BoneheadBruin

Be the Fat Bear Week you want to see in the world. Make your Fat Bear Weakness your strength.

One other small addition addition that I didn’t know where to fit is that, as a non-neurotypical gay man, wrapping my life around furries makes it more comfortable to unmask around people. People literally do not bat an eye if I want to gush about Fat Bear Week, or throw out a hear-me-out about that one undead werewolf monster that “kisses” the priest in Castlevania.

I’m a furry because I think anthropomorphic animals are neat. It’s kind of just that simple. Participation as a furry to me is just a minimum of making an avatar (a fursona) and talking to or hanging out with other furries. Honestly, it’s hardly different than modern VTuber obsession – our community just happened to start with early western animation rather than more recent eastern animation.

Furry is a “lifestyle” and can be taken as far as you want it to take it. We are a community you can chill in, a hobby you can participate in as any kind of creative person from artist, to musician, to 3D modeling, to the person developing the extremely complicated sex stuff going on in VRChat, or a kink you can dress up and fuck in. You can either make everything yourself, buy your way in, or it’s honestly totally normal to just hang around artists enough that they end up making things for you when they’re bored – although it’s good manners to actually participate in that person’s area of the community rather than begging for art.

Furry being more of a lifestyle than a hobby means it’s very easy to just include it in your daily rituals. There are hundreds, if not over a thousand furries in the greater Seattle area. I can go to dinner with other furries, I participate in a furry Twitch community, I game online with furries, and I’m currently about to go on a camping trip out in the woods of Washington for an event called Furwood that takes place at an exclusively queer campsite called Triangle Recreation Camp with nearly a hundred people (though many are dropping out due to the expected rainy weather this weekend).

What furries are NOT is:

1. A collective of pedophiles/groomers/zoophiles. They do exist in the community (and basically every online community) but almost every site/app explicitly blacklists this content and good Lord you should see the anti-zoophile witchhunts on Twitter. The natural anonymity of furries and sheer scale of the fandom does result in these things coming up frequently though, and furries could definitely do a better job moderating their spaces.
2. Exclusively people dressing up in fursuits to bang. This is a minority of furries that shit costs thousands of dollars. There is, however, a lot of overlap with puppy play, a bdsm kink involving pups and handlers roleplaying as various animals, usually dogs. I know many people who own a partial fursuit (they wear a head and hands but the rest is normal clothes) and also a leather/neoprene pup mask that they switch to for the actual sex stuff.
3. People who believe they are actually animals. These are called “Therians” and many Therians are also furries but most furries are not Therians. It is pretty normal to ROLEPLAY your sona, but the depth of that roleplay is up to the individual. For example, I refer to myself as a polar bear on the internet but that’s about it. I do however know people in our community who have 10+ pages of lore, use the dreaded creepy asterisks, commissioned custom multi-hundred dollar VRC avatars, and never break character.

Maybe they’re supposed to be moderated by devs/publishers, but I’d guess as high as 99% of steam communities are unmoderated or simply auto moderated for specific slurs. Basically every game I’ve ever looked at has just piles of threads asking “Is ThIs GaMe WoKe???” or “PLEASE ADD LGBTQ2IABBQ+ CHARACTERS!!!” as award farming shitposts. Heaven forbid its a competitive game because those forums get rancid. It also happens I’m the discussion of basically every news update for any game with a remotely active community.

There is zero or nearly zero accountability for the state of the community hub and Valve simply saying “devs should do it” is just passing the buck.

Honestly it goes deeper than that. I’m part of a very small streamer community and the two biggest points of exhaustion are actually just community management and the platforms themselves.

You can be having an absolute blast playing games, bullshitting with chat, whatever else, and then ONE person can come in and ruin the entire vibe. The two big ones are people “um, ackshually"ing a joke you make or someone deciding to trauma dump into a 10+ person conversation to fish for compliments. The amount of times one of the streamers is vibing, making jokes, chat is blowing up and someone comes in like” I hate myself I want to die please compliment me and make me feel better while you’re live :'(" is insane. Just zero self awareness and you can’t just ignore someone writing what sounds like the first half of a suicide note so suddenly you flip from entertainer to therapist. For larger streamers this comes in the form of random groups of people deciding they don’t just hate you but actively want to sabotage you through stream sniping, harassment, doxxing, etc…

The platforms are just as bad. Having to constantly fear that any accident in a game gets you banned is just such a suffocating experience. This is worse in games with open mics where it’s your responsibility to police, mute, whatever else the random outbursts of hate speech and slurs. Heaven forbid you’re playing a game that suddenly surprises you with nudity or something else and you’re left wondering if you’re gonna get flagged by TOS because it arbitrarily wasn’t artistic enough. Lord have mercy on your soul if you stream something from Nintendo - - who seemingly just rolls a die once a month to decide which random community built around their games they want to Thanos snap out of existence.