ideas please

I had an RP years and years ago when Humans and Furries were at war (Anthros). The plot became rather twisted.

I don't know if I should say how it happened.

I would say.. I would give you a few ideas, but .. err.. my writing and ideas .. well not pg-13 .. Not even rated r.. if you catch my drift lol

Do you have anything else to work with,
or just a world where humans and "furs" co-exist, and end in a war?
And what are "furs" in your world?

Fur's and humans where living together.
all were happy, life was good.
No one really knows what happened nexted,
but many say it was the human media that struck first!!!
the furs retaliated with cat ninjas trained in the arts of crouching kittens and hidden hippo
the humans set up traps baited with yarn balls and squeaky mouses
then the furs sent in the ferrets
but the humans just had just to put up some aluminum foil and they couldn't get past
then they send in the squires and the fur really flew...
car policies went throw the roof as drivers tried to dodge them on the road!
farmers of every type of nut known to man wondered how all the trees everywhere where suddenly barren!
the flying squires where the worst...

I don't know much about plot, but if you work in a steam punk theme, you could submit it for the califur conbook. I hear their editors are looking for some more solid submissions.

It's funny you should mention such a thin, as I am currently in the process of starting up a web comic that in a way has that situation, but a bit more complex. Basically Anthropomorphs come to rise from humanity after the constant imbalance of chemicals and genetic material from livestock is handed down to the human population and accelerates rapid mutation. The population is devestated by stillborn attrocities at first, but a vast minority begin to survive. Those that are not torn asunder by radical hate mongers are thrown into labratories for study. The birth defects are labeled under the biproduct of a submissive new genetic disease. No real action is taken and the situation begins to become rather unstable, with riots rising across The US and Europe.

Eventually the anthropomorphs or "biomorphs" ass they will be termed in the story, will be engineered and bred for specific purposes so that the rest of humanity won't have to dirty it's hands. Long story short, the subjugated rebel and cause all sorts of ruckus.

That's really just backstory at the moment, there's going to be a truck load more story involved, and quite a bit of effort has gone into the backstory, or history of the universe the comic will take place in. If you want to check out the progress for yourself, check

http://www.furaffinity.net/user/watercolorwolf/

It's my general furry-art related page, as well as the launching grounds for the very beginnings of the comic. Though my site has only the base effects and final products. The writing and backbone to the art is done by Burn Bright Tyger.

Boy that was longwinded. Sorry if it seems like I was hijacking your thread, just wanted to share what I had been working on in a similar vein hoping that something might be inspirational.

And then there was talk of nueturing, and the elders said "WE SHALL SMITE THESE HAIRLESS BARBARIANS" and war raged among the bipedal races of earth...who will be the vicotr, who will be the one to come out on top, will there be any nuetering...find out next time, same fur time, same fur channel.

Sorry couldnt resist, it's 2 am and I cant sleep.

Not too much to work with in your description sweets, was there anything more you wanted then just a war, like any kind of specifics? do furs currently reside with the human population? are they segregated from the human world? or are humans encroaching upon their land etc etc etc.

If you could provide some more details I may be able to see about tossing you some idea's.

You might want to check your idea with a geneticist first. The mode of gene change you're proposing in your story is not possible. Genetically engineered food cannot randomly pass along the transgenes to other organisms.

Closely related organisms can hybridize and thus acquire the genes, but you cannot get a fish gene from a genetically altered tomato by eating said tomato.

And bad chemicals induce random mutations and/or neuroendocrine/endocrine disruption. They'll give you cancer or mess up your physiological homeostasis, but they will not turn you into a furry.

This hearkens back to the old comic days when everyone seemed to think a huge dose of gamma-radiation was all it took to get super powers. Sorry to say, all that does is make all your cells lyse from the immense amount of ionization damage and chromosomal destruction and you die rather horribly in a few hours.

You might instead want to look more to something deliberate gone wrong or out of control: a super-soldier experiment, a mad scientist (Kage! D: ), or bio-terrorist-made super parasite.

