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”.

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.

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.

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.

I read an animorphs book from the perspective of Tobias.

I watched many furry_irl videos from the click and eventually I realised I had an affinity for furries.

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.

Renard’s tunes and Squeedge’s cartoons ^_

Warrior cats. Then MLP: FiM. But what actually made me call myself a furry was Zootopia.

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.

Geometry Dash

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.

I’ve always liked media with anthro characters, but my introduction to the furry community was actually at an anime convention.

I had preordered my tickets for A-kon 2002, and back in the day when you preordered you got a few little comic books from a local comic book store in your bag for free. As fate would have it, one of my free comics was Havoc Inc #2. I stayed up late that night reading and rereading the comic, and then trying to draw the characters. I loved it.

A-kon 2002 came and went (great con) and I started setting my sights on what I wanted to cosplay as for A-kon 2003. That summer, Hamtaro had started airing on Cartoon Network, and I thought it would be funny to make a big mascot-suit style costume of Hamtaro. So I googled “how to make a mascot suit” and one of the very first pages I ran into was Yappy Slyfox’s webpage, The Fox Den. After that, there was no escape.