DISCLAIMER: All that is written here is personal and may not apply in your situation. It is what I’ve learned as a result of my own personal experience.

So I’ve had the Nitram suit for about three months now, and I’ve done more than a fair bit of fursuiting. But before Furpocalypse, I had never attended a furry convention with my fursuit. I actually had a lot of concerns on the best way to fursuit while at Furpocalypse.

Furry cons are unique in that a fursuit is appropriate attire for pretty much any event:

• Walking around in the dealer’s den? You can do it in fursuit.
• Going to a panel? You can do it in fursuit.
• Hanging out in the games room with friends? You can do it in fursuit.
• Going to a room party? You can do it in fursuit.
• Heading to the dance for the evening? You can do it fursuit.

Short of heading out to a restaurant to eat, you can fursuit anywhere while at a furry con. And being in fursuit is generally seen as a positive thing, so you’ll probably want to fursuit as much as possible. Sadly, fursuiting comes with a number of drawbacks:

• Fursuiting is physically exhausting. The heat, the sweating, the limited vision, the bumping into things, the dehydration, the limited breathing, the trouble that stairs give you, the fact that you’re carrying ten pounds (or more) of fur on your back, the tail that you have to manually haul around to avoid having it drag on the ground…

• Fursuiting is heavily impractical. Your voice is muffled (if you even speak), you have virtually no dexterity, you cannot carry or use a phone, you have no pockets to carry your wallet, you have no peripheral vision, your face is unable to show emotion, going to the bathroom is a nightmare, you cannot eat, drinking is impaired and you are at all times at risk of having your $2000 toy damaged (if, for instance, a drunk person spills a beer on you)

• Fursuiting is demanding. As a fursuiter, you’re bringing a character to life, so acting as your normal self is not enough. What that means depends on your character – it might mean adopting a different way of walking, jumping around, completely foregoing speech, speaking in a modified voice, making animal noises, using a squeaker, etc. Fursuiting is a performance that you’re giving for the enjoyment of others, so you need to be on your A-game whenever your suit up.

• Fursuits get dirty just from wearing them for too long – and they are very difficult to clean. Fursuiting for three days back-to-back at Otakuthon was not too hard for me, since I was local I could just dump my smelly suit in the washing machine and have it be ready the next day. But when you’re attending a con in a different country, staying in a crappy motel, washing your suit is not usually an option. You have to mind your suit’s cleanliness very carefully – no one wants to hug a funky fursuit. If you don’t want to end up sweating through the fur, you have to keep each suiting session short.

• Hugs from a fursuiter feel amazing – however, hugs while wearing a fursuit are not as great. You can’t appreciate the texture of the fur when you’re wearing a thick layer of fur yourself, and the enjoyment is dulled. Hugs while fursuiting are also often uncomfortably warm, and they’re often the last thing you want while burning and sweaty inside your fursuit.

Overall, fursuiting limits your ability to just relax and enjoy the con.

After Furpocalypse, here’s what I’ve learned:

Lesson 1: Learn to love the partial.
When I first attended a furry con, I thought partial suits looked like crap – fullsuits looked so much better. “When I do get myself a fursuit, I’ll always wear the whole thing, not just a crappy partial.”

Turns out partial suits are hugely more practical. You can stay in a partial suit pretty much forever, and you can be completely independent and functional with it. My go-to partial is “Party Mode”, meaning just my head and handpaws. I skip the tail, since my tail is a massive hassle to wear – if you have a tail of reasonable size then you can wear it, just mind how you sit. I also skip the footpaws – my footpaws are very very loose (making walking difficult), get damaged very easily and get very very dirty after every single session. Plus, my shoes match my suit, and they’re awesome.

Get a good outfit that you use for partial suiting – I bought a purple shirt to exclusively wear when suiting as Nitram, and I’m still looking for a decent pair of purple/teal pants to go with it. This is easier if you’re a woman/wear women’s clothing – men’s clothing is pitifully devoid of bright colors.

Being in Party Mode is not too difficult physically. It’s still hot, but good head-fans go a long way to mitigate this. You still have limited vision, but you can do almost anything a human can – if you need to use your phone (which you’re carrying because now you have pockets) then you just need to remove one handpaw, use your phone then slide the handpaw back on. No need to muck about with getting your bodysuit over your handpaw, since you’re not wearing the bodysuit.

