the convoluted series of events that led to me becoming a furry
October 6, 2025
Hi! In case you're new here, this isn't my coming out post. I became a furry like 7 years ago and have been making furry art since (you can see some of it here!). Instead I'm gonna talk about how I became a furry. For reference! I also feel it might comfort people in the same position I was.
"Furry" content I grew up on
I don't remember being born a furry. Back then I was more into things like Transformers, Bionicle, and Halo (I only know Halo all that well please do not ask me about Transformers and Bionicle you will defeat me in battle) . That being said, I also did like a few things that might've influenced me a little.
First is How To Train Your Dragon. HTTYD centers entirely around dragons and their human trainers, as you might have guessed. I was a little nuts for this. I watched the first and second ones, I watched Race to the Edge (the spinoff TV show), and I played School of Dragons, which was the series' MMO. Ever since I have lost my mind over dragons and dragon-related creatures. My fursona right now is a dragon, in fact. I haven't watched The Hidden World yet, which is a critical mistake that I should probably rectify soon.
Secondly, Lilo and Stich is another I really liked as a kid. My rundown is that a violent, armed alien lands in Hawaii, becomes a girl's dog, and bonds with her over the course of the movie. I watched it, it's direct-to-DVD sequel featuring a sandwich-oriented alien, it's other direct-to-DVD sequel where Stitch starts to seize, and it's TV sequel where Stich gets his own ship. I liked the first one, and I remember the other ones being pretty okay. I didn't watch the live action version and I don't plan to because Disney doesn't make good live action remakes...
The third influence is Halo. I wasn't born early enough to play the OG Xbox, and so I didn't play the first two games. But I did have Halo 3 and Reach. As a kid, I was profoundly afraid of playing Halo online for some reason (I wailed the one time I accidentally went into the online games screen) and so that was also out of the equation. But I did play the shit out of the campaign and Forge mode on both games. As you might've guessed I was an Elite preferred species player. "Elite" is the human word for the Sangheili, who are one of the game's alien species. They eventually split away from the Covenant and join the humans who are trying to stop them from deworming the galaxy of all sentient life.
There's people in the fandom who are also fans of the above, and so I felt comfortable putting them here. But theres a final influence that's really vague. I've been into dinosaurs since I was a child. I can't really put my finger on it though? My guess would be Dinosaur Train, which is so far in the back of my head that I only vaguely know the appearance of one or two characters from the show. There was also The Good Dinosaur which no one remembers except for me because it was the center of my life for like 3 years during my childhood. That was the only thing I ever made fan fiction for as a kid; Arlo and Spot were not only characters in one of my universes, but were in fact the main characters until that universe died down and got replaced with Drachenworld. This was after I was already pretty fascinated by dinosaurs, though, and I could go on with talking about all of this but this section's getting a bit long.
the FIRST exposure events
I'm a zoomer and so I've been on the internet ever since I've had a computer, which I'd say 17 years ago at least. That means I probably saw furry art at least once, because furries are everywhere. One site I visited occasionally during this time was DeviantArt, which I would later use to post my first furry art.
Something I need to bring up for this is animation memes. These are not traditional memes that you share on twitter for people to exhale through their noses at. The idea behind animation memes is that you grab a slice of audio, usually from a song, then animate over it, then publish it in the hopes that other people use the same audio for their own animations. Thus, the audio becomes a "meme" that's conveyed through animation.
Furries are already pretty familiar with animation memes, but another fandom that used animation memes a lot was the FNAF fandom. I am fully aware that Scott funded Trump and other Republicans only for Trump's administration to defund the LGBTQ youth suicide hotline. I am non-binary. I have no reason to financially support people who fuck over trans people. And regardless of intention, I'm not going to support someone who does support those people. I've never bought anything licensed by Scott, and now, despite his stuff being a core part of my childhood, that won't change. Sorry.
Bearing that in mind, I used to be nuts for FNAF too. The fandom for FNAF was insane. It still is. There's a lot of fan-made songs, starting with the Living Tombstone and involving artists like DAGames (who I haven't heard of ever since I lost interest in FNAF, in case something happened). I also remember the animation scene being pretty sophisticated. The quality wasn't all that consistent, but there was plenty of SFM and hand-animated stuff. I mainly fell in love with the lore of the games and all of the fan-made content. This fan-made stuff along with animation memes (inside and outside the FNAF fandom) stuck with me as a kid.
I also used to play a lot of Roblox, and so inevitably I played FNAF games on Roblox. Most of them were roleplaying games, the best one I played let you make your own animatronics. Obviously, I played around a lot with that, and inevitably I made a lot of colorful animatronic characters. For those who don't know, FNAF is all about homicidal animatronics that happen to be anthropomorphic animals. And so when my brother saw me playing this game, he brought up the word "furry". I didn't know what that meant, and so he explained it to me. That's when I first learned of furries.
anti-fur years
Welcome to the third section of this post! Are you ready to hear of something I'm not proud of?
