Do you remember when and what helped you discover your affinity for furries? If you do, I’d like to hear your stories!
To get the ball rolling I’ll start with mine. While I certainly can’t pinpoint the exact date I became fixated on anthros, I can absolutely remember getting Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast when I was 7 or 8 (2000ish).
Seeing Tails was all I needed to get hooked, and want to be a cool fox like him. I didn’t even have a word for it until I started using the internet years later, but my furry fate was sealed from then onward. It was the catalyst that got me into fantasizing about having fur and a big tail, and got me doodling lots of Sonic art as a kid. While I’ve long since stopped making Sonic art, Tails still holds a special place in my heart over 20 years later.
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For me, there were several separate threads that all came together at one point.
In middle school, I was envious of my friends’ artistic abilities and I resolved to get better at drawing. This was during the heyday of DeviantArt and so I made an account and followed my friends. Traversing through people’s profiles and what they liked, just randomly surfing, I discovered the work of Melissa O’Brien (“Frisket17”) and I fell in love with their entire oeuvre.
Then I realized why I was so in love with her work specifically: for the first time, I saw depictions that closely resembled the world that I had built in my head – a sort of sunny, tropical spinoff of Redwall. And then I was like, oh my god, it’s not just me! I’m not the only one who wants to see this sort of thing. I wanted The Lion King but in a city. I wanted the beach episode of Redwall. I finally had a word for it: I wanted furry. And it turns out I could draw these characters, too – I could flesh out my own world AND get better at art. Win!
I didn’t realize it at the time, but the reason I had created my own world in the first place is because I desperately wanted an escape from my real life woes about gender identity and my sexuality. I learned through anthro art the relationship between the furry fan and their fursona, and I was like, “I want one, too.” I REALLY liked the idea of being a person, but WITHOUT the BS human limitations that were contributing to my gender dysphoria.
So, I guess I stumbled upon the fandom initially because I wanted to get better at art, but the reason I stuck around is because it offered a safe space for me to explore identity. That was the real awakening.
I’m glad you were able to discover a way to navigate your identity, and discover the art and worlds you wanted to create! Thanks for sharing your story!
I’ve always felt more comfortable around animals than people, so of course I would be drawn to animal and animal-like characters in media. (And there are a lot of them when you’re a kid!) It didn’t become anything of note until my teen years, however.
One day I was flipping channels on the TV when I came across a documentary about foxes. It was meant for children, but the information was new to me and I found myself watching to the end. A day or two later I was watching something on Cartoon Network when the main character suddenly held up a fox as a prop for a joke. The next day I noticed a random picture of a fox somewhere, and then it was like foxes were suddenly everywhere.
And yet, despite foxes being such a common animal with great importance in folklore and popular culture, I realized that I knew almost nothing about them. This felt like a problem that I needed to solve. I read everything I could about the creatures, both in my father’s old encyclopedias and later on the internet when I got access to it, and the more I learned the more I started to identify with them. As a socially-awkward teenage nerd I really resonated with the idea of these small, solitary creatures struggling to get by on intelligence alone, without all the easy advantages given to their larger canine relatives. Now I began to imagine myself as a fox, and would often spend the last moments before sleep imagining the adventures of this other me. This idea of an “inner me that is a fox” would become a useful tool for exploring my identity.
While I consider this the start of my furriness, it would be many years before I actually joined the furry fandom. There was a lot of misinformation on the early internet that kept me away, and I won’t repeat it here but I’m sure many of you know what I’m talking about. Then one day a friend of mine shamelessly held a brony birthday party and I decided that if he could embrace his weird interests so openly then I could at least admit mine to myself. I started lurking on r/furry, realized they were actually cool people, and was shocked to learn that the weird little fox people in my head are something other people have and that they’re called “fursonas”.
Oh yeah can very much relate to liking animals more than people. Glad to hear it helped you explore your identity, even if the bad rumors of the past kept you away from the fandom for a while. Those furry communities really do chip away at those old biases over time. Furry_irl was very helpful for me personally to overcome my internalized fears and accept my bisexuality. Thanks for sharing your story!
I guess I should have included the rest of it!
I was raised in a very queerphobic environment. Lurking in furry spaces introduced me to the LGBT community which put me on the path to realizing that I’m trans and demisexual. Now I have a bunch of amazingly supportive furry friends that are helping me figure all of this out. This really is a great fandom.
Oh, hello me.
I’m old so for me it was Disney’s Robin Hood but internet access wasn’t really much of a thing when I saw it on TV at age 11, so I fell in love with foxes and spent so much time finding books about them and pictures of them. Seeing one made me so happy – I was obsessed.
A few years later I got internet access and that lead me to newsgroups. alt.fan.foxes lead to alt.fan.furry which lead to FurrMUCK and…that was it for me.
I read an animorphs book from the perspective of Tobias.
This but Jake
Sometime in 2013 or 2014 my brother called my art furry art as an insult and something to avoid, I didn’t really know what a furry was. This was the biggest mistake of his life.
Considering how talented furry artists tend to be, that is a pretty funny insult. Bro really took all the Ls on that day.
Being a furry never felt like a conversion or choice to me, it’s just something I’ve always been. It probably showed its first signs around when I was like ~8, being interested in reading about dragons and werewolves. Eventually figured out I was more interested in werewolves than other people were, and being terminally online I stumbled upon the VCL imageboard and a lot of stuff clicked into place. Figuring out I was gay was also hand in hand with learning about furries, so props to the furry community for helping with that.
