June 16, 2010
“What is a furry?”
Cara asked me, due to a casual mention in a video I was showing her, “What’s a furry?”
I didn’t really have a good answer.
I mean, I don’t know, I asked Brer and he’s like, “Eh, I just like the art and porn and such,” and that’s a perfectly fine explanation. But that doesn’t really do it for me. That doesn’t sum up what it is. At the same time, it’s not like I’m an otherkin or anything. It’s not a completely spiritual sort of thing that I find in being a furry either. It’s kind of something in the middle.
Basically, I’ve spent years not looking in the mirror and attempting to come to terms with who I am versus “who I am.” The whole time I’ve been doing this, though, I’ve been a furry, and I’ve been online doing these things. When I was online, when I was “poetfox,” I was me. No holdups, no anything. I could just be myself. As such, I find myself thinking of myself in those terms often. I read a story once about how your soul associates and resonates with a “true name,” the name you answer to the most, and that it doesn’t have to be your given name. I think my soul would probably resonate with poetfox more than any other name. I really do.
So that’s part of what furry is to me. It’s putting up a level of abstraction to remove inhibitions and let you be yourself, no matter how weird that person is. The other part is a culture of acceptance. Furries have their inter-group arguments, just like any group, but on a whole, the furry fandom is obscenely inclusive. You can say you’re into really weird shit, and people won’t bat an eye, probably because they’re into weirder shit, and that’s wonderful. Whatever you want is there, and some assholes may judge you, but fuck those guys, you’re cool. You could, say, enjoy playing a CCG about controlling a harem fucking each other. Hell, you could MAKE such a game and succeed enough to make an expansion. And it’s cool. It’s all cool. It’s crazy, it’s awesome. It’s cool.
It’s that culture, real or imagined on my part, and that connection that makes me a furry, unashamedly. Granted, I’m not going to force it on you or rub it in your face, but it’s something I am. It’s part of the description of me. I guess that’s what it is to me. Like any mostly undefined group of people, though, I’m sure it means any number of other things to other people. But that’s what I wanted to attempt to explain to Cara.
And I didn’t, of course. I ended up pointing to my current background and saying, “Oh, that’s a furry.” Which, you know, isn’t completely off, I guess.
It’s just… complicated! Apparently.