You can go from Party Mode to completely human in under a minute – slide off both handpaws, set them down on a table somewhere, unzip your head, take off the head, turn off the fans, take off the balaclava, done. You can also carry all this very easily by sticking the balaclava and handpaws inside your head – and you can set it aside somewhere safe if, for instance, you need to eat.

Party Mode takes away a lot of the stress and impracticality of suiting. You’re still keeping the illusion of being your character (eg: not showing any skin) while keeping most of your ability to function. You can dance for hours while in Party Mode, something that would easily kill you in fullsuit. Yes, it’s a small aesthetic sacrifice – fullsuiters still look better, but I’ll take a clean partial over a sweaty fullsuit any day.

Lesson 2: It’s okay to break character.

I had a notion that fursuiting has to be done “correctly”, which meant following all these rules:

• Never break character (eg: never speak)
• Never take off any part of your suit where people can see you
• Always wear the full suit when going out, no partials allowed
• Always fully wash the suit (including undersuit) and brush everything between each outing

When you’re suiting at a furry con, you’re going to have to break some of those rules. The cleanliness rule requires a blend of good judgment and adhoc stopgap solutions, which we’ll cover later. The partial should be employed judiciously, as a good compromise between fullsuiting and not suiting at all.

Taking off parts of your suit in public (especially the head) is frowned upon, since it “breaks the magic”. It’s absolutely true that you should avoid taking off your head if you’re around children/members of the general public or acting in some official capacity (eg: volunteering at an event). But when you’re among peers, at a furry con? No one cares.

Initially, I never wanted to take off any part of my suit unless I was done suiting for that day. I didn’t want to go to the headless lounge, take off my head and sit down in front of a fan. For one, I can take the heat. I’m in good shape, so I have a massive amount of endurance when it comes to tolerating physical exertion. And second, taking off a sweaty balaclava only to need to put it back on fifteen minutes later is Really. Gross.

I’ve since relaxed that policy. One major reason is that I’ve gotten a lot more used to suiting/unsuiting quickly. I used to hate putting on my head – having to pull and stretch the balaclava so it doesn’t roll back over my eyes as I slide on the head, having to deepthroat the camelbak tube as I put on the head to keep it in my mouth, having to fiddle with the head zipper and having it get stuck with fur clogging it up - you get the idea. After months of doing it, I’m now a lot better at it. I got a looser balaclava, which now generally stays out of my eyes. I stopped keeping the camelbak tube in my mouth at all times, which also means that I can speak now. And I just got better at handling the zipper – or maybe I just ripped out all the spare fur that was around it, so it doesn’t get stuck anymore.

Also, the headless lounge is like the best place to socialize, ever. It’s fursuiters-only (no plebs allowed, doh-ho-ho), there are free drinks, free food, good ventilation, beautiful fursuits everywhere and dozens of cool people just chilling out.

As I said – no one at a furry con really cares if you take off any part of your fursuit. Furry fashion is an eclectic mix of fursuit parts, harnesses, badges, collars, baggy pants and undersuits. You will see all possible permutations of these items during your weekend. It is perfectly ordinary to see a man stroll onto the dance floor wearing nothing but a skin-tight black lycra bodysuit – he’s a fursuiter, temporarily out of suit, you’re at a room party and this is his room. No big deal.

Take off your handpaws whenever you need to use your phone, check the schedule, write something, whatever. If you sit down to play a board game, take off your head and set it aside. In my experience people are very respectful of fursuit parts and theft doesn’t seem to be a concern - likely because most fursuits are unique and easily identifiable, so anyone wearing a stolen fursuit would be quickly caught.

Most important: talking in fursuit. Socializing and fursuiting for me used to be completely incompatible – I had a plastic tube in my mouth at all times and I dogmatically refused to speak in an effort to not break character. This made it very difficult to meet new people, make new friends and socialize – whenever I got into a conversation, I would just stay silent and eventually wander off because I couldn’t contribute.

On the first day of Furpocalypse I suited up and forgot to put the camelbak tube in my mouth before putting on my fursuit head. When I noticed, I decided “screw it” and went out anyways. It turns out:

• This is immensely more comfortable (seriously, having a chunk of plastic in your mouth at all times is not fun)
• I can still drink by placing the tube into my muzzle
• This allows me to speak.

