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.
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.