I know a lot of people consciously choose to be a furry at some point but I wonder how many people are just locked into it from the start, like how I feel.
Even here there have been a few comments (including my own) of some specific media making them realize they like anthros a lot, which I’d say is on par with any other fiction like folklore dragons or werewolves piquing your interest. I was furry before I knew a single other person on earth that felt this way, it just took a while to find a word for it and be involved with the fandom at all.
For sure - I meant like as a percentage, or if there was any evidence of it being possible to be locked in at birth, like sexuality etc. If it’s just down to disney movies as a kid setting the path, it’s weird that it only happens to some people.
Ironically I don’t really interact with the furry community much so there’s probably already a good answer for this question that I’m not aware of.
I watched many furry_irl videos from the click and eventually I realised I had an affinity for furries.
“I wonder why I like these videos so much?” Then suddenly you look down and have paws lol.
I find it hard to tell where I -started- being a furry because I sorta-kinda ship-of-theseused myself into one?
You could argue it all started with Sonic the Hedgehog, but I’d argue back that liking pointy boys that go fast does not a furry make.
All I know is that by the time I knew it all my friends were either furries or furry-adjacent and then I was like “phuck it, so am I”
I think mine was just a slow gradual thing, not a singular event. I googled werewolves a LOT though, and drawing animals is a lot easier than drawing people, so my art mighta been a key factor.
I was exactly the target demographic for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in its heyday.
Oh no, if you come into contact with mutagen, you’ll turn into a cool looking anthro! Please, anything but that, noooooo-
I’m 99% sure everything for me can be traced back to Blinx: The Time Sweeper, an old Xbox exclusive with anthro cats and pigs. Really awesome game, and to this day, I think it was a gem of mechanics and dynamics that it’s a pity never became something more. That would’ve started in around '06. I was 3-4.
I didn’t know the concept of furry until '16 or so, when I would’ve been 13-14. I had a fascination with fur and animal stuff, and a younger friend (he was like 12) said something like “Oh, so you’re a furry?” A few googles later…I was like GOD NO. Came back by early-2017, with a more careful Google and an open mind, and yeah, I was. Joined a furry forum in mid-2017, and the rest is history. Seen a lot of stuff in my time here, but unfortunately, I arrived too late to see a lot of the furry community that used to exist in my local area. Just a few years too young to have caught RCFM.
While it’s too bad you missed out on local furry stuff, I’m glad you were able to come back and discover the fandom after the initial rejection.
I vaguely remember Blinx, seeing it on those store TVs where you break your neck for a demo lol. Couldn’t you literally rewind time briefly in that game? That was such a cool idea!
Yeah! You could basically warp time (and later, space in the sequel). Rewind to access areas, fast forward to jump things, pause to defeat enemies, and even record to have yourself so multiple things at once. I wish Microsoft and Artoon did something with that, but the popularity of Halo (namely in the US and EU markets) overshadowed every other Xbox exclusive.
Warrior cats. Then MLP: FiM. But what actually made me call myself a furry was Zootopia.
Sounds like a good list of media to finally crack through your defenses! God I really gotta watch Zootopia at some point.
Geometry Dash
This has me curious, as I don’t know the game too well. Are their maps with furry content on them? Maybe a content creator with a fursona, or perhaps fan art of the game?
Surprisingly, I’ve played a gigantic amount of time at this game and i only remember one level where there was kinda furry content in it, but can’t remember the name.
I actually found the furry fandom through someone i met on this game. I was young and cringe and i noticed another player’s level that i thought was cool and asked him for a collab. We did a level together and we continued to talk via discord, where he sent me some of his artworks sometimes. I was amazed by this, i really love those drawings. And so after searching for similar pieces i found what are furries and since then I can pass a day without thinking about fluff xD. Unfortunatly we lost contact, but it was a really sweet person and i enjoyed chatting with him a lot.
If you want here is the level we made.
That is incredibly wholesome, I’m glad you two met and shared those moments together!
I was… well, kinda always a furry. Grew up with Pokemon, Star Fox, Sonic, Loony Tunes, some Disney stuff (not really that much, though, mainly house of mouse), Swat Cats, that one era of Justice League animated with the version of Cheetah that was actually anthropomorphic and didn’t just look like she was wearing body paint, etc.
Took me a very long time to actually fully join the fandom, though. Once I found out about it I was really afraid that my parents would react poorly to the whole thing and I had friends who were, well… not very encouraging about it - they weren’t hostile or anything but they bought into the BS that the media tends to spread about us. I only ended up actually starting to interact with the fandom after I moved out, just before COVID.
My anthro awakening was Blacksad, but i circled around the furry fandom for years and years before joining last year.
Circa 2010 i was feverishly googling “tiger girl” looking for pictures of elvish girl in the forest with her pet tiger, you know, that kind of fantasy art; and i found some obscure forum where someone posted a furry drawing of a tiger girl, and someone commented ‘can someone please draw a furry that isn’t trying to be sexy’, and i’m like ‘what’s a furry’
But even just that anecdote already hints at why i didn’t join the fandom: there was less SFW furry content back then, and i was a lot more prudish. Both have changed since.
So, you know, on the list of things i could/should have done ten years ago, there’s that.
