Altho most of the time people just use furries with no intention at all of doing anything interesting with them, their being talking animal-people merely an aesthetic choice because it gets the writer's rocks off.

And I gotta say the "furries as a metaphor for persecuted minority group by humans" has gotten totes played out too *coughGeneCatlowcough*

Actually I get kinda bothered even with species as personality metaphor sometimes because it's just so darn lazy. If you can rewrite "the tiger" as "the buff buzz-cutted guy" and not really lose anything in the story then something's wrong with it :I.

Well okay not necesarilly wrong with it but if someone wrote a sci-fi story about alien races but the aliens lived and acted exactly as humans then most people would think something'd be weird with it. Animals are all totallly different species with their own instincts but all furries in fiction have the most basic instincts, outlooks, and motivations of humans, which are all apes, and plenty of stories do nothing to justify their being there at all. Altho the thing about the two species of Jesus sounds like it is actually starting to press past the "furry as haircolor/ethnic race" thing maybe.

BUT HEY that's just me I dunno. I hypocritically still enjoy stories about furries more anyway because it's an aesthetic fetish and seriously that's basically the only real core reason for just about every furry, extra justifications pruned off.