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 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. Side note, it turned out my mother is actually pretty chill about the whole thing.