There must be a plausible origin for the furry species. How many types are we talking about here? Getting one species engineered is hard enough. If you're looking at the whole gamut of furry types, then you've got a MASSIVE plausibility problem. How on earth do all those different genetic backgrounds get introduced? And how too do enough of these furries arise or humans get transformed to create a stable population?

Too often in stories like these, the practicality of the origins of the situation composing the primary plot in the story are not properly thought out. Good science fiction always at least attempts to make an origin sensible within the bounds of the story and what is known scientifically at the time. You can make up things that cannot be proven or disproven, or can at least be given a certain air of credibility in the fiction (such as warp drive), use the old problem-solver 'magic' to escape certain practicality issues, or use the alien method (by which the furries are an alien race, but then you can at best have a few species and it must take place far in the future after other issues such as pathogenic organisms from different biospheres are taken care of.

One mode of transforming many species at once could use a common theme of a failed attempt to combine science and magic. One obsessed crazy science dude could try making himself all-powerful and whatnot by merging his mind with a strong animal body and instead his quantum reactor/Harry Potter thingamajig goes kablooie and the resulting half-magic/half-science blast transforms everyone within a given radius.

Just a thought. :3

It's fairly easy to introduce backstory throughout the entire story. Bits and pieces can be tossed into conversation here and there, or some sort of exposition or whatnot. There are so many ways to do it.

The retrovirus thing is a problem as retroviruses are tiny. They can carry only a few genes at most. For a total re-engineering of physiology, it'll take hundreds of genes with specific tweaks here and there. And then you have to wonder what the motivation would be to introduce 'furry' genes into crops? Why on earth would you be putting genes for fur into a tomato or corn? Hmm... a tomato that can grow in winter by being endothermic? That might work for a farce. Or did they already do that in "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"? :B

In any case, you need a logical reason why there are lots and lots of furries. Wide-spread very deliberate genetic engineering or meeting an alien race are among very few plausible scenarios. Others that can work are the magic option and dimensional shifts (it's the Marvel Multiverse again!).

How about an advanced human population that genetically breeds a slave race based on their pets and some exotics.... expected revolt, yada yada, eventually humans and anthros team up to fight nasty aliens that try to take over the earth while its distracted with infighting between species? If thats not complicated enough, you could add mind controlling dolphins.

Jeefers

First of all, I think that it is grand that you wish to write a "furry" story; that is one of the goals of Furry Fandom, after all - and a heck of a lot of stories have been written, both by furry fans and professional Horror and SciFi writers.

But that brings me to the point: many stories along the lines of Anthro/Human conflict have already been written - not to discourage you, for many more SHALL be written after our time here - and many if not most of the detailed plot devices that others above have suggested have already been incorporated into stories, some well, some poorly, some so outrageously but still published because other factors in the story make them worth reading. If you get a chance there in the UK, see if any of the english Furry Groups have a member with a collection of back-issues of TALES OF THE TAI-PAN or YARF! In the YARF! collection, look for stories about the "Double Helix Corporation".

Again, I do not wish to discourage you, go ahead and write your story - but I would suggest leaving the back-story explanation of WHY there are Anthros in our human world, as brief and as vague as possible, and get on with the start of the conflict, and into the conflict action itself. Stories about the Battle of the Blitz presume that EVERYBODY knows SOMETHING about WWII, so spend a MINIMUM of time and space explaining anything but the barest facts. The CONFLICT is the thing! This gives you some wriggle-room getting out of the chute, and if you try for some detail up until that point, half your audience will be sidetracked by the possibilities that those details hint at.

Will the Anthros be blocked from participating in our normal economy, denied jobs, unable to pay for food from the local market, compelled to revert to Grazing or Hunting? Will there be ghettos of Herbivores or curfews on Carnivores, or "meat rations" to keep them civil? When the conflict starts, will Lupines form packs? Will they ally themselves with Vulpines? Would Wolf-like Anthros even be allowed in the UK, as they are currently non-native? Would the countryside be populated with little Rabbit Villages and Ferret Towns, where the inhabitants will develop or hide their own "Just Us Folk" type of culture? Will there be primarily single-race-dominated areas, where the local minority is recognised and cared for, but not strangers of the same race?

