not nazi_furs. They are hateful individuals putting on costumes pretending to be like people they do not understand who have been dead for years. These people WANT you to associate them with nazis, and calling them that only feeds their egos. Lets try not to do that.
If you take anything away from our group, let it be a reminder of our origins as nerdy nerds pouring over history books, saturating ourselves in history to better understand what happened in the 1930s and 40s. Take a look at our current situation we find ourselves in and ask yourselves if we are all doomed to repeat our past mistakes. Then focus your rage and disapproval in a productive manner. Get out there and vote the real racist out of office. Mobilize in peaceful protest, advocate for the oppressed and downtrodden. Make the world a better place than you found it."
I stepped away from the fandom when my home convention, RCFM, ended after a decade. I had been run into the ground, my wallet taken advantage of entirely too much, and I was burnt out beyond belief. Remy stayed more up to date on fandom things, I know there were issues with other "nazi" groups popping up that were inundated with the alt-right. There was no avoiding getting lumped in with them, so we eventually just enjoyed our interests in silence, away from everyone else.
To be completely honest, the majority of our time was spent in museums and hunting down weirdly specific esoteric research topics, which we'd then attempt to discuss while drunk around a fire (this is the academic way). It wasn't to idolize these people or politics, it was to understand an extremely complicated time period and what was born out of it. There are SO MANY absolutely fascinating aspects to study, not just "woo big scary gun death ubermench". What people saw most though, convention-wise at least, were the room parties where we could let our hair down and be WEIRD. Furcon room parties are fucking weird just as a baseline, throw some uniforms and sadomasochism in, sometimes some LSD, and... I mean yeah. And of course that's all that stuck in anybody's mind. Though, tbh, a lot of the time for the majority of the night, it was just a small circle of friends watching war movies and drinking. We came up with this (not) great idea to take a shot every time there was a depth charge in Das Boot, yeah I can't recommend that lmao.
Even from the reenacting standpoint, Remy was putting together a US medic impression (not even German! *clutches pearls*) over the past few years, because he was an EMT by trade. I've always reenacted a very inept Wehrmacht artillery officer who is a touch cowardly, not great at their job, and is usually relegated to office/paperwork. It's far from the edgy internet shock value people associated us with.
Nowadays I am usually running around in the woods alone, or getting the shit kicked out of me in uniform (consensually). I'm just less visible about it. I wish I didn't have to be. It feels very lonely, extremely so now that I've lost Remy. I think there was a good opportunity somewhere in there to push back against the alt-right by being very VERY gay and trans and queer and weird in uniform, destroy the image they were trying to create for themselves, but the current culture of the internet wouldn't have allowed that. I'm still going to keep doing that, just.. y'know, in my own space, on my own time.
I hope other people are out there being weird too. I'll be weird with you in spirit.
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