The only downside is you can see the tube hanging at my side, but it is worth it.

What happened afterwards is that I magically found my voice. Rather than staying completely silent, I started vocalizing – making cute little animal noises and very basic words. I naturally developed my own fursuit voice, which I describe as “a derpy bear”. I spoke in a very low tone, stretch out each word, making vowels and “H” sounds as long as they can be – my favorite word is “halloooo~”. This happened without any conscious effort on my part – being in character and wanting to speak, this is what came out.

I also found I could now allow myself to break character, have a conversation while in fursuit and then slip back into character as needed. Rather than force myself to stay in character at all times, I could switch between the two as needed. If I’m around little kids, then of course I’ll stay in character. But if I’m with three other furries who are having a conversation, there’s nothing wrong with breaking character to join in.

You don’t have to be giving a performance 100% of the time you’re suiting. You’re not working for anyone and you’re not a volunteer – so if you want to break character, go ahead and do it, as long as you exercise good judgment. It’s okay to relax when you’re suiting around other furries.

Lesson 3: Some stop-gap solutions for cleanliness

Washing your suit while at a con is not really practical – you likely don’t have access to a washing machine, and even if you do you don’t want to spend valuable con time washing and drying your suit. You’ll need to have a pragmatic approach to cleanliness.

The most basic rule is to limit the amount of time each fullsuit session lasts. Depending on how much you sweat (I sweat a lot) you can be in suit for a good 1-2 hours before excess sweat goes through your undersuit and starts soaking your fur. If you stay outside (where it’s cold and windy), occasionally step into the headless lounge for a few minutes to just stand in front of a fan or just stay close to the guy with the portable blower (<3  icepaws) you can go for a solid two hours without having your suit accumulate any notable funk.

Your undersuit and balaclava will be gross – this is fine. You can freely rinse them in a hotel sink and/or douse them heavily in Lysol. Lysol cans state very clearly not to apply to acrylic plastics (which your fur is) but there’s nothing wrong with using it to mask the funk of your undersuit, at least for a day or two.

Judicious use of partial suiting will sidestep the whole cleanliness issue – if you’re not wearing your bodysuit, you won’t accumulate any real funk.

If you’re fullsuiting a lot, fursuit “perfume” is something that exists – while it’s no substitute for regularly washing your suit, it can allow you to suit up and not be gross on the last day of the con. Get a bottle of fursuit cleaning spray from WashYourPaws, pick one that smells nice and give your bodysuit a few hits of it to hide the musk.

I had a small portable fan in my luggage – I would leave my fursuit head on top of it to dry the foam whenever I wasn’t wearing it. This can also be useful if you need to dry your undersuit in a hurry, as long as you have a way to hang it up.

Lesson 4: Eventually fursuiting becomes second nature

After you’ve suited for long enough, you begin to adapt and your fursuit becomes an extension of yourself, not unlike regular clothes. With enough practice, you’ll develop tricks to do basically anything. Going to the bathroom while in partial is still somewhat difficult, but doable.

Eventually fursuiting stops being hard. Your senses somehow adapt to having two inches of foam surrounding your head. Your body can adapt to almost anything, and if you wear a partial suit long enough it’ll become a natural part of you.

---

That is all for today. These are the most useful lessons I learned in my time at Furpocalypse. I have no doubt I’ll continue to learn and improve as I continue to fursuit.

There’s a lot more advice I could give, like “you don’t have to suit up if you don’t want to”, “plan in advance which events you want to attend”, “plan your suiting and unsuiting times to match your schedule”, “don’t bother suiting up if you’re just attending a panel or a show, there’s no point in wearing a fursuit if you’re gonna be sitting down for an hour” and “Have a handler/photographer if you’re wandering off in fullsuit so you have someone to take pictures/check the time/use a phone” but those are really no-brainers that should go without saying.

I will share one last trick with you, which was inspired by  Shawshank_Crux – if you’re fullsuiting alone and have no pockets to carry your room card, you can keep your card inside one of your footpaws, underneath your foot. Guaranteed to not lose it. This is especially helpful if you suspect your handler will wander off and leave you stranded on your own.

Happy suiting!