Is there some sort of "end-game" that you wish this to conclude with, or would your story just be an episode in an already existing conflict, that will continue without effective resolution by the time your story has ended? You aren't planning to chronicle a whole war, are you? Makes it hard to care for or become attached to any particular characters, if you do - and observing individual characters is where much of the richness and "otherness" of Anthro, "animal-based" behaviour and culture in your story would be on display.

You COULD isolate the Foxes to Ireland, and the Badgers to Scotland, and have a special detachment of elite, Gurkha Squirrels...And Tigers in the RAF...

Alright, this last bit was silly, but you should get the idea - there are HUNDREDS of good directions to go, if you don't get too bogged down in scientific realities and explanations of HOW such came to be from what we have NOW. Some of your ideas will be similar to others, but much will be novel. Be shameless in exploiting achetypes and stereotypes, and let your audience take your suggestions and fill in the details out of their own minds. 221-B Baker Street is vivid and solid and real to most readers of mysteries, but there is precious little in the way of description of it in Conan Doyle's books.

Actually, hormones tend not to be too much of an issue in foods unless you're using a huge amount of dairy from large commercial farms.

Endocrine disruption has been noted from some pesticides AND from drinking water contaminated with contraceptive hormones. Guess what, the human body doesn't absorb everything from those pills. It excretes the excess. And the wastewater treatment in most cities doesn't remove or destroy steroid hormones. In a number of rivers, the hormone levels are now high enough to cause physiological effects!

But rather than inducing mutation, endocrine disruptors tend to induce reduced fertility or infertility due to malformed organs.

Another class of chemicals that probably already has created lasting changes in humans and many other organisms are those which alter DNA labelling, ie methylation and acetylation. These changes, which only recently were recognized as extremely important (stemming from attempts to figure out how why stem cells are stem cells in the first place), can alter gene expression levels for GENERATIONS! Experiments with nematodes has found that some epigenetic marker changes lasted for up to 60 generations of offspring after one single exposure. The DNA sequence itself is unchanged, only how it is read and expressed is altered.

This may be the reason for increases in such things as autism, where direct gene links have proven elusive. Instead, a change in expression in a gene that may be vulnerable disrupts a pathway for certain neuronal development pathways and a syndrome results with no apparent mutation.

And the scary part is, the chemicals that can induce epigenetic changes are everywhere! We can't even start to predict what lies down the road several generations from now when all the various expressional alterations begin compounding. There could be quite a tremendous increase in developmental disorders among other things. Metabolism is another vulnerable area, since so many of its regulatory pathways are influenced by external environmental cues.

Then we have fun things like mercury, which can alter brain development in minute quantities.

Now, all that being said, you could project this all out to a point where humanity has practically sterilized itself and most other higher organisms on the planet through rapid, unregulated development of 3rd world nations with no environmental controls (just look at China's problems with massive chemical spills, horrible air quality, and deliberate spiking of products with toxic materials like melamine and ethylene glycol for example). Add in some unforseen teratogenic/mutagenic effects from combinations of chemicals that alone seemed harmless, and some humans might get the idea to try and cross their DNA with other animals to create newer and more resistant species.

Perhaps they might try creating stable polyploids with spare chromosomes that could be switched on if needed, perhaps they'd develop a biomedical protozoal parasite (instead of only a virus) to splice entire regions/replace chromosomes of DNA at a time. And this parasite, with a rather disagreeable tendancy to grab and insert random chromosomes from one host to another, rapidly spreads across the globe since its incredible mutation level means it would be very difficult to design a treatment which could effect more than a few of its myriad forms.

This is just a simple way. It could actually be more complex than that.