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I’ve always admired the furry fandom. They are the laid-back hippie artists of the digital age, and their DIY spirit is downright inspiring.
# When large art websites like DeviantArt and SheezyArt started rejecting adult art, the furries simply built their own sites. Decades later, FurAffinity is still thriving. And even when FurAffinity changed some rules and rejected some of its own members, those furries simply built another site, and decades later InkBunny is still thriving. Both doing their own thing and coexisting just fine. Many artists are on both. Just different houses with different rules. Where do you feel like hanging out today? There are even more furry art sites out there… just in case. And they are ALL extremely well-made.
# When the rest of the world seems to be hopelessly drowning in toxic politics, the furries still seem to abide by their unwritten rule of “You do you!” Every artist is different. Every gallery is shameless. Nobody is surprised by this, and nobody expects it to be otherwise. Because that’s how it has always been (for at least 30 years). Don’t like an artist’s work? Just skip the “watch” button and silently move on. It’s that simple. Art has keywords. The websites have filters. Viewers suggest keywords to fill the gaps. And their search engines actually work! They had all this figured out decades ago. It just feels like the rest of the world forgot.
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Social Media
Meanwhile on FurAffinity
# When the rest of the world seems hopelessly hooked on exploitive social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, relentlessly harvesting people’s private details and artwork to sell for profit, the furry websites are still just art sites made by artists, for artists, run by artists, with barely a cookie in sight… all still going as if social media just never even happened. And while everyone laments the loss of the “old web”, the furry community just… never stopped.
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I consider myself a casual furry at best. I barely draw furry art but I can easily enjoy it because it never looked strange to me. It simply looks like a cartoon. What’s strange about an artist drawing something? I had a childhood where literally every cartoon had a talking animal in it. Scooby Doo talked. Micky Mouse talked. Duck Tales talked. Bugs Bunny talked. The Smurfs talked. Sonic talked. I think the only exception I can remember was Transformers, and that was because the alien transforming robots were talking! We didn’t call these “furries” back then, we just called them “cartoons.” Even the old classics were Looney Toons and Disney. Cartoons had always been this way. I feel like I didn’t start seeing cartoons without talking animals until anime arrived. And even then the Pokemon and Digimon were still talking.
# But also consider this: When your average cartoon is about mutant turtles traveling between dimensions to fight an evil talking brain while transforming robots steal cubes of energy to teleport to their cybernetic home planet on a precarious beam of light, while the ghostbusters time-travel to save Christmas… you don’t even notice if an animal starts talking in the middle of all that delightful chaos. How can I hate the furries? They celebrate all the things that made my childhood fun! We’re weird because the 1990’s were weird… and the 1980’s, and the 70’s, and the 60’s, and the 50’s, and the 40’s.
# And then as I entered my teenage years I discovered a fandom that was exploring all the same naughty new ideas that I was, right along with me! Thousands of artists shamelessly combining all their favorite things, all doing it differently, never once being embarrassed about any of it.
# I’m a child of the 90’s. Calling it all “furry” after the fact seems like a weird retcon, propagated by Big Newspaper to sell more EWW! … or something like that. Some people can freak out and be miserable if they want to, but I’m just gonna continue enjoying life… and making my own websites.
