We have ideas and stories that cannot fully take place in the real world because some critical parts, like warp drives and anthros, do not exist and may never exist. Because of this though, these things can take any form we like. Anthros could include alien species, and warp drives and teleporters can come in all shapes and sizes. These fandoms are driven primarily by their collective creativity, since coming up with totally brand new ideas would be hard to do and hard to read/watch/look at without at least some familiarity.

If we can inspire things to become real, or at least take inspiration from stories when designing a product, this feeds back into itself and inspires people to try and bring more things out of fiction and into reality. Much of the furry fandom is involved in tech and politics in some way, same goes for the sci-fi fandom, and so this creates a feedback loop where we favor things that support the things we already liked and wished were real, where possible.

The furry fandom isn't as focused on the tech side of things though. For us, the setting just needs to account for the lifestyles of our characters, we like to imagine the complexities of anthro characters trying to live together in the same cities and towns. Our focus is on our characters, the details of their lives, and the ways they interact with our friends characters.

I do go on about AI a lot more than I should, but I feel like it would be a step towards a fandom sandbox where we create our characters, have a few conversations with them to make sure they're behaving correctly, and then send them off into the sandbox to play with our friends characters. We could then write events our characters would deal with, and tinker with our characters if they do something we didn't want, refining them as they go. We could have D&D style games where the event is guided by chance rather than our preferences, and the characters we meet along the way would belong to someone. And at the end of the day you could chat with your character and see how their personality has grown or improved.

That, and the fandom's getting older, there's a lot of characters who just aren't drawn anymore that used to have hundreds of drawings made a year. Sometimes people lose interest in their character, but with simulated characters and links to all the works they once belonged to, the fandom wouldn't just be archived anthro art continually buried under all the new stuff.

Realistically though, I don't think we could run a simulation with every single character the furry fandom has ever created. There'd be millions living in different settings and across multiple worlds, with different rules about the technology and magic in each world, and all their character interactions would need to make sense according to those rules, but would also need to make for an interesting story. It could be a long time before any fandom could make something useful out of it.

I might recall some characters that I don't see anymore, but I can't recall all of them all at once with perfect clarity. Having the characters bumbling around on their own personal quests would at least give us an idea what's out there. I'm picturing it a bit like City Skylines, where you can click on individual people and see who they are and what they're doing, except that their system is more complex and instead of a generic humanoid body it's a body that matches the character's form and size. Maybe something like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress where it's a story generator by design.

And if people don't want their characters to live on after they've stopped commissioning art of them, they could always choose to keep their character private so that even if other people try to add the character to the system it would be recognized and blocked from public use. They could still just get the original artworks and make up their own scenarios without permission, but there would be no sandbox public version for a century or so. Once the copyright runs out the character could be released, but unless they were very popular it's unlikely anyone would remember them, and the sandbox would be the only way to introduce people to the character and their owner.

Unless of course the fandom is gone in a century, or has changed so much that the sandbox is no longer relevant to the fandoms primary goals, but I'm hopeful that with the way the internet is, fandoms will persist.