A long time ago, I made an anti-fur group on Steam. It got to the incredible size of 1 person-- me. Unfortunately I can't find the group, I assume I deleted it a long time ago after I stopped hating myself. It had a dumb name along the lines of "the furhur hunters" because I didn't have the balls to just say furry.
This was during what I'd call my edgy years. It wasn't an emo phase, but it was one where I had this weird type-6 mindset and was dedicated to morality and principles. I hated communism, I loved the USA, and I was fascinated by other cultures. My knowledge of all three of those things was as deep as the puddle you leave when your sweat drops on the floor. I had an Ogryn level of naivety torwards these things, and I was no different when it came to anti-fur stuff.
I didn't exactly do anti-fur stuff the way I see it done today. I wasn't in touch with other anti-furs-- I didn't even know there was an anti-fur flag until after I became a furry. Don't get me wrong, I still did stuff like walking into furry communities and crying at the people there. Only instead of going to the comment section of a YouTube short and calling someone fatherless, I joined Team Fortress 2 servers and did some weird SCP Foundation roleplaying shit.
I used to play a lot of TF2 around this time (on the Dell Inspiron from 2015 that I now use as a router) and what better way to symbolize success over furries than to play against them in Team Fortress 2! On a computer with two cores... and integrated graphics... over a Wi-Fi connection...
Needless to say I probably didn't win that much. I eventually had this crazy-ass encounter on one specific server, where I was humiliated by this guy pretending to be a furry woman flirting with me (I did NOT announce that I was an underaged kid, I need to emphasize). This is where my anti-fur peaked. On the same server I once started singing in the text chat. Not in the voice chat. In the text chat that you open by pressing the forwards slash on your keyboard. I nearly got kicked, but thankfully I instead ran out of the server in a panic.
coming to terms
Embarassing and bad stuff aside, being an anti-fur did something important, which was exposing me to furry stuff. The main stuff I took in was on YouTube. I spent my nights looking through channels and vine compilations made by furries. One of the videos I watched was Beta's "7 levels of being a furry"; I wasn't sure if he was a furry then or became one after the video, but it was one of the first videos I watched of a furry talking about furry stuff.
I folded and realised that there apparently wasn't anything bad about furries. Then I realized that I already like anthropomorphic animals. Then I realized I was kind of obsessed with furry stuff. Then I realized I was probably aligned with furries.
coming out of the closet (there was none)
I have a weird habit where I refuse to commit to something before announcing it to the people around me. My family was sitting in a diner. I used the word "Mercury" with a few letter swaps to tell everyone I was a furry. And that was it...
Another weird thing; I can date exactly when I became a furry on the internet. How? I made this Newgrounds post not long after coming out, complete with an amazing picture that I keep forgetting about. I also came out to... the server with the person pretending to flirt on me (at least I hope they were).
after the closet
Ever since that post it's been... great! If I'm talking about how I became a furry, I need to mention Zillion Ross, who long ago made this tutorial for drawing furries that basically started my art in its entirety. I've dropped some parts of the method he shows in that video, but when I followed that tutorial I actually started making art that I liked. My art's only gotten better since.
And mentally it's been pretty great too. I've discovered a lot about myself, and I may have not come to terms with those things if I hadn't been in this fandom. Apparently I resonate with a lot of the fandom. There's people who feel uncomfortable the way I do. There's people who are into the same things I am. I have found so much art that I like, I don't know if I'd even be into art if I wasn't a furry.
autism
The thing about the furry fandom and furry art is that they represent autistic people pretty well. Autistic people are going to behave differently than other people. We stim, we do things for no apparent reason. We ignore social queues, yet the things people do can impact us in ways that can't really be described. We hardly understand "rational behavior" because rational behavior doesn't exist to us. Autistic people act like the human experience is completely foreign to them. We act like dogs in trench coats.
My sona is a giant dragon and not a human because, not to sound like a criminal, but I feel tremendously more aligned with a beast breaking into convenience stores and stealing their glizzies than a tax-paying citizen. When I talk to strangers, whatever I say I've already passed through 5 or 10 filters to make sure it works in the current context. I overthink job interviews and give myself a whole process when people in my family can get by with "being themselves". I'm so unsocial that there's a lot of household tasks that I'm just now learning. When I look at what other humans are doing, it's pretty foreign to me.
I know that I'm not literally a dragon. I'm saying it would make sense if I was one. It would make sense if I was anything that wasn't human, really. I chose a dragon because I just like being big. I could be a chaos god and I still would be nothing compared to the eldritch superorganism that is humankind.
And yes, it would be unhealthy to entirely reject contributing to human society. Please don't do that. There is value in the human experience. Making things. Sharing those things. Finding people. But it's a good way to come to terms with the challenges I face. It's definitely a good way to find people that face those same challenges, too.
No one was willingly born into human society. The crazy part is that people still participate in it solely to experience what value it has. Even people who aren't human.